April 2014

Automating SharePoint Online Tasks (O365) using PowerShell + CSOM – Part 4

This is my fourth blog post in the Automating SharePoint Online using PowerShell + CSOM Series. Here are the list of old posts in this series.

Automating SharePoint Online Tasks (O365) using PowerShell + CSOM – Part 1

Automating SharePoint Online Tasks (O365) using PowerShell + CSOM – Part 2

Automating SharePoint Online Tasks (O365) using PowerShell + CSOM – Part 3

Just to reiterate, what we want to achieve is to create site columns and content types and then adding site columns to content type and then finally adding content type to list.

So in this blog post I am going to show you how to add site columns to Content Type using PowerShell and CSOM.

Continue reading “Automating SharePoint Online Tasks (O365) using PowerShell + CSOM – Part 4”

SharePoint : Migrating User Alerts

When you do Version to Version (V2V) upgrade for your SharePoint domain may change (for whatever reason) or in case of FBA your membership provider name gets changed. I am not going to get into the details why that would happen and how to handle your upgrade in those scenarios.

What I am going to talk about is one big issue that will occur when you run into the above scenario. That is issue is all the user Alerts will not be displayed. When I say not be displayed what I mean is that Alerts will be upgraded (I am assuming you kept your Portal URL the same) but when users login to the portal they will not see the Alerts. Why is that, you asked? Well before you start blaming SharePoint, let me tell you, that SharePoint is doing its job right. Each Alert have User and UserID assigned to it. The momentum Domain name changes or your membership provider changes, New UserID gets created for the same user and for SharePoint there is no Alerts set for that user and hence it will not display any Alerts. Unfortunately SharePoint does not have face recognition technology built into it… YET.. J

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SharePoint 2013: How to hide FBA Login page warning

When working with SharePoint 2013 and using Forms Based Authentication (FBA) you would notice that SharePoint assumes that you will be using FBA with extranet scenario and on login page it gives you a warning message which looks something like this.

Basically SharePoint detects that your page is not using secure connection i.e. HTTPS and hence it warns you that you should use HTTPS given your username and password will be sent in clear text. Fair enough. But what if you have a UAT environment and you are not using HTTPS and you want to remove that warning message given you do not want your test users to be concerned.

Well there are two options to this.

Continue reading “SharePoint 2013: How to hide FBA Login page warning”

Automating SharePoint Online Tasks (O365) using PowerShell + CSOM – Part 3

This is my third blog post in the Automating SharePoint Online using PowerShell + CSOM Series. In the last article we saw how to authenticate against SharePoint Online site and how to access Web and List using PowerShell + CSOM. Here is the blog post.

Automating SharePoint Online Tasks (O365) using PowerShell + CSOM – Part 1

Automating SharePoint Online Tasks (O365) using PowerShell + CSOM – Part 2

Just reiterate, we are going to create site columns and content types and then adding site columns to content type and then finally adding content type to list.

So in this blog post I am going to show you how to write a code to create a Content Types using PowerShell and CSOM.

Continue reading “Automating SharePoint Online Tasks (O365) using PowerShell + CSOM – Part 3”

SharePoint 2013 – Development Environment minimum requirements

For a change I am going to talk about SharePoint 2013 development environment. This is a common question when I present at different SharePoint Saturdays. What is my laptop specs. Well I use Lenovo W510 with i7 CPU, 32 GB or RAM and two 480GB SSD. This helps me run multiple VMs simultaniously.

But for the most developers they do not have luxury to get laptop with loaded resource. Typically they have 16GB of RAM. So here is my advsie if you want to start with running local SharePoint 2013 environment as VM.

First thing first, make sure you buy a faster SSD drive. This is must if you want to do development locally. This will help you big time. With 16GB RAM and 480GB SSD is workable solution for your SharePoint 2013 VM. Using SSD makes a notable difference. You did not mention about your CPU but as long as you are i5 or above you should be fine as long as you tweak your SP 2013 environment for smooth performance. e.g. Don’t use Search Service or any other service unless it is required.

Actually a good list of items to keep in mind is posted in the following thread.

Minimum real world system requirements for SharePoint 2013

Given the fact 16GB is bit low on Memory (I mean for SP 2013 single server as VM ) you will have to play with memory allocation to see what gives you optimal performance where you can work on your host and guest.

Also when working with SharePoint 2013 make sure you dont create or start any service applications or services if you do not need them. e.g. if you do not need Performance Point service then dont create it. Save resources for SharePoint 2013 Search. 🙂

I hope this helps someone.

Hide Search Box and Views from List Admin Page in SharePoint 2013

In SharePoint when you click on the List Header or use some other way to navigate to List page you will notice that it will give you a search box on top of your list as well as in SharePoint 2013 it will also show you all the views as links.

This is accepted behavior for most but for some reason some people dont like to see these artifacts. In SharePoint 2010 you probably would have to use CSS hack to hide these unwanted things.

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