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...

SharePoint Online is part of O365 tenancy. O365 Global administrators are something like farm administrators in our On-Premise SharePoint deployment. However, global administrators will have complete control over O365 tenancy components such as SPO, Exchange Online, Lync etc. In a typical large enterprise, you would expect SharePoint Administrators who are currently managing on-prem farm to manage SPO as well. With this in mind, I started Googling and I was taken to this specific article which talks about something called SPO Admin. However, when I looked at such a role in O365 Admin console, I could not find any such group. After digging more into this, I got hold of a few articles where authors have clearly mentioned that Global Administrator is SPO Administrator. These two are not segregated. I really wonder what could be the thought process behind this design from MS. A separate role could have resulted in delegating SP specific administration activities to SP team. Hope MS w...

Some of my colleagues who are end users are familiar with SharePoint as they have been using it since 2007 version. They have the understanding that default Members group in a site collection will have Contribute permission. They are right! However, when they added users to Members group in SharePoint 2013, they had surprise as well as scared for the fact that Members were able to delete List/Document Library. Members Group Yes, in SharePoint 2013, by default Members group is mapped to "Edit" permission. Edit permission is a superset of Contribute permission. With "Edit", users will have permission to create/modify/delete List. Basically, Edit = Contribute + "Manage Lists" permission Just take a note of this before you add users to Members group . You can either change the permission of Members group or create a new group mapping to Contribute permission.

Adding Twitter widget to SharePoint page has many useful cases for users such as You can display the feed on specific topic relevant to the site You can display the feed from specific Twitter handle relevant to the site Site users can tweet from within SharePoint Adding the widget is very simple and am going to show these steps. In this example, I want to display the Twitter feed on tag "SharePoint". 1. Login to Twitter 2. Search for a tag. Here I searched for SharePoint. In the search result, click on ellipses and select "Embed this search" Embed this search 3. In Create Widget screen, select your options and click on Create Widget button Create Widget 4. Copy the code. You can save these changes for future use as well Copy the code 5. Back in SharePoint, use Content Editor Web Part to paste the above code and save the page Twitter Feed on SharePoint page That's it! Now your SharePoint site users can see the latest f...

Wish my readers merry Christmas and happy New Year 2015! May the new year be filled with Health, Success, and Peace in professional and personal life.