A Practical Guide to SharePoint 2013

A Practical Guide to SharePoint 2013
A Practical Guide to SharePoint 2013 - Book by Saifullah Shafiq

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Slipstreamed Copies of Office 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 with SP1 Announced

At the SharePoint Conference today Microsoft announced that a slipstreamed version of Office 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 with service pack 1 is releasing.
Available today for download from the Microsoft Volume Licensing site, IT Pros will be able to provide full installation versions of Microsoft's Office and SharePoint products with the integrated SP1 bits. This ensures an easy installation of Office 2013 with SP1 to new systems and provides the ability to install SharePoint 2013 with SP1 directly to Windows Server 2012R2. It also delivers IT Pros with the tools to create administrative installations and custom deployments.

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Custom Ribbon Action and Set the Customize Icon to Ribbon Button in a SharePoint Hosted App

This article explains the Custom Ribbon Action to set the Custom Image to a Ribbon button and that is absolutely awesome! I was creating a Custom Action in my SharePoint Hosted app. I wanted to add a Button into the Ribbon of any Custom List to my App Web and do some work based on List Information. I started by adding a Custom Ribbon Action.

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Sunday, December 28, 2014

Create Content Type Event Receiver

We are using an existing content type of template type Contact. We are adding an event receiver that operates on the Item Add event. For the moment, we are just using the event receiver to block the item from being added with an error message.

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Thursday, December 18, 2014

Salesforce to integrate with OneDrive for Business and SharePoint in new universal file sharing solution

Salesforce.com today announced Salesforce Files Connect, a centralized, universal file-sharing solution that enables enterprise customers to seamlessly browse, search and share files located in any repository—all from a single user interface. We’re pleased to announce that OneDrive for Business and SharePoint will be the first file sharing platforms to integrate with Salesforce Files Connect.

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Monday, December 15, 2014

Sharepoint 2013 adds new social features

If you still think of SharePoint as document libraries with a nicer interface and more management tools than a file share then you're missing a lot of the value. Increasingly, SharePoint is about connecting employees as well as letting them collaborate on documents.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Google Invites SharePoint Users to Use Its Cloud

Google has expanded its Cloud Platform so that it supports a number of Microsoft operating systems and applications.

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Monday, December 8, 2014

Google Cloud Platform Adds Expanded Support for, uh, Windows

Microsoft has been steadily increasing its footprint on all platforms, including iOS and Android. The software company has been delivering software solutions to non-Windows environments, sometimes at the seeming expense of current Windows and Windows Phone customers, evidenced by customer complaints.

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Friday, December 5, 2014

Throttling Limits in SharePoint 2010

Throttling is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 lists. It allows SharePoint administrators to impose limits on the number of items returned by list queries from a list.

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Thursday, December 4, 2014

Garage Series: A developer’s view of transitioning to the apps for Office model

This week long-time developer and VP of Product, Ryan Duguid from Nintex describes what it took to make the shift going from full trust code to the apps for Office model. 

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Identify SharePoint 2013 Foundation or Server (Version)

It's crazy that there are easy ways to determine what the Edition (SKU) of SharePoint 2013 is that you are running. I have come across this several times, where someone asks me a SharePoint question. Not that I want to answer a question with a question, but the first thing I ask is what version of SharePoint they are running.


Tuesday, December 2, 2014

SharePoint 2010: Business Connectivity Services

This article explains step-by-step how to make an external content type using Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS).

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Monday, December 1, 2014

Why SharePoint 2013 Cumulative Update takes 5 hours to install?

I recently went through the process of applying the latest SharePoint 2013 Cumulative Update on my multi server SharePoint 2013 Farm.   To my surprise, I found the total time to apply the patch (install the bits) took over 5 hours per SharePoint Server.   This time doesn’t include running PSConfig which is considered phase 2.   My SharePoint 2013 farm is hosted by a Windows 8 Hyper V environment where my VM’s meet the minimum hardware requirements for memory etc.   I found that as I started to gracefully terminate other SharePoint services running, the time of subsequent patch runs started to drop tremendously.   I suspect the following:

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Sunday, November 30, 2014

Demystifying SharePoint Admin Permissions

Recently I’ve gotten a couple of questions about how or where to apply administrative permissions in SharePoint. In a couple of cases someone has come to me after giving an account some permissions but it still couldn’t do what they needed. I’ve pointed people to my How to create a SharePoint 2010 admin account and stop using sp_farm blog post for some guidance. That blog post is more about the “how” and less about the “why.” So in this blog post I’m going to try to map out the “why.”

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Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Show Tree View Navigation SharePoint 2013

Sometimes the default SharePoint 2013 Quick Launch is not enough to assist users to navigate to a SharePoint site. The tree view is an extra navigation option that provides a hierarchical view of all sites, lists and libraries in the site, including any sites below the current site level, such as the Document Center site template, display tree view navigation by default.

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Friday, November 21, 2014

Help shape the Microsoft Ignite event

When we announced Microsoft Ignite last month, we told you it will bring together the best of our past events for Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Project—and then take it to the next level, based on what our customers and partners have asked for.

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Saturday, November 15, 2014

SharePoint 2013 doesn’t support Windows Server Core Installation

Last week I was talking to Bill Baer, (blog | Twitter) my BFF and Senior Technical Product Manager for SharePoint at Microsoft. We were chatting about fun things like muscle cars, schnitzel, and how awesome Iowa is. I’d recently been asked by a couple of customers if SharePoint 2013 supported being installed on a Server Core installation of Windows. For those of you that haven’t played with this yet, it’s a minimal installation of Windows Server. The idea is that the fewer things you have running on Windows the fewer resources it will take, the less you’ll have to patch, and the fewer places the bad guys will have to attack your server. Everybody wins except the bad guys.

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Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Create App Catalog Site in SharePoint 2013

This article explains how to create an app catalog site in SharePoint 2013 using SharePoint 2013 Central Administration/PowerShell. An app catalog site contains a special type of Document Library that is used to upload and store app package files.

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Saturday, November 1, 2014

Configuring and fine tuning SQL Server for SharePoint 2013

Hot on the heels of my award-winning, life-changing, awe-inspiring article, Set Up SQL Server 2012 as a SharePoint 2013 Database Server, comes parts 2 and 3 at SharePoint Pro Mag. If there was a story that demanded a sequel, this is it. Now, if you haven’t read part 1 yet, go ahead and get caught up. You don’t want to start in the middle of the story. You need to know who the characters are, and what our protagonist's motivations are, what the exotic locations are, what is the McGuffin, etc. The story in part 2 picks up right where part 1 ends, so you’ll need to be up to speed.

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Friday, October 31, 2014

SharePoint 2013 and HTTP Module

How to deploy http module in SharePoint 2013.

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How to tell which Service Pack 1 you have installed on SharePoint 2013

It’s been a fun couple of months for guys like me that watch SharePoint patching. Earlier this month Microsoft discovered aparticularly nasty bug in SharePoint 2013 Service Pack 1 and they pulled it. They locked their best and brightest patchmeisters into a room, threw in some Mt. Dew and Snickers bars and had them crank out a newer, better, stronger,more-able-to-be-patched version of Service Pack 1. If you were one of the people that installed the first, broken SP1, the fix is to install the new, shiny SP1 over top of it. The problem is figuring out which version of SP1 you have installed. The new SP1 looks an awful lot like his older brother, right down to the Farm build number (15.0.4569.1000). There is an easy way to tell them apart in Central Administration.

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Saturday, October 25, 2014

Guest Portal in SharePoint

A Guest Portal is a portal for displaying projects to guest users without access to the main portal. Since we don't want to provide the main portal's access to a guest user, we create a new portal in another site collection and provide access to guest users and display projects that are shared with the user and share information stored in the list.

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Thursday, October 16, 2014

Introducing Microsoft Ignite

New post published on office blog!

http://blogs.office.com/2014/10/16/introducing-microsoft-ignite/

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

How to Upload Files to SharePoint 2013 with PowerShell

Every once in a while I get to add a little flair to a project I’m working on. Recently I was working on a couple of projects that intersected, sort of. First, I’ve been writing some scripts to automate some processes we have. These scripts do some pretty good logging to the file system in case there are problems. The average person would have stopped there, but not me. I wanted to take it a step farther. I added a bit where the script uploads the log files to a SharePoint document library. This makes them easier to get to for support personnel, and it makes it easier to search through them for specific issues. SharePoint saves the day again.

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Monday, October 13, 2014

How to Configure Page Output Caching in SharePoint 2013

In a normal operation, SharePoint generates ASP.NET pages dynamically from page templates and database content. These ASP.NET pages are then converted into HTML and sent to the client browser. This is a resource-intensive process. Page output caching stores the HTML output for specific SharePoint pages in memory, so that SharePoint does not need to regenerate a commonly-requested page every time.

Enterprise Keywords in SharePoint 2013

I have noticed that SharePoint Users take a lengthy route of column creation to add Enterprise Keywords.

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Sunday, October 12, 2014

Working With Search Engine Optimization Settings in SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013 introduces native support for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that requires custom solutions in SharePoint Server 2010 and earlier versions of the product. This feature primarily focuses on Web Content Management (WCM) implementations, because it is available only for publishing sites with the feature activated.

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Saturday, October 11, 2014

Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 019 with Waldek Mastykarz on the Office Graph

In episode 19, Jeremy Thake chats to Waldek Mastykarz, a SharePoint MVP, about the new Office Graph API Preview and the Graph Query language.

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Friday, October 10, 2014

How to Debug SharePoint 2013 Using Server-Side Request Tracing

In some cases, problems can occur before requests reach SharePoint. To investigate such problems, you may need to capture and analyze network traffic or IIS requests.

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How to Debug SharePoint 2013 Using Client-Side Request Tracing

In some circumstances, it can be useful to monitor HTTP requests and responses from a client computer. One of the main advantages of this approach is that it enables you to view all the HTTP traffic generated by a specific page request.

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Thursday, October 9, 2014

Introducing OneNote class notebooks—a flexible digital framework for teaching and learning

Editors note: After receiving feedback from readers on the value of the OneNoteForTeachers.com, we have elevated it to the top of the post with bold.
“OneNote is so much more than a piece of software, it is a framework for teaching and learning.”
—Rob Baker, director of technology, Cincinnati Country Day School

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Kennametal: manufacturing leader creates unity and harnesses knowledge with Office 365

Today’s post about Office 365 was written by Steve Hanna, chief information officer at Kennametal. 
Being a CIO is about more than just achieving benchmark performance and lowest costs for technology assets. I believe it’s really about collaborating with your business leaders to drive better overall results for the company. At Kennametal, we recognize the huge impact it makes on getting those results if we have the right people onboard, particularly when they work together.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

4 Ways to Kick Start Your SharePoint Implementation

We've discussed the importance of proper planning, change management strategies and providing end user training in order to ensure a successful SharePoint implementation. While it is definitely good to have a plan or strategy in place for any software project, with the fast pace of change you shouldn't wait until you have the entire project complete before rolling out anything. If you wait too long to deliver something, users will get impatient and the project will lose momentum.

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Tuesday, September 30, 2014

6 Predictions for SharePoint, Office 365 in 2014

It's been an interesting year for SharePoint. We've started to see steady adoption of SharePoint 2013, as well as continued usage of SharePoint 2010 and some older versions. And Microsoft’s shift to focus on the cloud and Office 365 left many guessing about the future of the on premises version of SharePoint.
Whatever comes in 2014, I don’t believe SharePoint is going anywhere. But I do think we’ll see more changes.

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Friday, September 26, 2014

Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 017 with Matthias Einig on transforming your SharePoint full trust code

In episode 17, Jeremy Thake chats to Matthias Einig, a SharePoint MVP, about transforming SharePoint Full Trust Code to the SharePoint app model.

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Thursday, September 25, 2014

Finnair takes to the cloud with Office 365

Today’s post on Finnair’s move to Office 365 is excerpted from the full case study.
Finnair logo
The airline industry has seen its share of turbulence over the last decade, as mega-airlines merge and acquire smaller players, more regional airlines take to the air, and customers aggressively seek online bargains. Finnair, Finland’s largest airline and the fifth oldest airline in the world, has remained successful because it knows how to adapt and find smarter ways to operate.

Friday, September 19, 2014

Nintex Forms in SharePoint 2013 / Office 365

Welcome to an article on Nintex Forms in SharePoint 2013 / Office 365. Here we will see how to use Nintex forms; I will be showing everything in detail so even a first time user doesn't have any issue.

Terms as Search Refiners in SharePoint 2013

In this article we can explore how to convert Managed Metadata Terms into Search Refiners.

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Tuesday, September 16, 2014

September 16 Project webcast now available on-demand

CAROUSEL_Project_260x146Join us Tuesday, September 16, at 9:30 a.m. PT/12:30 p.m. ET to kick off the new Project webcast series!
This session will discuss how to create a project lifecycle workflow, with branching logic based on project-level metadata.

Monday, September 15, 2014

Insights into SharePoint Replication

When I joined Microsoft back in 2006 to help build out the Microsoft Managed Services offerings — a precursor to the SharePoint Online platform within Office365 — I spent a good deal of time talking with customers and partners about improving the performance of SharePoint across multiple locations: from deployment and architectural best-practices, to content synchronization and WAN optimization.

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Thursday, September 4, 2014

Create a SharePoint Site Page

This article provides the procedure to create SharePoint site pages in SharePoint online.

What is page?

A Web page in a site can display lists of information, enabling team members to organize the information any way they want, such as by subject, due date, or author.

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Monday, September 1, 2014

Forms-Based Authentication in SharePoint 2013

Forms-Based Authentication is a claims-based identity management system that is based on ASP.NET membership and role provider authentication.

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SharePoint Adoption Tips and Tricks #SPC14

As organizations struggle to provide users with meaningful solutions to improve daily work, user adoption has become a big area of focus. In many cases, the adoption issue has little or nothing to do with the technology and really comes down to the culture, the people and the end goal.

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Sunday, August 31, 2014

SharePoint: A Formidable Enterprise Collaboration Platform

Everyone knows SharePoint has had problems. However, the Radicati Group just released a report that contains words new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella must be more than happy to hear.
According to the Microsoft SharePoint Market Analysis, 2014-2018, edited by Sara Radicati, Microsoft ironed out the wrinkles in the 2013 edition and now offers a powerful enterprise collaboration platform for business users.

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CMSWire's Top 20 Hits of 2013: SharePoint

SharePoint was one of the topics that attracted a lot of interest in the past year — and just as much controversy. It seems everyone has a view on it and how it should be used.
However, there were three big subjects that dominated, and make up the lion’s share of our Top 20 this year: 1) SharePoint Online 2) SharePoint and Yammer and 3) SharePoint in Office 365. There were other issues too, like records management, search and how search is being used in the enterprise.

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Thursday, August 28, 2014

Search for sensitive content in SharePoint and OneDrive documents

Wesley Holley is a program manager on the Office 365 team and Shobhit Sahay is the technical product manager on the Office 365 team.
Responsible organizations today use a variety of controls and policies to keep their data safe and secure. These controls become even more crucial if the data involved is sensitive information, which can range from industry-wide data (such as credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, or customer information) to proprietary information (such as patents or confidential documents). Protecting this sensitive data is important because it enables organizations to comply with industry, government, and other regulations.

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Reed Elsevier rallies around Office 365 to collaborate across countries and cut costs

Today’s post was written by Michael Bouchet, vice president of Infrastructure Services at Reed Elsevier
Michael Bouchet  of  Reed ElsevierReed Elsevier is a world-leading provider of information solutions for professional customers. LexisNexis helps lawyers win cases, Gray’s Anatomy helps doctors save lives, Elsevier BioSource helps scientists make new discoveries. Other Reed Elsevier companies help corporations build commercial relationships, insurance companies assess risk, and government and financial institutions detect fraud.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Problem and Solution - SharePoint 2013 Prerequisites Installation on Windows Server 2012 R2

After I installed my Windows Server 2012 180 days trial version I decided to install SharePoint Server 2013 and give it a try (I know I'm late but being late is better than never).

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Sunday, August 24, 2014

SharePoint 2013 Search - Part 4

Searching File Shares

You can also search files shares for content and information using SharePoint search. To setup file share search, follow these steps:

1. Open SharePoint Central Administration site.

2. Click General Application Settings.

3. Click Farm Search Administration.

4. Click Search Service Application.

5. Click Content Sources under Crawling in the left side menu.

6. Click New Content Source.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Taxonomy Refinement Panel Web Part and faceted navigation now available in SharePoint Online for intranet scenarios

Over the last months we’ve taken many steps towards enabling search-driven publishing for intranet sites in SharePoint Online. We enabled the Content Search Web Part (CSWP), the cross-site publishing feature, and a new group cache that improves the performance of the CSWP.
Now we’ve enabled two features that previously were available only in SharePoint Server 2013—the Taxonomy Refinement Panel Web Part (TRPWP) and faceted navigation.

Friday, August 22, 2014

Your SharePoint 2013 farm in Microsoft Azure is just clicks away

The Azure Preview Portal now supports the automated creation of a basic or high-availability SharePoint farm in Microsoft Azure.
SharePoint Server Farm
You can use your Azure subscription, an Azure trial subscription, or your MSDN subscription to set up your farm.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Duplicate managed accounts - Item has already been added error

You can add multiple managed accounts in SharePoint but you cannot delete them. If you add same account twice, and you are logged in with that account, you get following error when you try to do anything in the central admin:

Item has already been added, key in dictionary: domain\user

The solution is to remove one managed account. Use PowerShell.

$managedaccount = get-spmanagedaccount -identity "domain\user"

remove-spmanagedaccount $managedaccount[0]

This will remove the extra managed account. You may have to log out and log in again. Also recycle the application pool associated with that managed account.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

SharePoint Online simplifies storage management

Mark Kashman (@mkashman) is a senior product manager on the SharePoint marketing team.
The journey to simplify the admin experience in Office 365 continues. Previously, we increased allOneDrive for Business users’ storage allotment to 1 TB. Along with this adjustment, we removed the OneDrive for Business quota management tab from the SharePoint Online admin center.
Today we are introducing a new storage model based on usage, making it easier to manage availability of storage across your SharePoint Online team sites. In addition, we increased the number of site collections limits to parallel and adjust the new usage model.
Let’s dive into the details.

Monday, August 18, 2014

SharePoint 2013 Search - Part 3

Search PHP Sites

As of this writing, PHP is the 6th most popular programming language (after Java, C, C++, C#, and Objective-C). A couple years back, it was at 4th position. I consider it to be a most popular web programming language. Till Jul 2007, 20,917,850 domains and 1,224,183 IP addresses had been registered for PHP sites. Searching sites created with such a popular technology with one of the world's best search technologies really makes sense. Especially in enterprise environments, where you are usually tasked with such requirements, this kind of combination does not seem illogical. Steps for setting up PHP search are as following:

Friday, August 15, 2014

New Patterns of Collaboration in SharePoint

SharePoint has come a long way in the past decade. In this, the final installment of my three part series, we'll be looking at the new capabilities introduced in SharePoint 2013 that change how companies can collaborate — remember, if you’re still treating SharePoint like the Web-based file share it was in 2003, it's time for a reappraisal.


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Thursday, August 14, 2014

UserVoice driving improvements to SharePoint API

The SharePoint API allows Office 365 developers to call SharePoint to work with the Office 365 building blocks, including Sites, Lists/Libraries, and List Items/Documents. These APIs come in two main types: native SDKs in .NET, JavaScript, and Silverlight; and a REST API.

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JSON Light support in REST SharePoint API released

The REST SharePoint API has been an extremely popular way for Office 365 developers to work with SharePoint sites, lists/libraries, and list items/documents. One of the big bits of feedback we got from developers using the REST SharePoint API was about the payload of the data that was returned. Our response was to add support for JSON Light. JSON Light is an open standard that allows developers to provide in the header of the request how much metadata is returned. To check out more about JSON Light, head over to the Microsoft OData JSON spec document. You can also check out all the endpoints for the SharePoint REST API over on MSDN.

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Sunday, August 10, 2014

SharePoint 2013 Search - Part 2

Federated Search

SharePoint search provides two approaches for processing queries to return search results. One is content crawling and the other is federated search. Let me remind you, if you are an experienced SharePoint user and have used SharePoint 2010, that just like “Search Scopes”, “Federated Search” terminology is extinct in SharePoint 2013.

SecureSphere for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007, 2010, 2013

Microsoft SharePoint provides easy access to business-critical data through intranet, extranet, and public-facing applications. So when that information is sensitive or regulated, security is a major concern.

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Saturday, August 2, 2014

SharePoint Online simplifies admin interface plus adds new controls over user experience

Mark Kashman (@mkashman) is a senior product manager on the SharePoint marketing team.
Narrow in on what is important—the task at hand. And when that changes, refocus. The journey tosimplify the Office 365 admin experience continues, this time with a focus on simplifying the SharePoint Online admin center. For those admins who don’t specialize in deep SharePoint management, our goal is to allow you to manage the service more easily while maintaining access to the most common controls.

SharePoint 2013 Search - Part 1

In this Article:

  • Result Sources
  • Federated Search
  • Setup Bing Search
  • Search External Data Sources
  • Setup File Shares Search

SharePoint enterprise search is regarded as one of the world’s best search technologies. SharePoint 2013 has gone one step farther and added new enhancements to this world-class technology. There are new enhancements for finding people and expertise. Phonetic search works in multiple languages. Search results display authored documents and information about past projects that can showcase a person’s expertise. There are contact cards that provide a way to contact people directly from the search results.

Friday, August 1, 2014

Hybrid Clouds for SharePoint: Great, but Not for Everyone

The hybrid cloud is the talk of the industry for 2014, and a hybrid cloud for SharePoint / Office 365 is no exception. But not everyone is going hybrid, at least not permanently.
Back in 2010, Steve Ballmer said that Microsoft was fully committed to the cloud, saying "the cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities." And it has proved this with the continual development of Office 365 and other cloud based services. Ballmer’s view was echoed in a recent interview we did with Mark Kashman, Microsoft senior product manager.

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Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Webinar: Busting myths about Office 365 and your small business

Is Office 365 Small Business just an online version of Office? Why do I want to store stuff in the cloud? Can I share docs with those outside the business? Guest host Tom Werner will lay out how Office 365 can help small businesses like yours and answer your questions.

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Friday, July 25, 2014

SharePoint Business Connectivity Services - Part 5

Business Data List Web Part

Now that you have learned how to setup Business Connectivity Services, you will learn how to use Business Data list web part to show external data on any SharePoint page  you want.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Uninterrupted communication with Office 365 helps keep information flowing at the Center for American Progress

Today’s post was written by George Estrada, Vice President for Technology, Online Communications at Center for American Progress

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Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Microsoft’s unified technology event for enterprises

Over the past few months, it has been awesome to connect with our technical communities, customers, and partners at the SharePoint Conference, Lync Conference, Exchange Conference, Project Conference, and most recently, at TechEd North America. While the world is increasingly digital, there is still no replacement for time together, in person, to talk tech and business, and simply get to know each other better. Hands down, my favorite weeks of the past year have been those spent at these conferences, meeting with many, many of you!

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Montgomery County, PA—How government can become more dynamic, responsive, and cost-effective through Office 365

Today’s post was written by Anthony Olivieri, Chief Technology Officer at Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
Picture of Anthony OlivieriOne of the best things about working in technology is that there’s always something new, some way to “build a better mousetrap.” But mousetraps are only worthwhile if they truly address the business needs that you’ve identified within your organization.


Sunday, July 20, 2014

SharePoint Business Connectivity Services - Part 4

Modifying External Content Type

You can modify external content type if you want to make changes. For example, in the above figure you may have noticed that you only see three records where the country is US. What if you want to show all records? You can remove the filter from the content type.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Playing to win—GameStop ups customer service with Office 365

Today’s post was written by Jason Cochran, vice president of Store Operations at GameStop
GameStop infographicAt GameStop, we’re all about giving players the video games and devices that they need to have fun. Walk into any GameStop store and you’ll see equally enthusiastic customers and employees comparing scores, evaluating devices, and discussing new virtual worlds. Despite that focus on fun, it’s important to remember that we run a serious business. We’re a rapidly growing Fortune 500 and S&P 500 company with more than 6,000 stores, and we need all our stores to reflect our brand and uphold our high level of service.

SharePoint Business Connectivity Services - Part 3

BCS Login failed for user NT Authority

If you have created an external content type and are trying to access it in a list and get Access Denied that is because you have not given permissions to the logged in user to use that external content type. You can easily give permissions to that user or to all users in your site by going to central administration site and configuring business connectivity service.

Publishing My Book: SharePoint 2013 WCM Advanced Cookbook

On January 23rd, 2014, Packt Publishing published my first book, SharePoint 2013 WCM Advanced Cookbook. It is available at Amazon.com and other online retailers. A sample chapter is also available for download from the Packt website.
I’ve been working for Sitrion (formerly NewsGator), the best place to work on the planet, for almost two years now. I’ve learned a lot during my time at Sitrion and when I learn new, exciting things, I like to blog about them. The folks over at Packt Publishing found me through my blog and asked me to write a book about web content management with SharePoint 2013.

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Thursday, July 10, 2014

SharePoint Business Connectivity Services - Part 2

1. Click Next.

2. Click Add Filter Parameters button.  In the Properties pane, select Country in the Data Source Element drop down. Click Click to Add link in the Filter field.

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Dakota Financial: Direct funder reduces the cost of expansion, boosts productivity with Office 365

Dakota Financial filmed their own Office 365 story on a Nokia Lumia 1020.
Dakota Financial provides funding for equipment leasing to small businesses that cannot obtain traditional financing. It replaced an expensive scanning solution with Microsoft Office 365, SideKick 365 DCM (a SharePoint App from SkyLite Systems), and a scanner from Kodak. Today, the company is saving more than US$14,400 a year in document storage costs. Employees are working more productively by using Office 365 and the SideKick 365 DCM app to automate document uploads to online storage.

DeSantis Landscapes: Firm stays nimble, saves 30 to 50 hours a week with Office 365

DeSantis Landscapes filmed their own Office 365 story on a Nokia Lumia 1020.

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Tuesday, July 8, 2014

New interactive training for hybrid computing now available

Bill Baer is a technical product manager on the SharePoint team.
Hybrid computing is the intersection between traditional on-premises and cloud computing models. Deploying a hybrid scenario is useful when you need to realize ROI on existing on-premises investments, when you require a bridge between on-premises and cloud to support migration, or if you’re not ready to move to the cloud all at once. We are committed to continued innovation and guidance for those of you who are deploying hybrid scenarios. To demonstrate our commitment, we recently launched new interactive hybrid computing training and introduced new changes to SharePoint that make it easier to work in hybrid environments.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

SharePoint Business Connectivity Services - Part 1

Business Connectivity Services is a centralized infrastructure in SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 that supports integrated data solutions. SharePoint 2013 acts as an interface that you can use to surface data from external data sources. Enterprises do not store their data in one location. Enterprises use myriad of data sources and applications with each application connected to a separate data source. Before Business Connectivity Services, surfacing data from different sources was not easy and required lot of effort and custom programming.

Cross-post from the SharePoint blog: Options to create forms in SharePoint 2013

Last week, Keenan Newton published a blog post on the SharePoint blog. In his post, Keenan explains the different options for creating forms in SharePoint 2013. To summarize, you can choose from several different tools for building forms in SharePoint. Depending on what your specific needs are, you will find a wide range of tools that provide flexibility for both business users and developers.

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Monday, June 30, 2014

Changes to the Design View in SharePoint Designer 2013

Hi, I’m Keenan Newton, a senior product marketing manager on the SharePoint team.

We’re making some changes to the Design View in SharePoint Designer 2013, and I wanted to talk about the reasoning behind the changes.

With SharePoint Server 2013 embracing new web standards for client side rendering of pages such as JavaScript, JSON, and OData, there is no longer a need to support a visual web page editor within SharePoint Designer. With that in mind, we removed the ability to visually edit pages in SharePoint Designer 2013 because its page editor is designed to only understand the unique features of a SharePoint web page. With our support of new web standards, any web page designer can now be used for editing web pages in SharePoint Server 2013. This includes form customization, conditional formatting of page content, layout, theming and branding. To simplify the process of integrating customized SharePoint pages, SharePoint Server 2013 includes a new feature called the SharePoint Design Manager. This feature enables a web designer to export a web page from SharePoint, customize it, and then import it back into SharePoint, all right from the SharePoint site.

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Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Montgomery County: Better service for my team, county colleagues, and our citizens through Office 365

Today’s post was written by Lisa Tolomeo, Client Services Manager for Montgomery County, PA
Picture of Lisa TolomeoLisa is increasing her responsiveness to team members and internal customers, thereby improving public service. Read her story and learn how Lisa keeps lines of communication open and stays flexible to react to technology emergencies and help county employees continue to deliver excellent service to their community.

Monday, June 16, 2014

What’s new in SharePoint Server 2013 for IT professionals

In today’s volatile economic climate, organizations require collaboration, communication, and productivity solutions to be both cost-effective and flexible. SharePoint Server 2013 can help you achieve new levels of reliability and performance, delivering features and capabilities that simplify administration, protect communications and information, and empower users while meeting their demands for greater business mobility.

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Sunday, June 15, 2014

SharePoint Online (Office 365) Development - Part 3

1. Open App.js in editor. Add two new variables at the top:

 var context = SP.ClientContext.get_current();  
 var user = context.get_web().get_currentUser();  
 var web = context.get_web();  
 var lists = web.get_lists();  

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 002 with Radi Atanassov

At the European SharePoint Conference in May 2014 in Barcelona, Jeremy Thake caught up with Radi Atanassov about why OAuth is important to developers in the new App Model.
In SharePoint 2013, the OAuth authentication and authorization flow for apps involves a series of interactions between your app, SharePoint 2013, the authorization server, and the end user at runtime. 

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

SharePoint Online (Office 365) Development - Part 2

If you have worked with JQuery before, the syntax will be familiar to you. When the app loads, getUserName() method is called. It loads user properties in the context object. onGetUserNameSuccess() method displays the user name on the screen. All you have to do is append “Hello World” after the user name.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Yammer brings conversations to your OneDrive and SharePoint Online files

Christophe Fiessinger is a group product manager on the enterprise social team.
At SharePoint Conference 2014 we announced new enterprise social experiences across Office 365 helping businesses work more like networks by leveraging the power of the cloud to bring people together, gain quicker access to relevant insights and help make smarter decisions, faster.

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Webcast: Real-life SharePoint deployment conversion from FTC to App Model

In this video you will see examples and patterns for app model transitions–full-trust code transformed into the app model. We’ll review a real customer example demonstrating the patterns, findings, and learnings on this transition, where deployment was based on 500,000 lines of server-side code and classic feature framework elements.

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Tuesday, June 3, 2014

SharePoint Online (Office 365) Development - Part 1

SharePoint Online provides a robust, flexible development environment for developers to create custom solutions. SharePoint Online is a cloud based service, hosted by Microsoft, for businesses of all sizes. Instead of installing and deploying SharePoint server on premises, businesses can simply subscribe to SharePoint Online to provide their employees with an enterprise grade solution to create sites to share documents with colleagues, partners, and customers. SharePoint Online provides the following features:

Sunday, June 1, 2014

SharePoint hosting—the good, the bad, and the ugly

SharePoint hosting is often seen as an alternative to running it within your own organization. It seems like it would give you to the flexibility to run SharePoint with customization unavailable in SharePoint Online, coupled with the cost savings achieved by cloud computing and outsourcing the high people costs associated with an on-premise deployment.

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Saturday, May 31, 2014

SharePoint Branding Part 5

Adding Sign-In

Here is another snippet that you can add in your master page. Sign In link is automatically displayed on your page in the upper left corner. You can customize the look and feel and change its position to display it anywhere you like. The Sign In snippet is a security trimmed control. You can add a new Sign In snippet and remove the one that is part of the master page by default or you can customize the one that is already on the page. Below we will look at both options. To add a new snippet, repeat the steps explained previously to add a snippet to the master and choose Sign In snippet. Copy the HTML to clipboard and return to the master page (in editor) and paste the snippet where you want it displayed and then remove the default snippet from the page. For your convenience, I am listing the steps again below:

1.      Go to Design Manager and select Edit Master Pages link on the left side.
2.      Click the HTML master page (index365.html).
3.      Click the Snippets link in the top right corner.
4.      Click Design tab.
5.      Click Sign In snippet in the ribbon.
6.      Click Copy to Clipboard button to copy the snippet HTML.
7.      Paste the snippet to the master page at your desired location.
8.      Locate following code in the master page and remove it. This is the default Sign In link code.

<!--MS:<SharePoint
:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat="server" AuthenticationRestrictions="AnonymousUsersOnly">-->
    <!--MS:<wssucw:Welcome runat="server" EnableViewState="false">-->
    <!--ME:</wssucw:Welcome>-->
<!--ME:</SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>-->


Listing 12-14: Default Sign In Link

Now, the second option is to re-use the default Sign In link. All you can do with it is add some style and change its location otherwise it works perfectly fine. Depending on the design of your site, you may want to put it in an appropriate location. To add styling to the Sign In link, you have to add a style class to the CSS and embed the code shown in the above listing within a div with that style class.

9.      Locate the code shown in the previous listing and add <div class=”signin_btn”> before it and </div> after it. Updated code looks like this:

<div class="signin_btn">

 <!--MS:<SharePoint
:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat="server" AuthenticationRestrictions="AnonymousUsersOnly">-->
<!--MS:<wssucw:Welcome runat="server" EnableViewState="false">-->
<!--ME:</wssucw:Welcome>-->
<!--ME:</SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>-->
</div>

Listing 12-15: Sign In Link

10.  Now cut the whole snippet (as shown in the listing above) by pressing Ctrl+X (or Cut command from the context menu)

11.  Locate following line in the master page and paste the code (from the clipboard) immediately after it:

<div class="main_wrapper" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">


Listing 12-16: Location of Sign In link

After moving the Sign In snippet to new location, code looks like this:


<div class="main_wrapper" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<div class="signin_btn">
<!--MS:<SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat="server" AuthenticationRestrictions="AnonymousUsersOnly">-->
<!--MS:<wssucw:Welcome runat="server" EnableViewState="false">-->
<!--ME:</wssucw:Welcome>-->
<!--ME:</SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>-->
</div>
<div class="inner_wrapper">
<div class="logo">


 Listing 12-17
: Sign In link new location

By default, Sign In link appears in the top left corner. We have moved it to the right corner just above the Search box and have add some style to it. Class signin_btn is in the main.css and looks like this:


.signin_btn{
   float:right; 
   font-size:12px;
   text-transform:uppercase;
   color:#49176d;
   margin-right:10px !important;
   margin-top:5px !important;
   padding:0;
   margin:0
}

.signin_btn span a {
    display: inline;
    float: right;
    line-height: 0 !important;
    margin-bottom: -19px;
    margin-left: 0 !important;
    margin-right: 0 !important;
    margin-top: 9px;
    padding: 0 !important;
}


Listing 12-18
: Sign In link styling

Publishing the site

Now, you are reading to publish the site. Publishing the site is not difficult but there are several small steps that must be completed before the site is published.

1.       Go to Site Actions > Site Settings > Design Manager and click Publish and Apply Design link on the left side. In the first paragraph, second line, there is a link Go to the Master Page Gallery, click it.

2.      Go to social folder. You will see four subfolders: css, fonts, images, js and five or six files. Go to each folder one by one and publish all the files within each folder. On the root folder (social), publish the master page (index365.html). I will show you how you can publish the master page. Follow the same procedure to publish all other files in all folders. Hover mouse over index365.html and click the down-arrow that appears to open


the menu, and select Publish a Major Version. Add some comments in the Comments box and click OK.

Final Steps

Final steps include setting up the navigation links (in header and footer), adding facebook and twitter links in the footer, setting up SEO, page titles, and so on.

1.      From the mapped drive, open master page in an editor.

2.      Change page names in the navigation (menu2 – see below).

Figure 12-16
: Page names

3.      Replace index.html with ../../../Pages/default.aspx, about-us.html with ../../../Pages/aboutus.aspx, services.html with ../../../Pages/services.aspx, resources.html with ../../../Pages/resources.aspx, contactus.html with ../../../Pages/contactus.aspx. Note that new pages are located in the Pages library and master page is located in the _catalogs/masterpage/social folder, therefore, you have to give correct path to access the pages.

4.      Locate <div class="menu_footer"> and replace page names with new ones under this tag. Replace index.html with ../../../Pages/default.aspx, about-us.html with ../../../Pages/aboutus.aspx, services.html with ../../../Pages/services.aspx, resources.html with ../../../Pages/resources.aspx, contactus.html with ../../../Pages/contactus.aspx.

5.      In the same footer tag, there are Twitter and LinkedIn icons, add URL to your accounts in the href (Replace # sign with the URL).

Figure 12-17: Social media links

6.      Locate <div class="social_icons"> tag and add URL to your Twitter and LinkedIn account in the href (replace # with the URL).

Figure 12-18: Social Icons

7.      Save your changes and re-publish the master page. All your links should be working now.

8.      Open home page in browser. Click SITE tab and click Edit Title button in the ribbon. If you have not already set Title and Description, add them now in the Title and Description boxes and click Ok.

9.      Click Change Logo button and provide path to the logo. You can upload logo from the computer or select it from the SharePoint site if you already have it up there.

10.  Clic Edit Properties and select Edit SEO Properties.
Figure 12-19: SEO Properties

11.  Title field should already be populated. Title comes from the page’s title tag. If you want to change it, you can change it on this page. This it the title that search engines use in their search results. To change Browser Title, enter a title in the Browser Title field. This is the title that appears in the title bar of the browser. Meta Description field contains the description of your page. Search engines display this description under your link in the search results. Make sure the description is concise and meaningful and contain some of your keywords. In the Keywords field, add keywords that are relevant to your home page. Keywords are comma-separated and you can add a maximum of 1024 characters in this field. Finally, you can choose to include this page in the sitemap and expose it to the search engines. If you do not wish to include this page in the sitemap, choose Exclude from sitemap and hide from Search Engines otherwise keep the first option selected. Click Ok to save the changes. Repeast the process for all other pages.

12.  Go to Site Actions > Site Settings > Welcome Page. Click Browse button and locate your default page in the Pages library and click OK. With this step, you have set your site’s homepage. Users now don’t have to type complete URL in the browser, they just enter the domain name and home page automatically loads.

13.  Final step is to make the website available to the world. In the top right corner, under the Suite Bar, there is a button called MAKE WEBSITE ONLINE. Click this button, enter comments and click OK. That’s it. Your website is now live. Wait for a few seconds for the settings to take effect. Logout and close browser. Open your website again in a new browser and you will see your site up and running. Do the final checks and if something has been left, login and fix it. Start promoting your site and generate traffic. SharePoint public site is a goldmine for small businesses as you get all useful features like document management, meetings and events scheduling, email management, contacts management, tasks management and so on with your public website that acts as an informational brochure and introduces your business to the world. It is an affordable solution for small businesses that do not want to spend extravagantly on the development of such a useful website that can actually play a role in the promotion and management of their business. SharePoint Online is also available for medium and large sized businesses. If you are an enterprise, buy an enterprise package. It is still cheaper than hosting a site inhouse because the infrastructure and hardware costs are quite high and then you also need resources to handle and maintain your site(s). With a hosted solution, you can handle the day to day tasks yourself or at most you need one administrator to keep the site in good health.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4