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Blog entries related to Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 solutions such as Power BI, Microsoft Flow, Power Apps and Microsoft Teams
I recently had a client that wanted to change the default text that appears in all search boxes. By default it shows “Search this site…” and the client wanted it to be a little more customized to their environment. It turns out this is very simple to accomplish, and no code! We just need to edit 2 XML files.
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Awhile back I ran into an issue where I had some site collection backups that failed to complete. No big deal, but this caused the locks on the site collection to remain in place, as I curiously found my administrator account with deny permissions on all sites in the site collection. This begs the question “What other site collections could be locked?” That becomes a real problem if you have a large number of site collections. Who wants to check each one in Central Administration one by one? Being the non-developer type, I turn to my trusty friend PowerShell.
First, what are we talking about specifically? In Central Administration, click Application Management, then under Site Collections, click Configure quotas and locks. Choose your web application/site collection, and view it’s status:
If you’re like me, at some point in your life you have set out to search the internet for SharePoint for one reason or another. After you found what you were looking for, you take a few extra minutes to look at what other posts the site has and you realize, this is pretty useful, I want to grab the RSS feed. Or you are just building a list of your favorite SharePoint MVPs. Or maybe you’re new to SharePoint, and don’t know all the cool kids’ blogs. Well after a while, those really start to stack up in your RSS reader. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could combine all those useful SharePoint RSS feeds into one single feed?
Crawled properties are metadata properties that are exposed or derived from documents, lists, libraries and anything else that can be indexed. When you search in SharePoint, these crawled properties have to be mapped to managed properties, which will be displayed in search results and refinements. While you may already know this, consider the impact on your organization, or your client’s for that matter, if something goes awry with a key SharePoint component that boasts robust capabilities: Enterprise Search.
Updates are everyone’s favorite topic, and I just wanted to throw out a few good resources on how to keep up to date on the updates that Microsoft released for SharePoint 2010 and WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007.
First and foremost, to keep up to date on SharePoint updates, you need to subscribe to the updates RSS feed! These posts provide links to the KB articles and downloads for the various configurations (Microsoft Office, SharePoint Foundation, Server, Server with Project Server, Office Web Apps, FAST Search, etc.). Notice that this feed includes all Office products, not JUST SharePoint. Unfortunately Microsoft doesn’t publish an update feed just for SharePoint that I know of. Also, Stefan Gobner, a Senior Escalation Engineer with Microsoft support, does a bang up job also posting SharePoint CU releases on his blog, as well as when issues come up. Links:
I wanted to share this quick tip with PowerShell. Many times, we need to have an easy way to find the configuration database, and like a good SharePoint administrator, you want to try and use PowerShell. I have come across other blogs here and others that mention finding this with the registry, so this is just another way to do it.
The more I learn and get to know PowerShell, the more I love it. I am able to perform what used to be time-consuming tasks (many hours or days) in seconds (after you write the script of course). While writing a script recently to perform some tasks on numerous SharePoint sites (webs to be precise), I was constructing URLs for the sites and using as variables and I needed only part of the URL (the managed path). After a little poking around, I found a nice easy way to do it.
This is my third blog in a series concerning data integration. In my first two blog entries we overviewed some of the data integration hurdles as well as some of the common methods used to discover the net-change data that will need to be translated. Here in my third blog I’ll discuss some of the benefits of not integrating in real-time, but creating a batch job to perform the integration. We’ll also look at the Business Rules that may need to be applied within the integration process.
In my previous blog focusing on the hurdles of real-time, two-way data integration, I highlighted the hurdle of how to discover the data you need translated. In most cases, discovering the net-change data is all you want to translate on a real-time basis. Remember, a two-way integration means net-change data going in two directions or more (depending on the number of systems you’re integrating) at a rate determined by how many end-users there are on each of the systems being integrated. Business systems with a significant amount of end-users can create substantial volumes of net-change data.
After concluding the first day at the Microsoft Convergence 2012 event here in Houston, TX, I can summarize my feelings in one sentence, “It is a great time to be alive and working on collaboration!” Why do I say that? Here are a few brief insights:
In some cases, if not all too some extent, integration between Dynamics™ CRM , Salesforce® or/and SharePoint® with your back-office system is the key to user adoption. Real-time, two-way data integration allows all segments of the business to access the very latest transactional data, and the information that the data contains.
This weekend I’ll be packing my bags and heading off to Houston, TX to attend Microsoft Convergence 2012 to experience all of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM goodness I can get. I’ll plan to publish at least a couple of blogs while I’m there on whatever news or tips I can pick up. Feel free to leave a comment here if you’d like to request any specific topics Are you planning to attend? Great! Ping me and let’s plan to chat. It would be great to network with individ ...
SharePoint has had excellent dashboard presentation capabilities for a long time now. Dynamics CRM formally rolled out dashboard reporting with CRM 2011 (although using SharePoint and/or SSRS enabled dashboard reporting with previous versions of CRM). Now that this functionality is getting embraced and adopted by many organizations, how can it best be leveraged to change the game by truly accelerating performance? Simple. Combine the best of Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics CRM 2011 and TV or large monitors placed in public areas within your business. Here’s how we’ve done it at C5 Insight.
One of the most common issues I hear when implementing SharePoint for new clients, or supporting an existing SharePoint environment is the dreaded login prompt. There are multiple reasons for the password prompt, but I'll try and cover the basics here. Personally, I haven’t had to login to our internal company SharePoint in at least 6 or 8 months! How can you achieve this SharePoint nirvana? Let’s walk through the common steps to avoid having to login to SharePoint, whether opening the site or when opening documents. Here’s a quick rundown.
There are numerous cool new features in SharePoint 2010, and I’ve found that integrating them into custom solutions are not always straightforward. I found this to be true with ratings as well. Ratings are one of the new social tagging features that gives users a 1–5 star graphic to rate content. You can find a high level overview of social tagging features here on TechNet.
Normally this isn’t a problem. For example, you have your normal Shared Documents library, and you want users to be able to rate content. No problem right? We go into the library settings, and then click on Rating Settings. We simple click Yes, and hit ok. Too easy:
There was no big fanfare on this and could have been easily missed, so I thought it was worth repeating. Microsoft and the content publishing team have compiled their downloadable content and made available on Amazon in a nicely bound book! It’s great for all those out there that would stay up late at night feeling guilty for killing so many trees printing it yourself. You can find the the download links here on TechNet. I will include the information here as I’m just nice like that. I also didn’t say they were the cheapest around, but price varies by book ($66 is a little steep in my opinion).
Every so often while working in SharePoint, you encounter a feature that has almost no documentation or you can’t find anyone with a similar issue. This happened to me when I was trying to configure a workflow to move a document set to a Records Center. After I got this to work, I wanted to try and save others the grief and frustration that I experienced. If “Unknownerror” means anything to you, this post is for you.
This action might be useful in document management scenarios, where documents have a formal “approval” process, and management policies are defined to “expire” them to meet retention policies. Once expired, they would be removed from the current location and moved to another location, specifically a Records Center in this case where they sit waiting to be purged from the system.
Even if you’ve planned your SharePoint project properly, or it might be years later, you need to rename your SharePoint 2010 server. This quick tip covers this on SharePoint 2010 which is a much cleaner experience than it was in 2007. There is an STSADM switch that can handle it, but for 2010, there is a certain procedure to yield best results. I was able to do this on a single SharePoint server earlier and it worked great! This was a single SharePoint server with SQL on another server.
For 2010, there’s a new PowerShell cmdlet for this very thing, Rename-SPServer. This is this article on TechNet covering the procedure. It has you renaming the server itself first, then fixing up SharePoint. However I’ve heard of issues with that, and I had better results by doing it in reverse. That is, running the PowerShell to fix up SharePoint then renaming the server. Here is what I did:
1: Rename-SPServer –identity “old_server_name” –name “new_server_name”
Well, today’s the last day of the conference. I know, it’s very sad, but a great time was had by all. This was my first big conference, and I really enjoyed the experience. There were 3 breakout sessions today back to back with the day closing out with lunch in the early afternoon. It’s hard to believe they crammed 240 sessions in 3 and a half days! I got to rub elbows with some of the greats in the industry, bloggers, authors, MVPs and lots of folks from Microsoft. If there’s one tip I can give, it’s to stay in a hotel close to the conference! It was awesome to be able to be in 1 minute walking distance. You have to be able to drop off all the freebies in your room.
Whew what a wild couple of days! I didn’t get to blog last night so I figured I would combine yesterday and today. The sessions have been really good.
Tuesday started with the Todd Carter’s session about Extending SharePoint Health & Monitoring. He put on a good show, giving details on web analytics and diagnostic logging, and how to extend them using custom providers to get detailed reports. Very cool stuff! Then I attended one of the more popular sessions of the day by Microsoft Certified Master Scott Jamison, Best Practices Around SharePoint 2010 User Profiles. Now this topic is very near and dear to my heart. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, but I’ve come to a place where I accept the UPA for what it is, even with its shortcomings. He got a volunteer from the crowd (a fellow MCM and MCA Spence Harbar) to configure the UPA live. This was really more of a part 1 of 2, where Spence would take it deeper under the covers and show how to implement it via the UI and PowerShell.
The first day started with the big keynote with all of the about 7500 attendees! That’s a lot of people lovin’ some SharePoint in one place! Well, let me back up. On my way into the convention center for breakfast before the keynote, I noticed there was all this noise outside. Turns out a software vendor and SharePoint competitor called Huddle had hired a marching band to play a few tunes right outside the conference and march through. In my opinion, quite childish. Anyway, on the good stuff …
Walked into the keynote speech, and was entertained by the sweet sounds of DJ Keenan Kameleon. He’s a Senior Product Manager with the SharePoint Team at Microsoft. I’m told you can listen to his music mix from the keynote online here. Jared Spataro, Senior Director of SharePoint Product Management was up first, and gave some updates on some numbers. Can you say 62 million licenses sold of SharePoint with 125 million users? The overall theme for the conference is Productivity Delivered, which celebrates all the excellent work and solutions that customers and partners have developed on the platform. I won’t bore you with all the details, but you can read more on the MS SharePoint Team blog.
Wow, the time is finally here for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011! What an exciting time this is for SharePoint. The product celebrated it’s 10 year anniversary recently, and it has come a long way! The latest release SharePoint 2010 is really a game changer and is continuously expanding it’s presence and impact in the industry. This conference celebrates the product in a way that is just amazing. There are so many people from all over the world coming together for a single purpose – to share knowledge.
This year’s conference takes place in sunny Anaheim, California at the Anaheim Convention Center. Every hotel in a 15 mile area is SOLD OUT! Ok some of that is probably Disneyland. After checking in to my hotel and getting settled, I walked across the street to the convention center to check things out. I got registered and checked out the venue. This place is huge, three floors of SharePoint goodness! There are lots of great-looking sessions, and I narrowed down the ones I want to attend.
SharePoint 2010 has many new and very useful features, one of them being new functionality with content types via the Managed Metadata service application. It allows you to specify a content type hub, a central location for managing content types. You can then publish those content types to subscribing site collections. This opens up a lot of flexibility to manage content consistently.
Recently I ran into a scenario where I had configured content types in the hub site, and set the column order and published the content types. After awhile I had made changes to the root content type column order and re-published those changes. I found that the settings for the columns were updated (hidden, required, etc.) but the changed order did NOT update. This is fairly significant to users of a document management system as you don’t want your optional “Enterprise Keywords” field showing first with a required important required column at the bottom. Oh the humanity!
It’s well documented that the What’s New web part can be very helpful in showing recent information about content in a list or document library. It’s also well documented that to be able to add this web part in SharePoint 2010, you have to activate the site feature “Group Work Lists”. But what happens when you go to Site Actions –> Site Settings, click Manage Site Features and activate the feature, but the web part is still missing from the available web parts list?
Everyone has meetings they have to attend on a frequent basis, and we all want to get through them as quickly as possible (so we can get back to our game of angry birds). We need to have a quick and easy way for team members to provide an update on their assigned duties, as well as a streamlined method of reviewing them during the meeting. Since we’re lucky that our company has invested in SharePoint, let’s use it! This method I believe provides a very quick and easy way to accomplish your goals for capturing the information without using complicated add-ons or any other heavy lifting.
This is the final result. Cool huh? Nothing fancy, but it does the job (sometimes simpler is better). This is driven by a wiki page library, where every team member gets their own wiki page. You could just have one wiki page and sections where everyone just updates their text, but then you would have multiple people trying to edit that one page 15 minutes before the meeting, and get frustrated with all the merge conflict warnings. If everyone gets their own page, no conflict warnings. Let’s see how it’s done so everyone is happy.
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