Making Magic in SharePoint with PowerShell for Beginners

Managing common SharePoint admin tasks can be tedious. Introducing—SharePoint Online Management Shell! In this article, we'll walk you through some simple PowerShell scripts that can “magically” perform actions and save you time.

Lock-Down Self-Service for Creating Office 365 Groups

Self-service is for pumping gas or getting your own soft-serve ice cream at the ice cream shop…. not for creating new Office 365 Groups.

This article explains how to disable the ability for “everyone” to create groups in all Office 365 services that use groups. 

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!

Use SharePoint Workflow to Determine if a Field Changed Without Code

On a recent client project, we’re working to implement a task-based tracking solution in SharePoint 2010.  There is a parent Project, and that Project has a template set of tasks the workflow creates with due dates.  Then the requirement came up where if the Project due date changed, all of the task due dates needed to be updated to.  Read on to see how I show you an easy and simple no-code way using workflow to tell if a field changed. 

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. 

Use PowerShell to Call a Web Service - Don’t Reinvent the Wheel!

One habit that prevails through any vertical is to be efficient at what you do – work smarter not harder right?  In the land of PowerShell (or any development for that matter) that is a vital lesson to learn!  Something comes up and you need to turn to code or PowerShell to accomplish said task and you need to take care of it quickly.  In today's post, I'll show how to use PowerShell to call an existing web service to do all the hard work for us and save us tons of time writing a new script from scratch.  

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.

Microsoft Ignite 2015–Day 5

It’s been a packed week at Microsoft Ignite, and in this final post of my daily recaps, we’ll validate the awesomeness of Visio for dashboards and data-connected data graphics, review the common problems encountered when performing the initial configurations of Office 365 service for your organization, and finally share how search works in SharePoint 2013 plus how to scale it properly.

Use PowerShell to Enable Versions in All Document Libraries in All Subsites

In this post with PowerShell, I wanted to show you how you can write a script that will enable versions but starting from a subsite instead of the entire site collection. 

Plot SharePoint 2013 List Items on a Map – Automatically GeoCode Addresses with PowerShell

SharePoint 2013 comes with new features for plotting SharePoint list items on a Bing map. However, it isn’t completely intuitive how to accomplish this, and once you figure it out, it is still a lot of work. This post will look at using PowerShell to quickly geocode a full list of SharePoint list items with address data.

Creating Managed Metadata Terms in SharePoint with PowerShell

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.

Creating Managed Metadata Terms in SharePoint with PowerShell

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.

Archive Old Documents in SharePoint with PowerShell

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.

How to Easily Get the Root OU of an Active Directory User with PowerShell

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.

What Makes Good SharePoint Documentation?

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:

1. It can prove to be very helpful when planning upgrades to the next version of SharePoint. 
2. It can be useful if you have to rebuild your farm so you can easily replicate the environment.

How to Fix “No two choices should have the same ID” SharePoint Error

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.

SharePoint: Knowing What is in the Box and Using PowerShell to Move it

When considering an upgrade to your SharePoint environment, there are three questions you should always ask before you start.

Move all SharePoint Lists and Libraries to a New Site with PowerShell

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.

Make Multiple SharePoint Fields Required with Windows PowerShell

This entry includes script that was created for a recent client who asked me to make several columns required in their SharePoint 2010 site collection of approximately 25-30 subsites. This would've taken two minutes if all columns were site columns, however, that wasn't the case. As a result, the columns were not inheriting and I was forced to turn to PowerShell for a solution.

Use PowerShell to Create a Full SharePoint Training or Testing Site Environment

In this post I explain how to use PowerShell to create a full SharePoint (2010 or 2013) training site or testing site environment. This is the process I used to prepare for a recent SharePoint training course where I needed each of my users to have their own site collection in my environment.

Update a Managed Metadata List Field the Easy Way with PowerShell

I was working with PowerShell to update a managed metadata field that accepted multiple values in a publishing page library today and it was more difficult than it seemed like it should have been, so I’m posting here what actually worked for me. It turned out to be much simpler than I was trying to make it.

How to Delete a Service Application Database that is Not Responding

On a recent project, I hit an issue with databases that was interesting. We were restoring a lot of databases over to a development environment from production, as well as the managed metadata database. I had gone through the whole deal, backed up the database in the old server, restored it to the development SQL server, etc. There was an issue with the Managed Metadata service that required to have service application re-created. This lead to a situation where the service application database was unprovisioned, but not deleted.

Fixing SharePoint 2010 Calendar Overlays After a Move with PowerShell

If you ever move a calendar from one place to another, either as part of a site move or a list move, you will be greeted by the fact that your calendar overlays no longer work because the URLs to the overlaying calendars are hardcoded into the list view. I am trying to set up an automated restore from production to development, so having lots of broken calendars isn’t great. Fortunately, all you have to do is run a few lines of PowerShell to fix this.