Does the !New tag annoy you?

Are you a bit sick of that !New tag that appears beside a new item uploaded to a library? Well, you are not alone. I am repeatedly asked this question in our Applying SharePoint 2007 Core class: "How do I get rid of that annoying !New tag?" or "How long does an item really stays new?" J. Usually students ask these questions because they have uploaded/migrated a bunch of documents from their file share which are not really "new", but they get the !New tag assigned to them anyway.






Ok, so here are the answers:
First of all, this feature applies to not only Document Libraries, but also to other Lists such as Tasks, Issues, Contacts, Links etc. In the default installation of SharePoint, the "!New" tag gets appended to every new item in SharePoint lists and remains there for one calendar day. An administrator who has access to the SharePoint server has two options when changing the behavior of this feature:

1. Increase the number of days the icon should appear beside a new item in the list
2. Eliminate the appearance of the icon altogether

The stsadm.exe utility (located in the SharePoint server) is used to accomplish this task. Navigate to stsadm's location using a command prompt:
..\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\60\bin
The "setproperty" command will be used for this task as follows:
stsadm.exe –o setproperty –pn days-to-show-new-icon –pv (number of days) –url (Virtual server address)

For example, use the following syntax to prevent the new tag from appearing:
stsadm.exe –o setproperty –pn days-to-show-new-icon –pv 0 –url http://(your server name)

Hope this helps!