Configuration tips

All the undocumented weird configuration values that make stuff tick, even though they generally speaking likely shouldn’t.

Don’t remove the root site of your classic SharePoint Site Collection!

Let me explain SharePoint

A quick heads-up – if you remove the root site of your classic SharePoint Site Collection, that site’s going to be troublesome to deal with. Whereas you can always restore a normal site from the site collection recycle bin, the root site you can’t. You actually can’t access the recycle bin after removing the root site, nor can you make magic happen with PowerShell commandlets anymore.

Site Collection Recycle Bin

Site Collection Recycle Bin – where you could access it, if you still had your site!

The Recycle Bin would be located at a url like this: https://<yoursite>/_layouts/15/AdminRecycleBin.aspx, but after the site is removed, it won’t be there. 

If you actually just wanted to get rid of your site collection by removing the site (see below), you’re out of luck again. Even that didn’t happen, as you now still have the site collection, just without any sites in it. You can’t even reuse the url for anything, as it’s still reserved for your site collection! Continue reading

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How to fix “- – the web site does not support SharePoint Online credentials. The response status code is ‘Unauthorized'” error

SharePoint is not broken - it just does't work

While running some SharePoint Online -PowerShell commandlets, or connecting to a SharePoint Online site from your app, you get a following (or similar) error about your SharePoint Online credentials being unauthorized for something you should definitely be authorized to do:

And that’s not all – by digging into the full error message, you find the underlying internal error:

What awakens my curiosity, is this line:

However, when you open your browser, you can actually log in without a hitch. If that’s the case, this might be a weird internal error in SharePoint Online – doesn’t matter, there’s a hazy and weird, but simple fix!  Continue reading

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How to solve “Unified Groups aren’t supported.” -error

Unified Groups aren't supported.

When trying to use some functionality, that relies on Unified Groups, you’re getting errors in the console, similar to this: “Unified Groups aren’t supported.” In truth, this most likely means, that Unified Groups (that’s the internal/technical name for Office 365 Groups) is not enabled for this particular user. That breaks a bunch of different features for them, since the Graph API for Groups of course won’t work. This post describes one way to fix this issue!

How to solve this?

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Using “DetectedLanguage” to return only localized results from SharePoint Search index

How to SharePoint?

Localization and targeting of content in multilingual SharePoint installations is always an issue. SharePoint offers a multitude of ways profile content based on user language (or other properties), but none of the solutions are fool proof. This post describes how to fetch only localized results from SharePoint Search index, which solves at least some of the issues.

Description 

SharePoint Search index can be used in quite a few different ways. Probably the most typical way is by searching on SharePoint, or using webparts like Content Search or Content Results. However, one can also build custom functionality, custom client-side liftups, webjobs, single-page applications, mobile applications and a ton of other things that fetch data from SharePoint search index. However, on multilingual tenants, results are, by default, not localized at all. That means, that typically everyone will get the highest-ranking results back, despite them being in the wrong language. And that’s one of the many, many ways to annoy your users!

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How to form links to Planner tasks

Office 365 Planner logo

Office 365 Planner is a neat tool for task management. However, when you, for whatever use case, need to form urls that point you towards a single task (or a bucket, or a plan for that matter), you might run into trouble with how the url is formed. Custom domains actually make it a bit complicated, but luckily there’s a workaround!

Description of the issue

If you have multiple domains in your Azure AD, your Planner might end up using your custom domain in its urls. However, if you need to develop some multi-tenant code, that works with any tenant and whatever weird custom domains, you’d have to actually either create another user-supplied property (for the custom domain), or develop some creative extra code to fetch the domains from somewhere… Since the Graph API for Planner certainly does NOT return that!

No worries – you don’t actually need to develop any complicated or smart code. It’s actually WAY easier than that!  Continue reading

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Web part title changes not reflected to some users in multilingual SharePoint environment

SharePoint is not broken - it just does't work

​​When changing the web part title on a web part on a classic SharePoint page, changes seem to be saved for you. In reality, they are only reflected to some users.. And some users, on some devices, see the old title, whereas some see the new one. It’s a confusing situation and difficult to debug.

Why do web part titles get changed seemingly randomly?

Imagine this: You have a SharePoint environment, where you have multiple different languages set up. You also have users with multiple different workstation configurations – including multiple different languages. Different users, however, quite randomly see different revisions of web part titles in a very weird manner. This happens seemingly randomly even on new client devices, so no client-side caching is the reason.

This actually likely works as designed, it’s just kind of a confusing implementation. We’ve got Microsoft to blame for that, and their pretty bad documentation.. SharePoint actually localizes (and hence saves) Web part titles per-language.  Continue reading

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4 ways to fix error AADSTS65001 (The user or administrator has not consented to use the application)

Azure AD Login error

Fixing issues with Azure AD authentication for Enterprise applications can be tricky. This article contains multiple different fixes to an issue, where granting admin consent has somehow failed. Not all of the different solutions will work for all situations, though! That’s why I included a couple of different options to try… 🙂

Why do you even get issues with Admin Consent (like AADSTS65001)?

Imagine this: You’re trying to add or use an app, but the requires such permissions from your tenant, that only an administrator can grant.

Typically to add this kind of an app, you’ll have to be a global administrator. If it’s an enterprise application, it could also be in an invalid state after someone tried adding the app without sufficient permissions.

Our investigation was focused on a mobile app, that’s deployed as an enterprise app. Most of the things should apply for web-based apps or console programs or whatever else you’re deploying, too.

The whole error might look something like this: Continue reading

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The effect of using Managed Navigation instead of Structural on SharePoint Online

SharePoint_aint_broken

Have you ever noticed that your SharePoint site just gets slower and slower? That’s probably because the performance of Structural Navigation is absolutely horrible, especially vs. Managed Navigation. This blog post includes our findings about the issue, and I also include some explanation of the reasons behind the difference and a simple comparison to Search-based navigation.

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Solving Microsoft Teams Licensing Error “errorCodeTeamsDisabledForTenantForbidden”

Launching Microsoft Teams

This post explains how to fix the “errorCodeTeamsDisabledForTenantForbidden” error when trying to add guest users to Microsoft Teams channel. This issue might arise when a user is invited to a channel in your organization’s Microsoft Teams for the first time. Fixing it usually just requires a flip of a switch, but might also include some waiting.

Symptoms

You get an error screen like this, when trying to join a Teams channel as a guest user.

Teams Guest access error

Teams Guest access error

No fear, though – likely an easy fix!

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Unorthodox configuration: How to use VLK and Click-to-run Office Apps side-by-side (Visio and Office 2016 as an example)

Ever had issues with different versions of Office programs not living in harmony together? Me too! This post describes how I was able to fix the issue and get Visio and Office 2016 of different installation types to play well together.

Preface

This blog post was inspired by my need to have Office 365 ProPlus (2016 versions) and Visio running side-by-side on my laptop. That turned out to be a lot more complicated than it arguably should be, so I documented the steps for further use. These instructions are written for that particular scenario (installing MS Visio on a machine with pre-existing Office 2016/365 ProPlus installation). My laptop is running Windows 10 Enterprise, which probably caused one of the issues I ran into.

Let’s get started!  Continue reading

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