All the undocumented weird configuration values that make stuff tick, even though they generally speaking likely shouldn’t. These articles mostly describe hacks you need to configure in the production environment directly.
Hopefully, there won’t be THAT many articles in this category… But I guess there will. I mean, what can you do?
Weird configuration hacks are there to stay, after all.
This post describes the status of an ongoing issue in SharePoint Online, where the Managed Property “PictureThumbnailURL” will return null no matter what you do. This Managed Property is used for a few different use cases – most notably, Delve blog post’s hero, or header photo’s URL is mapped to this property, as it’s meant to be used as a thumbnail picture in a number of rollups. In this article, I describe the investigation, mitigation, possible workarounds and of course the current status of the…Continue reading Bug: “PictureThumbnailURL” always null in SharePoint Online Search results
This post explains how to add new Owners to your Office Groups using PowerShell. If your group has ended up without any owners, PowerShell might even be the only option, since the graphical user interfaces for Office Groups management are not that good. Background The hype around Office Groups kind of died down a little bit a while back, since their role wasn’t that clear – they didn’t really do much, and were confusing for end users. Back then, I posted about them replacing Site…Continue reading How to fix an Office Group with no Owners
Let me start this article, by reminding everyone that Azure Functions are awesome, and you should use them despite some hiccups. Having said that, let’s fix some errors! In the beginning of September 2018, Microsoft started pushing out breaking changes to Azure Functions 2.x. They had announced this a full month in advance, so they expected everyone in the world to update their Azure Functions to avoid the functions from breaking. I guess, however, that in real life, a month is not that much. Me,…Continue reading Fixing “The following functions are in error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.” error in Azure Functions
Have you ever wondered, how SharePoint’s Managed Properties for Usage & Analytics info actually work? There are all these nice properties available for getting view counts for different items in SharePoint’s search index, but they all seem to act like crazy. Plus they are sometimes pretty nonsensical… And not very well documented! In this post I’ll try to make some sense on how you can use them in programmatic scenarios. Read on… Update 12.3.2019: I’ve updated the post based on a lot of empirical research…Continue reading How to interpret SharePoint’s view count managed properties (like “ViewsLast1Days”)?
So, I’ve gotten this question from a lot of customers and partners, and I thought it’s worth clarifying the case a bit. “I’m seeing a lot of requests these requests to WsaUpload.ashx. What do they matter? They seem to degrade the performance – so what can I do about them?” That’s a great question! Let’s see what it is, why it exists, and what we can do about it! Posts Related to “Disabling requests to WsaUpload.ashx (Customer Experience Improvement Program)”:The Scary Anatomy of a Microsoft…Continue reading Disabling requests to WsaUpload.ashx (Customer Experience Improvement Program)
Have you ever tried to find out the number of users of an enterprise application in your Office 365 tenant? This could be needed for multiple different reasons: maybe your organization is paying for the app and you want to know who’s actually using it, maybe the usage is required by a company policy and it’s useful to know if organization’s members are actually using it, or maybe you just want to know about the user adoption of an app. For apps with under 100…Continue reading How to get the user count for Azure AD Enterprise Application
Got an error “Tenant app deployment is only supported in the app catalog site. The current site is not the app catalog site.”, even if the current site very much IS an app catalog site? There might be an easy fix! Problem Imagine this: you browse into your fresh SharePoint tenant, open the app catalog, click on an app, try to deploy it, and out comes this error. Tenant app deployment is only supported in the app catalog site. The current site is not the…Continue reading Solving “Tenant app deployment is only supported in the app catalog site.” -error
This is one of the kind of weird issues that you don’t really run into in your own development environments, but that you more often run into when you actually have non-godlike permissions. Oh, the woes of trying to use SharePoint with anything less than farm/global administrator… :) Anyway, in this post, I’ll describe a couple of solutions to an error: “Sorry, your files couldn’t be uploaded. The upload might be too large or the server might be experiencing high network traffic” You might encounter…Continue reading Solving “Sorry, your files couldn’t be uploaded. The upload might be too large or the server might be experiencing high network traffic.” in SharePoint
This article describes the localization / multilingual capabilities of SharePoint, and your options as an organization using it to achieve a seamless and user-friendly experience for your end-users and content editors. SharePoint’s definitely a powerful platform, but its multilingual features might leave a bit to be desired – and using them successfully requires some understanding of the platform! Background of Multilingual SharePoint Localization – or showing users with different language preferences content in their preferred language – is not SharePoint’s strongest suite. It never was,…Continue reading SharePoint Localization – a (somewhat) comprehensive how-to!
This article explains how to enable custom scripting for any SharePoint site collection. This is functionally equivalent with setting setting “-DenyAddAndCustomizePages 0” or disabling the NoScript feature. Different instructions and solutions apply to SharePoint Online, and on-premises scenarios (SharePoint Server 2013, 2016 and probably 2019) – so see below for all of them. Different solutions are required to resolve the issue for different target sites: Modern SharePoint Team Sites (attached to Office Groups if on SharePoint Online, and without one if On-Premises) Modern SharePoint Communication…Continue reading 5 ways to enable Custom Scripts for a SharePoint site collection
Another day, another Azure Active Directory error! So what’s this AADSTS70005 all about? While either developing or just trying to use an application that authenticates against Azure AD, you might get an error message that contains error code “AADSTS70005“. This means that you’re trying to use implicit authentication flow, but it isn’t allowed for your app. If you have access to the Azure AD you’re authentication against, it’s easy to fix! See more below… Reason You might get an error, somewhat like this: AADSTS70005: response_type ‘token’…Continue reading Fixing issue “AADSTS70005” by enabling the implicit authentication flow for your Azure AD app
Imagine this: you’re using a good old SharePoint blog site, and have a bunch of categories in use. That’s nice and easy – SharePoint offers the categorization functionality natively, and it works decently. Problems arise when you have a lot of categories, though – not all of them will be shown. Even if you tweak the web part to show more items on a page, this isn’t reflected on the whole blog site! This post article explains how to fix this. Problem For background info…Continue reading How to show more than 30 categories in SharePoint blog/news sites?
This post describes how to fix the error, where when publishing Azure Functions or Azure App Services you get an error like this: “Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.” This is luckily another straightforward fix! Problem Azure Function Publish fails with a message: “Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.” It is, indeed, caused by some of your files at the target of your publishing being…Continue reading Fixing the error “Web Deploy cannot modify the file on the Destination because it is locked by an external process.”
So, you got an error with a code AADSTS50011? It’s just Azure AD’s authentication acting up because of invalid reply address! here’s a bunch of different reasons that lead to this error. This post describes the variant where the URL’s case sensitivity differns from what’s configured. For me, the most typical scenario where I run into this error is accessing the app from SharePoint. Problem So, you’re getting an error somewhat like this: AADSTS50011: The reply address <…> does not match the reply addresses configured…Continue reading How to fix “AADSTS50011: Reply address did not match because of case sensitivity.”
So, you got an error with a code AADSTS50011? That’s ok – it’s just Azure AD’s authentication acting up because of invalid reply URLs! Since there might be a couple of different reasons for this error, this post also describes a couple of different solutions, that might help you overcome the issues. Problem So, you’re getting an error somewhat like this: But why? Did you mess something up? Well, if you’re the person who configured the app you’re trying to use, you probably did! Although…Continue reading How to fix “AADSTS50011: The reply address does not match the reply addresses configured” -error
So Microsoft keeps 14-day rolling backups of your SharePoint Online sites. That’s awesome – no need to take backups anymore, right? Not so fast. It’s not always so easy, and by just relying on these backups, you risk losing your data. Forever, I might add. This cautionary tale is about SharePoint Online, but I’d say you’ll need to take caution anytime you’re dealing with Microsoft’s automatic backups. The story starts with the client doing something unwise – a prime example would be them removing the…Continue reading A cautionary tale of relying on the automatic backups in SharePoint Online
Twitter embed has a stupid, built-in failure condition: if the User Agent contains IE10 or older, the embed script will not load. This causes SharePoint embeds to fail. This post describes how to fix that.
Is your Azure Web Application suffering from absolutely horrible load times every time someone accesses it for the first time every 15 minutes or so? Mine was. It was pitiful. I was developing a web-based service using EF6 and ASP.NET MVC 5, where all the assets were hosted in the Azure. Even though the app was reasonably lightweight and usually responded very fast, the first time someone accessed it in a while it took 20-60 seconds to load AND sometimes even timed out (especially with…Continue reading Solving Azure Web Application’s first load perfomance issues
Debugging SharePoint On-Premises configuration issues is the best thing since sliced bread, right? This post is about allowing/enabling Anonymous Access to a site collection – a simple configuration, that “simply works” like once every ten times you try it.
I stumbled upon a customer, that complained about some pages in their intranet throwing weird errors with authentication. Those pages seemed to have one thing in common – there was a Yammer embed (or a SharePoint script webpart with Yammer embed script in it, to be precise) there. The error code they got was “AADSTS90013: Invalid input received from the user”. Below, you can see an example of the error screen. Okay – this is going to be extremely specific, and probably won’t solve the…Continue reading Solving error “AADSTS90013: Invalid input received from the user”
