SharePoint 2013

There’s a lot of stuff happening right now at Microsoft, they innovate, create great software and services, the new CEO accepts and wins almost all challenges and the SharePoint and Office team is listening! This is the Microsoft that I like and this is how I want Microsoft to continue to be. But Microsoft and the SharePoint team can’t just listen in blind – they listens to us out here in the real world, customers, clients etc.

Introduction One of the blog post I receive the most e-mails about is the How to do active authentication to Office 365 and SharePoint Online. Some of the feedback I get is “thank you” etc. and some of them are people that are modifying it for all kind of things, especially when trying to do “background jobs” or integrations using user credentials. And this is what this post is all about.

After doing the Microsoft Cloud Show interview with Andrew Connell I thought it might be a good idea to write some of my tips and tricks for running SharePoint 2013 on Azure IAAS. Some of the stuff in this post are discussed in more depth in the interview and some things we just didn’t have time to talk about (or I forgot). I really recommend you to listen to the podcast as well and not just read this post.

A couple of weeks back I was interviewed by Andrew Connell for the Microsoft Cloud Show. The Microsoft Cloud Show is an (almost) weekly podcast where Andrew (AC) and his wingman Chris Johnson (CJ) discusses everything related to Microsoft cloud offerings including benchmarks with other cloud vendors. If you’re not subscribing and listening to the show already then I urge you to do that as soon as possible! Me and AC sat down for almost an hour discussing Microsoft Azure IAAS and specifically when running SharePoint 2013 in that service.

Introduction The other day I posted about the patching procedure for the SharePoint 2013 Distributed Cache (Microsoft AppFabric 1.1) and on that post I got a great comment from Riccardo: Hi Wictor, is it possible to discover the patch level of the Distributed Cache without looking at control panel? Powershell? That is a great question Riccardo! But the answer is not that simple… Check the version using Installed Updates The easiest way to manually check what version of AppFabric you are using, or rather which CU that is applied to AppFabric 1.

Introduction In SharePoint 2013 the Distributed Cache plays a very important role, it is a key component for performance and caching. An incorrectly configured or managed Distributed Cache will cause issues, with your farm. I’ve even seen blogs recommending turning it off, most likely due to that they don’t manage the cache properly and get into a situation where it causes even worse performance problems. One of the good things with the Distributed Cache is that is not a SharePoint service, it is a standalone service called AppFabric 1.

Introduction SharePoint 2013 (and earlier versions) allows you to use alternative authentication “sources” than Windows. We can part from the different options with Windows login, use Forms Based Authentication (FBA) or use a federated/trusted identity provider. Forms based authentication is a good approach if you don’t want to manage your users in Active Directory or if you don’t want to use Windows Login. The downside with FBA is that you must manually do some web.

Introduction The other week I posted an article about how to use SharePoint Hosted Apps when using SAML Claims, I did not expect that amount of feedback I had on that blog post, in e-mail, comments, tweets etc. Some of that feedback was how do you do it with Provider Hosted apps. Well you’re about to find out. It took me a while to get it properly done and there are some things that you should be aware of.

Introduction By now each and every SharePoint developer out there should spend their time building SharePoint Apps instead of the old trusted friend of ours; Full Trust Code. Ok, Apps doesn’t solve the equivalent of world hunger in SharePoint at the moment, but that’s a discussion for another time. I assume you get my point. We have two types of apps (we used to have three little monkeys jumping in the bed, but one just bumped his head); Provider hosted apps and SharePoint hosted apps.

Introduction Welcome to a new series of blog posts in which we will focus on the Disaster and Recovery (DR) routines for Workflow Manager 1.0 in combination with SharePoint 2013. During SharePoint Conference 2013 me and SharePoint sensei Spencer Harbar presented a session called “Designing, deploying, and managing Workflow Manager farms” (watch the video recording). During that session we discussed different DR options for Workflow Manager and the Service Bus and we got tons of questions on that specific topic.

Introduction When using the Web Platform Installer to download and/or install Workflow Manager you can no longer download and install Workflow Manager 1.0 and Workflow Manager 1.0 CU1. The only option is to download Workflow Manager 1.0 Refresh (which essentially is CU2). So when installing a new Workflow Manager farm for SharePoint or just because you want to rock some workflows you have to use Workflow Manager (WFM) 1.0 Refresh. Unless you’ve been smart and previously downloaded and saved the original Workflow Manager.

Here’s another post with scripts from my sessions at SharePoint Conference 2014 – this time from the Mastering Office Web Apps 2013 Operations and Deployments session (SPC383). To get a more in-depth explanation of all the details, please watch the recording at Channel 9. Let’s start…but first! OWA = Outlook Web App and WAC = Office Web Apps (Web Application Companion). Preparing the machine before installing Office Web Apps Before you install the Office Web Apps bits on the machine you need to install a set of Windows Features.

As promised I will hand out all the scripts I used in my SharePoint Conference 2014 sessions. The first set of scripts are from the demo used in the Real-world SharePoint Architecture decisions session (SPC334). This session only contained one demo in which I showed how to set up a Single Content Web Application and using Host Named Site Collections when creating Site Collections. Creating the Web Application and the Root Site Collection The first part of the script was to create the Web Application using SSL, configure the certificate in IIS and then create the Root Site Collection.

Wow, that was an awesome conference! SharePoint Conference 2014 is over and I’m very glad I attended the conference – both as a speaker and attendee. Finally Microsoft and the SharePoint Product Group told us about their future and vision for SharePoint and SharePoint Online. If you knew how long we have waited for this… I’m glad they start to sort out the service (ie Office 365) and now can add new capabilities into the platform.

I’m really proud to announce that I will be speaking at the long anticipated SharePoint Conference 2014 in Las Vegas, March 3-6 2014. The SharePoint Conference hosted by Microsoft is returning to Las Vegas, but this time located at the Venetian, bigger and perhaps more interesting than in a long time. If you are in the SharePoint business as a developer, IT-Pro, architect, business analyst, power user or executive, then this is the conference where you would like to be next year.

Introduction We all know that one of the most important parts of SharePoint 2013 (and 2003, 2007 and 2010) are SQL Server. Bad SQL Server performance will lead to bad SharePoint performance! That’s just how it is! There are tons of ways of doing this by having enough cores, adding more RAM, using fast disks, using multiple instances and even servers. You should all already be familiar with this. Search is one of the components in SharePoint that requires A LOT of resources, especially when crawling and doing analytics.

Introduction We all know that one of the most important parts of SharePoint 2013 (and 2003, 2007 and 2010) are SQL Server. Bad SQL Server performance will lead to bad SharePoint performance! That’s just how it is! There are tons of ways of doing this by having enough cores, adding more RAM, using fast disks, using multiple instances and even servers. You should all already be familiar with this. Search is one of the components in SharePoint that requires A LOT of resources, especially when crawling and doing analytics.

Introduction SharePoint 2013 (and previous versions) uses a client side “token” to validate posts back to SharePoint to prevent attacks where the user might be tricked into posting data back to the server. This token is known by many names; form digest or message digest or request digest. The token is unique to a user and a site and is only valid for a (configurable) limited time. When building Apps or customizations on top of SharePoint, especially using patterns such as Single Page Applications (SPA) or using frameworks such as knockout.

Introduction A couple of weeks back I blogged about the March Update for Office Web Apps 2013 and also how you could use that update to show PDF previews in a SharePoint 2013 Search Center. Since then I’ve received a lot of requests on how to enable PDF Previews in a Document Library, which isn’t there by default. Of course it is not a WAC thing, it’s a SharePoint 2013 thing – but the SharePoint 2013 updates (up until now at least) does not provide this capability either.

Wow, 2013 was an interesting year and the time has come for my annual blog post to sum up the year that soon has passed us and looking a bit into the crystal ball for the next one. This is my seventh summary post and it is always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006). For me the year has been really intensive on all levels; I don’t think I´ve ever experienced such a huge demand for my professional services as of now, there is so much new stuff to learn and it´s harder and harder to keep up, I have a hard time resisting doing tons of community stuff and at the same time we had a huge construction work at our house, and of course having two soon-to-be teenager girls takes its toll!

Happy Holidays everyone! At the upcoming SharePoint Conference, next year in Las Vegas, I will be presenting a session called Real World SharePoint 2013 Architecture decisions. The session will discuss and give examples of real world decisions and trade-offs you might be faced with as a SharePoint Architect. In order to make the session even more interesting I would like you all to help out with some statistics. Therefore have I created a small survey with a few questions.

I remember a person who clearly stated “I will never ever write a book again”. Yup, twas me. I managed to hold that promise for a year and a half. But when an interesting opportunity appears, I’m usually all-in again. And so it was. Early this year I got the request from some dear friends to help with writing another book, fortunately this time not as the single responsible author but instead together with a really experienced bunch of SharePoint people, whose knowledge and resume are really impressive.

Introduction In this post I will show you how to fix the “Could not find Stored Procedure ‘Search_GetRepositoryTimePerCrawl’” exception in SharePoint 2013. This is an exception that you can get when looking at crawl log details for a Search Service Application. The error might go unnoticed since it will not affect indexing or querying. Symptoms In SharePoint 2013 when you are trying to inspect crawl logs and statistics for indexing and querying you might see exceptions that say “Could not find stored procedure ‘Search_?

Introduction JavaScript is the future of SharePoint development (and please don’t quote me on that :-). JavaScript is everywhere in SharePoint 2013 and upcoming incarnations, and you will see a couple of posts on this topic from me in the future. The JavaScript language is easy (well, sort of), but the many different implementations and API’s built using JavaScript might cause confusion. One of the things in SharePoint 2013 that makes JavaScript development quite problematic is the Minimal Download Strategy (MDS) in SharePoint 2013.

Introduction I’ve been reading and seeing a lot of blog posts, articles, videos etc over the last few months discussion Host Named site collections vs Path Based site collections in SharePoint 2013, and 2010 for that matter. What I find interesting is that a lot of those articles are either misinterpreting the official guidance and documentation on TechNet or are just plain wrong. In this post I will try to clear up some of the confusion, and hopefully I’m not that wrong in this post.

It’s been over a week since I got home from an amazing trip to the other side of the globe (literally). It was a long way getting to New Zealand but definitely worth it. It was my first ever TechEd, both as attendee and presenter and first trip to New Zealand. I had a great couple of days meeting the SharePoint community and other Microsoft junkies, and also had the opportunity to have a quick breakfast with Scott Guthrie.

Overview and background This post is intended to show and explain why you see the intermittent (and annoying) “To start seeing previews, please log on by opening the document.” message when using previews from Office Web Apps Server 2013 (WAC) with SharePoint 2013. Unfortunately I do not have the magic bullet (yet) on how to solve it completely, this post is more on why you get it and how you can avoid seeing it too often.

For the fifth (if I recall correctly) year in a row I’m proud to present that I will speak at the annual SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2013 conference, September 30th to October 2nd. This year Office 365 MVP Göran Husman not only managed to bring some of the top-notch speakers around SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Office 365 to the conference, he also convinced them all to dress up in sailor suits and have the conference on a cruise ship between Stockholm, Sweden and Helsinki, Finland.

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at TechEd in New Zealand the 10-13th of September. This is really cool and my first trip down to Kiwi land. TechEd is a conference for all Microsoft technologies, not only SharePoint, but the lineup of SharePoint speakers and sessions at this conference just looks awesome; Dr. Search aka Neil Hodgkinson, MCA Wayne Ewington, MVP Mark Rhodes, MVP Debbie Ireland amongst others.

Introduction I frequently see one specific question asked on distribution lists, Twitter, Yammer and other social networks: “How do I install Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC) on the same machine as SharePoint 2013”, very frequently also followed by “any hacks accepted”. Those who have tried have noticed that there is a hard block – SharePoint cannot be installed on an Office Web Apps machine and Office Web Apps cannot be installed on a SharePoint machine.

Here goes a post in the middle of the summer, directly taken from yet another e-mail conversation with information that I thought was well known. It has been blogged before, but perhaps you readers (thanks mum and the other one) don’t follow those blogs, so here we go. Introduction Who doesn’t like Excel? Most people love it so much that they can’t get enough of it and uploads the Excel files to SharePoint and view and edit them using Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC).

Introduction This is a follow-up post on the SharePoint 2013, Office Web Apps 2013 and Excel files with Data Connections post that I previously wrote. That post talked about how you needed to do, so called, WOPI Suppressions if you had Excel files with Data Connections and had those data connections configured to use the authenticated users account. The WOPI Suppression made sure that the rendering of the Excel book was done by Excel Services in SharePoint 2013 rather than with Office Web Apps 2013.

Over the last few months I’ve been asked numerous times and I’ve seen quite a few e-mail conversations on how to work with new Host Named Site Collections (HNSC) and Content Databases. In this post I will show you how I have solved the problem using the native API hooks in SharePoint. Background Host Named Site Collections are not a new thing in SharePoint, it has been with us for quite some time, but not been extensively used due to previous limitations (and there still are some).

In SharePoint 2013 JavaScript is the new default language and all our (at least mine) solutions and projects are using JavaScript more and more, even though everything is not built as SharePoint Apps. Farm or Full-trust solutions built using JavaScript will in many situations create a better user interface and an improved perceived performance. The more we build user interfaces using JavaScript we cannot just forget about some of the basic UX rules, such as using localization.

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.

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.

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).

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).

I’m really glad to see some patches being rolled out for Office 2013, SharePoint 2013 and Office Web Apps 2013. There’s some really important fixes and some very interesting fixes that I’ve been waiting for. In this post we’ll take a look at the first Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC) update – specifically we’re looking at how to patch your WAC farm to minimize the downtime. If you follow my instructions you will have zero downtime (except for a brief moment where Excel stuff will not be accessible).

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.

Introduction The search engine and search experience in SharePoint 2013 has been totally re-written, since its predecessors. In SharePoint 2010 we had something called Best Bets or Visual Best Bets if you worked with FAST for SharePoint. A best bet was a promoted result that was triggered by one or more keywords, used by the search admins to promote certain links or banners for specific search queries. In SharePoint 2013 this is now called a Promoted Results and the procedure of creating them is different and so much better – there’s more ways to trigger on, more ways to render the results etc, but the actual shown result isn’t that smart, until now…

Here’s a short post with a tip that I find very useful. In many scenarios you have several SharePoint 2013 installations to handle – it might be different farms, production environments, testing, staging, development etc. Do you know which Central Administration you’re working in at the moment? They all look the same, SharePoint Blue, the regular Status Bar warning that you’re running out of disk space etc. Unless countermeasures are taken you don’t know what environment you’re in unless you take a look at the URL – which in many cases is just another server name and port.

In SharePoint 2013 the way Personal Sites (aka My Sites) are created have been totally rebuilt to support the new way of utilizing the Personal Sites. In this post I will go through how Personal Sites are provisioned, asynchronously, and bust a couple of myths about how interactive Personal Site instantiations should be “prioritized” and increase throughput. Background Personal Sites or My Sites were previously created “on-demand”. When a user went to his or hers non-existing My Site the provisioning started while the user waited for the site to be created, painfully watching the spinning animated gif.

Last week the Forefront team finally released Service Pack 3 for Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) 2010. This is a long awaited release for us working with SharePoint 2013 and for those using non-legacy operating systems and browsers. In this post I will show you how to publish SharePoint 2013 Host Named Site Collections through UAG 2010 SP3 and consume the published site using Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8.

The SharePoint Health Score was introduced in SharePoint 2010 and plays an even more important role in SharePoint 2013. The Health Score determines the health of a SharePoint server/web application on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is the most healthy state. SharePoint automatically starts throttling request once the Health Score is to high. The Health Score is can be calculated using many parameters, such as memory usage, concurrent requests etc.

With this new wave of SharePoint, the Office Web Apps Server (WAC – I don’t like the OWA acronym, that’s something else in my opinion) is its own server product, implementing the WOPI client protocol, which allows a client to retrieve documents from SharePoint on the behalf of the user. Documents will flow from the WOPI servers (SharePoint, Lync, Exchange etc.) to the Office Web Apps Server – this means that potentially confidential information will be transferred from the SharePoint environment and stored/cached on another server.

SharePoint 2013 introduces a whole set of new and improved features. One of the things that is both new and vastly improved is the Workflow platform. Workflow is no longer a part of the SharePoint core infrastructure, but instead a separate server product. Even though ye olde Workflow platform, 2010 style, is still in the product for backwards compatibility. SharePoint 2013 leverages the Azure service called Workflow Manager 1.0. (Not the cloud version but a local on-premises installation).

Only one day and a few hours left of the year of 2012 and the time has come for me to make my (now traditional) summary post. I’ve done it now for six years (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006) and it’s always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months. This year has been an interesting year to me and contained some really interesting milestones, happenings and events.

You all know that you need to install the SharePoint 2013 pre-requisites before installing SharePoint 2013 – this is done either online or offline using the pre-req installer. All the requirements are listed in the Hardware and Software requirements for SharePoint 2013 Technet article. Once in a while you need to do the installation on a disconnected machine, that is a machine that is not connected to the interwebz. Then you typically Bing for a fancy script that downloads all the pre-reqs for you and you run the pre-reqs installer in unattended mode.

Well, I thought I should write another episode of my Building your own WOPI Client series, here’s the links to the previous episodes part 1, part 2 and part 3. This time around we’ll dig into another of the different actions that a WOPI Client can surface – the interactivepreview mode. Background As you’ve seen in the previous posts we can build a viewer and an editor for C# files, to be used in document libraries for instance.

This is part three (and counting) of my Building your own WOPI Client series. In part 1 I discussed the WOPI Protocol and especially how to implement the Discovery process of a WOPI Client. In part 2 we built a viewer application as a WOPI Client and connected it to SharePoint. In this part we’re modifying our WOPI Client to support basic editing of the files. Modyfing the WOPI Client Discovery data The first thing that we need to do is to modify our Discovery method, in our case the static XML file, to tell the WOPI Server that we support editing of the files.

Welcome back to another part in my Building a WOPI Client series. In the previous and first post I walked you through the basics of the WOPI protocol, how the WOPI Discovery mechanism worked and how to implement it and finally how to register a WOPI Client with SharePoint 2013 as WOPI Server. In this post we’ll continue to build on our C# Viewer and now actually add the viewer – we ended the last post quite dull with just showing a simple Hello WOPI web page which we now are going to turn into a real C# viewer.

Hi friends, finally time for some posts with some real code samples, and not some silly scripts. In this post, and a couple of follow up posts, I will walk you through the basics behind the WOPI protocol and WOPI Apps and WOPI Hosts. In the end you will see how we can create our own viewers and editors for files just like the WAC Server 2013 can view and edit Microsoft Office files in SharePoint 2013.

In todays episode of discovering awesome features in SharePoint 2013 we’re going to take a look at something really interesting, a feature that has been requested for years, a better management of end-user licensing in SharePoint. Even though this article contains a lot about SharePoint 2013 licensing I must make it very clear that nothing has yet been communicated from Microsoft regarding licensing on SharePoint 2013, and I am no expert on licensing and this is a Preview and this article must be considered as-is, things will and might change over the course of time.

Introduction SharePoint is based on a very rich web interface containing lots of moving parts and lots of customizable areas. As you know the Interwebz is based on a request-response approach where you request a page and get a response back. The approach is the same whether you update the whole page or portions of it. The last decade we’ve seen smart approaches working around this “problem” using DHTML, JavaScript, AJAX, UpdatePanels, you name it.

Introduction In this small post I’m going to show you a really nice new feature to SharePoint 2013. It’s the Access Request and Invitations feature that allows you to easier manage access requests to your sites. Access Requests has been in the product for quite some time but required that your admins checked their e-mails once in a while. Using the new Share feature in SharePoint 2010 this process is so much easier.

Introduction SharePoint 2010 introduced the Service Application concept and that architecture model also includes the possibility to publish and consume service applications between farms. For instance you could have the Managed Metadata service application in one of your farms and use it in another farm. There are several interesting and valid scenarios for this and some of them include having dedicated Shared Services farms, that is a farm that’s only hosting service applications and not any content applications.

One of the best things introduced for developers in SharePoint 2010 was the SPMonitoredScope, which can be used to trace your application, and to pin down potential bottlenecks. I wrote a post on how to use it way back in 2009 – Improve you SharePoint 2010 applications with monitoring using SPMonitoredScope. It’s still worth a read and still true for SharePoint 2013. But the SharePoint team has continued to evolve the SPMonitoredScope in SharePoint 2013, with two small but interesting changes.

I hope you all had the pleasure to try out the new and improved Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2013 Preview. It’s a fantastic improvement to its predecessor and contains a huge number of improvements. One of the most notable ones is that it’s no longer a control on your page which only shows you information about the current request. It’s now a separate window which shows you all requests since you started the developer dashboard session.

As usual a new version of a product has new requirements of all different kinds; especially when it comes to resource usage. With SharePoint 2013 there is no difference. The Hardware and Software requirements for SharePoint 2013 Preview is published and I thought I should walk through the new and updated requirements and compare them with SharePoint 2010. And also talk about some other key changes that you need to be aware of when planning your SharePoint 2013 installations.

Well, by know everybody living in the SharePoint world are sitting with their best tin foil hats on and installing, configuring and fiddling with SharePoint 2013 Preview, which was announced today by mister Steve. I’ve been fortunate to be a part of the (debated) closed beta for some time and have been trying out the new version of our favorite product. You probably will be overwhelmed with blog posts over the next couple of months, up until the SharePoint Conference 2012, and continuing after that.