SharePoint 2013 Archives

Plan Extranet Sites Migration to SharePoint Online

April 16, 2018 No Comments

Extranet sites or Sites having access to external users in SharePoint have been in use for long, across various organizations. It provides great collaboration when working with multiple vendors/partners. There are various articles about external sharing capabilities of SharePoint Online. In this article I am just going to focus on migration scenarios only. Extranet Sites in SharePoint On-Premise There are various ways to implement external access in on-premise SharePoint farms like External Users created in Active Directory in a separate OU and/or account names starting something like ext_ or gst_ to easily identify external/guest users External Users in a separate trusted […]

ADFS, SharePoint

How to Use AD Security Groups with SharePoint using ADFS Authentication

February 18, 2018 No Comments

Few years ago, almost all companies were using their SharePoint environment authenticated directly with AD. Most of those were configured simply to use NTLM authentication. That provided easy SSO for domain joined machines and users accessing from within the company network. Following microsoft guidelines, many companies made use of Active Directory (AD) security groups to provide permissions to a large set of users. Problem Statement With Office 365 and other cloud services, many of those companies started making use of Federated Authentication like Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS) to ensure all cloud services use the same credentials and provide SSO. We […]

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 […]

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 […]

SharePoint

SharePoint Hosted Apps in AAM or host-header environments for SharePoint 2013 with ADFS

May 7, 2015 No Comments

Hey Guys, Many of you might have started working on or at least looking at Hybrid Implementation of SharePoint 2013 and Office 365, probably using some federated Authentication like ADFS 3.0.You might not have faced any issues when installing and running even basic apps from SharePoint store in Office 365 environment, it is not that easy, well at least not that well documented on how this exactly works for In-Premise sites. In some case, you might have got it working in your lab/dev environment easily, but what if you have a SharePoint site with Host Headers defined in IIS. As […]

SharePoint, SharePoint Online

Developing Hybrid Apps for SharePoint 2013 and Office 365

February 23, 2015 No Comments

Hey guys, You could find a lot of articles over internet on how to setup a development environment for developing SharePoint Apps. Some of those articles (including technet) nicely explain how to setup the Apps environment for SharePoint.However, when I started exploring, I found many confusing and contradicting stuffs there, for example Configure your Domain Name section in the technet article Configure an environment for apps for SharePoint (SharePoint 2013) is correct for SharePoint hosted Apps (or if you want to use SharePoint store apps) and NOT for provider hosted apps !!! Anyway, I will skip these and assume that you have […]

SharePoint

HTTP to HTTPS Redirection for SharePoint Sites hosted on Azure VMs

January 31, 2015 6 Comments

Lets take a look at a scenario which is getting more and more prominent with many organizations deciding to move their SharePoint environment out of their own data center to host of MS Azure VMs. This is more seen in smaller/medium size companies who completely want to do away with their data centers by moving most/all such services (like Exchange, Lync etc.) to cloud. This article is for VMs created using Classic Model in Azure, If your VMs are created using Azure Resource Manager (ARM), read this article instead Well, when running a medium sized SharePoint farm in-premise, mostly organizations […]

ADFS, SharePoint

ADFS 3.0 with SharePoint 2013 Redirection Loop – Another way out

November 24, 2014 No Comments

This good old topic with lots of different behaviors and solutions. In my case I had 3 different SharePoint 2013 web applications say site1.mycompany.com, site2.mycompany.com & site3.mycompany.com configured to use ADFS 3.0 Everything was working fine on all the browsers till the final day of our production rollout… and then the moment came… just a few hours before we had to go live, site2.mycompany.com & site3.mycompany.com started throwing errors when trying to login… It was same old & popular ADFS redirection loop issue… only on Internet Explorer… and only for these 2 sites… Site1 kept on working fine… Tried all […]

SharePoint

Migrate SharePoint 2010 Search Service Application to SharePoint 2013 – The Fineprints

October 8, 2014 1 Comment

Hi Guys, In this post I would like to share about how to migrate an existing SharePoint 2010 Search Service application to SharePoint 2013 Search with specific Index location.The requirements for doing so could be – You are doing an as-is migration, in this case migrated sites in SP 2013 looks and behaves same as SP 2010. Some organizations go for this option to quickly move to SP 2013 and then update their’s sites UI to 2013 interface gradually, site by site You want to keep using already created search scopes/content sources/crawl schedules etc in SP 2010 Search Service Application […]