Eric Skaggs' Blog

Advertising on Twitter with Microsoft Flow

Sat, 29 Apr 2017 19:42:12 GMT

I’ve decided to do a bit of a speaking tour this year and have submitted my “Working with the SharePoint Framework” session to various SharePoint conferences. For those to which I’ve been accepted to speak, I decided to look into leveraging Flow to socialize my session in the hopes of gaining more attendance and otherwise spread the word that my session exists.

If you haven’t looked into Flow yet, I recommend you do. It’s simple and can be effective at automating some things for you. It’s a service offered by Microsoft and is similar to IFTTT. IFTTT is another service worth considering as it can improve your personal productivity quite a bit; some folks have a use for it and others don’t, so it’s up to you to determine if there’s anything there you can use.

Flow is free to use if you have a Microsoft account. Get started here: https://flow.microsoft.com. As of this writing, it’s my understanding that you can execute 750 Flows per month for free. Once you hit that, your next execution will simply fail. It’s also included with an Office 365 subscription so if you have that you can benefit from more executions per month.

The Flows that I’ve created are very simplistic. I want the Flow to do the following:

Run once per day.
Post a tweet about my speaking engagement with some details about the event and include a registration link.

To accomplish these tasks, I’m using the following activities in Flow:

Recurrence
Post a Tweet

Below are the details of each activity from a Flow that I have scheduled to run every Monday. I’ve got similar Flows configured for each day of the week with different information about the event to help advertise various aspects of the conference: hotel accommodations, schedule and session info, etc.

Below is a sample of the resulting thread over a few days. You can see each tweet contains different content, and has the helpful hashtags and info to help promote the event.

Using Flow like this has been an excellent, automated, hands-off approach at promoting my speaking engagements.

Uninstall .Net Framework 4.6 to Install SharePoint 2013

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 01:22:38 GMT

We’ve got a nice little AWS CloudFormation template that builds out a SharePoint 2013 Enterprise farm, configures everything nicely, then deploys a custom code solution right over the top of that. We’re using public Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) in the template and all has been going well. Then, starting this week, SharePoint 2013 no longer installs as expected and starts failing with a message indicating that .NET 4.5 needs to be installed.

What’s that all about? It turns out that Amazon updated their public AMIs over the weekend with a Windows update that includes 4.6. Automatically updated AMIs are a good thing in most cases, but not in ours…and yes, we should be using our very own AMI to avoid just this issue.

A few minutes of research points me to these two very helpful links:

1. http://geekswithblogs.net/bjackett/archive/2015/07/28/be-careful-installing-.net-4.6--visual-studio-2015-with.aspx

2. http://techibee.com/powershell/powershell-uninstall-windows-hotfixesupdates/1084

I found what that the KB mentioned at the bottom of the first post, KB3045563, did not exist on my AMI. Instead, I had to uninstall KB3102467.

Yet another problem: KB3102467 wasn’t listed as an installed update or anywhere else. I was only able to find it with PowerShell’s Get-Hotfix cmdlet. It’s altogether possible that I overlooked it somewhere.

Anyway, I attempted to run the PowerShell function outlined in that second link, but I kept getting a message about a failing RPC server.

Having learned the hard lesson about copying/pasting from websites and how it usually retains some sort of formatting over the years, I decided to type it all out piece by piece as I needed it for my specific scenario.

Here’s a link to the PowerShell that ended up working for me: https://github.com/skaggej/powershell/blob/master/Windows-UninstallNET4.6.ps1.

Hopefully it works for you, too!

Open Live Writer is here!

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 20:45:10 GMT

I’m so excited! Windows Live Writer bit the dust quite a long time ago and I’ve been missing it, but Scott Hanselman let us all know about it yesterday, 12/09/2015: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingOpenLiveWriterAnOpenSourceForkOfWindowsLiveWriter.aspx.

I’m interested to see how things go and what kinds of things the community does to it now that it’s open source!

Visit http://openlivewriter.org for the details.

Starting an Office 365 User Group

Tue, 16 Jun 2015 16:15:00 GMT

When I moved away from Chicago, one of the things I had to leave was the Chicago Office 365 User Group. While deeply saddened about this departure, I was excited to start my new opportunity in Phoenix with Catapult Systems. I took on the role of SharePoint Local Practice Lead (LPL) for Catapult’s Phoenix office. My responsibilities included billable consulting work, providing pre-sales technical support, and building the SharePoint business here in Phoenix to grow the practice. Given my role at Catapult, community involvement is high on my personal list of priorities.

Having been part of such a vibrant SharePoint community in Chicago, I wanted to see if the same was out here. I found AZ SharePoint Pros, the local SharePoint user group and started attending. I also went a few other groups I found out on Meetup. Some are good, some are ok, and some aren’t worth going to; that’s just the way it is. AZ SharePoint Pros is an awesome SharePoint user group with excellent and consistent attendance led and run by Eric Stoltze, Lester Sconyers, and Brenda Starr. Even so, I needed more. I needed more about SharePoint Online in Office 365. Based on how things went in Chicago, I decided to start up the Phoenix Office 365 User Group. Having made that decision, I discovered how many questions I really had about how to go about it. I decided to reach out to the world and let the people who have already done it tell me what’s best. It saved me a ton of time and effort and I’d like to share my learnings here.

Before You Begin

Check for other similar groups
1. Why create a new group if the one you want already exists? Doing that can cause confusion amongst attendees and bad blood amongst your fellow organizers. We’re all doing this in our free time and without pay, so play nicely.
Start attending other groups
1. Even if they have nothing to do with yours, go to some and talk to the speakers/organizers. Let them know about the group you’re starting and ask them to help spread the word. Of the 10 or so local community leaders I spoke to, zero refused to help.
Connect with your local Microsoft contacts
1. Assuming you’re working to create a user group based on some Microsoft technology, talk to the local Microsoft folks and get their buy-in and participation.
Find a venue that meets the following criteria:
1. Enough space for your targeted audience
2. A projector
3. Wireless Internet
4. Free parking
5. Neutral ground (unless you’re meeting at Microsoft, this is ideal)
Pick a regular day of the week/time to meet
1. Never Monday
2. Never Friday
3. Pick Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday
4. You can’t always meet on a specific date because sometimes that’s a holiday.
5. Most user groups in Phoenix meet on the 1^st/2^nd/3^rd Wednesday of every month – sometimes those are holidays too, but they’re easier to manage.
6. During business hours or after business hours?
  1. This usually depends on the venue, but I personally prefer after business hours because I’m actually working during business hours.
7. Meet up to once per month, but no more.
Name your group
1. Be original and pick something that will have meaning for the foreseeable future.
2. I called mine “Phoenix Office 365 User Group” because:
  1. Location matters when social media comes into play
  2. I wanted to call it out as Office 365 instead of SharePoint because Phoenix already has a SharePoint user group and an Office 365 group opens the door for a wider variety of attendees and speakers.
3. I abbreviated mine as PHXO365UG. Not great, I know. However, it’s unique and short enough for Twitter (#PHXO365UG) and still maps to the group’s full name.
Have Marketing create a logo for you
1. I reached to the awesome Marketing team at Catapult and said something like “I want to start the Phoenix Office 365 User Group. Can you create a logo in a few different sizes for me?” After a couple of back-and-forth Q&A emails, I had two designs to choose from. I picked one and requested it in various sizes for various websites and marketing platforms, and was off to the races.

Spread the Word

Meetup
LinkedIn
Twitter
Microsoft Technical Communities
Write about it on your blog and/or a community blog. SharePoint-Community.net is a great example of a site that has many authors: http://sharepoint-community.net/. Perhaps you can find something similar to this that aligns with your group…if not, maybe you should be the one to start it.

Community Advice

Finally, here’s the advice I was given by various members of various communities. I’ve left user names out on purpose. These are direct quotes. Some are short, some are long; typos are typos.

Advice #1

“One of my previous employers started a Cloud Computing User Group which ended up just being a venue for the company to deliver webinars and lunch and learns to customers. I think a true user group needs to be... started by the users. You can certainly facilitate it, but ask yourself some questions:

What happens if a competing Office 365 provider wants to present? Is it an Office 365 user group or is it a Catapult Systems Cloud User group?
How are you going to generate content? How much are you going to provide and who will provide the rest? Members? Vendors?
How often are you going to meet? I know some that go monthly and some quarterly. I've run a user group before and monthly only lasts so long before you run out of content if you're responsible for creating it all on your own.
Where are you going to meet? Do you have a neutral place to meet so that members don't feel like they're being sold by Catapult every time they attend a meeting? Maybe a member has a venue or you could use the local Microsoft office?
Is there really demand for a local group? Do you have enough Office 365 admins or users to justify a group that meets regularly?
Who is your audience? Admins or users? What do you do if consultants from competitors show up and potentially heckle you?
How are you going to manage your presenters? They'll likely be vendors at least part of the time? How much are they allowed to pitch their product/service vs. presenting? 1 slide w/5 min or less pitch? No sales pitch at all, just a mention of employer?

Does that help somewhat? If there's really demand, I'd suggest you kick off the group and get it moving for the first couple meetings... preferably somewhere neutral. Then put together a board of members to own the ongoing organization of the group. At that point you just become another member and vendor, but one that is well connected in the group. People will smell a rat if the group is just always Catapult presenting... it would really just be an extension of the sales organization. And interest will wane quickly if people just see one sales presentation after another.”

Advice #2

“@Eric, use the tools in Meetup.com. I do, works a treat.”

Advice #3

“Hi Eric, I started an Office 365 user group in my area to great success! It launched a couple of months ago, however most of the member dont engage online much with a linked in group or meetup. One way i have tackled this is to deploy a yammer network for the group as they seem to be more intrigued with that then interested in a linkedin group. I would still suggest setting up a free linkedin group and inviting people to it as a way to advertise your user group.

Microsoft has a lot of material out there on Office 365 especially if your ogranization is a partner. I tend to utilize those during the meeting and normally the way i work it is that i speak on 1 to 2 topics during the 1.5 hr meeting. I usually leave the last 30-45 min for open disscussion and Q&A.

As far as hosting your meeting, try the microsoft office in your area (if there is one). Its FREE usually to book a meeting there and has all the technology you will need to do a visual presentations.”

Advice #4

“@Eric -- Our user group is general IT (www.ditug.org) but we have done a lot of online meetings covering Office 365 using the 25 user Office 365 account available to members of Microsoft Technical Communities, aka MSTC (www.technicalcommunity.com). Depending on where you are located there is a Microsoft evangelist for each part of the US. Contact the evangelist for your area and they will make sure that you are accepted at MSTC if you qualify.

I found that virtual meetings work well for Office 365 presentations and allows for other presenters via LYNC (once you get your group's subscription)”

Advice #5

“I would recommend a bunch of stuff

Immerse yourself with the local MS guys; sales, TAM’s etc. – make sure they know to promote your group when they are at clients – it’s a value add for Catapult AND MS.
Get on twitter and advertise your events all the time
Same with any Catapult blogs you have
Get a web site – we use wordpress and use that for
- Content storage
- Topics to cover etc
Every single sales call you/sales do – promote the HELL out of your group
Try and get third party vendors to sponsor your events –
- Pay for pizza
- After session drinks (HH)
- Maybe monthly giveaways
  - We have given away an XBOX ONE last year at Christmas
Try and get your community to participate – I have gotten several of my clients to present sessions - this is a GREAT way to build camaraderie
I ask all the DUMB questions users are afraid to ask – this helps stimulate additional questions J”

Advice #6

“I get third party venders to cover pizza and soda and maybe a HH after.

Any vendor involvement is minimal even if they donate.

I also mandate NO POWERPOINTS – (again MY issue) as I do not want salesy fluff at the user group. So if a vendor does present they bring their TECH guy.”

Advice #7

I’ve helped support the Austin SPUG for the past couple of years. While it was far from a new group by the time I joined, we have seen a recent surge in attendance. Here are some observations that may help:

This is probably obvious but the #1 driver in attendance is the speaker/session topic. It’s nice and fun to have an MVP fly in or do a virtual session, but there were definitely times that a local, less famous speaker with a more relevant topic drew a bigger crowd than an MVP with a worse topic
One of the changes we made that seemed to have a huge impact on attendance is offering more 101-level sessions. For a long time all of our sessions were either bleeding edge (“new search features of 2013”) or fairly specific (ex. Case study of a 2007 to 2013 migration). While these were interesting to the people who lived and breathed SharePoint on a daily basis, it turned out there was a huge demand for people who were just starting out and wanted to know the basics (ex. “How to use Document Sets”, “Document Libraries: From Soup to Nuts”)
Sponsorship is a huge pain in the ass. In the Austin SPUG, we have had both the pleasure and unfortunate precedent of having a sponsored meal at all of our meetings. I wouldn’t even say that it’s as much of a draw as it is a perk, but people have now come to expect it. As such there is almost always a late scramble right before any meeting to try to secure a corporate sponsor to pay for the meals. If there’s any way you can get around this (BYO, collecting dues, crowdfunding) I would recommend it.
People do love free swag though. If you have a Microsoft contact there that can provide you with free marketing stuff, even if it’s old (t-shirts, books, bags, etc.), it’s a great way to get people to stick around after the meeting.”

Advice #8

“+1 for the rock star. When I first started out, the DFW SMUG had only about 10-12 people attending per meeting. Then we had Wally Mead come and do a full day session. We had around 40 people show up for that. After that our attendance has been steady around 25-30 per meeting.

I haven’t had much trouble finding sponsors. In fact I’ve had people reaching out to me to ask to sponsor. It works really well if you can coordinate with the other user groups to all have the same sponsor. Last month we were able to schedule the DFW and San Antonio meeting a day apart. This allowed Blue Stripe fly in for our DFW meeting and then head to SA the next day.

Another thing that I have been trying to incorporate is, having more speakers who are slightly outside of our area. For example, we primarily focus on System Center. However, we have had presenters on SSRS, PowerShell, and Azure to name a few. People really seem to enjoy these.

One idea I am thinking about trying out here, is to reach out to the local colleges. College students, especially those close to graduating, are always looking for networking opportunities. If we reach out to them now, then over a few years, we can really grow our membership and participation as they enter the work force.”

Using Azure Automation to Generate SharePoint Online Site Collection Storage Reports

Mon, 15 Jun 2015 16:12:53 GMT

We’ll keep this one short and sweet. Jeff Jones (@spjeff) wrote a nice PowerShell script to generate an HTML-based report detailing SharePoint Online site collection storage quotas and usage. You can view his original script and his post on it here: http://www.spjeff.com/2015/05/18/office-365-monitor-site-collection-storage-ps1-daily-email/.

This is great for on-prem scenarios, but I’ve been doing a lot in SharePoint Online and wanted to see if I could adapt it to something that would work there. I was able to do it using Azure Automation and PowerShell Runbooks there. Here’s a short video I created that walks you through the solution: https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=48105308A1A5ACCD&id=48105308a1a5accd%21255763&v=3.

Some pre-requisites:

Need an Office 365 email account (I’m using my developer account)
Need SPO admin access in an O365 tenant (global admin or SPO limited admin will work)
SendMailUsingOffice365.ps1 needs to be published in order to test Get-SPOStorageInfo.ps1

While this is a sample of what’s possible, the real thing would be automated to run every day without human intervention. I see this being extremely useful in all kinds of scenarios. Getting this put together for the first time took me a few hours, but I definitely recommend spending some time with automation in Azure to check out the possibilities.

SharePoint Online – Starter Console Application

Thu, 21 May 2015 16:27:00 GMT

I've been doing quite a bit of work lately with remote code execution for SharePoint Online (SPO) to deploy artifacts (sites, webs, columns, content types, etc.). While the OfficeDev PnP project on GitHub is the definitive way to go and we should all be following those patterns for large-scale SPO dev efforts, much of what I've been doing is very ad-hoc. To help with this, I've created a simple "starter" console app for working with SharePoint Online. Check it out here: https://github.com/skaggej/sharepoint/tree/master/SPO_Console_Starter.

SPO_Console_Starter Usage

This console app has everything you need to get started. It was built with references to the SharePoint Online assemblies (v16) via the NuGet package at https://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.SharePointOnline.CSOM. Make sure to install that if you have issues.

If you change nothing and simply run it, you'll be prompted for the authentication info for your SPO environment and, once authenticated, the console app will simply output "Hello, SPO!"

private static void ExecuteCustomCode(){ Console.WriteLine("Hello, SPO!");}

Microsoft Guidance on Search Crawls in SharePoint Online

Wed, 20 May 2015 17:32:07 GMT

Ok, so there’s no “official” guidance. Generally, the message has been “you need to wait.”

As you may know, we currently have no way to initiate a full/incremental crawl of content in SharePoint Online. Unfortunately, outside of that statement, Microsoft hasn't provided any "official" guidance on the topic. In troubleshooting a recent issue, I opened a support ticket regarding this. A few days later, I received a little bit of guidance, but it still can't be considered official. So, with that, here's the Q&A you can reference if you ever need to provide a customer with something more substantial than “we can't do it” or “you’ll just have to wait.”

How often do full crawls run on content?
1. There are not full crawls that run on content
How often do full crawls run on people and user profiles?
1. There are not full crawls that run on the user profiles
How often do incremental crawls run on content?
1. 4-6 hours after previous incremental crawl is completed
How often do incremental crawls run on people and user profiles?
1. 4-8 hours after previous incremental crawl is completed
If I add a new user profile property, how long must I wait until it’s available as a crawled property?
1. Wait for next incremental crawl to be completed
After mapping a crawled property to a managed property, how long must I wait until that managed property is updated to reflect that mapping?
1. For any mapping changes, as you may be aware, new/updated content would get the changes however for the existing content a re-index needs to be done. For user profiles, I have already explained above that since there is no option given to re-index, a support ticket needs to be raised and Microsoft can re-index all user profiles in the given tenant.
If I add a new managed property, how long must I wait until it’s available for querying?
1. This should be available immediately since creating managed property has no effect on the index, however if you are querying the index then index should be updated.
Will Microsoft be providing us with the ability to manually initiate search crawls like we can in on-premises environments?
1. As of now the answer is No, however if this changes then public announcement would be made

Additionally, there’s an excellent thread out on the Office 365 Yammer Network here: https://www.yammer.com/itpronetwork/#/Threads/show?threadId=454314774. If you’re not already a member of that Yammer network, you’ll need to submit a request to join. Summarizing that post, Mikael Svenson (@mikaelsvenson) has written a couple of PowerShell scripts that address this issue as well. He’s written up an article on that here: http://techmikael.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-trigger-re-indexing-of-user.html. You can jump directly to the PowerShell scripts here: https://github.com/wobba/SPO-Trigger-Reindex.

On May 13^th, the Office 365 Yammer Network hosted a SharePoint YamJam in which I posted a question about this. In an effort to compile all of this information in one place, here’s the link and transcript: https://www.yammer.com/itpronetwork/#/Threads/show?threadId=535940901.

Transcript

May 13 at 9:25am

SharePoint YamJam

In a hybrid scenario, will we have the ability to force a full crawl of our content in SharePoint Online from SharePoint on-prem? Not being able to manually initiate full crawls in SPO has been my biggest pain point for the last 6 months. Telling customers "you need to wait" is not great. Telling customers "I have a script someone wrote that should do it" isn't great (even though the script and Mikael Svenson (MVP)) are both great). ;-)

I'd really love to see an improvement in search in SPO and it'd be great if SP2016 on-prem could help there somehow.

Translated from English

cc: Mikael Svenson (MVP)

May 13 at 9:26am

I should add that this is really related to user profile updates...in the realm of refreshing crawled and managed properties more rapidly.

May 13 at 9:26am

Yes in setting up and in training on our environment, the wait for search to catch up was painful. It would be nice if we could periodically force it, even if on a limited basis.

like this message like this.

May 13 at 11:30am from Windows Phone

I think the technical challenge of this is that tenants might not have their own content source and it all just runs like a train. Also if people force a lot of full crawls it could mess up the total crawl dynamic.

But it would certainly be great, and I'm sure it's possible to achieve of they want.

Regarding Hybrid I'm curious as to how I can expunge all my hybrid crawled content if I accidentally killed the onprem SSA and db?

To summarize, when dealing with search in SharePoint Online, be prepared to wait and be prepared to tell your customers to wait…even with Mikael’s scripts. Hopefully this will be addressed in the future.

Office 365 – SharePoint Online Usability Update

Tue, 19 May 2015 15:31:52 GMT

A very useful new update has been rolled out to list toolbars in SharePoint Online. If you’ve gotten sick of the ellipsis (…), then you’ll appreciate how handy this is.

To see the updated toolbar, navigate to a list or library. You’ll see something that looks familiar, but notice the More drop-down on the far right? Hmmm…what’s that do?

Select a document to find out. When you do, you’ll see that the More option becomes enabled and opening it reveals the additional actions you can take on that document. This is much faster than trying to use the ellipsis or the ribbon. Fantastic!

It gets even better! Now you can right-click a document or item to bring up this same menu, too!

SharePoint 2013 - Accessing referenced file from is not allowed because the reference is outside of the App Web

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 04:29:00 GMT

Scenario

I ran into this when deploying an event receiver that would update the master page of all sites (SPWeb objects) when activated in a particular site collection (SPSite object).

Accessing referenced file from is not allowed because the reference is outside of the App Web.

Problem

The problem is described and resolved here: http://mctalex.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/powershell-fix-for-app-master-problem.html.

Better Resolution

I adapted this script to something a bit more readily reusable: https://github.com/skaggej/powershell/blob/master/Set-SPAppWebMasterPages.ps1. Just enter the root URL of a site collection and it will update the master pages for all app webs within it.

SharePoint Online Public Website Offerings

Wed, 28 Jan 2015 06:19:15 GMT

On December 19th, Microsoft announced the removal of the public website feature from SharePoint Online. Of course, it's not really a full removal, but the feature is transitioning over to unknown third-party offerings...unknown, that is, until today. Today, Microsoft announced that Wix.com and GoDaddy.com are two of the available third-party offerings and there are more to come. Read the full article here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/3027254.

From the article:

Who will be providing the third-party offerings?
The following website hosting companies currently partner with Office 365:

GoDaddy
Wix.com

Needless to say, this is an exciting time for public websites in SharePoint Online. Back in its heyday, the ability to add web content to pages in SharePoint without having to know HTML, CSS, etc. was huge. Of course, anyone who's built out a page in SharePoint that had any real impact to users definitely involved some customization in that realm. Today, the world is a lot different and folks need more efficient ways to update content; true no-code efforts that make updating web content fun instead of a chore.

I think Microsoft has made a wise decision here. SharePoint has long been a "jack of all trades," one of them being web content management. SharePoint can do it, sure, but I think it's a great move to let companies who do it better manage it going forward. Microsoft can offload that effort to others and focus on enhancing SharePoint's core capabilities for everyone's benefit.

Synchronizing Custom Active Directory Attributes to Custom User Profile Properties in SharePoint Online

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 16:51:00 GMT

Scenario

CustomerA wants to maintain employee attributes in Active Directory (AD), yet have them available for viewing and selective editing within SharePoint Online’s (SPO) User Profile Service.

Problem

While the Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AAD) Sync Services Tool does synchronize on-premises AD attributes to AAD, it does not push all of those attributes to properties in SPO.

Solution Synopsis

Solving this problem involves extending the AD schema and writing custom code to push custom AD attribute values to custom user profile properties in SPO.

Solution Walkthrough

In this solution walkthrough, we’re going to pretend that CustomerA wants to add a custom attribute of "Favorite Color" to its on-premises AD environment and have that pushed to a custom user profile property in SPO called "Favorite Color."

Extending the AD Schema

Adding a custom attribute to AD involves extending the AD schema. This is normally frowned upon because AD typically contains unused attributes that can be leveraged, but it’s certainly possible to do. Do this at your own risk and understand that once you’ve extended the schema, there’s no going back.

Follow the instructions in this link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms677620(v=vs.85).aspx

Obtain a Base OID by running oidgen.vbs

Create a base OID value for classes (add a .1 to the base OID from part a)

Create a base OID value for attributes (add a .2 to the base OID from part a)

Assign each class its own unique OID value (add a .1 through .N to the base OID from part b)

Assign each attribute its own unique OID value (add a .1 through .N to the base OID from part c)

Build out the script

Important!

Each attribute must have the appropriate values for:

attributeID (based on assignments from the above step 2)

attributeSyntax: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc223177.aspx

oMSyntax: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc223177.aspx

isSingleValued: TRUE or isSingleValued: FALSE

Each class must have the appropriate values for:

governsID (based on assignments from the above step 2)

mayContain: each property that should be a part of this class (one row per property)

.ldif file

Ensure that the LDAP path contains the correct containers and domain configuration

White space matters

Partial Example Script (this is only a sample and should not be run as-is)

#Attribute definition for CompanyA-FavoriteColor

dn: CN=CompanyA-FavoriteColor,CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=sp2013,DC=com

changetype: ntdsschemaadd

objectClass: top

objectClass: attributeSchema

cn: CompanyA-FavoriteColor

# The below "attributeID" must be changed!

attributeID: 1.2.840.113556.1.8000.2554.22192.62955.61904.17455.36579.16120863.6105657.2.3

attributeSyntax: 2.5.5.12

isSingleValued: TRUE

adminDisplayName: CompanyA-FavoriteColor

adminDescription: CompanyA-FavoriteColor

oMSyntax: 64

searchFlags: 1

lDAPDisplayName: CompanyA-FavoriteColor

systemOnly: FALSE

dn:

changetype: modify

add: schemaUpdateNow

schemaUpdateNow: 1

# Classes

dn: CN=CompanyAUser,CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=sp2013,DC=com

changetype: ntdsschemaadd

objectClass: top

objectClass: classSchema

cn: CompanyAUser

# The below "governsID" must be changed!

governsID: 1.2.840.113556.1.8000.2554.22192.62955.61904.17455.36579.16120863.6105657.1.2

mayContain: CompanyA-FavoriteColor

rDNAttID: cn

adminDisplayName: CompanyAUser

adminDescription: CompanyAUser

objectClassCategory: 3

lDAPDisplayName: CompanyAUser

name: CompanyAUser

systemOnly: FALSE

dn:

changetype: modify

add: schemaUpdateNow

schemaUpdateNow: 1

dn: CN=User,CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=sp2013,DC=com

changetype: ntdsschemamodify

add: auxiliaryClass

auxiliaryClass: CompanyAUser

dn:

changetype: modify

add: schemaUpdateNow

schemaUpdateNow: 1

(note that the last line in this file is blank)

Run the script with the ldifde command-line utility (available on the domain controller from the command prompt)

Example: ldifde -i -v -j C:\Users\Administrator\Downloads -f COMPANYA_AD_ExtendSchema.ldif

Ensure the script ran successfully…check the log for errors

From the Start screen, type MMC to open up a new Microsoft Management Console.

From the File menu, click "Add/Remove Snap-in…"

Select "Active Directory Schema," click Add, then click OK. (If you don't see this option, you can follow the steps in this article to install the Active Directory Schema snap-in: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc755885(v=WS.10).aspx.)

In the AD Schema MMC tool, reload the schema and confirm that your class and attributes are in place

Open "Active Directory Users and Computers." (If it was already open, close it and re-open it; a refresh will not show the updates.)

Ensure that "Advanced Features" are enabled so that you'll be able to access the "Attribute Editor" tab in the next steps.

Right-click any user object and select Properties.

Select the "Attribute Editor" tab and confirm that the new attributes are listed and available for editing.

Now you can edit these attributes in preparation to sync the changes to SharePoint Online.

Make Changes to SharePoint Online

Create a new user profile property called "CompanyAFavoriteColor." Once created, change the display name to "Favorite Color."

Get the code that pushes from AD to SPO

The code is available on GitHub here: https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/tree/master/Samples/Core.BulkUserProfileUpdater.

Update the code as needed to work in your environment and with your custom properties.

Get the code that exports SPO user profile properties

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/SharePoint-Online-Export-f9b38f2c

Update the code as needed to work in your environment and with your custom properties.

Get the code that writes to AD

The code is available on CodePlex here: https://bulkupdateadcsv.codeplex.com/.

Update the code as needed to work in your environment and with your custom properties.

Remove those extra users from Azure AD and Office 365

Wed, 10 Dec 2014 16:48:00 GMT

When working with the Azure AD Sync Services Tool (a.k.a. DirSync), you'll often end up with user accounts synced up to Azure AD that you don't need and will never license. This typically happens during the initial sync (full sync) as subsequent syncs are deltas. In any case, here's a quick PowerShell script you can run against Azure AD that removes only those users that are synchronized with on-premises AD and are unlicensed: https://github.com/skaggej/powershell/blob/master/PS_Azure_AD_Remove_Synchronized_Unlicensed_Users.ps1.

It's pretty self-explanatory, but feel free to leave comments/questions.

SharePoint 2013 - Hide Recent from Left Navigation

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 16:47:00 GMT

This has already been written about, but I couldn't find a good step-by-step guide that had all the pieces clearly laid out. So, that's the goal of this post.

The "Recent" section in the left navigation of SharePoint 2013 is incredibly annoying. In my opinion, it's something that should be off by default, but we should have a way to enable it as desired through the user interface. Unfortunately, it's on by default and if we want to turn it off, we can't. It's not possible.

As an alternative, we can hide it with jQuery and CSS. Follow the steps below for success.

1. Download jQuery from: http://jquery.com/download/. In my case, I ended up with version 2.1.1.

2. Figure out where to store jQuery in your SharePoint site collection. I don’t recommend using a content delivery network (CDN) or any URL that’s in another domain due to trust issues. In my case, I created a document library in the site called “js” in which I plan to store any and all JavaScript files. I did this in the top-level site to ensure that jQuery is easily referenced from anywhere within my site collection.

3. Now that jQuery is available within your site collection, you can hide that pesky “Recent” section on one page or on all pages following the methods below.

Hide “Recent” section on one page

1. Edit the page

2. Add a Content Editor Web Part to the page

3. Paste this code into the Content Editor Web Part, making any changes you need to.

<script src="/js/jquery-2.1.1.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

4. Save/Check In/Publish the page and you’re done.

Hide “Recent” section on all pages

This assumes that all pages in your site collection are referencing the same master page. Of course if you have multiple master pages and site collections, you’ll need to do this for each master page being used within each site collection.

1. Edit the master page of your site in SharePoint Designer 2013 (other methods work fine as well).

2. Add a reference to jQuery in the HTML <head></head> section of your master page.

<SharePoint:ScriptLink language="javascript" name="~sitecollection/js/jquery-2.1.1.min.js" runat="server" OnDemand="false" LoadAfterUI="True" />

3. Add the jQuery script to hide the “Recent” section within the “PlaceHolderAdditionalPageHead” content placeholder.

4. Save/Check In/Publish the master pages and you’re done.

The Result

View your site again and you shouldn’t see that annoying “Recent” section in the left navigation anymore!

Office 365 Video YamJam

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 16:46:00 GMT

If you'd like to get the scoop on some of the features, functions, limitations, and considerations for Office 365 Video, then check out this YamJam: https://www.yammer.com/itpronetwork/uploaded_files/27257276.

If you're not a member of the IT Pro Network on Yammer, you should be able to request an invitation. There's really a lot of good content here that should add some clarity around Office 365 Video.

Long story short, it's new and will continue to change quite a bit. To submit your own changes, you can go to the UserVoice site for Office 365 Video here: https://office365video.uservoice.com/forums/273864-general.

SharePoint Saturday Phoenix 2014 - Recap

Sun, 23 Nov 2014 16:45:00 GMT

I had a great time at SharePoint Saturday Phoenix yesterday. My session went very well and there was a good turnout. If you're interested in obtaining the content from my presentation, you can access it via OneDrive at http://1drv.ms/1x7lHiR.

Thanks to everyone who came out. ASU is a great venue and we look forward to seeing all your smiling faces again next year!

SharePoint Online PowerShell Connect-SPOService Error

Wed, 19 Nov 2014 16:39:00 GMT

I've had a lot of trouble recently with connecting my PC to my SharePoint Online tenants via PowerShell. The process is fairly simple and this article is the best starting point: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161388(v=office.15).aspx.

Having done all the right things, I was running into the following error upon every time I'd run the Connect-SPOService cmdlet: "The Application ID (AppID) for which the service ticket is requested does not exist on the system."

I don't know what that means or where to begin with it, so I hit the web and found nothing useful. Ugh.

Well, today I got lucky. I'm presenting at tonight's meeting of the Phoenix Office 365 User Group and have been spending a few precious lunchtime minutes prepping for tonight. In particular, the facility we meet in does not provide wired network access and so I want to make sure that my virtual machines work are going to play nicely with my wireless NIC today. I disabled my Ethernet NIC and am only on wireless now as I write this.

Somehow, that fixed the issue. I'm guessing it has something to do with my host (Windows 8.1) running Hyper-V and having several different virtual switches that share my wired Ethernet NIC.

I'm now essentially not using any unusual network settings and I've been able to connect to multiple tenants now without a problem. Yay!

Update 01/05/15

I just called and talked to tech support at my ISP and the "The Application ID (AppID) for which the service ticket is requested does not exist on the system" message is occurring because I'm on a residential network instead of a business network. Looks like I'll have to go to the office for these kinds of things. Argh!

Update 02/02/16

I've found success in connecting to my company's VPN for the last year. While that's worked, it's been pain in the neck to connect to VPN on and off all day. Today Max Melcher posted a similar article here: https://melcher.it/2016/02/for-security-reasons-dtd-is-prohibited-in-this-xml-document. Check it out. You might find success in some DNS updates and disabling IPv6.

SharePoint Saturday Phoenix 2014

Mon, 17 Nov 2014 16:37:00 GMT

I'm speaking at SharePoint Saturday in Phoenix in just a few short days. We're at ASU! I'm excited to check it out as I've never been over there. My wife and I packed up our lives and moved out to Phoenix in May, so there are several things we need to do yet. In any case, to register and see details for the event, visit the SPSEvents site here: http://www.spsevents.org/city/phoenix/phoenix2014.

My session will be covering PowerShell for Office 365, which is a topic that's becoming more and more relevant in SharePoint projects as companies migrate all or part of their sites to SharePoint Online. It's interesting to see an Office 365 session at a SharePoint Saturday, but that's the way things are moving. It's not enough to know SharePoint on-prem anymore. You need to know it online, too. Since it's one feature of Office 365, you end up being better at what you do if you know a thing or two about Office 365 management.

If you specialize in SharePoint, it's likely that you'll eventually run into something in SharePoint Online. Having the skills to support the tool is necessary and I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see more Office 365 topics at SharePoint Saturdays. Supporting this, consider the yearly SharePoint Conference being merged with others to form the Microsoft Ignite conference. We've just gone from 3-4 days in one technology to a full five days spanning several...most of which are currently in Office 365...and I'd be willing to bet the rest move that direction as well.

I hope to see you there!

SharePoint 2013 Displaying People Search Results in Multiple Columns

Wed, 05 Nov 2014 16:35:00 GMT

I recently had a need to take the normal people search results in SharePoint Online and make them look better. In particular, use all that white space to the right of the default search results listing. Forgive the photos below. I wanted to keep the large resolution to demonstrate the functionality here.

Default People Search Results

CSS

Drop this CSS in a Content Editor Web Part on the page.

Updated People Search Results

The result gives me what feels like a responsive design. As I narrow my browser's width, the search results adjust accordingly and even maintain their order.

SP2013 Geolocation Manager

Mon, 03 Nov 2014 16:34:00 GMT

Adding a Geolocation column to a list in SharePoint 2013 is a bit of a pain because there’s no built-in user interface to do so. Instead, you have to add it with code. Check out Tobias Zimmergren’s article to get acquainted with the Geolocation column in SharePoint 2013: http://zimmergren.net/technical/sp-2013-getting-started-with-the-new-geolocation-field-in-sharepoint-2013.

Now, to the point of my post, I’ve just launched a project on CodePlex to provide a UI for Geolocation management in SharePoint 2013. Ideally this will work in both on-premises and online environments.

As this is a new effort, it’s currently in beta and needs a lot of work to be truly awesome. That said, check out the project here: http://sp2013geolocationmanager.codeplex.com/. I appreciate any and all feedback. You can reach me at eric.skaggs@catapultsystems.com or eskaggs@outlook.com.

PHXO365UG - Next Meeting - 09/17/2014

Sat, 30 Aug 2014 16:33:00 GMT

The first meeting of the Phoenix Office 365 User Group was a huge success! I was hoping for 5 or so people to show up, given that it was the first meeting, but we ended up with a total of 9 attendees! Thanks again to those of you that were able to make it and for those of you that couldn't, I have great news.

Our next meeting will be on Wednesday, September 17th from 5:30pm to 7:30pm at TEKsystems here in Phoenix. Registration and everything else you need to know is available on the group's Meetup site. In this session, Rob Riley will demo the Office 365 products at a high-level as to familiarize what products and features are included in Office 365. He will touch briefly on Office 365 licensing and how the license choice refers to the features available to the user.

I’m excited about unifying the Office 365 community in Phoenix!

Have input? Reach out to me directly: eric.skaggs@catapultsystems.com

Follow the group on Twitter: Phoenix Office 365 User Group

Join the group on Meetup: Phoenix Office 365 User Group

Visit the group's responsive Office 365 site on your favorite device: https://phxo365ug-public.sharepoint.com/.