Yesterday I got the really cool news that I completed all recertification requirements for the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master: SharePoint certification. Couldn’t be a happier SharePoint professional right now!

What is the MCSM and what about MCM?

The Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) program has during the latest year transitioned into the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM) program. It is not only a change in name but also a change made to adapt to the new world order. The program is not longer focusing on one specific version of the product but instead focus on what’s in the market at the current moment and specifically it covers both on-premise and cloud solutions. This is good in many senses – this allows the program to always be current, always use the latest techniques and technologies etc. The MCM was a certification without expiration date (well eventually the product cease to exist, but you still have the cert) whereas the MCSM has a three year life span and you must recertify to stay on top.

The first MCSM : SharePoint rotation!

I was fortunate to be able to participate in the rotation called U3, or Upgrade 3, which was the first MCSM rotation for SharePoint. It was two weeks on site, in the always sunny and warm Seattle, in January. I had the opportunity to spend these two weeks in a class room with the finest SharePoint professionals there is. We had great instructors, awesome labs, and fantastic discussions over the two weeks duration. It all led up to one written exam, called the Knowledge Exam, and one hands on lab, called the Qualification Lab. As always the QL was basically doing a couple of weeks worth of deep dive SharePoint work in about 8 hours time. Taken into account that this was a beta it was just about the hardest work I’ve ever done – but it was pure fun. And I made it! Phew…

Congrats to all my other friends that made it through this rotation and best of luck to the ones who will have the joy of doing the exams one more time! You can do it!

Today at the SharePoint Evolutions 2013 Conference I announced my latest pet project called Open WOPI. Open WOPI is an open WOPI client that allows you to extend SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013 and Lync 2013 with file previews and editors for any type of file formats.

The project is now (at least very, very soon) available to download from openwopi.codeplex.com and is published under the Ms-PL license. This is currently an early beta (or what you would like to call it) but will be improved over time.

Standards

Open WOPI is based on the [MS-WOP] protocol, published by Microsoft, and used by Office Web Apps Server 2013, SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013 and Lync 2013.

File format support

Currently Open WOPI has support for the following formats:

• GPX - Uses Bing maps
• TXT - Viewing and editing
• VSDX - Thumbnail viewing

More formats are in the works…

Documentation

Not much yet, but I’ll try to add that over the next few weeks.

More information

For more information, feedback and ideas about the project please refer to the Codeplex site: openwopi.codeplex.com. I’d like to hear what file formats you would like Open WOPI to support.

The slides from the presentation at the SharePoint Evolutions conference and links can be found here.

Contributors

Thanks to Sam Dolan, aka Pinkpetrol, for the really cool logo for Open WOPI.

Just discovered a really interesting and just awesome nugget in SharePoint 2013 that solves a problem that have been annoying me for a long time. The problem manifests itself when you’re having multiple URL’s for your SharePoint farm or when using SAML or Forms based login (like in Office 365 and SharePoint Online) and you’re using the profile pictures on sites not residing on the My Site Host Web Application (or host named site collection). Then the user profile picture is not shown, you get the default image not found image or you’re prompted to authenticate with the My Site Host.

Let’s take an example. Assume I have one site at intranet.contoso.com and the My Site host exists on mysite.contoso.com. I have not configured any Internet Explorer zones or anything and I’m promted to log in at each location. This is how the Newsfeed Web Part will look like on intranet.contoso.com, if I cancel out the authentication prompt or if I’m using some forms based login:

You see, no fancy picture of Mr administrator! There’s a couple of ways to solve this using IE Zones, anonymous access etc, but none are perfect and comes with consequences.

So how can I get the picture to be shown without messing with security, cross domain issues etc. Fortunately I guess I was not the only one that was annoyed by this (most likely everyone using Office 365 as well) so the SharePoint team has added a new feature to SharePoint that allows us to show profile pictures cross-domain.

It’s a very simple operation and just requires some basic PowerShell skills. Basically all you need to do is to set the CrossDomainPhotosEnabled property on the SPWebApplication object to true, like this:

asnp Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
$wa = Get-SPWebApplication http://intranet.contoso.com
$wa.CrossDomainPhotosEnabled = $true
$wa.Update()

Now the Newsfeed, in the sample above, will look like below. And I was not prompted for any authentication or anything! Isn’t that sweet! And it works very well on Host Named Site Collections as well.

Basically what happens behind the scenes is that the request for the user picture is sent via a “proxy” .aspx page called userphoto.aspx which takes a couple of parameters; URL of the picture, the account name (or e-mail) as well as the picture size (S, M or L). This page will return a JPEG stream of the user profile picture without crossing any domains on the client side.

I hope this little nugget will save you and your customers a lot of time and annoyance..

If you still haven’t picked up on my book about SharePoint Web Parts – SharePoint 2010 Web Parts in Action, then this is the chance for you. Today (5th of April) the book is featured as the Manning Deal of the Day. All you have to do is browse to http://www.manning.com/wilen/ and then use the dotd0405au promotion code. This will give you 50% percent discount, for you non-math-geniuses that’s half off the full price! And since you now saved a couple of bucks, there’s another Manning book with the same deal and promotion code today and that’s PowerShell in Action 2nd edition.

PS: Even though the name of the book implies SharePoint 2010, it’s fully applicable to SharePoint 2013 – very little has changed in the Web Parts space.

Well, what are you waiting for, go get it…

In less than two weeks I’m speaking at the SharePoint Evolutions Conference 2013 in London. It is as exciting for me as it is for all attendees. The conferences held by Combined Knowledge has proven over the last years to be the highlight of SharePoint conferences around the world – everything from the venue, to the people, to the sessions and to the parties are surgically planned and executed – no one leaves without a smile on their face and pumped with knowledge!

As a speaker being selected for this conference is the by far the proudest moment of any SharePoint professional and I’m so glad that I’m back for another year, hanging around with the best of the best, and not only speaker wise – the speakers at the Evolutions conference are the people that knows the product inside out and work with the product in real projects.

This year I’m having one session called Extending SharePoint, Exchange and Lync 2013 with a custom WOPI Client. I will walk you through the WOPI protocol, which is what Office Web Apps Server 2013 (WAC) is built upon, and show you how to make your own WOPI client for custom file formats, for viewing, editing, previews etc. This will be an interesting session and show you a really interesting “partner opportunity”. I’ve prepared a good set of demos, so be there!

Looking forward to seeing old and new faces at this conference. If you haven’t registered yet – there’s still a chance for you to get your very own ticket.

I just received the confirmation that I am renewed as SharePoint MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) for my fourth consecutive year. It’s an honor being chosen among all the professionals around the world, especially now when SharePoint is getting more and more widespread and is being adopted by more and more companies worldwide.

I’d like to take the opportunity to say thanks all my colleagues at Connecta, that put up with me, and all my friends around the world that I’ve learnt to know throughout these years. I’ll continue to write obscure blog posts and show up at conferences, and I will continue to organize the Swedish SharePoint User Group meetings.

Thank you all for the support!

Introduction

SharePoint 2013 introduces a new model on how Site Collections are upgraded using the new Deferred Site Collection Upgrade. To keep it simple it means that SharePoint 2013 can run a Site Collection in either 2010 mode or 2013 mode, and SharePoint 2013 contains a lot of the SharePoint 2010 artifacts (JS files, Features, Site Definitions) to handle this. When you’re doing a content database attach to upgrade from 2010 to 2013, only the database schema is upgraded and not the actual sites (by default). The actual Site Collection upgrade is done by the Site Collection administrator when they feel that they are ready to do that and have verified the functionality of SharePoint 2013 (or you force them to upgrade anyways). But, the Site Collection admin might have to upgrade sooner than expected for some sites.

Upgrade troubles

This post is all about what has happened to us when our Office 365 SharePoint Online (SPO) tenant had been upgraded (and right now the Site Collection upgrade is disabled for us so we can’t do anything about it). The limitations of customizations in the 2010 version of SPO was very limited (to be kind) and we embraced JavaScript (which people have despised for a decade and now suddenly think is manna from heaven). We also leveraged Managed Metadata in a lot of lists, libraries and sites. We’ve built Web Parts using JavaScript CSOM to render information and also .NET CSOM stuff running in Windows Azure doing background work. Once our tenant was upgraded to 2013 all of the customizations using Managed Metadata stopped to work…

JSOM sample with Managed Metadata

I will show you one example of what works in SharePoint 2010 and what does not work in SharePoint 2013 when you’re site is running in 2010 compatibility mode.

Assume we have a simple list with two columns; Title and Color, where Color is a Managed Metadata Field. To render this list using JSOM we could use code like this in a Web Part or Content Editor or whatever.

var products;
function loadProducts() {
	document.getElementById('area').innerHTML = 'Loading...';
	var context = new SP.ClientContext.get_current();
	var web = context.get_web();
	var list = web.get_lists().getByTitle('TestList');
	products = list.getItems('');
	context.load(products, 'Include (Title, Color)');
	
	context.executeQueryAsync(function() {
		var collection = products.getEnumerator();
		var html = '<table>'
		while(collection.moveNext()) {
			var product = collection.get_current();
			html +='<tr><td>'
			html += product.get_item('Title');
			html += '</td><td>'
			html += product.get_item('Color').split('|')[0];
			html += '</td></tr>'			
		}
		html += '</table>'
		document.getElementById('area').innerHTML = html;
	}, function() {
		document.getElementById('area').innerHTML = 'An error occurred';
	});
}
ExecuteOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded(loadProducts, 'sp.js');

As you can see a very simple approach. We’re reading all the items from the list and rendering them as a table, and this html table is finally inserted into a div (with id = area in the example above). This should look something like this when rendered:

The key here is that Managed Metadata in 2010 JSOM is returned as a string object (2010 .NET CSOM does that as well). This string object is a concatenation of the Term, the pipe character (|) and the term id. So in the code sample above I just split on the pipe character and take the first part. There was no other decent way to do this in SharePoint 2010 and I’ve seen a lot of similar approaches.

Same code running in SharePoint 2013 on a SharePoint 2010 mode site

If we now take this site collection and move it to SharePoint 2013 or recreate the solution on a 2010 mode site in SharePoint 2013. Then we run the same script, then this is what we’ll see, something goes wrong…

You might also see a JavaScript error, depending on your web browser configuration. Of course proper error handling could show something even more meaningful!

Something is not working here anymore!

What really happens is that the CSOM client service do not return a string object for Managed Metadata but instead a properly typed TaxonomyFieldValue. But that type (SP.Taxonomy.TaxonomyFieldValue) does not exist in the 2010 JSOM. Remember I said that SharePoint 2013 uses the old 2010 JavaScripts when running in 2010 compatibility mode. Unfortunately there is no workaround, unless we roll our own SP.Taxonomy.TaxonomyFieldValue class (but that’s for another JS whizkid to fix, just a quick tip to save you the trouble – you cannot just add the 2013 SP.Taxonomy,js to your solution).

So why is this so then?

If we take a closer look at what is transferred over the wire we can see that when running on SharePoint 2010 the managed metadata is transferred as strings:

But on SharePoint 2013 it is typed as a TaxonomyFieldValue object:

It’s a bit of a shame, since the server is actually aware of that we’re running the 2010 (14) mode client components! (SchemaVersion is what we sent from the CSOM and LibraryVersion is the library used on the server side)

I do really hope that the SharePoint team think about this for future releases – respect the actual schema used/sent by the Client Object Model!

Of course, this JavaScript solution will not work as-is when upgrading the Site Collection to 2013 mode. That is expected and that’s what the Evaluation sites are for.

What about .NET CSOM?

We have a similar issue in .NET CSOM, even though we don’t get a SharePoint CSOM runtime exception. Instead of returning a string object you will get back a Dictionary with Objects as values – but if you’re code is expecting a string you still get the exception. So in 99% of the cases it will fail here as well.

Summary

Deferred Site Collection update might be a good idea and you might think that your customizations will work pretty well even after an upgrade to SharePoint 2013, just as long as you don’t update your actual Site Collections to 2013. But you’ve just seen that this is not the case.

Happy easter!

In my last post (still smoking fresh) I showed you how to update your Office Web Apps 2013 farm to the March 2013 update, connect it to SharePoint 2013 and being able to view PDF documents in the browser. What I didn’t explain or show in that post was how to enable the PDF Previews in Search – but I’ll do it now.

Pre-requisites

Before you start fiddling with this, you need to make sure that you have the March 2013 update of Office Web Apps Server 2013 (WAC) installed and connected to your farm – if you don’t know for sure, ask your admins – sometimes they know…if they don’t give them the link to my previous blog post.

Note: You don’t have to have a patched SharePoint 2013, this will work on the RTM bits.

Default PDF Search Experience

SharePoint 2013 natively supports crawling PDF documents, through the new document parsers. That is you don’t have to fiddle with any custom PDF IFilters etc. The native PDF document parser is a good enough solution, but have some room for improvements.

The Search Experience and display in SharePoint 2013 is based upon Display Templates. Display Templates decide how the result should be shown and how the fly-out of the result should look like. For Office documents, when SharePoint 2013 is connected to a WAC farm, SharePoint displays inline previews which you can use to skim through the results really quick. For PDF this is not the case – not even if you use a WAC farm with the March 2013 update (even though the WOPI binding supports the interactivepreview action). This is a sample on how a PDF document could look like in SharePoint 2013 Search:

Enabling PDF Previews in the Search Result

Since we have the opportunity to modify the Display Templates and create our own Search Experience we can very easy modify the fly-out/hover panel of the PDF results to show the interactive preview. We can do this in two different ways…

Create a new Result Type

The easiest and fastest approach to enable our previews for PDF documents is by creating a custom Result Type. This is done by going to Site Settings > (Search) Result Types and then finding the PDF Result Type. Choose to Copy the Word Result Type. This will create a new Result Type.

Give the new Result Type an appropriate name, “PDF with Preview” for instance. Then scroll down to Actions and in the “What should these results look like?” drop-down, choose to use the Word Display Template.

Then just click Save, go back to your Search Center and search for a PDF document and voilá – we have PDF Previews.

Modifying the PDF Display Templates

The second approach, which is a bit more advanced is to actually modify the PDF Flyout Design Template. You do this by going to Site Settings > Design Manager then choose 5. Edit Display Templates. Locate the PDF Flyout item by filtering on the Target Control Type column and use SearchHoverPanel, then scroll down to PDF Hover Panel. To modify the PDF Hover Panel, use the Word Hover Panel as a template. I’m not going in to all the details on how to modify the actual HTML file (see my similar post on how to achieve this here). But once you’ve modified it, make sure to save it to the gallery so the JS file is generated, and publish it. Now (if you made the correct updates) you will have Custom Search Previews for PDF documents.

Summary

You’ve now seen how you quick and easy can enable PDF Search Previews in SharePoint 2013 using the March 2013 update for Office Web Apps 2013. All you need to do is either create a custom Result Type and use the Word Display Templates or modify the default PDF Display Template. I really hope that Microsoft makes this a standard feature for upcoming SharePoint 2013 releases.