Zero Downtime Patching in Action
Whenever I talk about high availability in SharePoint and SQL Server Always-On Availability Groups I inevitably get a bunch of questions about the "zero downtime" patching concept first introduced at last year’s Microsoft Ignite conference. There seems to be a great deal of confusion about this topic, with many people wondering how it works, what happens to […]
Configuration Challenges with Office Web Applications, SSL Offloading and Default Zone URL’s
Configuring Office Web Applications in a development or test environment is a pretty straightforward process: install the server bits, run a bit of PowerShell to create a WAC farm, set your WOPI bindings in SharePoint, and you’re done. But doing so in a full production environment, with high availability, SSL offloading, split DNS, HTTPS redirection, […]
Access Denied Errors Activating Publishing Features in a SharePoint Team Site
Many organizations have a governance policy in which certain individuals are granted Full Control permissions of individual sites, usually after completing some training or demonstrating proficiency in site administration skills. In such a scenario, it is quite common for a number of different users to be site owners throughout a wide or deep site hierarchy […]
Upgrading Content Databases with Duplicate Site Collection URL’s
Anyone who has ever tried to do an in-place upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to 2010 knows what a complete nightmare that process could be; without much effort you could easily destroy a farm and spend endless hours trying to rebuild from scratch. The process was so fragile and prone to failure that in the 2013 […]
SharePoint 2013 Search Provisioning Errors – It’s All About Permissions
Configuring Search in SharePoint 2013 can be a tricky process that is best accomplished via PowerShell scripts. For starters, those messy database names with GUID’s in them that get created from UI provisioning are just hideous, but the real issue is that a proper topology (meaning search components running on more than a single machine) […]
SmartTrack for SharePoint Promotional Video
We’ve just released a new promotional video for SmartTrack. Check it out!
Creating Permalinks for SharePoint Blog Post Items
Most commercial blogging platforms use a fixed URL structure, known as a "permalink", to identify posts – something like "http://www.myblog.com/2012/09/13/This-Is-My-Post.html". This structure makes it easy to reference a particular post, supports trackbacks/pingbacks, and makes it simple for search crawlers to locate content. Unfortunately, the SharePoint 2010 Blog template has no concept of how an actual […]
Using PowerShell to Set List View Parameters in SharePoint Web Parts
While working on some modifications to the SharePoint 2010 blog site template I ran across an interesting problem. I was trying to duplicate the functionality of a particular web part; in this case, the Posts web part which outputs a formatted display of list items on the Category.aspx page of a blog site. The default […]
How to Manually Disable Claims Authentication in SharePoint 2010
In a previous post I shared some thoughts regarding changes to authentication providers in SharePoint 2010. As I worked through the issue of removing Claims/FBA and reverting to NTLM I discovered a number of issues that manifested themselves in strange ways. The first problem I encountered was the inability for a Farm account to make […]
Access Denied Errors After Changing Authentication Provider Settings
Sometimes, we SharePointers take things for granted because we work with the platform on a daily basis and intuitively understand how things are supposed to function. Accidental site administrators, power users, and the poor folks in IT who’ve had SharePoint dumped in their lap through no fault of their own, can easily get frustrated by […]