Automatic Logon to SharePoint

This little setting can save you LOTS of time if you find yourself repeatedly typing in your user ID and password to access a SharePoint site and its contents.

Setting Internet Explorer to automatically log on to SharePoint Services.

NOTE: This configuration assumes you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer as your browser (i.e., not FireFox or Netscape, etc.). 

1.  Open Internet Explorer (IE)

2.  From the menu, select Tools >> Internet Options

3.  Click on the “Security” tab

4.  Click on “Custom level…” button at the bottom of the options screen

 

5.  Scroll down to the very bottom of the list until you get to the “User Authentication” section and select “Automatic logon with current user name and password.”

6.  Click on OK button to save the change.

Please note that once this setting is in place, you will not be able to logon as another user since the logon protocol is now automated.  If you need to logon as another user to SharePoint, you will need to change this setting to “Prompt for user name and password.”

Google search tip… only EDU sites

You may already be aware of how to utilize Google’s search operator “site:” to limit searches to a particular domain such as:

 

Here, the Google search engine will limit its query to all pages on the “lander.edu” domain.  To broaden the search, but only within .edu sites, just add “site:.edu” to your search query.

This is helpful when you want to compare what you’re doing with what other institutions are doing, in terms of marketing and documentation, and one of the benifits of having EDUCAUSE administer the .edu domains (i.e., qualified search results when using the site search operator in Google).  For example, at Lander, I was curious about how other universities had set up their style guides in coordination with web publishing and could easily get started by typing the following into the Google search box:

“style guide” university logo use site:.edu

This doesn’t work as well, obviously, with domains that are more generic, such as .com or .net.  For more information on available search operators and syntax, see the Advanced Operators Reference on GoogleGuide.com.

Growing a little tired of You

Hey, I’m excited as everyone else about the powerful lever of technology that enables you, me and everyone else to publish on the internet, but I disagree with the one who thinks we should all be elevated because of it. She’s the one who’s saying how wonderful it is that we can now define and redefine all things to our hearts content —just because we have amplification. The risk of “open mic night” used to be limited to time and space. Now, with the web, the risk of “open mic night” is unlimited. The internet has extended “open mic night” to anytime, anywhere. Voyeurs and exhibitionists rejoice! So when I saw myself on the cover of Time Magazine’s Person of the Year issue (a glass wrinkly), I was disappointed.

Book Gluttony Redeemed

Many years back, as a college student living north of Chicago, I stumbled across the largest used book sale in the world, Brandeis Used Book Sale. It was hard to miss; a huge tent that had swallowed up an entire parking lot of a north suburb shopping mall. Once inside the bustling arena of books and boxes, tables and carts, I realized I was not the bibliophile I once thought. I was normal, at least compared with these people.

Library Snoops Take Heart!

A person’s books should tell you a lot about them. Whenever I visit someone’s house, it’s hard to resist browsing their library (altruistic snooping). Of course, a person’s library may not be as revealing as you think. Interests change over time, along with opinions, and shelves will often include gift books that are clearly oddballs on an otherwise “coherent” bookshelf. Who of us hasn’t been given a book by Aunt Gerty, handpicked from the “best-seller” shelf of the 10 Items Or Less checkout isle? Books like, “How to live like the Wakipakis of Walnut Creek”? So then, book snooping has its weaknesses, but help is on the way. Thanks to the internet, the emergence of social networking, and open connections to the likes of Amazon.com and the Library of Congress, our home libraries can connect and communicate like never before. I will be highlighting two applications that I’ve been using for a couple months now–LibraryThing and BookMooch–to give you a glimpse of what’s out there.

Lander web search revised

The search results will NO LONGER include PDF files, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and other atypical web content. Too many of these types of files were being returned in the search results page making it difficult for some users to find the web pages they were looking for. For example, if you tried to find “academic affairs”, you wouldn’t find the Office of Academic Affairs website until about the third page. With the search index excluding the above stated document types, it now comes up first.

If a web master wants specific documents to show up in the search index, they can reference it (with a link to the document) within an html page.

Luminis information sessions going well…

The Luminis campus portal information sessions scheduled for Tuesday (Oct 17) and Wednesday (Oct 18) of this week went well. Most attendees were not familiar with what a portal was and so were able to see a sample of what campus portal would look like.