Sharepoint 2013 Cumulative Updates Patching Overview

18th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

A couple months ago, I had the opportunity to help a client to patch their Sharepoint on-premise 2013, which was last patched up to 2014. It was a challenging but interesting experience. We decided to use the Nth-1 patch, which was March 2018 at that time. It was a 5-weeks engagements, where we had to break down the steps and processes from back-up preparations, roll back strategies, on-patching strategies to post-patching testings. Lots of inputs and discussions among DBAs, system engineers, IT manager and Sharepoint engineers.… [Keep reading] “Sharepoint 2013 Cumulative Updates Patching Overview”

"Cannot complete this action" error in Sharepoint team site

6th of April, 2018 / / 2 Comments

Lately I was assigned a long standing issue in a well known organisation with Sharepoint 2013 on premise, in which some of its users have been getting this weird “Cannot complete this action” error screen whenever they delete a document from a file or modify a list view in their team sites.

Lots and lots of testings were done throughout a few days and I came out with the following an analysis summary:

  • Issue exists in some sub-sites of a team site under a team site collection (Sharepoint 2013 on-premise)
  • Error occurring consistently for team site users (including site collection admin), changes did get actioned/ saved
  • Users have to click back to get back to the previous screen to get back to the site
  • Error didn’t occur for some other team sites
  • No specific error correlation ID, nor anything suspicious in ULS log

Luckily i was able to find an answer from Microsoft.… [Keep reading] “"Cannot complete this action" error in Sharepoint team site”

Sharepoint Approval Workflow – Updating existing assignees

28th of March, 2018 / / No Comments

Workflows play a big role in everyday’s Sharepoint ‘Business as Usual’ activities. Users need to get things approved by stakeholders before publishing the content to others. In Sharepoint, there’s a built in Approval workflow template that you can enable on any list or library (this template will only be visible once you activated the Workflows Site Collection Feature). Once enabled, we can setup an Approval workflow by configuring some settings as below:

The Approval workflow initiation form, without any default values, looks like this.

Initiator will fill in the list of approvers and set either serial or parallel approval. For the approvers listed in the workflow, they receive a task assigned to them, and they receive an email notification. For further information on how approval workflow works, read: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/understand-approval-workflows-in-sharepoint-2010-a24bcd14-0e3c-4449-b936-267d6c478579
Modifying existing workflow
What i would like to bring up in this topic, is that with workflows setup using these existing templates, you could actually go in and change the list of approvers by clicking on the Add or update assignees of Approval in the workflow in progress dashboard.

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Query multiple object classes from AD using LDAP Query

31st of January, 2018 / / No Comments

Recently I had to make a query to the Active Directory to get the list of users and contacts. To achieve this, I used the LDAP query. See the following function:

 ///<summary>
/// Queries the Active Directory using LDAP
///</summary>
///<param name="entry">Directory entry</param>
///<param name="search">Directory searcher with properties to load and filters</param>
///<returns>A dictionary with ObjectGuid as the key</returns>
public static Dictionary<string, SearchResult> QueryLDAP(DirectoryEntry entry, DirectorySearcher search)
{
    entry.AuthenticationType
… [Keep reading] “Query multiple object classes from AD using LDAP Query”

Migrating Sharepoint 2013 on prem to Office365 using Sharegate

14th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Recently I completed a migration project which brought a number of sub-sites within Sharepoint 2013 on-premise to the cloud (Sharepoint Online). We decided to use Sharegate as the primary tool due to the simplistic of it.
Although it might sound as a straightforward process, there are a few things worth to be checked pre and post migration and I have summarized them here. I found it easier to have these information recorded in a spreadsheet with different tabs:
Pre-migration check:

  1. First thing, Get Site Admin access!
… [Keep reading] “Migrating Sharepoint 2013 on prem to Office365 using Sharegate”

Restoring deleted OneDrive sites in Office365

16th of October, 2017 / / 1 Comment

A customer has requested whether it was possible to restore a OneDrive site that had been deleted when the user’s account was marked for deletion in AD. After a bit of research, I was able to restore the site back and retrieved the files (luckily it was deleted less than 30 days ago).
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