Archive for the SharePoint 2013 Category

Map your Office 365 SharePoint Masterpage library from Windows Explorer

Map your Office 365 SharePoint Masterpage library from Windows Explorer

Here’s a great tip I got from Randy Drisgill at SPTech Con Austin 2015. You can map your masterpage gallery from Windows Explorer to make it very easy to work with SharePoint Branding projects. Here are the steps: Right click on your computer in Windows Explorer and select Map Networked Drive. Paste in the URL to your SharePoint Online Site Collection you’d like to brand. Note: your site collection must be in the Intranet Zone in your Internet Settings from

Read more

The New Azure SharePoint Farm Option

The New Azure SharePoint Farm Option

Today, for the first time ever from Microsoft, a new SharePoint farm on Azure from scratch is just a few clicks. This is significant in 2 ways. For one, Microsoft is showing renewed commitment to the on-premises flavor of SharePoint. Secondly, for anyone who’s ever wanted their own SharePoint 2013 Farm in the cloud on the cheap and easy, this is a great new option you didn’t have yesterday. Check out the new Azure gallery from http://portal.azure.com. Below is what

Read more

Off with SharePoint’s Head? Or, bye Dad?

Off with SharePoint’s Head? Or, bye Dad?

@maryjofoley broke the news this morning that @jeffteper has been promoted. It’s great news for Teper in his continued rise up in Microsoft. What does it mean for SharePoint, the business he takes responsibility for creating? Teper has been the head of SharePoint since before it was SharePoint in 1995 with Site Server 1.0. His LinkedIn Profile says Led the SharePoint business from its inception through growth to a $2 billion business used by 75% of organizations Teper’s departure from

Read more

OData BCS Code Sample from TechEd 2014

OData BCS Code Sample from TechEd 2014

Full Session Recording Last Wednesday, I presented a session on SharePoint’s Business Connectivity Services at Microsoft’s TechEd 2014 North America. It’s mostly demo and the recording is available on Channel 9. To start, I show connecting to a SQL Database from SharePoint Designer, creating an external list, modifying it’s views, adding an external business Data Column to a Document Library and surfacing the External Data in a Word Document. Development Example Part of Demo When @jthake told me my session

Read more

SPTechCon San Francisco 2014 Highlights

SPTechCon San Francisco 2014 Highlights

SPTechCon San Francisco 2014 wrapped up last Friday. I was there from end to end, presenting in the first time slot Wednesday and the last time slot Friday. Here are some of my highlights from the show: Andrew Connell’s Keynote Andrew encouraged attendees to get used to the fact that Microsoft is moving to the cloud. As an example, he pointed out that Yammer has no executable install file. It is cloud only. And further, SharePoint Social will not be

Read more

$20K+ of Software for $475 – Microsoft Action Pack

$20K+ of Software for $475 – Microsoft Action Pack

Update 4/22: Note that this offer does have restrictions. It’s aimed at tech companies which both my examples are. A friend at a small business asked me the most cost effective way to buy SharePoint for internal use and demonstration. I suggested the Microsoft Action Pack which is part of the Microsoft Partner Program. In the US, the program fee is $475  per year. There is also some paperwork involved, which can take time. The benefits for your company far

Read more

Upload a file to SharePoint by PowerShell

Upload a file to SharePoint by PowerShell

Question from a friend A friend of a friend asks: I know there’s stuff all over the web that tells developers how to programmatically store documents into a SharePoint 2013 document library, but what source would you recommend? One of the groups on one of my projects has an image capture application built in Visual Basic. They need to be able to create folders within a SharePoint 2013 document library and store reports in that folder. And my friend adds:

Read more

Use Nintex and Rackspace Cloud Servers Together

Have you ever thought creating a new SharePoint Server would be as easy as adding a new item to a list in SharePoint? Today, you can set that up in about 15 minutes with Nintex Workflow 2013. Rackspace Actions in Nintex Live Automating server creation in SharePoint starts with Nintex Live. Creating a new SharePoint server is only one of the new workflow actions available since May 1st on Nintex Live. Check out the full list below and in the

Read more

How do you automate FBA web.config changes?

I was asked today by a friend, How do you modify the web.config through a WSP? My quick answer, I don’t! Not if I can avoid it other than the changes made through Visual Studio item properties like safe controls entries and others. However, showing my true consultant nature, I turned the question into the above. That’s a more specific question with a couple good possibilities I’d like to share, but still, it seems like there may be better answers

Read more

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Inside Out Early Release

I’m so excited to see that the second book I’ve co-authored has made it to the Early Release stage! You can purchase Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Inside Out Early Release at Oreilly.com today. When you purchase an Early Release book like this, you will receive the first 10 chapters we’ve drafted and all updates to the digital edition including the final release E-book. If you’re not familiar with O’Reilly E-books, they are all DRM free and available to read in formats

Read more