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.

Slipstreamed Install of MOSS 2007

Until recently to install SharePoint 2007 on Windows Server 2008 R2 we had to manually slipstream MOSS SP1 with SP2, but since Jan 20th 2010 Microsoft have released MOSS SP2 slipstreamed package, it is available on MSDN!

Adding web parts to Document library throwing error

Sometimes you may want to add a content editor to a document library page http://server/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx?PageView=Shared and might want to move it above or below the document library and might get the error below

"The file is not checked out. You must first check out this document before making changes."

This is because in the "Versioning Settings" of the document library settings the item "Require documents to be checked out before they can be edited?" might have been set to "yes". Though you may wonder that you were not editing any documents but just trying to move the document library web part around in the page and it still would not allow you to make any changes before you turn the "require documents to be checked out..." option to "no"!

Once you have moved your web parts around you can go back and change the versioning settings back to how it was.

Delegation Tab missing Windows Server 2008

When trying to setup Kerberos to work with SharePoint you need to setup the app pool account as trusted for delegation. you may find that the delegation tab is missing in AD in Windows Server 2008, this is "as designed", the delegation tab will appear only after an SPN is created for the service account.

So do setspn -A HTTP/intranet.domain.local DOMAIN\Account from a command prompt in the famr and then go to AD and search for the DOMAIN\ACcount and you will see the delegation tab appear.

WSP Stuck on deploying or retracting in Solution Management

If your solution package is stuck on deploying or retracting status for a long time on the "Solution Management" page in SharePoint Central Admin then check that the "Windows SharePoint Services Timer" windows service is started on ALL the web front end machines.

SharePoint Server 2010 VS SharePoint Foundation 2010 Features

Microsoft have a good feature list available in the new SharePoint release.

Sharepoint foundation is the free version, was called WSS in 2007 version.
Features can be found here..
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee539826(office.14).aspx

SharePoint Server 2010 is the licened version, was called MOSS in 2007
Features can be found here…
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee557323(office.14).aspx

Error when adding web part solution package An object in the SharePoint administrative framework

You sometimes may recieve the error below when trying to do stsadm -o addsolution -filename "wspname.wsp"

An object in the SharePoint administrative framework, "SPSolutionLanguagePack Name=0 Parent=SPSolution Name=il.sharepoint.workflows.wsp", depends on other objects which do not exist. Ensure that all of the objects dependencies are created and retry this operation.

wspname.wsp: The Solution installation failed.

This is especially the case if you have just done a retract/uninstall and you try to add straight away. If you try again in a few seconds it will work. Basically this is because when you delete a wsp from solution management and then immediately run this stsadm command, there will still be clean up operations going on in the background. So just leave a slight delay between uninstall of solution packages and re-deploys.

SharePoint Search Crawl Returns Access Denied

Our SharePoint search suddenly stopped working last week and on googling found out that if the Default Content Access Account in SSP - Search Administration - Default Content Access Account is of the format domain\username it seems to fail but once changed to the format of username@domain.local it works!

"Access is denied. Check that the Default Content Access Account has access to this content, or add a crawl rule to crawl this content. (The item was deleted because it was either not found or the crawler was denied access to it.)".

Restricting access to mysites in SharePoint

You may come accross the requirment where you would want only certain group of people to be able to create my sites. This is possible by modifying permissions on Shared Services Provider, to do so follow these steps

1. Logon to Central Admin
2. Click on the Shared Services Provider that hosts my sites
3. Click on "Personalization services permissions" under the group "User Profiles and My Sites"
4. Click on the group "NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users" if it exists in that list and untick the option "Create Personal Site" and click save.
5. Using the menu on the permissions page, add the SharePoint group that you want to give permissions to
6. Click on the Group that you just added and select the permissions "Create Personal Site" and jobs done!

Modify Web Part Properties window very small

When editing a SharePoint publishing page or my site page and if the "modify shared web part" window appears very small or not visible then the short cut fix is to set the below style in your css file that is referenced from your Master Page

#MSO_tblPageBody {
height:600px !important;
}

The Trial Period for this product has expired - SharePoint 2007

I recently copied a Virtual Hard Disk from my Colleague and when I tried to create a new Publishing site, I got the error message "The trial period for this product has expired". I checked the licence tab in Central Admin and found that it said it was a enterprise licence.

On further investigation I found out that the service account used for the web application where I was trying to create a publishing site was using the "Network Service" account, on changing this to an account that was a member of the local administrator's group (since this was a development VM loaded on my laptop) the error message vanished, how strange!

SharePoint Search Error - failed due to the following error: 800703fa.

When I tried to edit my User Profiles and Properties page in my Shared Services Providor, I saw the error below

"An error occured while accessing the SQL Server database or the Office SharePoint Server Search Service. If this is the first time you have seen this messag, try again later. If this problem persists, contact your administrator"

On clicking on the Search Settings in the SSP, I got the error below, and the same error repeated in the event log..
Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {BDEADEE2-C265-11D0-BCED-00A0C90AB50F} failed due to the following error: 800703fa.

Also no search results were being returned.

We were running MOSS 2007 on Windows Server 2008 R2. The solutions was to reset IIS! No idea why I had this problem and how it solved but didnt have the time to investigate it that day!

One Way Trust in SharePoint , People Picker and Profiles

We had a scenario where SharePoint was installed on Domain A and the users whom accessed SharePoint where from Domain B.

This will work most of the time until you start doing things like People Picker in SharePoint and configuring profiles, my sites etc.

There is some more work for that to happen as listed below

1. To get people picker working correctly for users from other domains you need to run the syntax stsadm -o setproperty -pn peoplepicker-searchadforests -pv domain:domain1.com;domain:domain2.com,domain2\user,password –url https://sharepoint.domain1.com (good guide on this http://www.gk.id.au/2009/04/people-picker-sharepoint-and-forest.html)

2. To greet people from the one-way trust domain by name in SharePoint and to enable creating my sites for the other domain users , you would need to import the profiles of the users from the second domain. You need to do this by going to shared services providor - User Profile and Properties - Configure Profile Import (at the bottom of the page)

Once on that page, choose custom source and create a new source for the AD (example of syntax to use for the custom source can be found here or just google http://miss-sharepoint.blogspot.com/2008/04/custom-source-in-profile-import.html)

3. If you also want the one-way trust users to have their own "my site" then you need to change the app pool account that your my sites web application uses to an account from "Domain B". This is because since it is a one-way trus between
Domain A <- B, a domain account in A will not be able to talk to B but in order for my sites to work, my sites app pool accountconnects to the domain where the user is from to get the information related to the user but it will work the other way round because B has a one way trust with A.

So create a domain user account in Domain B and through Central Admin update the App Pool account that my sites uses to the Domain B account.

Finally add that app pool account into the farms administrator's group to complete the process.

The trial period for this product has expired. Kwizcom

We had a strange problem where certain users were seeing the Kwizcom "trial period for this product has expired" message whereas it was working for others, obviously we had the full licence and had activated it when this occured.

On investigation we found out that our Alternate Access Mappings in SharePoint was not setup correctly i.e. we have multiple WFE's but in AAM we did not have entries for all the WFE's as internal url's and also our public url was not in the Intranet Zone and this for some reason had caused Kwizcom web part to show as though this message!