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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
Our blogs, on-demand videos and events lists have expanded so much in the last year, that we’ve been asked if we can provide some options to follow selected topics only.
So if you would like to focus on information by product (Salesforce.com, Dynamics CRM or Microsoft SharePoint) or by role (Business or Technical) – you have options to do that. You also have options to choose which channel you want to follow us on (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, RSS or e-mail).
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AND … to sweeten the pot … we will be giving away 5 copies of our forthcoming book, “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Administration Bible” to a randomly selected list of those who are following us. More details are in the full posting.
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For everyone starting to learn PowerShell, it’s hard to know where to start. Thomas Lee (author of his blog Under the Stairs and a PowerShell MVP) worked with the great folks at PowerShell.com and Idera to put on a very useful and pertinent webcast on how to format PowerShell output. It’s one in a series called PowerShell Power Hour. Think about it, every command in PowerShell you run outputs data. Wouldn’t you like to know how to get it to display like what you want?
What’s the different in Format-List and Format-Table? What’s a hash table? Can we format currency? He shows you! This is not for someone who’s never used PowerShell before, but for those who are learning commands, getting some output, and need some tuning. You can access the webcast at PowerShell.com’s site after registering for free. It’s also available at Idera’s site as well.
If you need more of a getting started tutorial, check out the first webcast in the series “Getting Started with Windows PowerShell” by Tobias Welner (PowerShell MVP) here. If you’re looking for more focused PowerShell information for SharePoint 2010, Joel Oleson wrote a great post on this topic.
Recently, one of my colleagues came to me with an issue he was having with SharePoint. After making sure it wasn't friendly "user error", I determined this to actually be a bug in SharePoint 2010 RTM. Here's the issue:
On your SharePoint 2010 RTM farm, go to your My Site Profile page, and edit it. You are able to change the "Activities I am following" once, and save. But when you do it again, save and double-check, the change was not saved. What gives?!
I recently came across this and wanted to be sure everyone is aware of this limitation. With the new release of Office 2010 including 64-bit support, there has been some confusion about which version to install. Microsoft has been clear in their recommendation:
For whatever reason, say you installed Office 2010 64-bit on your machine, and you happily go to your shiny SharePoint 2010 site (or WSS/MOSS), open up a list, and hit Datasheet View. To your surprise, you see this:
You know who you are out there. We've all done it, because it’s such an easy thing to fall into. You're just happy as a clam with your shiny new SharePoint site, and you're all ready to create some content. First up, a document library. We love our shared documents, right? Well, how many times after awhile do you find yourself emailing links to files like:
http://intranet/Shared%20Documents/June%20Assessment/Rev2%20Standard%20Quote%20for%20client.xls
So we’ve all been waiting, and waiting, and waiting to hear from Microsoft about the fate of the “fab 40” templates for SharePoint 2010. Well, they finally have made a decision. You’re not going to like it. Read the full details.
The bottom line from the article:
Microsoft is not releasing new versions of these templates for SharePoint 2010 Products.
SharePoint 2010 is great at many things, and one of the new integrations with Office 2010 is with uploading multiple pictures to a picture library using the Office Picture Manager.
Say you you’ve got a bunch of logos you want to get into your new fancy 2010 picture library. You would click Upload –> Upload Multiple Pictures right?
In SharePoint 2010, you may have noticed a bit of interesting behavior when trying to open a PDF file; we certainly did. In fact, I’m surprised more people have not come across this in their 2010 environments, or perhaps the users simply thought this was the appropriate behavior and didn’t want to inform IT.
If you have spent any amount of time with SharePoint 2010, you have seen the “lightbox” feature which allows the SharePoint user to remain on the same page, providing a pop-up dialog box, while dimming the background – very Web 2.0!
This “lightbox” dialog can be enabled/disabled within any list in the Advanced Settings.
If you’ve been dabbling in SharePoint 2010's new hosting (multi-tenant) environment and been creating host-named site collections, you have may noticed that the default SharePoint security groups typically created by default are not there in the root web. These include:
Members
Owners
Visitors
These are created by the SharePoint API, and apparently isn’t called properly when host-named site collections are created through PowerShell in a multi-tenant environment. This ONLY happens in a multi-tenant environment. Even if you create the host-named site collections through PowerShell in a non-hosted environment, the first time you visit the site, you might be prompted to choose the site template and to create the default security groups.
So how do we get them back without creating them manually? Read on...
The ability to tag EVERYTHING in SharePoint 2010 is one of my favorite features.
But, if you’re like me, you sometimes create a personal or enterprise tag hastily. And you know what they say about haste … you end up with typographical errors or inconsistent capitalization.
And, if you’re like me, it REALLY bugs you to see all of those inconsistencies in your terms.
This morning I had the task of getting PDF indexing to work in search on our new SharePoint 2010 installations. There are various existing blogs out there, so I thought I would combine what I used into one place.
The majority of the steps to get this working are documented here at Nick Gratten’s SharePoint blog.
You will also need the adobe PDF small icon. The best place is to get directly from adobe here. Download the 17x17 small icon.
If you are copying the files from another UNC file server (say from your 2007 server) onto Server 2008 (or R2), Explorer might block the files to protect you from yourself. Right click the file, click properties, and make sure you don’t have the option to unblock. If you do, click Unblock.
There have been discussions around if this works on SharePoint 2010 Foundation. While officially I’ve seen where it’s said it is not supported, there are apparently workarounds.
Cloud computing has been the subject of much conversation (and hype) for about a year now. Our 4 City Tour (www.successaccelerators.com/4city) focused on this, as did some recent research with one of our partners (white paper forthcoming) and our partner Salesforce.com has long led the charge in the cloud computing conversation.
This past week, cloud computing took center stage at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington DC. From all indications, cloud computing will be the number one area of focus for Microsoft for the next 12 months (or more). So just what is cloud computing, why is it important to you and what is Microsoft doing that will impact it? Let’s tackle each of those questions in sequence.
I wanted to take a minute and talk about a really cool new feature of SharePoint 2010 relating to backups – Granular Restores. While doing some test migrations from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010, we needed to choose the best method to selectively move data from an old site to a new site.
In SharePoint 2010, you have the ability to restore content (down to the list level) from an unattached SQL database. How cool is that! Here’s the new Backup and Restore options in Central Admin:
One of SharePoint’s popular features is Document Management, which leads many organizations to migrate their data from files shares or their Document Management System over to SharePoint. Is this best practice? Let’s not be hasty, and look at the various things to consider on both sides of the coin.
Although the idea of user adoption is not a new idea, we consistently find our clients asking for more ways or better ways to get users to “use the system.” Depending on the scope of the project, we always recommend some level of governance and training for our clients to get the most from their implementation. These are critical pieces of the overall solution that we feel play a significant role in whether or not the product is accepted or rejected by the users.
In addition, with the recent release of SharePoint 2010, this topic has once again become a priority for many of our clients looking to implement this new version. While superior to the previous version in far too many ways to mention here, the user interface has been completely enhanced with the “Ribbon” interface first seen Office 2007. For users of SharePoint 2007, this will be a slight learning curve to use the new interface, but as with Office 2007, once learned the productivity and efficiency will increase exponentially.
I was reminded today about the difference of removing vs. deleting a web part from a site page today. There’s already a great blog on the subject and it can be found here.
The quick and dirty is that when you either choose to “close” on a web part or click the “X” in edit view, this does NOT remove it from the page, it only hides it. There is a Closed Web Parts gallery where this closed web part gets placed, and if there are enough closed web parts, it can significantly decrease your pages load time, as it still loads the closed web parts.
Like SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010 comes in three different versions. However, the version names have changed and what is available in each version is different. So if you’re moving from the SharePoint 2007 world to the SharePoint 2010 world, it can be a bit confusing (it has been for me). The versions are:
When I was configuring a new installation of SharePoint Server 2010 the other day, I hit a snag when creating a Managed Service Account while creating a new Web Application. My existing Application Pool account wasn’t listed and I couldn’t choose the “Configurable” option to manually type it in. I attempted to make the existing application pool AD account a managed account, but got the error:
“The given key was not in the dictionary”
To correct this error, you need to go into Active Directory and make a security change:
Today is the day! Microsoft officially has released SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010 and related 2010 products like SharePoint Designer, Project 2010 and Visio 2010. You can watch the event and get other information at the launch site:
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx
Other Resources
If you would like more information on SharePoint Server 2010, you can check out the following resources:
Breakdown comparison of the editions of SharePoint Server 2010
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Editions-Comparison.aspx
The time has finally arrived! Microsoft’s Corporate VP for Microsoft Office Takeshi Numoto recently announced the final release milestone for the 2010 wave of Office products including SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010. Here are the critical dates...
During a recent migration, we ran into an issue when attempting to migrate users from one domain to another using stsadm migrateuser. Hopefully this will help any others that are getting this strange error. Our environment was a small MOSS 2007 64-bit farm installed with slipstreamed SP2, with the February 2010 cumulative update applied.
We were moving from an on-premise to Hosted solution, so this required a new domain and user accounts. Since the new domain wouldn’t know anything about the old domain’s user accounts, we added the –ignoresidhistory switch. We ran the following command:
I wanted to pass-along a special promotion that Bamboo Solutions has going on…
For a limited time, when you purchase the SharePoint Video Library from Bamboo Solutions, you'll receive a free FLIP Video UltraHD Camera valued at $260.00 (see details below).
There’s no catch, no tricks; just a simple, great offer. Purchase the SharePoint Video Library for $500, and Bamboo Solutions will ship you the Flip Video UltraHD so you can start filling your video library with fun and useful video content.
I wanted to let all of our readers know about a cloud computing event that will be held in 4 cities along the East coast. I admit, it is my company that is hosting the “4-City Tour” but this really is a going to be a good way to see many cloud platforms at work.
Highlights:
Parallel sessions on Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com, SharePoint, and Unified Communications Integration luncheon showing a live demo of integration between CRM, SharePoint, and UC Exclusive research on the top cloud challenges from CFOs and CIOs Exclusive demos of SharePoint 2010 Exclusive session showing Microsoft CRM and Salesforce.com in a live side-by-side comparison
Cities:
May 4 – Charlotte, NC May 6 – Washington, DC May 11 – Raleigh, NC May 13 – Atlanta, GA
Many of you may be familiar with the Business Data Catalog (BDC) feature of MOSS 2007 that allowed for the integration of SharePoint with various line-of-business (LOB) systems on a read-only basis. In SharePoint 2010, the BDC has become the BCS – Business Connectivity Services. The BCS has it’s own dedicated database and runs as it’s own service application (as do many of the other services in SharePoint 2010) that can be enabled at the Web Application level.
With Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 capabilities, people are now empowered with read and write access to LOB applications and external data sources (such as SQL, Oracle, SAP, CRM, Siebel, Web services, and custom applications), whether they are online or offline. An entire site can be taken offline by using Microsoft Office Workspace and then users can resynchronize when they’re reconnected to the network.
The complementary paper includes over 12 years of research, recent survey results, and CRM turnaround success stories.
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Whether you are upgrading to SharePoint Online, 2010, 2013 or the latest 2016, this checklist contains everything you need to know for a successful transition.