SharePoint 2016 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

Office 2013/2016 Client Authentication with SharePoint and ADFS

February 26, 2018 3 Comments

Recently one of my customers started rolling out office 2016 to their employees who were previously using office 2010. Though the office 2016 upgrade was going smooth, we started getting complains from a few users regarding multiple credentials popups. Problem Statement The customer had SharePoint 2016 configured with ADFS 3.0 authentication. Users who got migrated to Office 2016 suddenly started getting these authentication prompts when editing office documents which were opened from SharePoint document libraries. An ideal case was – they open the document for editing, leave it open for some time, say 1-2 hours, they get back and when they […]

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

Unable to open excel files in Office Web Apps – Another way out

November 15, 2017 No Comments

We had a SharePoint 2016 medium size farm (2 WFEs, 2 App Servers, 2 DB Servers & 2 OWA Servers) configured and running perfectly fine for a few months. Until one fine day, while opening Excel files in browser started throwing the below error – We’re sorry. We ran into a problem completing your request. Please try that again in a few minutes. Strangely, all other office file types (Word, PowerPoint) continued to work in browser without any issues. Update: As per Microsoft, this is a known issue (“System Center 2016 Operations Manager APM Agent causing heap corruption in SharePoint”) […]

Enterprise Search

Query execution is only allowed with IgnoreSafeQueryPropertiesTemplateUrl=true when the user has the UseRemoteAPIs permission

October 24, 2017 1 Comment

I had setup a cloud Hybrid Search environment for one of my customers with SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint Online. It was working fine for past few weeks, until one fine day for almost all the users started getting the error message “Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerException: Query execution is only allowed with IgnoreSafeQueryPropertiesTemplateUrl=true when the user has the UseRemoteAPIs permission” when searched from on-prem environment. Cloud Hybrid and Federated Setup Just to share some background about the environment setup, I had followed the recommended approach for setting up the cloud hybrid environment and all the content was correctly getting indexed in Office 365. The […]

Azure, Azure Chatbot

Integrate Azure Chat Bot with SharePoint

July 17, 2017 6 Comments

In my previous article, I wrote about how can we create an simple Azure chat bot based on one of the default template, Forms Flow, that Azure Bot comes with. That is good to get us started but to make anything useful, we need to extend the bot. In this article I am going to talk about how can we extend the Azure Chat bot with Forms Flow, we created last time, and Integrate it with SharePoint. This logic can be used to integrate both with SharePoint on-premise (2013 and 2016) and Online. Problem Statement We are going to extend […]

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, 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 […]