August 2016

SharePoint 2013 Check-in / Check-out PDF files using Adobe Acrobat Reader

I get this request once in a while where users wants to checkout PDF document hosted in SharePoint from within Adobe Acrobat Reader or once check-out from SharePoint they want to check that document back in (or save the document) to SharePoint from Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Now if you are using SharePoint 2013 out of the box you may not get this feature. Fortunately there is simple configuration change that you would need to make to have this feature.

On all your SharePoint web front-end servers you would need to edit your DOCICON.xml file and update the PDF mapping to the following.

When changing this entry I was reading that it was recommended to perform IISRESET but that is only needed if you need this change to kick in right away. If you can wait then this change does not even require app pool recycle. In my case I had to wait roughly couple of hours (not 100% sure).

Nick Patel also have blogged about this in details if you are looking for additional information.

https://nikpatel.net/2012/09/09/improved-pdf-support-in-sharepoint-2013-delivers-better-user-experience/

SharePoint Saturday – New York 2016

Last week, I was at New York speaking at SharePoint Saturday NYC. It was pretty exciting to see more than 600 user attending SharePoint Saturday NYC and also gave me chance to meet many of my speaker friends. The event was at Microsoft office in New York.

I would like to thank everyone who attended my session. I presented on creating SharePoint 2016 farm on Microsoft Azure using Azure Resource Manager (ARM).

http://lanyrd.com/2016/spsnyc/sfbzpz/
It is always amazing to speak at SharePoint Saturday New York since it is one of the biggest SharePoint community event with over 500 attendees every year.

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

I look forward to speaking in next year’s SharePoint Saturday NYC.

PowerShell – Querying User Profile Service Application – SharePoint Server 2013

This blog is quick way to show you how you can query your user profile service application for specific user. It is always easy to find user by using the UserName but in case where you do not have username available but the display name available e.g. someone giving you excel file to load data in SharePoint list.

In that case you can use the following script to query the user profile service application using the display name.

Here is the script.

Add-PSSnapin microsoft.sharepoint.powershell

$site = Get-SPSite "http://intranet.contoso.com/"

$web = $site.OpenWeb();

$context = Get-SPServiceContext $site;

$profileManager = New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager($context);   

$searchPattern = “USER DISPLAY NAME”;   

$searchResults = $profileManager.Search($searchPattern);

foreach($result in $searchResults)
{
    write-host $result.AccountName;
}