SharePoint

When I explored this new feature of SharePoint in Online (this feature is available in SharePoint 2013 also), I found it interesting because it solved one of the common problems people faced in SharePoint. I will first explain about this feature and I'll cover the problem and the solution in another post. This feature allows Site Collection Admin assign a unique ID to every document in the site collection out of the box. If you recall, there was no out of the box way to assign a unique number to the documents across libraries in a site collection. Yes ID column is unique but only within a library. Document ID column contains a number which is unique across libraries. To start with, let's have a look at a typical document library. This is a familiar view for SP guys. By default, you don't get Document ID column in a library. All Items View To get Document ID column, you need to activate a site collection feature "Document ID Service" as shown below. S...

Yesterday Microsoft announced that SharePoint Server 2016 will be available by Q2 2016. A few things which caught my attention are People-centric collaboration - Not sure what does it mean but is it something like Delve? On-premises can use the power of Delve and Office Graph. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) feature brought to the SharePoint. It looks quite exciting! Hope there will be a major change from user experience perspective. This alone can boost the SharePoint adoption in the Organization.

I had one interesting learning, so thought of sharing this information here. Suppose you need to crawl certain files which are stored in a file system. These files are accessible over http URL through a non-SharePoint application. We had challenges in crawling through URL. The option we looked at was to crawl the file system. These files were shared and SharePoint search was configured to crawl this location. When we search for a document, it successfully displayed the result as shown below. Search Result If you notice, the location is shown as "file" path. The ideal scenario is to replace this path with the URL path which users have access to. This is where Server Name Mapping helped. Navigate to Central Admin -> Manage Service Applications -> Search Application -> Server Name Mappings. As shown below, set the corresponding URL for file path. Add Server Name Mapping After you set this, perform a crawl and search for the document. In the search resul...