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.
I won a hackathon! They had fun topics, it was a cool challenge, a well organized event, and had cool prizes. Since this is the first hackathon I ever took part in, I thought I’d post something about my experience and the solution(s) I figured out. Description I recently took part in a fun hackathon organized by DevPost for Microsoft. Earlier, I posted some info about my hackathon entry, How to Resolve Managed Metadata Madness in SharePoint? I had played around with Flows and Cognitive Services before,…Continue reading Hackathon win: Resolving Managed Metadata Madness
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…Continue reading Don’t remove the root web of your classic SharePoint Site Collection!
While running some SharePoint Online -PowerShell commandlets, or connecting to a SharePoint Online site from your app, you get the 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,…Continue reading How to fix “The website does not support SharePoint Online credentials. The response status code is ‘Unauthorized’”
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…Continue reading Using “DetectedLanguage” to return only localized results from SharePoint Search index
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 property names on the search center of that site collection. Nowhere else, though. That ended up being unexpected, unituitive and unusable for the end-users. Description of the issue Typically, when…Continue reading Alternative Languages in SharePoint forcing the (cumbersome) use of localized Managed Properties
This article describes an interesting feature of Multilingual User Interface in Classic SharePoint. So, in short, I encountered another, very interesting feature of Classic SharePoint Publishing sites, 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.…Continue reading How to resolve Webpart title changes not reflected to some users?
With the usual configuration of Office 365 and Azure, there might be multiple Azure AD (AAD) instances associated with your subscription. When creating registrations to whatever SharePoint-related apps that you might be using, if you create the registration to the wrong Azure AD, it can’t access the data in your SharePoint. Or at least without further configurations, it probably won’t get any data from your Office Graph API or whatever else you might want to use. How to find the instance of Azure AD associated…Continue reading How to use the Azure AD associated with your SharePoint Online
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 Home, Hub, Sites, Start… What?5 ways to enable Custom Scripts for a SharePoint site…Continue reading The effect of using Managed Navigation instead of Structural on SharePoint Online
This post describes a couple of ways to fix the issue “For security reasons DTD is prohibited in this XML document”. At least for me, it appeared when trying to access SharePoint Online using Powershell or a console program using OfficeDev.PnP (which in turn uses CSOM). Error When running any piece of code, whether in PowerShell, .exe console or anything else than in the code behind relies on .NET Framework, you get an error like this: For security reasons DTD is prohibited in this XML document.…Continue reading Fixing the “For security reasons DTD is prohibited in this XML document.” issue
If you’re working on SharePoint deployments, and aren’t familiar with SharePoint Search Query Tool, you’re probably doing something wrong. Or you’ve gotten a really troublefree tenant and simple requirements.. :) At least for technical issues, it’s the #1 tool for debugging what’s in the index and what isn’t. This blog post describes how to use it to investigate SharePoint Online Search index issues. This blog post is about using SharePoint Search Query Tool to investigate search index issues in SharePoint Online. First of all, you…Continue reading Using SharePoint Search Query Tool
Microsoft is deprecating, or even removing one of the widely used features in SharePoint sites – Site Mailboxes. For the end-user this might no mean much, but still requires some additional work from the administration side. In this post, I’m trying to give a rough outline, on what you (as an administrator/content producer) should do. So, what exactly is happening? Posts Related to “Site Mailboxes deprecated on SharePoint Online – use Office Groups instead”:SharePoint Home, Hub, Sites, Start… What?5 ways to enable Custom Scripts for…Continue reading Site Mailboxes deprecated on SharePoint Online – use Office Groups instead
In this post, I’ll try to archive everything you need to download and install to get commandlets like Connect-MsolService working. I’ve had to do it a couple of times when changing laptops, so it’s good to document them somewhere! :) So, when would you need to follow this guide and install the modules described here? Mostly this comes to play, when you’re switching machines, try to run the SharePoint Online Management shell but it doesn’t even exist on the machine, or it does exist but…Continue reading Getting Connect-MsolService (and other Azure Active Directory PowerShell cmdlets) to work
This post describes the actual, working and fast process of removing a site collection in SharePoint Online using the Remove-SPODeletedSite commandlet in SharePoint Online Management Shell (a flavor of PowerShell). Description Sometimes you need to get rid of a site collection you’ve created in SharePoint Online. The most typical example perhaps being removing the team site created for a group of people working together. That’s pretty simple and there are a few ways of doing that. For example, you might just go ahead, and delete the site…Continue reading Remove-SPODeletedSite – Actually removing a SharePoint Online Site Collection
In this post I instruct a simple way to stop SharePoint (either on-premises installation or SharePoint Online) from redirecting to Delve or MySites (respectively). The normal behavior is, that this happens when users click any name of a user anywhere in SharePoint. This is often not desired, and sometimes just confusing or impractical. Problem If your customers are like mine, a lot of them hate Delve or MySite or both. Or maybe they just are’nt willing to yet adopt Delve. Or perhaps you’ve heard of…Continue reading Disabling Delve/MySite redirection from SharePoint Site Collections
Luckily, SharePoint Add-ins (or App Parts, like they were called earlier) are slowly getting killed and rooted out of all the sites they once were deployed to – and I don’t think anyone’s going to miss them. However, as so often happens with legacy implementations, there will still be thousands of sites, where SharePoint administrators and developers will be responsible for maintaining and developing the solutions further. This will occasionally require updating app parts, which is a process that kind of sucks. Here I’ll try to simplify…Continue reading Updating files in an App Part (SharePoint Add-in)
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. One typical form of the error might be something along the lines of “Identity Client Runtime Library (IDCRL) could not look up the realm information for a federated sign-in.” coming up. This could happen for example, when Connect-SPOService is called, but it’s probably not exclusively associated with that commandlet. Symptoms While running your PowerShell scripts using SharePoint Online…Continue reading Fixing “Connect-SPOService : Identity Client Runtime Library (IDCRL) could not look up the realm information for a federated sign-in.” -error
This post describes a peculiar problem one customer had. In their intranet, all of their employees had a managed metadata -typed managed property in SharePoint User Profile Service and a mapping from that property to RefinableString31. RefinableString31, in turn, was used on Search DisplayTemplates to show the textual value of the managed metadata field. Symptoms The mapping and displaying the values worked beautifully – except for one user. Her people search results profile wouldn’t show her office address no matter how long the customer waited…Continue reading RefinableString -managed property in SharePoint Online not populating for all items
This post contains a really small, 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 keyword-field (managed metadata, with values added by editor users), and wanted to use the SharePoint’s searchbox. The problem was,…Continue reading Tweaking the SharePoint list view search box to filter on managed metadata fields
SharePoint Server versions 2013, 2016, and 2019 don’t have that old and familiar “sign in as a different user” option in the site menu, and for the time being, nor does SharePoint Online. However, sometimes it’s very useful functionality to have, so it’s a bit weird Microsoft chose to get rid of the option. This post outlines a method that I’ve found to work quite well for making SharePoint ask for credentials so that you can use another account to then log in! Really nice…Continue reading How to log in to SharePoint as a different user
