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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A quick heads-up – if you remove the root site (or RootWeb, like it’s called in the code) of your classic SharePoint Site Collection, that’s going to cause you some grey hairs. It might even, in some rare cases, be unrecoverable! The following post describes what kind of issues you might run into, if you remove the root web instead of the whole site collection, and how to remove the site collection instead. Update 13.7.2019:SharePoint Online keeps evolving, and at least on some tenants, removing […]
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: Cannot contact web site ‘https://[tenant]-admin.sharepoint.com/’ or the web site does not support SharePoint Online credentials. The response status code is ‘Unauthorized’. And that’s not all – by digging into the full error message, you find the underlying internal error: MSDAVEXT_Error=917656; Access+denied.+Before+opening+files+in+this+location%2c+you+must+first+browse+to+the+web+site+and+select+the+option+to+login+automatically. What awakens my curiosity, […]
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? Posts Related to “How to solve “Unified Groups […]
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 […]
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 […]
Localization and multilingual environments in SharePoint are an endless source of interesting issues and blog post topics. In one case, we had a tenant created originally in English, and a site collection created in Finnish. In this particular case, SharePoint somehow messed up the language settings, and ended up requiring the use of localized managed properties on the search center of that site collection. That ended up being unexpected, unituitive and unusable for the end-users. Description of the issue Typically, when you use SharePoint Search, […]
I encountered another, interesting issue – this time in a SharePoint environment, where multiple display languages were in use. When changing the web part title on a web part on a classic SharePoint page, it seems like SharePoint saves the changes for you. In reality, only some users see the changes. So, in short: Some other 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 […]
Have you run into error AADSTS65001 with your application, that tries to authenticate against Azure AD? I sure have – seems to happen at least every other time when I’m building something that uses AAD to authenticate against SharePoint. Fixing issues with Azure AD authentication for Enterprise applications can be tricky. But a lot of the time, this is just another Azure Active Directory error that we can fix easily. This article contains multiple different solutions to the issue, where granting admin consent has somehow […]
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. Posts Related to “The effect of using Managed Navigation instead of Structural on SharePoint Online”:SharePoint Localization – a (somewhat) comprehensive how-to!The Scary Anatomy of a Microsoft License Fraud4 ways […]
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. No fear, though – likely an easy fix! Posts Related […]
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 […]
This post describes how to stop Windows applications from stealing focus from each other. In a practical sense, no piece of software should be able to “jump” to the top and activate your cursor in it, after the steps in this blog post have been applied. Description After some recent batch of Windows updates my Outlook desktop client started stealing focus whenever there was a new email coming in. Like most people, I get a lot of email, and after a while my humor completely […]
This post describes why it’s beneficial to use a user analytics tool in your intranet. I use Google Analytics as an example of such tool, and different deployment options for SharePoint intranets are covered briefly. Why would I use Google Analytics with my SharePoint intranet? In general, it’s absolutely necessary for you to know your users, if you want to deliver an enjoyable user experience. One key aspect of knowing them is knowing what they do, while they use your system or service. SharePoint being […]
This post describes my super-simple fix to a weird error about “Identity Client Runtime Library (IDCRL)” failing with federated sign-in, when running PowerShell scripts against SharePoint Online. Symptoms While running your PowerShell scripts using SharePoint Online Management Shell, and trying to log in using Connect-SPOService, you get an error. Your cmdlets fail at connecting to the SharePoint Online with the following (or similar) error message: Identity Client Runtime Library (IDCRL) could not look up the realm information for a federated sign-in. Of course, you could […]
This post contains minor but nifty tweak to search box in SharePoint list views. Applies to 2013, and Office 365 (for now). Pretty basic stuff, but had to figure this out for a customer so can just as well document it here :) Okay – so a customer needed to be able to filter view items in a SharePoint list by values in a ke yword-field (managed metadata, with values added by editor users), and wanted to use the SharePoint’s searchbox. The problem was, out of […]
