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.
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 […]
In this post I instruct a simple way to stop SharePoint (either on-premises installation or SharePoint Online) from redirecting to MySites or Delve. 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 maybe they just want to […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
