My experience in Stockholm #ESPC15

I have written a 2 part article about my experience in the #ESPC15 in Stockholm, for the conference website community blog.

On part I, I talk about the first day keynotes, which were quite interesting. On part II, I go through some of the most important insights I got from the other presentations I attended.

Check it out!!

Day 1 - Pre-Conference Tutorials (#ESPC15)

The day has arrived, here's the European SharePoint Conference kicking off!

To start things easy, in this Pre-Conference kick off day, we were presented with full-day tutorials. There were quite a few interesting options, on a total of 8 available.

Live from the European SharePoint Conference in Stockholm

I will be live blogging and twitting from the European SharePoint Conference (#ESPC15) in Stockholm this week!

Follow me on Twitter (@alexem) or just keep up with the news on the blog (here or @GetSPcom).

Looking forward to it!!

Paul Culmsee in Dublin: Intellectual Capital is the key

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend Paul Culmsee's seminar called "Re-writing the rule book for managing knowledge", held at the Microsoft offices in Dublin.

I have been following Paul's blog for a couple of years now, Clever Workarounds, so I was looking forward to meet him in person and also talk a bit more about Dialogue Mapping...

I'm glad to say he fully delivered on the expectations!

Speaking at the SharePoint Evolutions Roadshow'14 (Dublin)

Last June, I was invited to speak at the SharePoint Evolutions Conference Roadshow, here in Dublin. It was a joint session promoted by Derek Finnerty, my practice director in Storm, with Gerry Moloney, from the NTMA.

The goal of the presentation was to show "a client story, a very real one, about the hoops and hurdles our client went through to create a SharePoint centric platform that delivered a full range of business solutions to make things work".

Problems with the Content Organizer: 10 shortcomings

The Content Organizer is one of the ECM features that got promoted to a global feature in SharePoint 2010, enabling it to be used in any site or context. It was already available in MOSS2007, but only within Record Centers.

I've used this feature in a couple of SharePoint 2010 projects and, unfortunately, it still had some problems. If you are building a new DMS, I would still definitely recommend looking at it, but not without first taking a look on the challenges I faced back then.
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March'14 in Shares

A new initiative in the blog: Month in Shares.

I usually read a lot about SharePoint and technology in my own time and I believe good content deserves to be shared. Every month I'll take a look at the retweets I've made and do some sort of curation work with the highlights.

Here's March'14.
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Changing to a UNC path in the command line

Ok, so this one's a quickie. I was invoking some PowerShell from the command line (a batch file) that would iterate a Web Application, gather some info and generate a CSV report into a local folder.

Suddenly, there was a requirement to save these reports to a network shared location. The current solution had a variable for the location of the reports, but it wouldn't support a network path.
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Word not saving to SharePoint by default

Recently, I had an intermittent issue with the Save button in Word 2010. It was a SharePoint 2010 project and I was creating a new document using the New > Content Type button in the ribbon of one of the document libraries.

The Content Types were custom and so were the document templates behind them. When I was saving for the first time, it would default to the local Document library and not the document library in SharePoint. Bugger!
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PowerShell Tip #1: Loading custom assemblies

PowerShell is a great trick to have in your bag, it allows easy and flexible scripting using SharePoint objects. Whether you're automating a certain one-off(ish) task, or just debugging a certain strange behaviour, it is always the tool I resort to.

This time, I was having an issue with an Event Receiver. PowerShell came to the rescue!
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Thoughts on Release & Deployment Management

A friend of mine, Carlos Nogueira, wrote a great article on some of the best practices that should be applied on release and deployment processes.

It was very interesting to read, especially considering he works with non-Microsoft technologies and tools, that the challenges on the "other side of the fence" are exactly the same, something we sometimes forget.

This has been one of my focal points (...)

Iterative upgrade to SharePoint 2013

Migrations and upgrades are not a new problem in the SharePoint world, nor the problems associated with such projects, especially on installations that have been highly customized.

But because it's not a new problem, the approach taken in these projects might not be the most modern one. I recently read the upgrade process strategy followed by Tobias Zimmergren and found it to be an interesting one.
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HTML Masterpages and UpdatePanels in SP2013

Although this seems to be an old problem (at least from 2010), I just faced this issue a few days ago, so it is still live and kicking in SharePoint 2013.

We had a custom webpart that had an UpdatePanel to asynchronously execute some actions. So far, nothing unusual.

The problem was it worked on a Dev box, but not on the soon to be Live site. Ever heard this one? :)

How to Quickly isolate and remove a problematic WebPart

 Here's a nice tip of the day, for anyone wanting to solve those annoying WebPart exception issues.

A lot of times, when you start tweaking with WebParts, you can end up breaking the whole page unexpectedly. To quickly resolve this issue, one thing you can do is close the offending WebPart.

To do this, you can simply add a special query string parameter called "contents" and set it to "1".
For example: (...)

Central Admin's 'New' Web Application button greyed out

This is a replay, but always good to remember - pops up every now and then. I was questioned about this today and decided to give a brief explanation.

It has happened to me in the past, wanting to create a New Web Application and the button was greyed out. I couldn't quite understand why, since I could perform the remaining administrative tasks I was looking to do at the time.
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SP2013 & VS2012: .ascx.g.cs missing!

I've been working with SharePoint 2013 for a while now, on and off...well, mostly off to be honest, as the main client I'm working for - 80% of my time - is still on SP2010 (will be very interesting to get them moved to SP2013!).

The first annoying issue I got was with missing .ascx.g.cs files for the Web Parts. I couldn't actually understand what the hell was happening, for a while! We're using a farm solution (we have full control on the environments) and Visual Studio 2012 to develop.
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Import/Export SharePoint Managed Metadata Termsets

I recently worked in a project where I had to use Managed Metadata Terms in several different SPFarms.

However, I had to guarantee that all TermSets/Terms had the same GUIDs associated across all environments.

To accomplish this, I used a great project from codeplex called spmmdnavigator.
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SharePoint Search: IsDocument and contentclass properties

A common request, when you're setting up a Search Service Application, is trimming results to documents only. Usually, it's not added value to show lists, libraries, folders or sites as search result items (for refinement, it's a completely different story).

Throughout the years, I've seen people achieving this in multiple ways (most commonly excluding *.aspx using crawl rules), but the right way of doing it is creating a scope and using either the IsDocument or contentclass properties.
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How to avoid the fatidic UnauthorizedAccessException (0×80070005)

Recently I came across a series of issues when a client I had worked with changed their security matrix.

I had a webpart that applied a CAML query on a list to retrieve data and then present it. The problem I was having, when the customer changed their security matrix, was that some users no longer had permissions to retrieve the list where the data was being stored.
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How to disable Search to index content inside documents

Have you ever had a requirement from a client to customize SharePoint Search, to disallow users from querying for any content inside documents?
I had this request recently, and it was a while until I found solution for it..

To accomplish this, I had to remove some internal Crawled properties from the Search Service Application.
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