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Posts Tagged 'howto'

We are pleased to present below all posts tagged with 'howto'. If you still can't find what you are looking for, try using the search box.

3 Ways to Get a Direct Link in SharePoint Online

If this blog title captured your attention, then you are very likely aware of the problem. It seems like just yesterday I could go into a document library, right click on a file, and Copy shortcut.  Those days have past and now we get a whole list of confusing options to choose from. Is it possible to just get a regular link? I’ll show you three ways how...

How to Get a Direct Link to a File in Modern SharePoint Online Libraries

[Video] How to Filter Email Attachments with Microsoft Flow

I’ve noticed a lot of questions related to filtering email attachments lately in the Microsoft Flow Community. For example, a user gets an email and only wants to save the PDF/DOCX/XLSX (excluding images) somewhere. Whether you save them to OneDrive for Business, a SharePoint site, or even a local file share, this video will show you how to accomplish that task. Follow along as I walk you through the process, step-by-step...

filter email attachments using Microsoft Flow

Two Quick Tips to Avoid Clicking Empty Folders in SharePoint Without Metadata

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! 

Afraid of Metadata? Two Quick Tips to Avoid Clicking Empty Folders in SharePoint

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. 

How to Filter Out Deleted Calendar Events in SharePoint

Have you ever been using a SharePoint calendar with recurring events then noticed some events started showing with a title of “Deleted:”?  I’m going to show you a quick way to hide these events from a view.

Easily Check Available Property Values in Microsoft Flow

Easily Check Available Property Values in Microsoft Flow

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:

  1. What properties can I access easily without additional steps?
  2. What is the value of those properties?

Once you know those two things you can know if you need to do additional steps to accomplish your requirements for your Flow. 

Employee Engagement - It's NOT an Initiative, it's a Culture

Employee engagement – it’s just one of the latest buzz words floating around. But what does it really mean? I can tell you that it’s not just performance plans, timely feedback and evaluations. We need to stop being so focused on the employee’s productivity and start focusing on their experience in the workplace. If an employee is having a good experience, it stands to reason that this will allow them to be more productive and engaged. So how do we do that? Let’s take a look at five principles to get us there…
Engaging Employees with SharePoint

Use PowerShell to Set Permissions on All SharePoint Libraries, Folders and Files

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!

Where To Download the Latest SharePoint Designer for 2013/2016

I’ve had this come up multiple times lately, and I thought I’d put up a post to help get the information all in one place.  Now that we’re moving away from SharePoint 2010 and dealing with SharePoint 2013/2016/Online more often, folks still want SharePoint Designer but are confused which version they need.  You want to be sure to get the latest and most patched version, which requires more than one download.

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.

How to Set External Columns in a SharePoint List 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. 

Six Tips To Manage Active Listening In Your Next Meeting

How many times have you facilitated a meeting where you shared all of the information that needed to be covered, only to have people messaging, emailing or calling with questions about the content an hour, a day or a week later? Frustrating right? So how do you achieve the goals of your next meeting, in a meaningful way, that will stick with your audience? Let's examine 6 quick tips.


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

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.  

How to Migrate a SharePoint 2010 InfoPath List Form to SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint Online

Migrate InfoPath list form error
I’ve been working with a client recently to migrate their SharePoint 2010 farms to SharePoint 2013.  A lot of the data was being organized so it was quite a granular move utilizing one of the common 3rd-party migration tools Metalogix Content Matrix.  Of course some of the SharePoint lists had been customized with InfoPath.  While this is fine, I went to move the list with the migration tool, and all went fine until it tried to move the customized list form template - template.XSN.  It refused. This post details exactly what I did next to work around this!   

Back to SharePoint Basics: Part 3–Working With Views

It’s been awhile but I am back to continue on my SharePoint Basics series for SharePoint.  Let’s see where we are:

Back in Part 2, I touched on SharePoint Views briefly in the context of creating content.  In today’s post I want to go a lot deeper with views and show you how to work with them while will help any SharePoint user work more effectively and efficiently.

Making Your Visio Drawing More Valuable with Live Data and Data Graphics

imageWhen it comes to Visio's high quality, yet static content, can we make that flat data more interactive and fresh?  Sure, with Data Graphics!  Some people refer to drawings like this as having data-behind.  You might have seen the Supply Chain example from Microsoft in a number of demos, and think that it must be some overly complicated configuration.  It’s not!

Insert A Little LUCK Into Your Channel Strategy To Optimize Your Partnership

In order for a channel strategy to be successful, the investment does not end with implementation. It takes a lot of hard work and a little LUCK along the way.

Installing Microsoft OneNote 2013 On Your Mac Or PC

 

When it comes to effectively taking notes, OneNote leaves Word in the dust. Don’t get me wrong, Microsoft Word is an excellent program and is very useful for specific tasks, but note-taking isn’t one of them. OneNote allows users to take notes the way that works best for them. In this blog entry, I will walk you through the installation process for your computer, step-by-step.

Use Power Pivot to Merge Related SharePoint List Data

Excel-2013 When working with SharePoint, you occasionally need to work with related data.  Since SharePoint isn’t setup for true relational data, that means we’re typically working with lookup columns from a child to a parent list.  This is all fine well and good, but I had a client ask me for some special filtering and output with this related data.  After reviewing my options, I found that the quickest way to do this (in under 15 minutes) is to use Microsoft’s Power Pivot add-in for Excel.  No SharePoint Designer required!  If you have Excel 2010, you will need to download and install the add-in.  If you use Excel 2013, the add-in is already installed, you just have to enable it.

How to Get Date Only in SharePoint 2010 Workflow

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. 

 

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

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

Five Different Methods for How to Print SharePoint List Item

Print a SharePoint List Item 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. 

 

Correct Empty ULS Logs in SharePoint 2010

imageIf you're unsure what ULS logs are or what they're used for, please see my previous post where I cover the basics. On a recent project, I was adding a new server to a SharePoint 2010 farm. After the join was completed, I went to go review the ULS logs to ensure all looked well and no serious errors or other issues came up. To my surprise, it was empty! It turned out to be a simple fix, but here are some things to check when this happens:

  1. ULS logging is driven by the Windows service "SharePoint 2010 Tracing". Ensure this service is started, and if it is already running, right-click on it and choose restart. Then re-check the ULS logs.
  2. If the above tracing service is started and re-starting doesn't help, it likely is permissions related. This was the problem in my case. To fix this, do the following:
    1. In this environment, the tracing service was running as the application pool account. We need to add that account to the local user group "Performance Log Users".
    2. Check the membership of this group on a working farm server, and ensure the new farm server has the same group membership.
    3. Restart the tracing service, and check the ULS logs again for entries.
  3. If you still have trouble, check the other local security groups like WSS_WPG and WSS_ADMIN_WPG groups and ensure the problem server has the same memberships.

While you shouldn’t have to, it might be necessary to either perform an IISRESET on the problem server, or even reboot to ensure new credentials take affect.

Quick Tip: Change the “Search this site…” text in SharePoint 2010

SNAGHTML6b48e8bI 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.

Quickly Find the SharePoint 2010 Configuration Database with PowerShell

powershell_iconI 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.

SharePoint 2010 Ratings and Custom Content Types

imageThere 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:

SNAGHTML7778c9

Tip: How to Rename a SharePoint 2010 Server

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. Tell SharePoint about the new server name via PowerShell. This is done via the Rename-Server cmdlet. Of course get-help is your friend to get details and examples, however the context help of the cmd (and the technet article for that matter) IS WRONG! It’s funny, because the example is right, but the explanation isn’t. Go figure, nobody’s perfect. Anyway, you give the command the old and new server names. TechNet says the old server name is in the form of a URL. That throws an error. It should just be . So the whole command would be like:
       1: Rename-SPServer –identity “old_server_name” –name “new_server_name”

Blog Topics

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CPR for CRM Study

The complementary paper includes over 12 years of research, recent survey results, and CRM turnaround success stories.

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SharePoint Readiness Assessment

This 60-second assessment is designed to evaluate your organization's collaboration readiness.

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CRM Self Assessment

Learn how you rank compared to organizations typically in years 1 to 5 of implementation - and which areas to focus on to improve.

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SharePoint Feedback Solution

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.

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SharePoint Upgrade Checklist

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.