Office 365 April 2017 updates. What’s New?

Microsoft has released a lot of cool new features as updates for its Office 365 Business premium subscribers. Few of the most exciting enhancements are

• §  Outlook Customer Manager
• §  Microsoft To-Do
• §  Designer to PowerPoint on iPad
• §  Support for Office 365 Groups in additional Office apps

What is Outlook Customer Manager?

Small businesses would find this update handy. Instead of having a separate CRM tool to manage customer relationships, now Outlook does the job. With Outlook Customer Manager, you now can manage customer relationships effectively. It comes with intelligent reminders and seamless integration with Bing, Cortana and other tools.

Though the update for Windows platform was released on November 2016, now it is made available for iOS and Outlook Web.

Check this video for an exciting demo: 

Tasks made easy with Microsoft To-Do

It is easy to plan and manage your work with Microsoft To-Do, an intelligent task management app. Stay organised and prioritise the next urgent job for the day with effective task management and intelligent suggestions. With a cloud storage, syncing across devices is automatic. Access your priorities wherever you are.

Microsoft To-Do preview: 

Designer to PowerPoint on iPad
We already have Designer for Desktop. With Designer creating stunning presentations can be done in seconds. But that is a luxury not for tablets. But no more the case with this latest update. Designer is made available on iPad also.

To learn more about Designer, please visit here. 

Image Courtesy: Microsoft 

Support for Office 365 Groups in additional Office apps

Groups is a feature in Outlook that offers worthy improvements over traditional distribution lists. It has a shared space for group conversations, calendars, files, notes etc. Now, this update brings in Groups to Outlook for Mac, iOS & Android.

Image Courtesy: Microsoft

For more insights into SharePoint, Office 365 please visit our corporate blog at http://www.hubfly.com/blog. We have many interesting updates on how you can benefit with SharePoint Intranet and Office 365 powered by Hubfly business productivity apps that we have developed on top of SharePoint.

These files can't be opened, Windows Server 2008

When trying to install exe on Windows Server 2008, you might see the error These files cant be opened

Your internet security settings prevented one or more files to be opened.

Right click on the file, click on properties and at the bottom of the general tab, you would see a “Unblock” button. If you trust the file you are trying to install, click on the button and click ok.



Then right click on the exe again and select “Run as Administrator”, that should run the program

Installing Visual Studio 2010 on Windows Server 2008 R2 Error

The installation of visual studio 2010 will fail displaying a number of different reasons when trying to install using an ISO mounted drive on Windows Server 2008 R2.
 One possible solution for this if the server has access to the internet is to use the web installer to install visual studio. You will find the corresponding web installers for each of the Visual Studio versions on MSDN. When using a web installer the installation succeeds.

Hide "Home" link in top navigation of SharePoint 2010

Hide the home node in the top navigation menu of SharePoint 2010

 In SharePoint 2007, if we set the datasource providor value of ShowStartingNode="False", the "home" link used to be hidden but if you try the same setting in SharePoint 2010, it does not work.


ShowStartingNode="False"
SiteMapProvider="Tried CombinedNavSiteMapProvider and SPNavigationProvider"

To fix this, I had to use the PortalSiteMapDataSource which used to exist in Moss 2007. To get it working follow the steps below:

1. Add a register tag to your master page


2. Add a PortalSiteMapDataSource to the master page

(Open Square Bracket) PublishingNavigation:PortalSiteMapDataSource


ID="GlobalNavDataSource"

Runat="server"

SiteMapProvider="CombinedNavSiteMapProvider"

EnableViewState="true"

StartFromCurrentNode="true"

StartingNodeOffset="0"

ShowStartingNode="false"

TreatStartingNodeAsCurrent="true"

TrimNonCurrentTypes="Heading" / (close square bracket)

 
 
3. Update your top navigation to use this data source instead

(Open Square Bracket)
PublishingNavigation:PortalSiteMapDataSource


ID="GlobalNavDataSource"

Runat="server"

SiteMapProvider="CombinedNavSiteMapProvider"

EnableViewState="true"

StartFromCurrentNode="true"

StartingNodeOffset="0"

ShowStartingNode="false"

TreatStartingNodeAsCurrent="true"

TrimNonCurrentTypes="Heading"/(close square bracket)



I have not tested it completly for side effects as I am just trying these things out in 2010. Will update this post if I find any side effects because of this.

Another way of doing this is through CSS...

 .s4-tn li.static > a {


display: none !important;

}

.s4-tn li.static > ul a {

display: block !important;

}

TFS keeps file checked out after successful check in

Some people might experience that on checking in a file into TFS, the file is actually checked into source control but the “checked out” icon appears in visual studio.

This is because of a visual studio settings, to change this follow these instructions.

1. Open visual studio

2. Navigate to Tools - Options and under the “Source Control” - "Environment" - untick the check box that says "Keep items checked out when checking in"
That's it!

Provisioning the Web Analytics Service Application on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

Before creating the web analytics service application, ensure the services on server have the following services as stopped "Analytics Data Processing Service and Web Analytics Web Service.".

If the services are not stopped then the creation of the service application seems to fail.

Also before creating the web analytics service application the
Usage and Health Data Collection and the Session State Service Application have to be provisioned on the farm

1. Navigate to SharePoint 2010 Central Administration.

2. Select Manage service applications under Application Management.
3. Under the New option, select "Web Analytics Service Application"
4. A form is displayed which requests the user to enter a name for the service, an app pool account, the database server name and two databases, one for the reporting and one for the staging database.
5. Once this is entered, click ok and the service will be created
6. Navigate to the services on server page and start the Analytics Data Processing Service and Web Analytics Web Service. If you have a farm environment, then start it on the server where you want the services to run
7. Navigate to the Central Admin page and select - "Monitoring"
8. Click on "Configure usage and health data collection" and choose the logs that are required.
9. Test whether the reports are working by selecting Monitoring from SharePoint 2010 Central Administration and then select View Web Analytics reports under Reporting

Configuring People Search in SharePoint 2010

In SharePoint 2010, people search crawls are not added to the content source sometimes and if you dont see people results, there are a couple of things that you need to check.

Ensure that the user profiles are crawled. To do that go to the search settings page and click on manage content sources - (It’s under Central Administration –> Service Applications –> Search Service Application –> Manage button) Click on content sources..

If an address starting with sps3 does not exist, then add it of the format sps3://intraneturl (where intraneturl is the url of your default intranet site).

Once that step is done, permissions need to be granted to the search crawl account to crawl the content.

To do that, go to the Service Applications page, click on the tab User Profile Service Application, do not click on the link but just highlight that line and click on the "Administrators" button at the top of the page. This will show a window where admin users can be added..If the search crawling account does not appear then add the account to the window and choose the permissions "Retrieve People Data for Search Crawlers" from the permissions list check box. If this step is not done, an access denied message will be shown in the SharePoint 2010 crawl logs.

Once the above steps are done,  full crawl of the content source needs to be done after which the people search will bring back results.