Office 365 Sharepoint – Search Results web part returning incorrect results for sites

26th of June, 2013 / / 1 Comment

I have been using Search Results Web Part (SRWP) in previous version of SP and it is a convenient way to display results filtered by content type, URL…etc without worrying about user permissions as it is taken care by SP Search.

In SP13 Online I came across a problem where the results returned from SRWP are incorrect when filtered on sites:

Results Preview display correct results – total of 12:

preview results

Results displayed on SRWP – total of 10:

webpart results

This issue is due to “trim duplicates” setting in the web part.… [Keep reading] “Office 365 Sharepoint – Search Results web part returning incorrect results for sites”

Exchange Online Inactive Mailboxes

20th of June, 2013 / / 5 Comments

In an enterprise deployment of Office 365 Wave 14, one of the recurring pain points was how to handle mailbox data retention once a user left the business and the data is required for compliance purposes. There were a number of options available to handle this:

  • Leave the mailbox in-situ and disable the user account
  • Change the license SKU to Kiosk Plan 2 as it’s a cheaper license cost and disable the user account
  • Migrate the departed user mailbox back to the on-premises hybrid Exchange platform
  • Use a 3rd party cloud archive solution

While all of these will work, on an enterprise scale they’re quite clunky and even with an identity management solution in place, they’re not particularly practical or cost effective.… [Keep reading] “Exchange Online Inactive Mailboxes”

SharePoint Web Service Caching using WCF Custom Channel

16th of June, 2013 / / 1 Comment

The New SharePoint App Architecture

To be honest, I’ve had this code for a while now sitting in the blog cupboard. It was originally intended to be used as part of a global content management system delivering content from a single SharePoint authoring point to many distributed content delivery systems. Since then, events have conspired to bring it back out of the cupboard but for a slightly different purpose. As I said in my previous blog, two things have happened in the world of SharePoint:

  • SharePoint went “Online” which means it is hosted centrally in a data centre (most likely) far-far away.
… [Keep reading] “SharePoint Web Service Caching using WCF Custom Channel”

Evolution of coding

14th of June, 2013 / / 5 Comments

Many years ago, back in Uni, I saw 2 guys in a computer lab writing a whole programming assignment without running it even once. The program was of relatively decent size written in C and consequently there were hundreds of compilation errors. That’s so silly, I thought…

After graduation I used to be a C++ programmer. The syntax sometimes was quite tricky and you would often compile after every new line of code. Sometimes, you would dare to write a whole function, just to find 10 compilation errors.… [Keep reading] “Evolution of coding”

Office 365: To Federate or Not to Federate… that is the Question

5th of June, 2013 / / 8 Comments

Yesterday, Microsoft released a new version of their ‘DirSync’ utility (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn246918.aspx) which up until yesterday provided a basic ‘copy’ of your local Active Directory accounts (Active Directory Domain Service or ‘AD DS’) from your premises to the MS Cloud directory (referred to as ‘Azure Active Directory’) for Office 365 (and other Cloud apps such as Team Foundation Service (TFS Online).

This blog is written for those considering moving to Office 365 (or have moved to Office 365) but haven’t identified any other application in the organisation apart from Office 365 that requires Active Directory Federation Services and SAML/WS.Federation… [Keep reading] “Office 365: To Federate or Not to Federate… that is the Question”

Skype Integration with Lync Server and Lync Online

3rd of June, 2013 / / 19 Comments

Skype integration with Lync has been teased since the first public beta preview of Lync 2013 in July 2012. Microsoft mentioned it in Lync 2013 Preview TechNet documentation (no longer available) and in a blog post by the Lync team UPDATE: Skype and so much more: Why we’re so excited about the new Lync which implied it would be available at launch. Lync 2013 became publicly available without Skype integration which was a bit disappointing after being talked about as one of the many features.… [Keep reading] “Skype Integration with Lync Server and Lync Online”

Connecting Cloud Services with Virtual Machines in Windows Azure

2nd of June, 2013 / / 7 Comments

As of Windows Azure SDK 1.7, Microsoft has enabled us to connect a cloud service with a virtual machine in Windows Azure. Now that the general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services has been announced, Microsoft also supports it.

The common scenario for this is connecting from a public ASP.NET web application that is running in a cloud service to a private SQL Server database that is running in a virtual machine via a virtual network.… [Keep reading] “Connecting Cloud Services with Virtual Machines in Windows Azure”