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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
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Trips (or projects) do not complete themselves. It takes “unseen” things to make it all happen, and that is where this habit will focus.
Whether you are using SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2013, it is very likely you are taking advantage of the Managed Metadata service for taxonomy and other purposes. Hopefully you have a development / test environment in addition to production, and if so you know it’s a struggle to keep them in sync. If your groups, term sets and terms are not identical down to GUIDs between the two environments, if you move a database from one to the other then all your terms will be broken… not good.
The point of this blog is not help you sync your environments with metadata. Let's dive in.
There are many opportunities for projects to veer off of course, not due to the unexpected, but due to completely avoidable items such as forgetting the definition of success, lack of focus, an individual personality, or a new technology coming to market. Think you’re immune and that “This will never happen to my organization!”? Unfortunately, in our experience we’ve seen it happen to the very best organizations, which is where this habit comes into play. No one has the intention of taking a cross-country road trip to Santa Monica, only to end-up in Fargo (no offense), or worse yet, to simply stop driving somewhere in Arkansas (again, no offense), and say, “Let’s do something else now.” At the end of the day, technology projects are no different. My guess is, you started the project in order to actually finish the project (and on time and under budget would great too!).
Habit 1: Chart Your Journey
Before you begin your project, define what a successful project will look like, and you have set yourself up for success from the start.
I recently needed to migrate all documents that hadn’t been modified in 90 days in all SharePoint webs within a SharePoint site collection to a records center. Here is a quick and easy way to accomplish this task.
After having some pleasant discussions in the SharePoint Yammer SPYam community on this subject and finding almost no information online about this topic, I thought I’d put some fingers to keys and do my part to share some information. This post assumes you have basic concepts and knowledge of SharePoint taxonomies, but review TechNet if you need more info or to get up to speed on the basic concepts.
If you have ever managed an Anonymous SharePoint site you know that working with Office documents is a pain. SharePoint and Office try to be smart. SharePoint passes a path to the to the Office application and then the Office application goes out to the web application to get the file. This post is going to provide you with a way to override the default link for Office documents within SharePoint so you can avoid all the log-in prompts.
While working on a client request recently, I came across a way to easily work with date and time values in a SharePoint Designer 2010 workflow. I was able to solve this using only SharePoint Designer. I reviewed other solutions, and I will give links to a couple others in case they are needed. This worked for me, and I didn’t see anyone else with this exact solution so I thought I would share for the greater good.
I recently got a request from a client that had a lot of employee engagement around blogging and they wanted to bring that front and center on their intranet home page. We were already rolling up an executive blog to the front page using the Content Query Web Part styled with some custom XSLT. They wanted it styled to look exactly the same, but using the CQWP again was out of the question since these employee blogs were coming from the user My Sites.
While working on a PowerShell script to do some updating list items in SharePoint, I first had to get some properties from the user account in Active Directory. The end goal was to update a managed metadata field, choosing terms based on the root OU that the user resided in Active Directory. I found an easier way to do this with PowerShell and wanted to share.
If you’ve gotten to this page, it’s because you or your users make heavy use of SharePoint lists, and the inevitable request came up “Ok this is great, but I can’t print this item, help!”. Like most things with SharePoint, there is no one right answer (sometimes there is!), but some are definitely easier than others or better depending on your needs. I'll show you a couple different common solutions out there in one place, and what worked for me.
A client contacted me the other day about some help with printing a picture library. I found a simple way to do this, and I wanted to share to hopefully save someone some grief.
If you search the interwebs for “print sharepoint list” you get articles that are either a fancy ribbon button for printing lists/libraries form codeplex, or doing javascript or similar to call the print dialog from a modal. That works, and I started down that path.
I've seen folks all over the interweb and even a client of mine hit this issue, so I wanted to take a moment in this blog to document it for posterity. It deals with the Usage logging features of SharePoint, and the all too familiar Microsoft bugs.
In this post I wanted to share a resolution to an issue I had with a client recently. At first I thought this was going to be a difficult issue, but as luck would have it the resolution was amazingly simple if you know what to look for.
When it comes to writing documentation, it is unfortunately one of those things that you will get to tomorrow, gets pushed because this server was down, or Bob needs his password reset. But I believe it’s important to at least have some form of documentation. This is important because:
This post is going to look at updating the out-of-the-box SharePoint 2013 icons. This comes in to play if you are creating a branded site.
Sooner or later, you might run into this error. I was able to work out the easy solution so I wanted to share it to help someone else. You will likely run into this error if you try to go site column or site content types, or from a list or library you click add site column. In my case, I had just created a site from a custom site template and was getting this error. Let’s dig in.
When considering an upgrade to your SharePoint environment, there are three questions you should always ask before you start.
I’ve been fighting an interesting issue lately where some hidden taxonomy columns are becoming visible. In this environment, there are simple custom content types with some custom site columns, a few of which are managed metadata columns. The issue is that what seems randomly, some strange fields suddenly show up in the library columns, and on the list forms:
Starting with one of the most important factors in choosing a cloud service, security has been the big stumbling block for many companies considering a move to the cloud. Microsoft's online services have been designed with security in mind.
After security, the most commonly mentioned area of concern regarding cloud services is reliability. Downtime means lost worker productivity and ultimately costs companies money.
I was on a project in the past where I was upgrading SharePoint 2007 to 2010. I really didn’t want to move all the lists and libraries for 100+ sites manually, so I turned to PowerShell. The following script takes the current site URL, and the new site URL where the lists will go. It looks to see if there are actually items in the list, and only moves lists and libraries that actually have content.
Using JavaScript, you can fire your own alerts without having to do any customizations to the SharePoint 2013 user interface (UI). This post will look at creating a list-driven notification system using the SharePoint 2013 notification bar.
In a previous post I described how to use the Managed Navigation functionality that is new in SharePoint 2013 to create a global navigation based on a Managed Metadata term set. This post is going to provide you with all the CSS you need to fully brand a SharePoint 2013 global navigation bar.
For a recent project, I needed to migrate around 70 HTML forms in their current format and serve them up from within SharePoint. These were fairly basic forms that just submitted all their data to email. Obviously, it would have been good to convert these to InfoPath or something else, but I simply didn’t have the time for that. In this post I will explain how I used SharePoint web services and jQuery to return SharePoint list data.
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