Heard good things, time to check it out
I keep hearing good things about WordPress and with the need to move my SharePointLonghorn.com blog to a new host, I figure it’s time to see what all the fuss is about here. Most posts to come very shortly…
Debugging an Explorer View issue
During a recent SharePoint 2010 upgrade project, we applied SP1 and DEC 2012 CU & encountered a frustrating issue. Everything in the farm was working as expected after we did the installation & ran PSCONFIG, except for an issue where some users could not use Explorer View to open some Document Libraries. More detailed user testing revealed that the issue only occurred for user who were using computers running Windows Vista or later. Windows XP users could open in explorer…
Creating a Sysprepped Windows Server 2012 image
One of the advantages to running Windows Server 2012 is the highly improved Hyper-V engine. In my time working on deployment scenarios I have found that creating a reliable baseline VM is critical to my success in getting farms deployed quickly and easily. To this end I have found that getting a new VM server with the OS installed to the correct level with patches, the SharePoint prerequisites, and all of the customizations that I like to have on a…
How to: Activate Desktop Experience in Windows Server 2012
I ran into an issue where I needed to active that Desktop Experience in on Windows Server 2012 and found that it was not in the same place that I was expecting it to be from previous versions. Figured that this might help some people. Desktop Experience is required to be running if you are going to utilize OneNote, which when working in a demo server environment can be very useful. There are some DLLs that are not accessible unless…
How to: Create Active Directory Users using PowerShell
Not unlike several posts in recent weeks, tonight’s adventures in PowerShelling started with from a conversation at SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire with the Iowan treasure Todd Klindt. The conversation was around the script that he used to create Active Directory users. I had my own bit of jumbled together code for this purpose, but his has some snazzy ifelse-ness to it and the ability to set Managers and add Pictures that made it especially appealing. At the same time there…
How to: Automatically log your PowerShell session every time
Preface At SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire I sat in a packed room and listened as Todd Klindt showed everyone how to install SharePoint 2013 without screwing it up (too badly). The big take away for me was this command that I had not heard about before called start-transcript. The power of start-transcript is that it is able to write everything that you do in a PowerShell session to a log file that you can review later. Todd demo’ed how he…
SQL Server 2012 SP1 is here & it’s huge for SharePoint 2013 BI
This is a massive deal for SharePoint 2013 BI. Here is an excerpt from What’s New in SQL Server 2012: “Business Intelligence highlights (with SQL Server 2012 SP1, Office and SharePoint Server 2013 ) Business Intelligence highlights (with SQL Server SP1, Office and SharePoint Server 2013 Preview) are: Enable self-service BI as a natural part of users day-to-day activities in Excel 2013: Access and mash-up data from any source (PowerPivot). Documentation related to PowerPivot in Excel 2013 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=255958). Stunning visualizations…
How to: Create a OneNote help file out of a PowerShell Module
Being an ITPro in the current day and age I write a decent amount of PowerShell. Since I am not always on a server that has the SharePoint PowerShell modules installed most of my time on TechNet is spent basically reading the help files of specific modules to validate syntax, flags or review examples. This can become a bit of a pain after a while so I thought it would be nice to have a OneNote notebook on my SkyDrive…
Planning a SharePoint Saturday: A recap of #SPSNH
We are now almost a month removed from SPSNH and it has been just enough time for the glow to start to fade and for life to start getting back to normal. The event was wildly successful and somehow managed to receive nothing but positive reviews. There were a few things that I noted that are worth mentioning: 1.) Drop off between registration and attendance was between 30-40%. 2.) Doing 6 keynotes instead of 1 made the day interesting, but…
Office 2013 has reached RTM… SharePoint, Lync & Exchange as well.
The big news of the [yester]day (after presenting at NHSPUG & then doing other work this post won’t actually go up until morning) is that Office 2013 has reached RTM. Big excitement for those of us who are already huge fans, but especially exciting is the announcement that Office, SharePoint, Exchange and Lync will all be dropping at the same time. The MSDN & TechNet availability is stated to be “mid-November” (can’t imagine what event that might coincide with) and…