SharePoint Online – it was weird when it came out, it’s been unstable for years, but it’s the portal solution by Microsoft we all love and cherish. It’s taken the whole ecosystem a few years to mature to a point where it finally became the number one choice for enterprise collaboration, and with its buddies like Microsoft Teams, the prime option for all kinds of communication & internal publishing needs as well.
My experience with SharePoint Online started around the end of 2013, when I started modernizing the full-trust farm solutions my employer had back in the day. The app, or add-in model, was just a bit frustrating to work with, but with updates it become usable as well. And nowadays, it’s definitely the go-to solution instead of self-hosted on-premises.
But what does Microsoft say about this?
What is SharePoint Online – according to Microsoft?
SharePoint Online is a cloud-based service that helps organizations share and collaborate with colleagues, partners, and customers. With SharePoint, you can access internal sites, documents, and other information from anywhere—at the office, at home, or from a mobile device.
-Microsoft
SharePoint itself is almost 2 decades old, and SharePoint Online has seen over half a decade of usage as well. That means that SharePoint Online, at this point, is a battle-hardened tool for collaboration and communication.
These posts handle the cloud installations, development, configurations and all kinds of weird issues.
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…Continue reading What is “fp.js” – and why is it snooping on your SharePoint usage?
There’s maybe a thousand things that can throw an “Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerException”, but a bit smaller amount of things, that are ambiguous enough to be called “Unknown error”. This post describes one, fairly usual fix for this issue! But let’s get back to the beginning for a second – you get what and when now? When running any code, that provisions new sites (much like https://www.koskila.net/new-pnpsite-fails-with-sitestatus3/), you get an error like this…Continue reading Solving yet another “Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerException: Unknown Error”
This was a peculiar case! An issue I hadn’t run into before, and luckily a disturbingly simple fix. But first, let’s set up the scene: We were running a long-ish PowerShell script using a Global Administrator account. One part of the script was supposed to add and deploy a couple of SharePoint apps. But while running Add-PnPApp, we ran into errors: Add-PnPApp -Path $path -Scope $app.Scope -ErrorAc… , Error: {“error”:{“code”:”-2147024891,…Continue reading How to fix Add-PnPApp failing with an Access Denied error
This issue seems to pop up bafflingly often, so I thought that it was finally time to document it for future generations. Granted, it mainly considers Classic SharePoint (which is very tightly built around Publishing features) – but Classic is going to be part of our lives for quite a while still, especially for those of us still primarily on SharePoint Server! While trying to provision subsites to your SharePoint…Continue reading Subsite creation in SharePoint fails with error 0x80070005 for any user (even global/farm admins!)
This article applies to a lot of different issues you might be having with your SharePoint-powered site or even custom functionality like mobile apps using SharePoint’s search index. I’ll list a few of the situations, which could be caused by these issues, below: Reason for the issue These issues are most of the time caused by an odd glitch in SharePoint’s search indexing. Every now and then, crawlers might start…Continue reading Issues with User Profile Property visibility in Search-powered functionalities
First of all: you’re right and your eyes are serving you well. It has indeed disappeared. Starting in October, it’ll be hidden from end users. Microsoft is retiring the “Site Content and Structure” tool in SharePoint Online. Which kind of makes sense, since it’s quite an old feature – albeit, a very useful one. How to access “Content and Structure”? Even though Microsoft is retiring the tool, and has already hidden…Continue reading Help! My “Content and Structure” page in SharePoint Online is gone!
So, you have a Client Id and a Client Secret, but don’t know if they work anymore? Maybe they are expired? Maybe someone removed them? Maybe you copy-pasted them from the wrong Key Vault and they belong to another tenant? No worries! We can use PowerShell to validate them. This article explains a simple way to validate and debug your client id and client secret using PowerShell. Solution By using…Continue reading The fastest way to verify your Client Id and Client Secret are valid with PowerShell
I got an error stating that the “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…Continue reading Solving the “Tenant app deployment is only supported in the app catalog site.” error
This article explains how to enable custom scripting for any SharePoint site collection. This is functionally equivalent to 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…Continue reading 5 ways to enable Custom Scripts for a SharePoint site collection
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…Continue reading A cautionary tale of relying on the automatic backups in SharePoint Online
