Report of All Taxonomy Fields containing a term in SharePoint Tenancy

24th of April, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Recently we had a request to find fields/columns in all lists across the tenancy which have a specific Taxonomy term because we needed to report on field usage across all site collections. However, we found that getting a report of all Taxonomy fields in your SharePoint tenancy that is linked to a specific Term Set can get quite daunting because there is no direct SharePoint Query to fetch the associations.
The technical challenge is that using PnP PowerShell, the Taxonomy fields are returned as a generic SP.Field… [Keep reading] “Report of All Taxonomy Fields containing a term in SharePoint Tenancy”

Promoting and Demoting Site pages to News in Modern SharePoint Sites using SPFx extension and Azure Function

23rd of April, 2018 / / No Comments

The requirement that I will be addressing in this blog is how to Promote and Demote site pages to news articles in Modern SharePoint sites. This approach allows us to promote any site page to News, add approval steps and demote news articles to site pages if the news need to be updated. The news also shows in the modern news web part when the site page is promoted.
Solution Approach:
To start with, create a site page.… [Keep reading] “Promoting and Demoting Site pages to News in Modern SharePoint Sites using SPFx extension and Azure Function”

Starting Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business IM sessions from a link

18th of April, 2018 / / No Comments

An interesting question was raised by a colleague recently:
Craig, How do you start an IM session from a link on a web page?
We all know that you can create a mailto: link that users can click to open their Outlook (or other mail) client and automagically pre-populate the to: field with your email address, but did you know you can do the same thing with Skype for Business?
Skype for Business
To create a clickable link that automatically opens a Skype for Business chat window to you, or anyone else for that matter, use the following format:
<a href=”sip:craig.chiffers@contoso.com… [Keep reading] “Starting Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business IM sessions from a link”

"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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Creating SharePoint Modern Team sites using Site Scripts, Flow and Azure Function

16th of March, 2018 / / No Comments

With Site Scripts and Site design, it is possible to invoke custom PnP Provisioning for Modern Team Sites from a Site Script. In the previous blog, we saw how we can provision Simple modern sites using Site Scripts JSON. However, there are some scenarios where we would need a custom provisioning template or process such as listed below:

  • Auto deploy custom web components such as SPFx extension apps
  • Complex Site Templates which couldn’t be configured
  • Complex Document libs, content types that are provided by JSON schema.
… [Keep reading] “Creating SharePoint Modern Team sites using Site Scripts, Flow and Azure Function”

Microsoft Teams Q&A

15th of March, 2018 / / No Comments

This page is a collection of Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business related questions and answers. It’s regularly updated as more information becomes available.
Microsoft Teams Q&A – Last Updated: 15th March 2018
Q: What is Microsoft Teams?
A: Microsoft Teams is a complete communications platform, that takes the best bits of Skype for Business, Yammer, SharePoint, Email and other web sources and presents them in one easy to use application. You can send IM’s, make voice and video calls, phone calls, Share documents, and collaborate all from within the one application.… [Keep reading] “Microsoft Teams Q&A”

Create Modern Pages and update metadata using SPFx Extensions, SP PnP JS and Azure Functions

13th of March, 2018 / / 3 Comments

Modern Site Pages (Site Page content type) have a constraint to associate custom metadata with it. In other words, the “Site Page” content type cannot have other site columns added to it as can be seen below.
SitePageContentTypeMissing
On another note, even though we can create a child content types from Site Page content type, the New Site page creation (screenshot below) process doesn’t associate the new content type when the Page is created. So, the fields from the child content type couldn’t be associated.… [Keep reading] “Create Modern Pages and update metadata using SPFx Extensions, SP PnP JS and Azure Functions”

Using Microsoft Identity Manager Synchronisation Server's Global Address List Synchronisation feature to create a shared global address book across three Exchange Forests

11th of March, 2018 / / 3 Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Introduction

Over the life of a company, there can be many acquisitions and mergers. During such events, the parent and the newly acquired entities have their IT “merged”. This allows for the removal of redundant systems and the reduction of expenses. It also fosters collaboration between the two entities. Unfortunately, the marriage of the two IT systems, can at times, take a long time.
To enable a more collaborative space between the parent and the newly acquired company, a shared “global address book” can be created, which will allow employees to quickly look up each others contact details easily.… [Keep reading] “Using Microsoft Identity Manager Synchronisation Server's Global Address List Synchronisation feature to create a shared global address book across three Exchange Forests”

Update Managed Metadata and Hyperlink column in a SharePoint list using PnP PowerShell

7th of March, 2018 / / No Comments

If you are trying to update a Managed Metadata and Hyperlink column in SharePoint online using PnP PowerShell and it is not getting updated, then this blog might be of help.
I had been working on a quick requirement for updating Managed Metadata columns using a PowerShell script for a bulk update requirement and it was not working as planned. The managed metadata column we were updating didn’t have the right format of Term store hierarchy and this was the cause of the issue.… [Keep reading] “Update Managed Metadata and Hyperlink column in a SharePoint list using PnP PowerShell”