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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
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...
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With any LUCK, I’m sure your users are actively using SharePoint search to discover and find content. Sooner or later they will struggle to find whatever it is they are looking for. Search is after all only as good as what you put into it. Utilizing crawl rules can quickly create relevant results, thus, increasing the likeliness that users keep using search.
How much time do you spend organizing meetings? How much time do you spend searching for a date/time that suits everyone on the meeting invite? Do you spend more time deciding on a meeting date/time than you do the actual meeting? If you spend a large amount of time scheduling meetings, FindTime is worth your time to test. Learn more about the time-saving benefits this application has to offer...
Microsoft Flow has an exhaustive list of available options, connections, abilities, etc. to make our work lives easier. Here, I am using Flow to make our lives fuller. By connecting Flow with Yelp, natural language chatbots, and a bit of AI, the question of "Where to eat?" is now answered by this multifunctional technology.
Microsoft Flow is like an open source toolbox. If you know what tools to use, Flow has countless connectors and custom use-cases to equip you with new solutions for your next project. With minimal coding, learn how to extract Yelp data as prospective customers and feed that information into the Leads area of Dynamics 365.
You’re using Office 365, you get the deal. You’re on a road-trip and Microsoft is telling you what kind of car you can have while letting pick if you want GPS or not. The Office 365 suite certainly does provide tangible and measurable benefits that alleviate a lot of headaches for many organizations. Having said that, all is not so simple or easy in Wonderland, is it?
I had this come up with a client recently and wanted to be sure to share the easy resolution given the vague information out there on this topic. This just reminds me how important it is to not just blindly troubleshoot the symptom, but investigate fully before continuing in your attempts at resolution.
We work with a lot of clients and from time to time, many aren’t ready for metadata. They agree that files are difficult to find and there are a ton of nested subfolders, the users just aren’t ready to use metadata instead of those folders. Are we resigned to living in the time-wasting droll of having no idea if the subfolder they are clicking into will even have files in it? No!
I’ll show you two quick ways to alleviate the pain of the hunting and pecking users are forced to do when they don’t use search and trying to find a certain file.
🍀 Happy St. Patrick's Day! 🍀
Learn why St. Patrick's Day is so important for customer and employee engagement!
If you are like my unfortunate client, your installation of Office Web Apps (or WAC) was humming along just fine until that one day comes that you wish you never got out of bed. This turned out to be a simple fix but took some hair-pulling to get there so let me share my journey.
As you are likely aware Office 365 provides a wealth of abilities to review reports of all the activities that users (and admins) are doing in Office 365. Recently we were using this to get download activities from SharePoint but hit a snag when trying to restrict the results to a specific site. The answer was actually backwards to the interface.
When creating any Microsoft Flows, sooner or later you are going to need to use values from user profile properties like Email Address, Name, Department, etc. You are wondering two things:
Once you know those two things you can know if you need to do additional steps to accomplish your requirements for your Flow.
Have you ever talked to someone who says, “Searching SharePoint is so easy – I find exactly what I’m looking for every time!”Me neither.Why the gap? And what can be done to close it?Your Intranet is not Like the InternetThe internet (let’s call it the web to avoid confusion) is not like your SharePoint intranet. The web is full of general information and when you’re searching it, you’re usually looking for general results. It is also powered by people who are interested in having their stuff fou ...
If you are still using SharePoint on-premises, then you will almost certainly be using workflows based on the 2010 workflow platform. These would include all of the out-of-the-box workflow reusable templates like Approval and Collect Signatures.
Recently I needed to change the start parameters of a workflow template that was deployed in a site template so there was a copy of the workflow in over 1,000 subsites. Of course I turned to my trusty friend PowerShell.
If you are using Office 365, you are likely very aware that with Microsoft at the controls, they are frequently making a lot of changes. Sometimes that’s a great thing and sometimes that’s not but on the whole it's a relief to not have to deal with an on-premise environment. Every month or so, Microsoft releases news about the recent changes that are being released. After going through February 2019’s update, I noticed a little but awesome change I wanted to call out regarding Microsoft Planner.
I’ve been involved with SharePoint for probably 12 years, and as a consultant daily for 9 years. In all of that time, I would say the most common thing I see my clients and others struggle to understand is the concept of metadata. What is it? What does it mean? I’ve often times explained it only to have someone say “Can I come by your office later and you explain it to me?”
Today I will do my best to put it in simplistic terms for relevance to SharePoint.
According to AIIM and Gartner, companies report that 53% to 80% of their content is ROTII (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial, Inaccurate or Incomplete). ROTII results in poor search results, duplicated work, decisions made on bad information, and frustrated users - in other words it destroys productivity, profits and satisfaction. Let's look at how to identify and clean up your ROTII.
I recently had an interesting issue with a client’s SharePoint environment that I wanted to hopefully help someone else out as it wasn’t the most intuitive cause. What do you do when you try to save list items or InfoPath-customized list items and it fails? It turned out to be really simple if you know what to look for.
When introducing SharePoint, start with something that will benefit all users, and that is easy to manage. Start with Document Management. Here are 6 steps to get started with SharePoint for document management.
When it comes to task management in Office 365 and SharePoint Online, you have three choices:
Which you use really depends on your requirements and how many people you are collaborating with.
Ever wish you could resize columns in a SharePoint view? In Office 365, your wish has been granted. But in SharePoint 2010-2016, it’s not.
There are various ways to fix this, but most require JavaScript. I prefer the CSS way as I always like to have a no-code solution, so let's take a look at how to use CSS to show multi-line text columns in your view.
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!
There is so much information available about SharePoint that sometimes it can be confusing to understand exactly what it's all about. Here is a very quick introduction to the facts about Microsoft SharePoint.
Does your team struggle to store, find, share and update documents? You're not alone - Harvard Business Review reports that employees can spend as much as 20% of their time just trying to find the documents that they need to do their job. Let's look at how SharePoint Document Management can help you solve this problem.
The complementary paper includes over 12 years of research, recent survey results, and CRM turnaround success stories.
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This 60-second assessment is designed to evaluate your organization's collaboration readiness.
Learn how you rank compared to organizations typically in years 1 to 5 of implementation - and which areas to focus on to improve.
This is a sandbox solution which can be activated per site collection to allow you to easily collect feedback from users into a custom Feedback list.
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.