SharePoint Saturday Baltimore – Office 365 and Azure Functions

Last week, I was at Baltimore speaking at SharePoint Saturday Baltimore. I was talking about using Azure Functions for SharePoint and Office 365 Developers.

When I talk with Developers in the community they are not aware how powerful Azure Functions are and they are very useful in various scenarios. My talk was to cover just that i.e. various scenarios where we can use Azure functions when using Office 365 Services.

I covered using Azure functions with:

  1. SharePoint Webhooks
  2. SharePoint Framework
  3. PowerApps
  4. Microsoft Flow

In my session I also covered how to get started with Azure Functions and how to debug them. So if you are new to Azure functions then you should definitely take a look at Azure Functions Documentation.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/

It was great speaking at SharePoint Saturday Baltimore and meeting with lots of passionate users.

Kudos to all the organisors, sponsors and volunteers for successful event!!!

I look forward to speaking in next year’s event.

Microsoft Teams – Create Team from existing Group

Microsoft Teams is a new chat-based work-space in Office 365. Microsoft Teams is an entirely new experience that brings together people, conversations and content so they can easily collaborate to achieve more.

If you have been using Group connected SharePoint sites then you will have option to create Teams from existing Office 365 Group. This means you will be adding Team to your existing Office 365 Group and still be able to lever existing investments on SharePoint site.

When you go to create new Microsoft Team you will see option to “Create a team from existing Office 365 Group”.

Now one thing to note here is that you would only see this option if you are the Group Owner of the existing Office 365 Group. If you are not the owner you will not see this option. I have seen lot of people getting confused that they do not see this option. If you do not see that option you are not the Group owner of existing Office 365 group.

Once you click the link to Create a team from an existing Office 365 Group you will be presented with th existing Office 365 Groups that you own.

On this screen be careful as to which Group you are selecting as currently there is no option to Swap your Groups.

Select the group and click Choose Team button which will get enabled once you select the Group.

This will create the team and connect to existing Office 365 Group.

Adding Planner to your Existing MS Teams

Microsoft Planner is a task management tool that your team can use to manage task and view the status of each task visually. It helps teams to create new plans, assign task and share files around projects or any other work that is going on. You can read more about it HERE.

In this blog post I am going to talk about how to add existing Plan to Teams. This is straight forward process but I still wanted to talk about some gotchas when adding Planner to the Team.

To add a Planner to the team you will go to any existing channel or create a new channel. Then you will click + sign to add a new tab. When you add a new tab you will have bunch of options to select type of tab. Here you will select Planner. Once you click Planner new dialog will open.

As you can see from the screen shot above I have a option to Create a new plan or Use and existing Plan. Now let me take a step back and explain what happens behind the scene. When you create a new Team or add Team to existing Office 365 Group you will have few things provisioned for you i.e. Office 365 Group, SharePoint Site and a Planner. Currently when writing this blog post there is one to one relationship between Planner and MS Groups. At the same time Teams have one to many relationship with Planner i.e. One team can have more than one Planner.

This is why you are seeing an option to either create a new Plan or use the existing Plan. If you select existing plan then you will have option to select your Plan from the dropdown and then you can access that Plan either from your Teams tab or from Planner Hub. When you create a new Plan then that Plan is not accessible from your Planner Hub and can only be visible from the Teams tab but tasks assigned to you are visible on the Planner Hub.

So it is bit confusing and I hope Planner and Teams team will work together to sort this out.

One last thing is that you will only see an option to select existing plan if you are an Owner on that Office 365 group. If you are member of a team and are allowed to add new tabs to the teams then you will only see Create new Plan option. So if you do not see option to select existing plan it might already be added to your team or you are not the owner on that Office 365 Group.

I hope this helps some of you.

Office 365 OneNote – “Sorry something went wrong”

For anyone new to OneNote, its an amazing tool for either taking personal notes or collaborating with your colleagues on various things. You can either access this after signing into Office 365 or use the desktop client and connect to your OneNote using your Office 365 credentials. I am not going to go into the details of what OneNote is and what it can do for you. I am sure there are plenty of videos and how to documents that you can refer to learn more about it.

This blog post is about an issue that you may run into when using OneNote. When you try to open the OneNote using your favorite link after signing into your Office 365 you may run into the following error.

“Sorry something went wrong”

Its not very helpful message as it does ont say much about the real issue.

If you share the URL of your OneNote with your colleague then they will get different error message and I think that error message is lot more descriptive and may point to the right issue.

The error message it throws is something along the lines of “Document does not exist or it has been deleted”. That is definitely interesting.
Before I can go into the details of what the real issue is it is important for everyone to know how OneNote works behind the scene in Office 365.

When you first time click the OneNote from your Office 365 it creates the OneNote file under your OneDrive for Business. Now by default it will create it under a folder called Notebooks. So as an end user if you are not using OneDrive then you will have no idea that your OneNote document is stored under your OneDrive.
Many times users when bulk deleting the folders under their OneDrive may also end up deleting the Notebooks folder. This is where you will run into the above problem.

Once you know what the real issue is, fix is very simple. You simply go to your OneDrive for Busienss and click Recycle bin. You should see your Notebooks folder right there and you can select the folder and click Restore. This would work just fine if you did not end up creating another Notebooks folder. In process of fixing the issue you may click the OneNote again and which in turn will create a brand new folder and new OneNote document. In that case simply rename the new folder that get created and then restore the folder again. This time it should work.

I hope it helps you understand how OneNote works and what you can do to recover accidentally deleted OneNote documents.

I will be speaking at SharePoint Fest 2017 – Seattle

I will be speaking at SharePoint Fest Seattle 2017 on August 10 and 11. This will be my first time presenting at SPFest and I am pretty excited to be presenting at this awesome event.

I will be talking about SharePoint On-premises Search Display templates.

While I looks like Display templates do not have future with the way Microsoft is moving ahead with Modern view I still think that there are many clients who are currently using SharePoint on-premises as well as Office 365 classic view.

One word of caution if you are currently using Office 365 classic view or planning to go to Office 365 from on-premises then I personally would not want to invest too much on display templates. There is no clear direction given from Microsoft on display templates so far and hence I cannot say anything with confidence but I will be keeping an eye on all the developments.

But if you are planning on investing on Display template then definitely you should plan to attend SharePoint Fest Seattle this year as I will be talking about display template customization. I will also be covering some advanced scenario.

I look forward seeing you all there.

Edit: The URL of the event is changed since its old event but you can still access the site using the URL below.

https://www.sharepointfest.com/Seattle2017/index.php

 

SharePoint 2013 – SSRS – The permission granted to user Error

In this blog post I am going to talk about SharePoint Server 2013 and SQL Server Reporting Services integration. If you want to configure SSRS in SharePoint integration mode then you can refer to the article below.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/biblog/2012/12/04/installing-and-configuring-sql-reporting-services-on-sharepoint-2013/

Once you have SSRS configured in SharePoint Integration mode and you try to create a new report depending on the configuration you may receive the following error.

The permission granted to user ‘NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON’ are insufficient for performing this operation.

Upon some search I found that you will receive this error if you have turned on Anonymous Access at your Web application level.

  • Go to your SharePoint Central Administration
  • Click Manage Web Applications under Application Management.
  • Select the Web Application where you are getting the above error and click Authentication Provider.
  • Select the Authentication Provider Zone(default is Default).
  • Confirm that you have not checked Enable Anonymous access.

Now if you must have the Anonymous access enabled on your web application the only way you can get it working is by creating a new web application where Anonymous access is not enabled. Get your report ready on that web application and then move it to the web application where you will be using it.

Basically your report would work just fine but you will not be able to design it when you have Anonymous access enabled.

I hope this helps.