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Azure Chat Bot with Interactive Forms Flow

July 9, 2017 No Comments

A few days ago, I wrote articles about Create your first Azure Chat Bot – Step by Step followed by Configure LUIS application for practical use in Azure bot and Create your first Azure Chat Bot with QnA Service – Step by Step. In this article lets explore how can we create an Azure Chat Bot which can have an interactive forms flow, i.e. a bot which can accept information as if filling a form and take some action based on provided inputs like booking a flight ticket or raising a support request. Half of the steps are similar to what you might […]

SharePoint

SharePoint Crawl Error- Processing this item failed because of a timeout

July 3, 2017 1 Comment

A few days ago, suddenly in one of the SharePoint farms which my team maintains, after running fine for few months, it started logging the error message “SharePoint Crawl Error- Processing this item failed because of a timeout when parsing its contents” for almost all the content the crawler was trying to index. Background It was a medium size farm, with 2 front end servers, 2 application servers with 2 database servers configured with always on availability groups. The search crawl was schedule to with “Continuous Crawl” with “Incremental Crawl” every 4 hours. Initially we thought it might be a […]

Analytics

Azure Application Insights or Google Analytics with SharePoint

June 28, 2017 2 Comments

Recently I was encountered with a question about implementing Google Analytics in a SharePoint on-premise environment that triggered a discussion, whether we should choose Google Analytics or look for Azure Application Insights, which is available in Azure stack. Azure was in use already since SharePoint Servers were hosted on Azure VMs and the Application Insight reports look quite impressive. I started to look into more details about what to expect from both of these. Google Analytics Lets take a look at the Google Analytics first. Google analytics is intended for website usage tracking and traffic optimization, has a nice dashboard and is […]

Azure

Create your first Azure Chat Bot with QnA Service – Step by Step

June 26, 2017 No Comments

A few days ago, I wrote an article about Create your first Azure Chat Bot – Step by Step followed by Configure LUIS application for practical use in Azure bot. In this article lets explore how can we create an Azure Chat Bot which can respond to any questions based on a known knowledge database using Microsoft QnA Service. First of all of course you need to have an Azure subscription, you can sign up for free here. Once you have the subscription ready, go to http://portal.azure.com Step 1: Create an Azure Chat Bot Browse to New – Data + Analytics – […]

SharePoint Online

How to Make SharePoint Online Site Collection Read Only

June 19, 2017 16 Comments

I am sure in the SharePoint world you would have run across a requirement of making the entire site collection(s) read only sometime. It is very easy if that requirement happens to be in SharePoint On-premise, we just go to the Central Admin and set the selected site collection as read only from under Locks and Quotas option. SharePoint Online Problem But what about SharePoint Online. When I searched for it, I came across this Lock/Unlock SharePoint Online Sites in Office 365 with PowerShell. Unfortunately, contrary to the claim, this code doesn’t seem to have been tested with SharePoint Online as […]

Azure

Configure LUIS application for practical use in Azure bot

June 16, 2017 No Comments

A few days ago, I wrote an article about how to Create your first Azure Chat Bot – Step by Step, Lets extend that article with additional details about how can we configure LUIS application and train it to be much more useful for practical usage.In my previous article, I covered how can we create a LUIS application. So, let’s go ahead and try to teach it a little more than “Hi and Hello” 🙂 To start with login to LUIS at https://www.luis.ai with your azure credentials. You should see the app already created (if you followed my previous article). You can […]

Azure

Create your first Azure Chat Bot – Step by Step

May 31, 2017 2 Comments

Hey guys, Automation and Machine Learnings are the new buzz words these days and Microsoft is leading the way. Azure Bot Service has been rolled out recently, which is currently in preview mode but has plenty of stuffs to try your hands on. In this article, I am going to explain step-by-step, how you can get started with Azure Chat Bot service using Natural Language processing. First of all of course you need to have an Azure subscription, you can sign up for free here. Once you have the subscription ready, go to http://portal.azure.com Browse to New – Data + […]

Azure

How to ensure SharePoint performance during SQL backups

May 20, 2017 No Comments

Hello Guys, In one of my recent SharePoint 2016 deployment (hosted on Azure VMs), we ran across an issue in which SQL Server 2014 managed backup was enabled for SharePoint databases. The size of all the databases combined was about 2 TB! The problem started when users started using the SharePoint application extensively, resulting in SQL transaction logs getting filled more frequently and hence SQL Managed backup triggering full backups of such databases during peak business hours multiple times. Now, whenever the backup used to get started, the communication between SharePoint server and SQL server started to show issues like […]

SharePoint

Playing with SharePoint Pages Dynamic Div IDs

May 1, 2017 No Comments

Hey Guys, I am sure there are many other ways, you might have achieved similar results, but dynamic div ids in SharePage pages give a hard time to many developers.Like most other people, developers love certainty, but SharePoint pages may generate 2 different div ids even for same page, when accessed by 2 different users, because of different permissions.I recently had a requirement to put a direct link to users’ my site document library in the my site host page. It’s a SharePoint 2016 environment, but they were not yet ready to go for OneDrive interface and decided to stick […]

SharePoint Online

App Only Policy with Tenant Level Permissions in SharePoint Online

September 11, 2016 16 Comments

There are various articles explaining what App Only Policies are and how they work with SharePoint Provider Hosted Apps. Two of the good starting points, I found are this msdn blog and this msdn article. The process of setting is App only permission is really simple. All you need to do is change the AppManifest.xml file. <AppPermissionRequests AllowAppOnlyPolicy=”true”> <AppPermissionRequest Scope=”http://sharepoint/content/tenant” Right=”FullControl” /> </AppPermissionRequests> The problem is if you need tenant level permissions for your app, you can’t register the app principal in any of the site collections, like you would do for any other level of permission requirement like Site Collection admin. Steps […]