Intro to Site Scripts and Site Designs with a Simple SharePoint Modern Site provisioning

6th of March, 2018 / / No Comments

Microsoft announced Site Scripts and Site Designs in late 2017 which became available for Targeted release in Jan 2018, and released to general use recently. It is a quick way to allow users to create custom modern sites, without using any scripting hacks. Hence, in this blog we will go through the steps of Site Scripts and Site design for a Simple SharePoint Modern Site Creation.
Before we get into detailed steps, lets’ get a brief overview about Site Designs and Site Scripts.… [Keep reading] “Intro to Site Scripts and Site Designs with a Simple SharePoint Modern Site provisioning”

Migrate SharePoint contents using ShareGate

27th of February, 2018 / / No Comments

Background

The first step in any migration project is to do the inventory and see what is the size of the data you have got which you are looking to migrate. For the simplicity, this post assumes you have already done this activity and have already planned new destination sites for your existing content. This means you have some excel sheet somewhere to identify where your content is going to reside in your migrated site and every existing site (in scope) have got at least a new home pointer if it qualifies for migration.… [Keep reading] “Migrate SharePoint contents using ShareGate”

Writing for the Web – that includes your company intranet!

20th of February, 2018 / / No Comments

You can have a pool made out of gold – if the water in it is as dirty and old as a swamp- no one will swim in it!

The same can be said about the content of an intranet. You can have the best design, the best developers and the most carefully planned out navigation and taxonomy but if the content and documents are outdated and hard to read, staff will lose confidence in its authority and relevance and start to look elsewhere – or use it as an excuse to get a coffee.… [Keep reading] “Writing for the Web – that includes your company intranet!”

How to set Property Bag values in SharePoint Modern Sites using SharePoint Online .Net CSOM

8th of February, 2018 / / 1 Comment

If you think setting Property Bag values programmatically for Modern SharePoint sites using CSOM would be as straight forward as in the Old Classic SharePoint sites, then there is a surprise waiting for you.
As you can see below, in the old C# CSOM this code would set the Property Bag values as follows:

The challenge with the above method is that the PropertyBag values are not persisted after saving.… [Keep reading] “How to set Property Bag values in SharePoint Modern Sites using SharePoint Online .Net CSOM”

Automate deployment pipeline tasks using Gulpjs APIs

1st of February, 2018 / / No Comments


Introduction

In this post I will be talking about gulpjs api and how gulp can be useful in automating deployment tasks. In a greenfield project there are a lot of post development tasks that a developer has to focus on besides development and with CI/CD being in focus now, post-deployment tasks are expected to be automated to make deployment pipeline more consistent and repeatable. These repetitive and common tasks not only adds-on to the project time and effort for the developer but also takes the focus away from the primary task.… [Keep reading] “Automate deployment pipeline tasks using Gulpjs APIs”

Quick start guide for PnP PowerShell

1st of February, 2018 / / 2 Comments

It is quite easy and quick to set up PnP PowerShell on a local system and start using it. Considering that PnP PowerShell has been gaining a lot of momentum among Devs and Admins, I thought it would be good to have a post for everyone’s reference.
So why PnP PowerShell? Because it is the recommended and most updated PowerShell module for IT Pros to work on SharePoint Online, SharePoint on-premise and Office 365 Groups. It allows us to remotely maintain a SharePoint Online and Office 365 tenancy as we will see below.… [Keep reading] “Quick start guide for PnP PowerShell”

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”

Automate SharePoint Document Libraries Management using Flow, Azure Functions and SharePoint CSOM

30th of January, 2018 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been working on a client requirement to automate SharePoint library management via scripts to implement a document lifecycle with many document libraries that have custom content types and requires regular housekeeping for ownership and permissions.
Solution overview
To provide a seamless user experience, we decided to do the following:

1. Create a document library template (.stp) with all the prerequisite folders and content types applied.

2. Create a list to store the data about entries for said libraries.… [Keep reading] “Automate SharePoint Document Libraries Management using Flow, Azure Functions and SharePoint CSOM”

Export/Import SharePoint Designer Workflows using PowerShell

24th of January, 2018 / / 3 Comments

Background

Your organisation is using SharePoint as a collaboration and productivity platform, and your business units have built their solutions on it. As part of business solutions, IT teams have built workflows using SharePoint designer to cater business needs. One of the challenges developers or IT professionals used to have is how to export and import this workflow to other SharePoint sites in case if you are having multiple environments like Dev, Test, UAT and Prod.… [Keep reading] “Export/Import SharePoint Designer Workflows using PowerShell”

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”