Quick start guide for PnP PowerShell

1st of February, 2018 / / 2 Comments

It is quite easy and quick to set up PnP PowerShell on a local system and start using it. Considering that PnP PowerShell has been gaining a lot of momentum among Devs and Admins, I thought it would be good to have a post for everyone’s reference.
So why PnP PowerShell? Because it is the recommended and most updated PowerShell module for IT Pros to work on SharePoint Online, SharePoint on-premise and Office 365 Groups. It allows us to remotely maintain a SharePoint Online and Office 365 tenancy as we will see below.… [Keep reading] “Quick start guide for PnP PowerShell”

Automate SharePoint Document Libraries Management using Flow, Azure Functions and SharePoint CSOM

30th of January, 2018 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been working on a client requirement to automate SharePoint library management via scripts to implement a document lifecycle with many document libraries that have custom content types and requires regular housekeeping for ownership and permissions.
Solution overview
To provide a seamless user experience, we decided to do the following:

1. Create a document library template (.stp) with all the prerequisite folders and content types applied.

2. Create a list to store the data about entries for said libraries.… [Keep reading] “Automate SharePoint Document Libraries Management using Flow, Azure Functions and SharePoint CSOM”

Connect SharePoint Online and SQL Server On-Premises with BCS/SharePoint Apps using Hybrid Connection and WCF Services

13th of November, 2017 / / 2 Comments

SharePoint Online cannot directly connect to on-premises data sources such as SQL Server. A recommended approach is to use Hybrid with SharePoint 2013/2016 but adds an overhead of infrastructure and maintenance costs. Hence to overcome it, I am going to describe in this blog how to use the Azure PaaS workloads and connect to on-premises data sources using BCS.
Using Azure Hybrid Connection (refer this post) and BCS with Azure Web App hosting WCF endpoint, we can now expose on-premises SQL data to SharePoint Online and Cloud by external content types (ECTs) or SharePoint Hosted Apps.… [Keep reading] “Connect SharePoint Online and SQL Server On-Premises with BCS/SharePoint Apps using Hybrid Connection and WCF Services”

Resolving “User not found” issue while assigning permissions using SharePoint CSOM

7th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

I was recently working on a SharePoint Online project where we were trying to automate library creation and provide required permissions on those libraries. We had an issue while modifying permissions with CSOM code on SharePoint libraries when the Created By user had left the company.
In this post I will outline the cause and the resolution as there was no online reference for resolving this error.
Issue: The CSOM code was throwing an error “User not found” even when creating a User object from web.EnsureUser()… [Keep reading] “Resolving “User not found” issue while assigning permissions using SharePoint CSOM”

Use Azure Hybrid Connections to get on-premises data from SQL to SharePoint Online

18th of October, 2017 / / No Comments

Azure Hybrid Connections are an easier and less complicated way to connect cloud applications with on-premises SQL data. This provides great extensibility options for SharePoint Online such as,

  1. Provider Hosted Apps hosted in Azure
  2. Business Data Connectivity using WCF services hosted in Azure
  3. SharePoint Hosted Apps using BCS external sources.

In this blog, I will illustrate the steps to configure Azure Hybrid Connections. In a nutshell, the diagram below outlines the data flow in Hybrid connections.… [Keep reading] “Use Azure Hybrid Connections to get on-premises data from SQL to SharePoint Online”

Implementing Bootstrap and Font-awesome in SharePoint Framework solutions using React

6th of July, 2017 / / 8 Comments

Responsive Design has been the biggest driving factor for SharePoint framework (SPFx) solutions. In a recent SPFx project for a customer, we developed a component using React, Bootstrap and Font-awesome icons for a responsive look and feel. While building the UI piece, we encountered many issues during the initial set up, so I am writing this blog with detail steps for future reference. One of the key fixes mentioned in this post, is for the WOFF2 font-type file which is a component in font-awesome and bootstrap.… [Keep reading] “Implementing Bootstrap and Font-awesome in SharePoint Framework solutions using React”