As I have been increasingly working with Enterprise Search in SharePoint 2013, I have found myself continuously re-researching specific topics. Thus, I have decided to publish this post and keep ot up to date with search content and configuration selfishly for my own reference, but if some else finds it useful - yayy…

I know I sure had a lot of trouble upgrading! I did all the updates like I was supposed to and the download would just not show up in the store! Very frustrating experience. So I did was all good IT folks to - Googled it! The end procedure was simple actually: Crack open IE on your target upgrade box Paste the…

Here’s the scenario: You have a file or blob of sorts that needs to be stored in an Azure Storage Container. That’s great - how do you get it to the container?? I have done this a few times and PowerShell is definitely my preferred method but I can never remember the steps. So, for my benefit and maybe others, here…

This is really big news on the Office Store front, at least in my humble opinion, and straight from the Office News blog: http://blogs.office.com/b/office-news/archive/2013/10/01/office-store-investments-bring-new-opportunities-to-developers.aspx. It reads as though we’ll be able to submitting updates to existing apps…

I am very excited to tell you that Ruven Gotz (yes his blog is also part of spinsiders.com) will be presenting the topic ”Taxonomies, Content Types and Metadata, Oh My!” this October at our regular CalSPUG meeting day on the third Thursday of the month (Oct. 17th). Doors open at 5:00, presentation should start around…

I have  been asked about this topic a few times in recent weeks and really wanted to keep this diagram handy, so I thought what better place to put it than my blog!  Microsoft has provided a lovely info document on this exact topic which can be found here. Looks pretty useful as far as I can tell. Enjoy! :)

… well, kind of. We’re still waiting on some Office 365 for Small Business Nonprofit pricing, but it shouldn’t be too long. Complete details can be found here. Here are the highlights (prices are in CAD): Office 365 Small Business for Nonprofits – Price coming soon, limit 25 users (Retail $5.10/user/month annual…

This little things are pretty useful for diagramming out Office 365 & SharePoint 2013 environments: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35772 One little trick to using them: After you add the shape to your diagram it will be blue, just turn off the theme for that item (or select many and turn of the…

How do I know, without looking at the properties of every Exchange Online mailbox, which users have setup mail forwarding on their mailbox?  That is a very good question.  If you Google around you’ll find lots of interesting answers, particularly around using LDAP queries to identify those mailboxes - but how do you do…

This was a big of a tricky endeavour and obviously a topic that I I don’t typically cover on this blog.  The whole reason for the post actually directly relates back to my Moving to Office 365 post as I haven’t get succeeded in moving enough of my operations to the cloud such that I am not dependent on my main internet…

Important little thing to know when dealing with larger companies in particular: Microsoft only allows one Office 365 tenant per Enterprise Agreement. While a company can have many Office 365 tenants, all the additional ones cannot be part of the company’s existing EA with Microsoft. I will try to get some links to…

Little important thing to note when evaluating SharePoint Online “Wave 15”: SharePoint Online does not have the components to enable View audit log reports. What does this mean to me you ask… Well, within the View Auditing Reports screen, there is a link named ‘Content viewing’ (see below). In full-instance of…

With the full GA release of Office 365 Wave “15”, I thought it was about time I started to really see what I could do with this platform.  I have been an avid SkyDrive and Outlook.com user for my personal email for sometime now, so why not see what else I can do with the cloud & Office 365 with my little experimental…

Now that SharePoint Conference 2012 is just a couple days away, I am sure everyone is busy selecting all the sessions they are wanting to attend via MySPC.  As I was admiring my completed calendar, I began to wonder: How I am I going to get this on my phone.  I attempted to import it into my corporate Outlook but that…

This will be a collection of articles or tools I find useful when it comes to potential deployment issues in a SharePoint 2010 environment. I’ll continually update it as I find new things! Certain folders may have to be excluded from antivirus scanning when you use a file-level antivirus program in SharePoint: http…

Another month means another CalSPUG meeting! (Web site should be up soon… sorry for the dead link.) This meeting should be a good one - and a non-developer topic as well. However… most developers should be interested in this! Title Keep Your Portal Governance Simple! Start Time Doors open at 5:00pm. Presentation starts…

One of the many problems when developing for SharePoint 2007 is database growth. This can be especially troublesome when your production environment has caching and auditing enabled. Here are some tricks to dealing with the growth. Disable Auditing when restoring your production environment in a development environment…

I recently had a request of me to hide the ‘Category:’ text on a List View web part in a MOSS 2007 farm.  As I have now had this request a few times and each time have to go figure out how to do it again, I thought that meant it was time for a quick blog post!  I found the original source here.  It’s a great write up…

Recently I came across the dreaded error below while restoring a production backup into a development / test environment using stsadm.exe -o restore. “The site collection could not be restored. If this problem persists, please make sure the content databases are available and have sufficient free space.” First a bit of…

This blog site was started in September 2008 by Ruven Gotz and Greg Carnie, two members of the Portals and Collaboration team at Ideaca* in Toronto.  Greg has since transferred from Ideaca’s Toronto office and taken up residence at their Calgary office, and Ruven now works at Navantis. We are two very different kind of…

While trying to compact a vhd that had been (unbeknownst to me) generating huge quantities of log files I recently ran across the rather strange “Unable to Compact a VHD Due to a File System Limitation” error: I found a couple things to try thanks to Google: vssadmin delete shadows /all KB982210 But none of those…

Once again - a long time since I have posted.  Perhaps I should just end trying to post at a pre-defined frequency and aim for something a bit more natural? At lot has changed for me of the last several months, especially since starting this blog.  One of those things in particular was my decision to move to Calgary…

So, I thought it was about time for me to start blogging again.  So much for weekly.  I will shoot for monthly this time! Anyway, here’s today scenario: I have a page layout with several fields (plain text or rich html) exposed.  The template is meant to be used for corporate policies which can be very long with many…

Hi everyone and welcome to my blog! This is actually my very first blog post ever – on any topic! Just a little bit about me: I am a SharePoint consultant (Business Analyst by title) with Ideaca Knowledge Services based in Toronto, Canada. I have been actively working with SharePoint for three years now and have been…