Category: Office 365

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.

The SharePoint Conference is back – almost

Microsoft today blogged about an awesome news. Microsoft will be hosting a SharePoint Virtual Summit, a free global online event, on May 16 2017.

Last year Microsoft had Future of SharePoint virtual event which was viewed by over 50,000 users and hence this year Microsoft is bringing it back.

At this year’s SharePoint Virtual Summit you’ll learn how to create a connected workplace in Office 365 with OneDrive and SharePoint and integrated with Yammer, Microsoft Teams, Windows, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jeff Teper will unveil the latest product innovations and roadmap. You’ll also hear from industry-leading customers on how they are leveraging these technologies as part of their digital transformation. Jeff will be joined by Microsoft corporate vice presidents James Phillips and Chuck Friedman to discuss how Office 365, connected with Windows and Azure, is reinventing productivity for you, your teams and your organization.

Make sure you register and secure your spot.

https://resources.office.com/ww-landing-sharepoint-virtual-summit-2017

Test drive Microsoft’s new collaboration tool – Microsoft Teams

I am just cross posting this for anyone who reads my blog regularly.

Microsoft is currently offering hands-on live sessions where you will have the opportunity to test drive Windows 10, Office 365 and my favourite collaboration tool Microsoft Teams. During this small-group sessions you will apply these tools to your own business scenarios and experience how they work for you.

Each 90-minute session starts with an online business roundtable discussing your biggest business challenges with a trained facilitator and then transitions into a live environment in the cloud. You will receive a link to connect your own device to a remote desktop loaded with Microsoft’s latest technology, so you can experience first-hand how Microsoft tools can solve your challenges.

This is pretty exciting since this is first time Microsoft offering this. Each session is limited to 12 participants.

You can read more about this at:

https://blogs.office.com/2017/03/15/test-drive-our-hottest-new-collaboration-tool-microsoft-teams/

U.S. customers: Register here
Outside the U.S.: Register here

Microsoft Teams is now generally available

Today is one of the awesome day as Microsoft announced that Microsoft Teams – the chat based workspace in Office 365 – is not GA in 181 markets and in 19 languages. This Office 365 based application is pretty awesome and it was very well received by over 50,000 organizations when Microsoft announced the preview in Novermber last year.

One of thing I really like about Microsoft Team is the speed at which they worked on many user feedback in last four months or so.

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public

For anyone that is new to Microsoft Teams I will just provide very high level overview here.

Microsoft Teams provides a modern conversations experience, with threaded, persistent chat to keep everyone engaged. We’ve rolled out many new communication features since preview, including audio calling from mobile devices, plus video on Android, which is coming soon to iOS and Windows Phone. And we’ve addressed numerous customer requests, adding the ability to email a channel, including attachments, send messages with markdown-based formatting, and receive notifications about all posts in a channel.

You should check out the official announcements and discussion below.

https://blogs.office.com/2017/03/14/microsoft-teams-rolls-out-to-office-365-customers-worldwide/

I am very confident that moving forward, Microsoft Teams will be providing new features and good developer platform.

Collaborating with External Users Using the Sharing Feature of Office 365 (SharePoint Online) – Part2

In Part 1 of this article I provided overview of sharing feature in Office 365. You can read that article HERE.

Now lets talk about what happens behind the scene when you share you content with external users.

External Sharing Approval process:

As of the writing of this article you must have a contributor or higher role when sharing a site or document with external users. This requirement is for the first time invitation only. E.g. you have three different sites under your private site collection and you share one of the sites with [email protected]. Since this is the very first invitation for [email protected], the person sharing the site must be a contributor or higher. The following image explains the process of inviting external users for the first time to the site.

Once the [email protected] user accepts the invitation then anyone on that site collection can share any remaining sites or specific documents on that site collection with that external user.

If a person with the read-only access shares another site or document on another site with the same external user i.e. [email protected] then that request will first go through the approval process. The Site Owner is required to approve that request before an external user gets an email invitation for the second site or document.

The following image explains the invitation process by the read-only user.

To summarize, you can increase the productivity of your SharePoint site by collaborating with external users in real-time using the SharePoint Online Sharing feature. I hope this blog post helps you.

SharePoint Saturday Ottawa – December 2016

On December 3, 2016, I was at Ottawa presenting at SharePoint Saturday Ottawa 2016.

The event was at Algonquin college.

I presented on developer introduction to new SharePoint framework (SPFx). I would like to thank everyone who attended my session.
It was awesome to see lot of interest to learn new framework as there were users who did not have any background on SharePoint server side model but wanted to learn more about how they can use their existing web development skills to build against SharePoint Online.
Kudos to all the organisors, sponsors and volunteers for successful event!!!