Category: Technology

  • Forms Based Authentication Configuration Manager for SharePoint

    Forms Based Authentication Configuration Manager for SharePoint

    I’ve configured Forms Based Authentication (FBA) in SharePoint on several occasions – from 2007 right through to 2013, but until now I have never discovered a life-saving tool that Steve Peschka has written called Forms Based Authentication Configuration Manager (FBA Configuration Manager for SharePoint 2013) available on his TechNet Blog Share-n-dipity. I’ve been there at least…

  • Workaround to “the server is temporarily unavailable” when signing into Lync 2013

    Workaround to “the server is temporarily unavailable” when signing into Lync 2013

    Since our Office 365 tenant was upgraded we’ve been experiencing difficulties with our users signing into Lync 2013. When these users tried to sign in, the Lync 2013 client returned an error saying it could not communicate with the server. The users received the following error. “The server is temporarily unavailable.” Background Firstly our IT guy…

  • Install standalone OneDrive for Business (formally SkyDrive Pro)

    Install standalone OneDrive for Business (formally SkyDrive Pro)

    Ok, so this has bothered me for some time – until now, there has been standalone OneDrive for Business SkyDrive Pro client. Users have had to install Office 2013 to experience the new way of synchronising files with SharePoint. The reason it has bothered me is that it is such a limitation to require the client…

  • Determining the version of your SharePoint Online servers

    Determining the version of your SharePoint Online servers

    If you need to check what version of SharePoint server your Office 365 tenant is running especially during the Office 365 and SharePoint Online service upgrade (aside from checking through the Admin Portal via https://portal.microsoftonline.com) then you can add the following /_vti_pvt/service.cnf to the end of your SharePoint site – as shown below. https://jcallaghan.sharepoint.com/_vti_pvt/service.cnf The page will…

  • Configure delegated administration on a Office 365 tenant

    Configure delegated administration on a Office 365 tenant

    Update: July 2015 Some readers have kindly brought to my attention that after reading this post, they were concerned as to data security. Having read this post back, some two years on, I can see how some misunderstanding can be made from this post, so I’ve updated the article to reflect this. Finally, the disclaimer…

  • Embed code in a SharePoint 2013 web part page

    Embed code in a SharePoint 2013 web part page

    A quick post here to share a new feature in SharePoint 2013 that enables you to easily embed code such as javascript and CSS into the content area of a web part page for example. Previously we did this by editing the page source or by creating lots of text files and linked them using…

  • The Sign in as Different User option is missing in SharePoint 2013

    The Sign in as Different User option is missing in SharePoint 2013

    I’ve been exploring SharePoint 2013 in recent days and noticed that the ‘Sign in as Different User’ option or action from the welcome control (user menu) seems to have been removed or forgotten from the user interface in this build. For someone who works with SharePoint as I do, any kind of administration, developing or…

  • Identifying your SQL server version using SQL Server Management Studio

    This one’s quick. There are a couple of ways to find out your SQL server version. Firstly the version is listed within the Object Explorer in the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. The second option which provides more detailed information is to run the following query. select @@version The version information is returned in the query…

  • Security trimmed top navigation links

    Security trimmed top navigation links

    I was asked to review a client environment yesterday to find out why the links in their top navigation bar were displaying for users that did not have permission to the particular sites. Creating sites It turns out that when sites were being created by the client on SharePoint Foundation 2010 they were being created…

  • ZoomIt for Mac – another screen magnifying utility

    On many occasion, I have been to conferences and on training where the presenter has done a demonstration and used a screen magnifying utility to enlarge part of the display. There are many utilities available that provide this functionality and are typically included with the accessibility option of most operating systems. Having asked many a…

  • Hiding an empty rich text column in XSLT

    Hiding an empty rich text column in XSLT

    This morning I was trying to create a new style in the itemstyle.xsl stylesheet to use within the content query web part (CQWP). I needed a custom style to display a list of announcements, some of which had content and others didn’t and this style was to improve this output. The problem is that the…

  • Working with Managed Paths in SharePoint using PowerShell

    Quite a common requirement for implementations of SharePoint that I am involved in is to create new managed paths for a given web application. While it is a simple task to perform via Central Administration, I inevitably turn to PowerShell to achieve this so that I can then include it as part of larger configuration or…