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 article explains how to add multiple aliases to one managed property in SharePoint Search Schema Management. Yes, it’s possible, just a bit unintuitive! I’ll explain the process below. Solution This seems to be another “gotcha”, that’s missing from the official documentation, but is super helpful to know when you happen to need it! The way I encountered it was in a dev/staging environment, where certain automatically created Managed Property, owstaxIdValoTags (I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what the name is all…Continue reading How to add multiple aliases to a Managed Property in SharePoint Search?
This article describes one way how to fix seemingly non-sensical “Access denied” errors, that you get when running Set-PnPAvailablePageLayouts. Problem While running the PnP cmdlet for enabling or selecting the available publishing page layouts for a web, you run into this, fairly generic error: Access denied. You do not have permission to perform this action or access this resource. PS C:\> Set-PnPAvailablePageLayouts -AllowAllPageLayouts Set-PnPAvailablePageLayouts : Access denied. You do not have permission to perform this action or access this resource. At line:1 char:1 + Set-PnPAvailablePageLayouts…Continue reading How to fix “Access denied” errors when running “Set-PnPAvailablePageLayouts”?
Modern SharePoint Online recently got a new, super useful and much-requested new feature: site footer. This little buddy now makes it possible to create informative, stylish and useful footer areas to your intranet sites. But what if you already implemented such a solution based on, say, SPFx extensions, and now you’ve got 2 footers? Well, you might want to disable one of those two. My guideline would be this: if you already have a custom/vendor solution for your footer, and it does what you need…Continue reading How to disable the footer in Modern SharePoint?
Have you ever run into a situation, where you just wanted to remove the currently standing function definitions from your app service without actually nuking the whole Functions app? I have! App Service configuration is usually easy to manage programmatically or by scripting, so even if you need to redo the deployment, it should be fairly straightforward. But what if you don’t have the setup scripted, and have already configured everything the way you like it – you’d really like to NOT nuke the whole…Continue reading How to remove Azure Functions without deleting the Functions App?
A couple of days ago, I got a comment asking how to fix error AADSTS90008 when developing an application using Azure Active Directory The error in question was this: AADSTS90008: The user or administrator has not consented to use the application with ID ‘[guid]’. This happened because application is misconfigured: it must require access to Windows Azure Active Directory by specifying at least ‘Sign in and read user profile’ permission. While the error itself is usually fairly simple, explaining what to do in a comment…Continue reading How to fix “AADSTS90008: The user or administrator has not consented to use the application”?
Microsoft is gathering all kinds of telemetric data out of the usage of SharePoint. I ran into an interesting JavaScript file, fp.js, on SharePoint Online doing just that. Gathering data. It loads on pretty much every single page request, so it’s something you’ll bump into anytime you open your developer tools! Your customer’s IT might even inquire about it – perhaps wanting to disable it for perfomance or information security gains? But what is fp.js and what does it do? Posts Related to “What is…Continue reading What is “fp.js” – and why is it snooping on your SharePoint usage?
Now for something totally different – for a change, I got to fix an issue with my own blog, so I had the chance to delve into PHP and WordPress configurations… :) PHP is an ever-evolving language – even if it might not always feel that way. The old workhorse has been powering most of the internet for a couple of decades, and weirdly enough, doesn’t really show signs of going anywhere. A huge part of the success story has been the fact that WordPress,…Continue reading “500 Internal Server Error” after updating a WordPress site to PHP 7.3
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)”:Frequently Asked Robot Lawn Mower QuestionsThe…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
This article explains the most typical reasons you might get an error with code “AADSTS70005”, and how to fix it. Spoiler alert – it usually just requires enabling Azure AD implicit grant flow for authentication! And let me show you – step by step – how to do that. Reason 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…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 article explains how to fix this in a couple of simple…Continue reading How to show more than 30 categories on Classic 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.”
