SharePoint Integration for Health Care eLearning – Moving LMS to the Cloud

21st of August, 2018 / / No Comments

Health care systems often face challenges in the way of being unkept and unmaintained or managed by too many without consistency in content and harbouring outdated resources. A lot of these legacy training and development systems also wear the pain of constant record churning without a supportable record management system. With the accrual of these records over time forming a ‘Big Data concern’, modernising these eLearning platforms may be the right call to action for medical professionals and researchers.… [Keep reading] “SharePoint Integration for Health Care eLearning – Moving LMS to the Cloud”

Provisioning complex Modern Sites with Azure Functions and Flow – Part 2 – Create and Apply Template

14th of August, 2018 / / 1 Comment

In the previous blog here, we got an overview of the high level Architecture of a Complex Modern team site provisioning process. In this blog, we will look at the step 1 of the process – Create and Apply template process, in detail.
Before that, below are few links to earlier blogs, as a refresher, to prerequisties for the blog.

  1. Set up a Graph App to call Graph Service using App ID and Secret – link
  2. Sequencing HTTP Trigger Azure Functions for simultaneous calls – link
  3. Adding and Updating owners using Microsoft Graph Async calls – link

Overview
The Create and Apply Template process aims at the following
1. … [Keep reading] “Provisioning complex Modern Sites with Azure Functions and Flow – Part 2 – Create and Apply Template”

Provisioning complex Modern Sites with Azure Functions and Microsoft Flow – Part 1 – Architecture

10th of August, 2018 / / 3 Comments

In one of my previous blog here,  I have discussed about creating Office 365 groups using Azure Function and Flow. The same process could be used also to provision Modern Team sites in SharePoint Online because Modern Team Sites are Office 365 groups too. However, if you are creating a Complex Modern Team Site with lots of Libraries, Content types, Termstore associated columns etc. it will challenging to do it with a single Azure Function.… [Keep reading] “Provisioning complex Modern Sites with Azure Functions and Microsoft Flow – Part 1 – Architecture”

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”

Planning Site structure and Navigation in SharePoint Modern Experience Communication and Team sites

26th of June, 2018 / / No Comments

If you are planning to implement or implementing Modern team sites or Communication sites, there is change in best practices for planning and managing the Sites structure, Site Hierarchy and Navigation. This is a very common question during my presentations – how do we manage site structures, navigation and content in Modern experiences.
So, in this blog, we will look at few strategies for planning Site structure and Navigation in Modern Experience sites.
1. First and foremost, get rid of nested subsites and Site hierarchy navigation.… [Keep reading] “Planning Site structure and Navigation in SharePoint Modern Experience Communication and Team sites”

Automate network share migrations to Sharepoint Online using ShareGate PowerShell

7th of June, 2018 / / 2 Comments

Sharegate supports PowerShell scripting which can be used to automate and schedule migrations. In this post, I am going to demonstrate an example of end to end automation to migrate network Shares to SharePoint Online. The process effectively reduces the task of executing migrations to “just flicking a switch”.

Pre-Migration

The following pre-migration activities were conducted before the actual migration:

  1. Analysis of Network Shares
  2. Discussions with stakeholders from different business units to identify content needs
  3. Pilot migrations to identify average throughput capability of migration environment
  4. Identification of acceptable data filtration criteria, and prepare Sharegate migration template files based on business requirements
  5. Derive a migration plan from above steps

Migration Automation flow

The diagram represents a high-level flow of the process:
 

The migration automation was implemented to execute the following steps:

  1. Migration team indicates that migration(s) are ready to be initiated by updating the list item(s) in the SharePoint list
  2. Updated item(s) are detected by a PowerShell script polling the SharePoint list
  3. The list item data is downloaded as a CSV file.
… [Keep reading] “Automate network share migrations to Sharepoint Online using ShareGate PowerShell”

Utilizing Sharegate migration Templates for Network share migrations

29th of May, 2018 / / No Comments

Sharegate supports PowerShell based scripting which can be used to automate and schedule migrations. The purpose of this post is to demonstrate the use of pre-created migration templates to initiate migration tasks in Sharegate using PowerShell scripts. In one of my previous project, we were migrating network shares to SharePoint Online using Sharegate as the migration tool of choice.

Based on our discussions with business divisions and IT department, the following requirements were identified for most of the divisions:

  1. Office documents, PDFs, Image files will be migrated
  2. Include only documents modified after a date for e.g.
… [Keep reading] “Utilizing Sharegate migration Templates for Network share migrations”

Automation and Creation of Office 365 groups using Flow, Microsoft Graph and Azure Function – Part 2

16th of May, 2018 / / No Comments

In the Part 1 blog here, we discussed an approach for the Group creation process and important considerations for provisioning groups. In this blog, we will look at getting a Graph App ID and App secret for invoking the graph service and then implementation of the group provisioning process.
MS Graph App Set up
Before we start creating groups we will need to set up a Graph App that will be used to create the group in the Office 365 tenancy.… [Keep reading] “Automation and Creation of Office 365 groups using Flow, Microsoft Graph and Azure Function – Part 2”

Latest updates to Modern Libraries experience in SharePoint Communication sites (Apr 2018)

11th of May, 2018 / / No Comments

Modern Libraries in Communication Sites have got some welcome facelift during the last few months (Apr 2018) and there have been many great changes. I am going to list of few of these updates here.
Note: Some of these updates might be limited to Targeted release (or First release) versions only. In case these changes are not available then they might be not in Standard release ( or GA release) yet.
1. Full page view of SharePoint libraries
The SharePoint libraries now have a full page view, which provides it to use the full home page layout of Communication sites.… [Keep reading] “Latest updates to Modern Libraries experience in SharePoint Communication sites (Apr 2018)”

Set up a Microsoft Graph App for Office 365 and SharePoint Online management to use in Azure Functions, Flow, .Net solutions and much more

4th of May, 2018 / / No Comments

Microsoft Graph API can be used to connect and manage the Office 365 SaaS platforms such as SharePoint Online, Office 365 Groups, One Drive, OneNote, Azure AD, Teams (in beta) and much more.
A Graph app is an Azure AD app that has privileges (with provided permissions) to authenticate and then execute operations when using PowerShell, Azure Functions, Flow, Office Online CSOM, SharePoint Online and many other tools.
It is quite easy to set up a graph app, below is a brief preview of the process.… [Keep reading] “Set up a Microsoft Graph App for Office 365 and SharePoint Online management to use in Azure Functions, Flow, .Net solutions and much more”