Monday, June 7, 2010

Replacing the Default Permissions Email Text

For the longest time, our users had expressed their annoyance with the out of the box email template that is received when permission to a site is granted. Typically, the text give you a welcome message and then proceeds to detail out "What is a SharePoint site?" If your users are like ours and already are well-acquainted with what a SharePoint site is, it might be time to change that message.

Although it is recommended not to change any default files, doing this is reletively harmless if, of course, it is tested thoroughly and done with caution. The file itself is an XML and is located in the 12 Hive (c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12) in the Resouces folder. The file is called core.en-us.resx.

To edit this file, you will need to open it up in Notepad and press CTL + F to search for the text "What is a SharePoint Site?" Once you find it, you will want to replace everything from "What is a SharePoint site?" to "...members of the site can contribute their own ideas and content as well as comment on or contribute to other people's." with the XML character for a non-breaking space (@#160). This will keep all of the tags in place and you will recieve emails without any text below the name of the site and the type of permission you were given.

Additionally, you will need to revise your documentation for installing service packs to include backing up this file before the Service Pack install and reapplying it afterwards, since it will most likely be overwritten when Service Packs are installed. However, when I recently installed the February Cumulative Update in my 2007 environment, and it did not affect this file.

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