Protect Your Identity in the Cloud With Multi-Factor Authentication

16th of April, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Multi-factor authentication is now available for both administrator and end user accounts.  This service is now available Office 365, Windows Intune, and Microsoft Azure.

One of the risks of cloud technologies is that they are accessible from anywhere.  This means that any hacker can try to log into your account from anywhere in the world.  User names are usually public and widely known (i.e. an email address).  The only thing standing between the hacker and your personal data is a password. … [Keep reading] “Protect Your Identity in the Cloud With Multi-Factor Authentication”

Simulate moving to the Cloud with NEWT

28th of March, 2014 / / No Comments

I’ve blogged a bit in the past about the unique challenges encountered when moving to the cloud and the unavoidable consequence of introducing new network hops when moving workloads out of the data centre. I’m currently working for a unique organisation in the mining industry who are quite aggressively pursuing cost saving initiatives and have seen cloud as one of the potential savings. The uniqueness of the IT operating environment comes from the dispersed and challenging “branch offices” which may lie at the end of a long dedicated wired, microwave or satellite link

Centralising IT services to a data centre in Singapore is all very well if you’re office is on a well serviced broadband Internet link but what of these other data centres with more challenged connectivity.… [Keep reading] “Simulate moving to the Cloud with NEWT”

Office 365 / SharePoint Sign-in with Xamarin.iOS

20th of March, 2014 / / 1 Comment

While coding up an iOS app with Xamarin I came across some odd behaviour when trying to programmatically sign in to O365 using HttpClient.

Xamarin

If you are not aware, Xamarin is built with Mono (the open source .NET Framework) and for all intents and purposes has the same namespace and language features as .NET 4.5. Excluding of course, all the Microsoft specific .NET parts.

HttpClient

OK I’ll set the scene. One of the requirements of my shiny new Xamarin app was to host a SharePoint site in a browser control.… [Keep reading] “Office 365 / SharePoint Sign-in with Xamarin.iOS”

Remote Event Receiver (RER) for Host Web using SharePoint Provider Hosted App in Office 365/SharePoint Online Environment

13th of March, 2014 / / 16 Comments

There are a number of articles talking about how to deploy Remote Event Receiver for SharePoint 2013, but few of them are in depth, especially on how to set it up for host web using Provider Hosted App in Office 365/SharePoint Online environment. I hope this post can provide detailed information for developers who need to deploy the same.

The inspiration for this article is another similar article written by Chris O’Brien, here. However the mentioned article talks about how to make the BasicDataOperations SP2013 provider-hosted app on MSDN work on App Web, not Host Web.… [Keep reading] “Remote Event Receiver (RER) for Host Web using SharePoint Provider Hosted App in Office 365/SharePoint Online Environment”

SharePoint Online – InfoPath Attachment Size Limit

26th of February, 2014 / / No Comments

In an on premise environment, there are guidelines around working with attachments in InfoPath and farm admin would be able to change the attachment size limit in the machine.config / web.config. However, the idea is to keep minimal attachments within the form, and make sure the InfoPath file size as a whole is within the file size limit as configured in your farm.

In SharePoint Online, there is a hard limit on the total attachment size to the InfoPath forms you create and store in Forms Library:

http://community.office365.com/en-us/forums/154/p/79149/305640.aspx… [Keep reading] “SharePoint Online – InfoPath Attachment Size Limit”

Map SharePoint Libraries with local file drive – A step-by-step guide

6th of September, 2013 / / 6 Comments

There are a number of articles talking about how to map SharePoint libraries to your local drive, but few of them are in depth, especially on how to set up the prerequisites. I hope this post can provide detailed information for users who need to do this. I will also give an overview and talking about some advantages of mapping SharePoint libraries with local file drive.

Prerequisites

You need to make sure the “WebClient” service is up and running on your server.… [Keep reading] “Map SharePoint Libraries with local file drive – A step-by-step guide”

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”

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”

An Overview of Server Name Indication (SNI) and Creating an IIS SNI Web SSL Binding Using PowerShell in Windows Server 2012

18th of April, 2013 / / 7 Comments

One of the frustrating limitations in supporting secure websites has been the inability to share IP addresses among SSL websites. In the day, there were a few ways to solve this limitation. One, you could use multiple IP addresses, binding a SSL certificate to each combination of an IP address and standard SSL port. This has been the best method to date but it is administratively heavy and not necessarily a good use of valuable IP addresses.… [Keep reading] “An Overview of Server Name Indication (SNI) and Creating an IIS SNI Web SSL Binding Using PowerShell in Windows Server 2012”

SharePoint Online 2013 – Setting Default Account for Organization Browser

6th of April, 2013 / / 26 Comments

Earlier this week I have received a requirement to make use of the SharePoint OOTB Organization Browser that needs to set the default root account to be a specific user…well, there are plenty of blogs on using custom JS in MOSS or Sharepint 2010 for this purpose – glad that this hasn’t changed in SharePoint 2013. But this is SharePoint Online which adds some challenges:

  • The username is no longer in the format of Domain/LoginName
  • It is using claims based authentication through ADFS

Below are the steps you can follow to set the default account on the SharePoint Organization Browser.… [Keep reading] “SharePoint Online 2013 – Setting Default Account for Organization Browser”