Viewing new SharePoint 2007 sites with IE7

Just a little tip as I finally crossed over to the dark side and installed the latest version of IE7. When you’re viewing a SharePoint 2007 site (WSS or MOSS, doesn’t matter) you’ll get a warning message from IE saying that an ActiveX control is causing problems on the site. This control is named “name.dll” and is the person smart tag that shows presence information. Just add your site to the trusted site list and the error goes away.

The message doesn’t come up in IE6 (unless maybe you have ActiveX controls disabled or some kind of uber-high security setting) so it might be new for those visiting 2007 sites with IE7 (it was for me).

And while I’m on the presence information bandwagon, here’s a couple of blog entries that discuss how to use it in your own Web Parts:

• Adding Presence Information to your Web Apps (Patrick Tisseghem)
• How to add presence/pawn to SharePoint contacts list (mondonovan)
• How to add Presence to your custom web parts (Mark Stokes)

Thanks to Dustin for the tip!

P.S. I’m also taking the plunge on a scratch desktop now and finally trying out Vista. It’ll be a few days until that gets installed as I go back to juggling all the cats I have in the air right now.