Psychology Technology

When creating a document library, sometimes templates will be added as a document, rather than as a custom type template.

Here is how to get your templates to appear in a document library:

• Create a template document in your favorite compatible Office application for Word, Spreadsheet, Powerpoint documents.
• Navigate to your site, and create a Custom Content Type for each template you will add later.
  • Site Actions, Site Settings, under Galleries select Site Content Types
  • Click Create
  • Provide a name and description
  • choose the appropriate parent content type (Document Content Types)
  • Choose a parent content type of ‘Document’
  • Select an existing group to add the content type in to ( Document Content Types)
• Navigate to your Document Libaray and add the Templates
  • Switch to Explorer View
  • Navigate in to the Forms folder
  • Add each of your required templates
• Choose Settings, Document Library Settings
• Advanced Settings (in the first column)
• Choose Yes for ‘Allow Management of Content Types?’ and click OK
• Navigate back to the Settings
• Now under Content Types, we can add additional Templates
  • Add from existing Content Types
  • Find your newly added Template in the list (The name you gave the ‘content type’)
  • Select it, click the Add button, then choose OK
• Now when you choose a New… document in the library, you will be able to choose from the added templates

So what are the pros of doing this?  Why not just add a document to the library and use that as the ‘master template’ ?

You will not be able to re-use that template across your enterprise.  It will only be available in that particular document library.  Also, adding the custom content type allows you to build up some rich meta-data around your documents, which will otherwise remain captured and isolated within a document.  For example, if your documents are around projects and resource hours available, you could ensure that one of the required meta-data fields to be filled in is the estimated resource in hours.  now you can report on that data in a List, or if you have MOSS, KPIs within a dashboard.

This is a humbling step from the now rather archaic method of a file/folder structure, but once your organization catches on, it can become an informationally rich resource much more than what any one document can provide.

I worked on an environment recently with the following error when trying to build a cube in our Project Server farm environment.

Analysis Services session failed with the following
error: Failed to process the Analysis Services database <DB_NAME> on the
measure group with the ID of ‘EPM Timesheet’, Name of ‘EPM Timesheet’ cannot
be processed because it contains MG dimension with the ID of ‘Task Is
Overallocated’, Name of ‘Task Is Overallocated’ with different granularity
attribute than its source object.

The first thing noticed was that the DB service and Analysis Services instances (they are on seperate instances) were out of synch (one had Cumulative update 9 with SQL 2005 SP3 applied, the other, a lesser CU).

After replicating the environment and still not getting reproducing the error, it was these links that helped point me to resolution.  The Application Server Native Client Tools for SQL had not been updated.  Once these had SP3 applied (and this doesn’t require a restart in a multi-tier farm thankfully, as the db services etcetera are not installed, just the client tools, backward compatibily and bits) the cube now builds with success once again.

In hindsight this was very straight-forward.  Unfortuneately sometimes in silo-like enviornments the cross-over from an Application to SQL Admin takes a bit of collaborative troubleshooting.

http://projectserverblogs.com/index.php?s=asadmin

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brismith/archive/2007/03/09/activex-component-can-t-create-object-cube-build-failure-against-sql-server-2005-analysis-services.aspx

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/31517871/olap-database-error-after-sp1-install.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc197552(office.12).aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/06/27/file-name-length-size-and-invalid-character-restrictions-and-recommendations.aspx