File under “why didn’t I do this years ago??” You can now easily install AutoSPSourceBuilder (my PowerShell-based utility for downloading SharePoint updates and integrating them into the installation media) from the PowerShell Gallery. TL;DR: Install-Module -Name AutoSPSourceBuilder No more need to browse to the GitHub…
As a Microsoft employee I’ve been “dogfooding” our new chat-based collaboration hub (Microsoft Teams) for a while now and pretty much enjoying the experience throughout. In the interest of knowledge sharing and wanting to be generally useful, I’d like to raise a usability/discoverability best practice that just…
Just in time for the release of the SharePoint Server 2019 Public Preview, I’ve made probably the most significant updates to two of my open-source offerings in a while… AutoSPInstaller will now install and create a SharePoint 2019 farm (using the Public Preview bits), and AutoSPSourceBuilder will download and…
With the recent announcement and release of the Public Preview of SharePoint Server 2019, my fellow PFE Nik Charlebois and I thought we’d record a quick chat of our thoughts on the state of things around SharePoint and two of the most popular automated installation approaches, SharePointDSC and AutoSPInstaller. Head on…
With the announcement a few months ago that CodePlex, the home of AutoSPInstaller and plenty of other open-source projects, was going to shut down roughly by the end of 2017, I knew I’d have to take action to keep my popular AutoSPInstaller automated SharePoint 201x installation project accessible. So, after a…
Several months back, some folks started reporting an error when attempting to install SharePoint 2013 on certain Windows servers - specifically, ones that already had the .Net Framework 4.6 installed. The error simply states: “Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s): This product requires Microsoft…
As someone who’s been running local Virtual Machines on a beefed-up laptop for several years now, I’ve found the strategy becoming more cumbersome and challenging as the demands of my main platform of choice (SharePoint) increase with regard to recommended specs. In fact, spec requirements are the main factor that have…
SharePoint 2016 is seeing its first post-go-live update - KB2920721 - available for download here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=51701. You may notice that it doesn’t follow the typical CU naming convention of ubersrv* - that’s because it’s not a cumulative update, but rather just a specific…
Just a quick update to let you know that, as of January 26, 2016, any non-personal technical posts will go to https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/brianlala/ instead of here. It just makes sense (and in fact is a bit late) since I’ve been working at Microsoft since August 2015. Keep checking back here just in case…
Yes, I’ve left the default title up there - because this is indeed my “hello” from within the walls of Microsoft. I started working for Microsoft back in August 2015 and it’s been a head-spinning, firehose-drinking exercise ever since. Looking forward to sharing some good thoughts and info on my new blog in the coming…
When SharePoint 2016’s Release Candidate was announced, you may have wondered why (and at the same time been a little sad that) there was no monolithic ISO or executable made available that would allow you to install straight to RC without first having to install the previous public release (Beta 2) first. Well, it…
The new ULSViewer for SharePoint introduces the capability to monitor all the ULS logs in your SharePoint farm at once, in real time. While this is a fantastic enhancement to an already near-perfect piece of software, I found one tiny little pain point with it. When configuring ULSViewer to monitor an entire farm, you…
Over the past few weeks and months I’ve been contemplating putting together a post that describes what I do – partly as a reference to others (to answer that oft-asked question), partly to inventory my own activities and interests, and in no small part to get myself thinking about what lies ahead. I also expect this…
-UPDATED May 2019- While AutoSPInstaller (my open-source project for installing SharePoint 2010-2019) is designed so it can be run and re-run as often as required to complete or tweak the installation and initial configuration of a SharePoint farm, there admittedly are times when executing the entire scripted process…
Head on over to the official Navantis Blog for my latest post on the SharePoint Conference 2014 – thoughts, highlights, impressions and shout-outs! Cheers Brian
In my last post, I described the installation errors that I experienced when attempting to do a slipstreamed install of SharePoint 2010 with SP1 + August 2012 CU, and a workaround that I’d implemented in AutoSPInstaller to allow the script to proceed beyond the error. It seems however that I was a tad hasty… subsequent…
Ever since the release of the August 2012 SharePoint 2010 Cumulative Update (CU), I (and several others) noticed that, during the SharePoint binary file installation portion of AutoSPInstaller, it would fail with a PatchApplicationFailure error in the SharePoint installation log, if we integrated Service Pack 1 + the…
Like most of you SharePoint folks, I find myself installing SQL Server quite frequently (since SharePoint has an ever-so-slight dependency on it). However I also like to have the latest & greatest service pack in my environments, and currently this means SP1 for SQL 2008 R2 (yeah I know SQL 2012 is out, but most of my…
Well it’s been a little while since the last AutoSPInstaller release (and the last blog post, to be honest) but let me assure you it’s been all work and (slightly less) play! The last few months have seen a pretty intense development crunch for the automated SharePoint 2010 install/config script, and I just can’t seem…
That is all.
With the release of Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 came a cmdlet called Add-SPProfileSyncConnection which finally allowed the OOB creation of a User Profile Sync connection with Powershell. Prior to this, one would either have to resort to manual creation of a User Profile Sync connection or write up some fairly…
As first pointed out in a discussion on my AutoSPInstaller discussion area on Codeplex, and seemingly confirmed in at least one post (that I could find so far), there appears to be an issue with one of the Powershell cmdlets that, when run with a series of other cmdlets, is the equivalent of the SharePoint Products and…
A few days ago Jie Li posted instructions on how to track SharePoint 2010 installations in an organization by using AD Service Connection points. This sounded really promising, as it could (for example) allow admins to track ‘rogue’ SharePoint installs, or at a minimum just be able to quickly determine where SharePoint…
I was recently asked to customize the Advanced Search experience for a Search Server Express 2008 customer. Remember that MSSE is basically WSS 3.0 + the search components from MOSS 2007 (remember that ancient product?). Anyhow this involved enabling the selection of a number of custom fields in the ‘property…
This is sure to raise more questions than it answers… but here goes: how I managed to get the downloadable Information Worker Demo VM to boot straight from VHD (i.e. no host OS). This assumes a fair level of comfort and proficiency in virtual hardware environments, specifically managing virtual hard disks, the Windows…
If any of you have had the chance to play around with Microsoft’s recent public release of the Information Worker Demo VM, you’ll notice that a) it has pretty much everything thrown in in terms of the Office suite of server/client products and b) it’s a hog! At idle, the VM will start to consume almost 10GB RAM…
