Handle Throttling in SharePoint Online

3rd of May, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

In this post I will be talking about handling throttling in SharePoint online custom code. I had recently faced throttling issue in custom CSOM code running from a console application which was working fine with the exponential delay pattern suggestion by community to handle throttling but lately started facing some issues.


Background

For one of our client we had console application to migrate documents from network file-share to SharePoint and update the corresponding managed metadata using the client side object model.… [Keep reading] “Handle Throttling in SharePoint Online”

Automation and Creation of Office 365 groups using Flow, Microsoft Graph and Azure Function – Part 1

1st of May, 2018 / / No Comments

Automating the creation of Office 365 groups via an event triggered process can help business teams use a consistent template across all their groups, especially if there are numerous groups provisioned throughout the year.
For example, in our case we have 500+ custom Office 365 groups that are created and maintained each year. Hence in this case it became obvious we wanted to spin up an Office 365 group from a SharePoint list where users could make the request on their own.… [Keep reading] “Automation and Creation of Office 365 groups using Flow, Microsoft Graph and Azure Function – Part 1”

How to make Property Bag Values indexed and searchable in SharePoint Online

26th of April, 2018 / / 1 Comment

In an earlier post here we have seen how we can set Property Bag values in Modern SharePoint sites. One of the major reasons for setting Property Bag values in SharePoint sites is to make the SharePoint sites searchable based on custom metadata.
However, property bag values are not crawled by the SharePoint Online Search index directly. To make a property bag value searchable, we must explicit set the property bag values to be indexed by the Search crawler.… [Keep reading] “How to make Property Bag Values indexed and searchable in SharePoint Online”

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”

"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”

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”

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”