Are Your SharePoint Workflows About to Stop Working?

 BREAKING NEWS: Microsoft recently announced that SharePoint 2010 Workflows will be retired in the next few months. Do you have a plan? Learn C5 Insight's professional recommendation.

Solution for HTML Markup Functionality on Calculated Columns

Some systems are still experiencing issues with HTML markup functionality on calculated columns. Here are a few different solutions for various environments.

PowerShell: Your Solution to SharePoint 2013 Suspended Workflows

One of my clients running SharePoint 2013 on-premises contacted me with a strange issue. They had some SharePoint 2013 platform workflows that were getting suspended and wasn’t sure why.  We got past that initial issue, but what I wanted to talk about today is what we did with all the active workflows that were suspended. Learn how I use PowerShell to make all those workflows resume instead of resorting to canceling them...

Quick Fix When SharePoint Timer Service Keeps Stopping with Logon Failure

There you are, minding your own happy SharePoint administrator business when you start getting calls from users stating that they are no longer getting alerts.  Others report issues with workflows not working.  What’s going on?  Turns out to be a simple issue, let me show you how I got there.

Quick Tip - Automatically Add Wildcard To Conditional SharePoint Search Queries

One of the hardest things to do is to train users on how to query SharePoint search effectively.  Here's a quick way to give users a helping hand when using search to automatically include a wildcard * in the query.  Small steps add up to great adoption!

The Incredibly Easy No-Code Solution to Simple Anchor Tags in SharePoint Navigation

Have you ever thought to yourself “I need an anchor tag in my SharePoint navigation and that must be easy”.  But instead you're met with frustration!  I’m going to show you a little trick I stumbled across that is SUPER simple and it works with no code!  Did I mention this works in Office 365?

Use PowerShell to Set Permissions on All SharePoint Libraries, Folders and Files

When you work with SharePoint permissions, you quickly figure out that you want to touch them as little as possible.  With a lot of things in SharePoint, permissions inherit top down.  So this means that it’s a best practice to always use that inheritance as much as possible.  But in today's post, I'll show you how to use PowerShell to change those permissions for all libraries, folders and files in the site!

Hide Root Node of the SharePoint Breadcrumb like a Pro with CSS!

Instead of another blog about PowerShell, I wanted to share a quick trick with CSS.  It’s quite common in a SharePoint branding design to include a breadcrumb navigation.  In SharePoint 2007 there was a simple horizontal breadcrumb separated by arrows, and SharePoint 2010 incorporated a tree-style drop down breadcrumb.  The site to site breadcrumbs were removed starting in SharePoint 2013. 

There are many blogs on how to bring either the “up-folder” or simple horizontal breadcrumb back.  But sometimes, you want to hide the root node and the separator.  In today’s post I’ll show you how to do that with just CSS.

Replace the Default SharePoint Media Player with a Friendly Minimized HTML5 Audio Player

I was working with a client recently and they use a lot of audio files, like when they record customer service calls for quality assurance.  When things go great, they wanted to highlight these cases of awesome customer support in audio clips in blog posts. 

They found the default SharePoint audio player less than appealing and wanted something better.  In today’s post I’ll show you something maybe you didn’t know about your web browser, and how to use it to make this experience better. 

4 Key Questions to Ensure You Create the Proper SharePoint Structure

I've been working with SharePoint for over 8 years now, and worked with a lot of different clients and types of users. I've seen that there's one area that a lot of people either struggle with, or get flat out wrong. That is what they create in SharePoint to store content. 

In today's post I'm going to give four questions to answer that should help drive what kind of content needs to be created. Why is this so important?  Keep reading to find out ...

How to Set External Columns in a SharePoint List with PowerShell

I’ve been working with a client recently on a project where we are using a BDC connection.  Things have been going fine when we were using the external item picker in an InfoPath form but we ran into a problem.  We are using an external column in the same library.  Due to issues I will explain, I need to set this external column with PowerShell.

I’ve seen a lot of online folks have trouble with this, so I thought that I would share how to properly set this column with PowerShell as there is a little trick to it. 

Use PowerShell to Set Permissions on All SharePoint Libraries, Folders and Files

In today's post featuring PowerShell, I'm going to show you how to use a script with a few functions and some handy tricks to quickly reset permissions with multiple libraries, folders and files.  This can be very difficult to handle manually, especially when there are many many libraries with many folders and files with broken permissions. 

One Missing Step to Uncheck Overwrite Existing Files in SharePoint

Discover the missing step needed to uncheck the default "overwrite existing files" for uploading documents to a single document library.

How You Make SharePoint Announcements Grab Attention Easily Using CSR

SharePoint has had “Announcements” for a very long time now.  The idea is good, you want to let people know what’s going in your department, division, location, site, project, whatever the case might be.  You put the Announcements on the homepage of your site, but they don’t exactly blow you away.  Today I’m going to show you an easy way to use Announcements for Critical News that will with style that get a lot more visibility.

Easily Apply Custom Branding with Focus on Content in SharePoint 2013

Focus on Content was a feature that emerged with the release of SharePoint 2013 and is also in SharePoint Online.   What this little button does is hides some structural parts of the rendered page to allow more room for the library, list or page content.  With custom branding, you might have issues. 

I’ll show you a quick and easy way to overcome this and get your users more screen real estate!

How to Migrate a SharePoint 2010 InfoPath List Form to SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint Online

I’ve been working with a client recently to migrate their SharePoint 2010 farms to SharePoint 2013.  A lot of the data was being organized so it was quite a granular move utilizing one of the common 3rd-party migration tools Metalogix Content Matrix.  Of course some of the SharePoint lists had been customized with InfoPath.  While this is fine, I went to move the list with the migration tool, and all went fine until it tried to move the customized list form template - template.XSN.  It refused. This post details exactly what I did next to work around this!   

Using AutoSPInstaller to Build a Three-Tier SharePoint 2013 Farm – Part 2

Welcome back to part 2 of my short series of using AutoSPInstaller to build a 3-tier multiple server SharePoint farm.  Last time we looked at all of the work we needed to do to get setup and discussed what our end goal was.  Now we can get down to business and start some installation!   I’ll walk you through the most critical part – creating your answer file, then the installation itself.

• Part 1
• Part 2 (this post)

Using AutoSPInstaller to Build a Three-Tier SharePoint 2013 Farm – Part 1

In this 2-part series I am going to take you through all of the necessary steps to use autospinstaller to build a 3 server farm doing remote installations on Windows Server 2012 R2 with SharePoint 2013 recent CU. (When I say all, I am referring to the SharePoint relevant pieces and the autospinstaller.) Continue reading for SharePoint 2013 (2010) installation.

2 Easy Ways to Calculate Working Days Inside a SharePoint Workflow

I’m in the midst of two different major workflows for clients right now, one of them being an HR New Hire Onboarding request and approval process.  One small but critical requirement of the process was that each level of approval needed a two business day wait period. In this post I'll demonstrate 2 easy ways to be able to calculate working or business days inside a SharePoint workflow.

How to Selectively Sync Folders to OneDrive for Business

While recently working with some users who are migrating to OneDrive for Business for SharePoint 2013, I was in a discussion about how to use the OneDrive for Business client.  After walking through the capabilities and how to use the sync client, the question was asked about how to selectively sync only certain folders from OneDrive for Business and not the entire library.  Users started uploading a lot of documents, and didn’t want to sync ALL of the files in their OneDrive for Business library.  They only wanted to sync some of the folders offline.  This is possible right?  Okay I must admit I misled you a little bit by the title.  You can’t use the OneDrive for Business sync client and only choose certain folders.  It will only sync the entire library or nothing.  But fear not, the point of this blog is to offer a few viable solutions as stop gaps until Microsoft adds this functionality. 

Back to SharePoint Basics: Part 3–Working With Views

It’s been awhile but I am back to continue on my SharePoint Basics series for SharePoint.  Let’s see where we are:

• Part 1 – What is SharePoint?
• Part 2 – Creating Content
• Part 3- Working with Views (this post)
• Future SharePoint Basics Goodness…

Back in Part 2, I touched on SharePoint Views briefly in the context of creating content.  In today’s post I want to go a lot deeper with views and show you how to work with them while will help any SharePoint user work more effectively and efficiently.

2014 C5 Insight Best Of Blog Round Up

Everywhere you look on the internet these days, you see Best of 2014 lists. And rightfully so – as we prepare to embark on 2015, it’s natural to gaze back across our most recent journey around the sun. In the spirit of helping you navigate through the more than 80 blogs we published in 2014, we’ve compiled a quick round-up of some of our most helpful and popular entries.

How to Add the ID Column to SharePoint Email Alerts

Generally the out of the box provided ID column is used as the “Issue ID” since it auto-increments by default.  Invariably, users need to be notified whenever issues are created or updated, so they subscribe to alerts on the list.  When they get their notification email, they notice that the Issue ID is missing, so they aren’t sure exactly which issue got updated. 

We can fix this by adding the ID field to the email alert file.  Let's take a look how.

What Am I Missing from SharePoint 2013?

The purpose of this article is to try and compile a list of features removed or discounted features, not list all of the changes or improvements in SharePoint 2013.  This list will vary somewhat depending if we’re talking SharePoint on-premise or SharePoint online, but I’ll try to call out the differences where applicable. 

Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? The SharePoint Edition!

Are you a newbie when it comes to SharePoint? Are you lost in the lingo, or trying to make heads or tails of how to incorporate the tool into your day-to-day operations? If so, this blog is for you!