Month: February 2015

This is bit odd behavior but you will notice that sometimes in your Office 365 site collection you do not have option to add SharePoint 2010 approval workflow. You will see all the other workflows i.e. SharePoint 2010 Disposition, SharePoint 2010 Collect Signature etc but you do not have option to pick Approval workflow.

I tried researching on this issue and only workaround that I have found so far is that deactivate the “Workflows” site collection feature and reactivate it again.

The challenge with this approach is that many times you are already using other workflows which comes as a part of “Workflows” and many instances are already in flight and the million dollar question is what happens to those workflows when you pull the trigger and de-activate the workflow.

Honestly I do not have the official answer for this but I have faced this issues and my recommendations are as follows.

1) Make sure your all your workflows are set to no new instances.

2) If possible complete all your inflight workflows.

3) Where possible take the backup.

After performing above steps you can go ahead and de-activate the “Workflow” feature and re-activate it again and your “SharePoint 2010 Approval” workflow should show up.

Just to verify the behavior I de-activate the feature with existing inflight workflows and re-activate the feature and all my in flight workflows were running just fine.

Having said that I would follow the above recommendation in Production.

Today Microsoft announced that their API Sandbox for Office 365 API will now have support for C#. Initially when it was released last year it only supported JavaScript.

API Sandbox runs your code in a “sandbox” environment which MS set it up. You can validate your code simply by clicking the “Run” button. Results will be displayed in the “Console” panel underneath the code snippets.

Visit the API Sandbox Here: https://apisandbox.msdn.microsoft.com/

You can read more about it at the following blog post.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/exchangedev/archive/2015/02/24/announcing-c-support-in-the-api-sandbox-for-office-365-apis.aspx

Sample Data:

If you want to know more about Sample data you can read the following article. This article shows the data that is associated with the sample user in the sample tenant:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/sample-tenant-data

Recently when working with Office 365 I was bit surprised to see that when I try to add a new site theme I was getting Access Denied error. I verified and double checked that I have all the required permission but still no dice.

So I Binged and came across this article. As per the article you will get this error if you have not turned on the option to run the custom script. This option by default is turned off in SharePoint Admin section.

To check this go to your tenant SharePoint Admin section and click Settings from the left navigation. Scroll down and you should see a section for custom script.

As mentioned in the article above click both allow options and wait for some time for your SharePoint Designer to start obeying you. 🙂

I would highly recommend you read the original article as it also has PowerShell way of turning this feature.