My IT Experiences - Microsoft 365, SharePoint & Azure

I got this rather nagging error while trying to customize a List in our SharePoint Online site using Infopath 2013. It turned out that you have to do some registry hack to get this working. Change the value of registry key  SignInOptions under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\SignIn\ to 0. You may also want to change the  UseOnlineContent key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Internet\ to 2. If you cannot find these keys in registry a new DWORD can be created. There is a blog post from Sahil Malik which helped me solve this issue: http://blah.winsmarts.com/2013-5-Registry_keys_to_administer_Office_365_in_your_Organization.aspx Here is the Microsoft document on this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj715259(v=office.15).aspx These settings are best handled through Group Policy and you may want to check with your IT/Network team before doing these changes.

Office 365 logo in the SharePoint sites can be changed using more than one method and one of those is using Javascript. We can use DOM to hide or change the logo details and add the function to _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames. Here is a test script for this purpose: function HideOffice365Logo()  {     var elem = document.getElementById('O365_MainLink_Logo');     elem.innerHTML = "Your Text";     elem.href = "https://bing.com";     elem.title = "Bing!!";     elem.style.color = "#fff"; } _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("HideOffice365Logo"); The above script hides the logo and replaces it with a text that says Bing! and links to bing.com site. I'm looking for a way to change the logo to another custom image, I'll update this post once I crack it.

This is an attempt to capture the things I learned about working with SharePoint using Powershell so I can refer back to it. 1. I was trying to get a list of all service application proxies with in the default proxy group and no matter how I tried output was truncated. Here is the command I used: Get-SPServiceApplicationProxyGroup | Format-Table -Property Defaultproxies  -Wrap -AutoSize | Out-String -Width 4096 Format-Table with parameters didn't seem to work in this case. It seems there is a property in PowerShell that has to be set for this output to display all items and here is how we can set it: PS C:\Windows\system32> $FormatEnumerationLimit = 25 I had to set this value to 25 to get a proper formatted output.

I had this issue with people picker in a classic mode web application in SharePoint 2013 and this site is in 2010 mode - users in certain sub-domains would not show up in People Picker. I was aware of stsadm commands to fix this and we ran the stsadm command to hook up people picker with another domain some time back. The latest issue was that people picker was not returning users from the root domain and few sub domains. After researching on the internet I found (contrary to my thoughts) that we could use PowerShell and not just stsadm to map People Picker to domains. It is a good idea to first check what domains are added/mapped to the web application using the following commands: $wa = Get-SPWebApplication -Identity http://mywebapp.com #List the Domains $wa.PeoplePickerSettings.SearchActiveDirectoryDomains This will list the domains currently People Picker is looking up for that web application. I used the following script to map our AD forest to People Picker: ...

How many times have we seen this in SharePoint 2013! I was working on custom search results page that had custom display templates. These display templates weren't complex and were almost similar to OOB templates. Everything seemed fine, I was getting results based on my query and managed metadata settings. All looked well until users started hitting these search pages. They were greeted with the message "Sorry, something went wrong". Search refiners in the page was working fine but not the results webpart. I had no clue what was going wrong. I tried ULS logs and found access denied error on the .js file that gets created part of the display template while logging in to the site as an end user with read access. I saw similar error in fidler while logging in to the site as an end user. Here are the errors I found using fiddler and IE dev toolbar: "file was blocked due to mime type mismatch" "Access denied. Item does not exist. It may have been dele...

I think we were bit too early to upgrade our SharePoint and Project Server farm to 2013 version! The one thing I do not understand with SharePoint 2013 (had the same concern with 2007 & 2010) is that what does Microsoft expect its customers who has invested in hardware, software, people, time and money to do with all the known issues in these products.  Here are a few examples: Blob Cache Issue Project Server 2013 - Missing Resource Issue SharePoint 2013 - Distributed Cache Bug SharePoint 2013 - Usage and Web Analytic issue   There are many other examples and we learn that these are bugs when somebody finds a workaround or a fix and mention it in their blog. But then these are not from MS officially but then those fixes work most of the time. I wish MS invested more in testing and made sure such a major release of a product like SharePoint 2013 didn't have so many issues. Looking forward to SP1 now but the best bet would be not to upgrade to SharePoint 2...

Sometimes when you login to Central Administration in SharePoint you cannot create, extend, or delete web application because the buttons in ribbon are disabled or grayed out. The same applies to the Authentication Providers button and if you hover mouse over this button this is what you see: This looks weird because you may be the farm administrator but still these buttons are grayed out. This can be solved by running Internet Explorer with elevated privileges (Right Click - Run as Administrator) or by accessing Central Administration website from Start Menu. Here is how you can do it from Windows Server 2012: