How to make accidentally “hidden” pages in meeting workspaces visible
A customer of mine recently had a problem with pages (theses pages appear as tabs) inside a meeting workspace. Only the author of the page was able to see the page. No other user (even me as Site-Collection-Admin) was not able to see or access the page. It comes to my mind that the page is possibly checked-out by the user …
Disguise
Unfortunately the list where the pages reside is hidden to the UI. So the user has no option to check-in the created page. The only way to access the list is to retrieve the id of the “pages-list” (e.g. via SharePoint Manager). Now you can pass it to the ManageCheckedOutFiles.aspx inside the _layouts-folder. Alternatively you can connect via SharePoint Designer and uncheck the “hide in browser”-option.
Your url looks like this: http://myserver/myweb/_layouts/ManageCheckedOutFiles.aspx?List=%7B6F145CFF%2D8779%2D4D38%2D8B11%2D6B37EBA0A76C%7D
You are now able to “overtake” the checked-out page for yourself for further editing. But your odyssey is not yet over!
If you want to check-in the document you get an error. It’s simply not possible! What helps is:
- Copy the affected page with SharePoint-Designer
- Paste it into the “pages-list”
- Delete the old checked-out page
- Rename the pasted page to the old page name
- Now your page is fully visible!
Prepare for the future
Because the pages-list does not have any views defined its hard to help users. If you have the list-id of this list you can use every management-page to customize this list (e.g. _layouts/listedit.aspx?List=%7B6F145CFF%2D8779%2D4D38%2D8B11%2D6B37EBA0A76C%7D).
Conclusion
I believe this is a bug. Perhaps there will be a fix. But don’t rely on it … What is really annoying is the fact that this list is a “special list” and you cannot add views to it. So if you ever get a page that does not show: use your SharePoint tools!-)
Update
The customer had a lot of workspaces where this has happened. This bug is really annoying! I have colored (yes that nice orange) the important part to fix this problem.
- March 18th
Hi Eric,
During my sharepoin support I enountered this issue on a number of meeting workspaces on my client’s site.
However I was able to resolve this. When I compared the properties of Pages libray on these faulty sites with the working one on some other site collection, I found one striking difference. It appeared that the “Title” field ws required in the faulty meeting workspaces that apparently didn’t get populated automatically and hence remained in checked out state. Once I made this field “not required” my issue was resolved. see if it helps!