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How to Use SharePoint Part 10 – Explorer View

Lauren Schmitt — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 16:23:12 +0000

Now that we’ve spent a couple blogs evangelizing the use of metadata in a document library, let’s reverse course. Today I’m going to focus on Explorer view. This has been something SharePoint has had for a few iterations now (at least SharePoint 2010, probably 2007). But it surprises me how infrequently it’s used. There are some caveats, which I’ll cover in this blog, but there are some very distinct advantages. Using it in the right circumstance can save you hours of waiting and frustrating.

What is Explorer View?

Explorer View allows you to open a SharePoint document library in Windows Explorer. It uses WebDav (which has its own limitations) but it allows you to move files to and from the library as if it were a local folder. The obvious advantage is being able to download and upload multiple files in a single shot.

How to Use Explorer View

In older versions of SharePoint, there was an option in the ribbon bar called Open with Explorer. Simply click on the button when using Internet Explorer and the document library opens in a Windows Explorer window.

In Office 365, the option is available from the Document Library menu.

When you click View in File Explorer SharePoint opens a new tab with the traditional view of a document library. From there, you click Open with Explorer.

After you click the correct option, Explorer opens with the view into your document library.

Now you can copy and paste as if the library were a local folder.

Good Times to Use Explorer View

Starting a New Library

You may have occasion to create a new library in order to store a series of documents. You can, of course, create the library, add the columns (metadata) to the library, and then upload the documents one-at-a-time, completing the metadata as the documents are uploaded.

But using Explorer View and Datasheet View will save you time and frustrating. Here is the approach I would recommend:

Create new library
Add metadata columns to the library. DO NOT MAKE ANY OF THE FIELDS REQUIRED at this point. If you do so, it may muck up the process because SharePoint will want the required fields populated when saving the document.
Create a view that contains all the metadata columns you want populated.
Access Explorer View.
Copy and paste all the documents into the library.
Return to the library and use Datasheet View for the view you created.
Populate metadata for the documents you just uploaded.
If necessary, in the Document Library settings, mark those columns you want required as Required.
The library is now current and ready for new documents!

Downloading Multiple Files from the Library

I’ve used – and still use – too many versions of SharePoint. It’s hard for me to remember which version can do what. You may need to download local copies of multiple documents in a library. It seems as if you should be able to select all the files you want and click download. This definitely doesn’t work in older versions of SharePoint. The last time I tried in Office 365, the documents download as a zip file… and even then I thought the process was clunky.

Regardless of the version of SharePoint I’m currently using, Explorer View has always worked for me.

Simply open the library in Explorer view, and use standard Shift-click or Ctrl-click to highlight the desired files, and copy them to my local machine. Easy.

Saving Files when Folders are Necessary

What? I just spent some time the past few weeks detailing why folders are an unnecessary evil of SharePoint libraries and encouraged all of you to use metadata instead. However, there are occasions when folders are necessary.

I use it when creating online curriculum that I want to save in SharePoint. The HTML 5 files produced by Adobe Captivate contain a standard index.html file and then a series of folders.

Of course, I could recreate this structure in SharePoint manually. I’d have to create folders, upload each document to the correct folder, and if there’s subfolders within the folder, repeat the process. It’s much easier to do it all with a quick copy and paste.

So I simply navigate to the library where I want the files stored. I open the folder in Explorer View. And then I just copy and paste the entire output of Captivate to the library (after changing the json references… but that’s for another blog).

After waiting a bit, the files are uploaded with the correct foldering structure, and the curriculum is ready for view. A user just has to access the index.html file.

When Not to Use Explorer View

If you want a previous version of a document, do not use Explorer View. Explorer View displays the most recent version.

If you need the metadata Explorer View will not work. If you need to move a series of documents from one library to another, it may seem the best way is to open both libraries in Explorer View and just pop the documents from one window to the other. However, if you do this, the metadata will not be in the new library. This can cause problems if you are actually CUTTING and PASTING. If you go this route, not only will the new library NOT contain the metadata, but because you actually moved the documents, the metadata will not be in the old library. It’s just lost.

Big files. WebDav’s limitation is 47.7 MB. I usually try to stay below 45 MB as a general rule. This holds true regardless of the maximum upload setting in SharePoint. The limitation is not SharePoint’s, it’s the WebDav technology. This maximum size is per file, not per bulk process. So if you have 100 documents that are each 1 MB, you are save to use Explorer View. If you have 1 document that’s 50 MB, don’t even try. It will bomb out.

Conclusion

Using Explorer View can make your SharePoint life easier, especially when working with multiple documents. But you need to use it judiciously. There are occasions when it may cause more harm than good. But if used wisely in the right circumstance, it can spare you hours of frustration.

Questions? Contact us to discuss your unique needs and learn more about our SharePoint support services.

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SharePoint Troubleshooting Tools – PowerShell

Lauren Schmitt — Thu, 21 Jun 2018 14:09:05 +0000

So far in this series we have covered a few of the tools a SharePoint administrator must master in IIS Logs, ULS Logs, and ULSViewer. Another that tool that every SharePoint administrator absolutely has to master is PowerShell. Every Microsoft application platform these days has a PowerShell API, including the cloud applications. To truly set yourself apart as an automation-focused administrator you need to learn PowerShell. In this article we will cover the basics of SharePoint PowerShell. We’ll also touch on some ideas on how you can put it to work for you.

Getting Started: Permissions

First things first. In order to run PowerShell commands against SharePoint (object model and databases) you are going to need the permissions to do so. You are going to need to be a farm administrator and have your account added to the SP Shell Admin group on the databases. Actually your account can be granted object model and limited content database access if you do not need full farm access. This is done using the “-Database” parameter of the Add-SPShellAdmin cmdlet. For our purposes we are going to ensure your account has full access to everything.

There are a couple different PowerShell IDE’s that are available as part of Windows Server and the SharePoint installation where you can author and run PowerShell scripts. These are PowerShell ISE (integrated scripting environment) and the SharePoint Management Shell. You can find these by searching form the Windows Server start menu. ISE is better suited for writing longer reusable scripts where the SP Management Shell is good for quick commands. Another very good options is Visual Studio Code which is more powerful than ISE, but we won’t cover that here. It requires a separate install and is free from Microsoft’s website.

The SharePoint Management Shell is just a PowerShell console window with the SharePoint module pre-loaded for you. The SharePoint Module is the SharePoint PowerShell API that contains hundreds of cmdlets specifically for SharePoint. If you prefer ISE then you’ll need to add “Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell” as the first line of your file to gain access to the SharePoint cmdlets.

Adding User Accounts

If you open the SharePoint Management shell and you see an error that the local farm is not accessible, then your account has not yet been added using the Add-SPShellAdmin cmdlet.

To add this user account to the SP Shell Access role you’ll need to run:

Add-SPShellAdmin -UserName DEMO1604\brett" />

Note the account you’re using to run this command will need to have DB_Owner on the target database. In this case the SharePoint configuration database. This also adds the user account to the WSS_Admin_WPG local groups on each farm SharePoint server.

Checking Brett’s SQL permissions we see that he was added as a login in SQL Server. He was also added to the SP Shell Access and SPDataReader roles on the configuration database.

Granting Access

We have not added Brett’s access to our content databases yet, so he will not be able to run PowerShell commands against sites in those content databases. We only have one content DB in our farm named WSS_Content_usclouddemo1604.uscloud.com. Running specific commands against the site content will result in access denied errors to the content database.

To grant Brett access we’ll need to run the same Add-SPShellAdmin command but specify the database name as a parameter. We have to use the Get-SPContentDatabase cmdlet inside of parentheses because the –Database parameter requires a specific SPContentDatabase object type to be passed into it.

Now Brett has been granted Shell Admin Access on the configuration database and our content database. He can now run PowerShell commands that interact with those databases behind the scenes. If Brett is going to need to run PowerShell against specific service applications like search or user profile, he will need additional Administrative rights to those service applications and their databases.

There is a wealth of information from here online about the available SharePoint PowerShell commands. Check out this API reference. The above should get you the basic access you need to get started playing with SharePoint using PowerShell.

If you have any other questions, contact us for some answers.

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How to Use SharePoint Part 9 – Metadata

Lauren Schmitt — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 13:56:44 +0000

So how does metadata work in a SharePoint document library? The answer is however you want it to. Unfortunately, from my experience “in the field” so to speak, it seems to be rather extreme, one way or the other. Meaning, organizations choose not to use metadata at all, or they try to use too much.

Remember metadata is used to help locate information. Of course, it stands to reason that the more metadata columns you have, the easier it would be to locate information. This isn’t always the case, as too much metadata can make it cumbersome to locate data. Additionally, when prompting users to assign an excessive amount of metadata, it really slows down user adoption of the SharePoint platform. The most egregious example I saw was a library that had thirty-three metadata columns! Every time a document was uploaded, a user would have to assign thirty-three metadata fields for the file to get saved. What happened? It’s obvious isn’t it? Users stopped saving their documents to SharePoint.

Implementing Metadata

As I said, this is the extreme case. Most often, very little metadata, unfortunately, is collected in the real world. Libraries end up looking something like this:

Essentially, the metadata ends up being the exact same as if it were on a file share: Filename, Modified Date, and the person who last modified the document.

Many will use the same methodology as a file share, and create folders. Something along these lines:

This does make it slightly easier. If I want to find an Invoice for a particular year, I just go to the correct folder. I always make the analogy that using folders in a SharePoint document library is like using a traditional old paper filing cabinet. Do people remember these? Basically, you’d store a bunch of papers in hanging folders with labels. These labels are like the foldering method in a SharePoint document library.

You locate the folder you need, and then shuffle through the papers within the folder to find what you want. Although this works… kind of… it’s not really that efficient.

The problem with this method (and the filing cabinets of old) is that you are limited to essentially ONE metadata field. And although you can find information this way, there’s a better way. Have a look at this:

There’s no folders in this library. All the documents are stored in the root of the library, and have appropriate metadata associated to them. So now if I want to see all the Invoices from 2016, I don’t go into the folder. Instead, I simply use the UI filter for the Invoice Year column.

Upon using the filter:

Now you can filter by another column to find what you want.

So now I can locate Invoices from 2016 by the ACME Explosives Company. But let’s say you want to find all invoices from this company, regardless of the year.

Just clear the Year filter:

And you’ll get your results:

This is something you can’t do when foldering in SharePoint (or when using a filing cabinet for that matter). When using filtered metadata columns, you have much more flexibility on what data to display.

Even More Ways to Filter Results

You can create a view that only displays Invoices that are greater than a specific amount. In this example, I’m going to use 1000.

Here’s the result:

If you wanted to find this information without using metdata, you would have to navigate to each year folder, open each Invoice, and then record those whose amount exceed 1000. Even better, you can still apply filters to other columns. So, If I want to see only Invoices exceeding 1000 by Spacely’s Sprockets, I just use the Company filter.

As you can see, using metadata will make you SharePoint life easier. But, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, you don’t want to use too many columns. You’ll burden, frustrate, and turn off your users to the idea of SharePoint. Too much of a good thing, and all that.

Keep Your Users in Mind

The ideal number of metadata columns is four to six. This won’t overburden the users when saving content. And really, with nearly any kind of content, you could categorize the content by using six columns. In our example of Invoices, we use Company Name, Invoice Year, Invoice Amount, and Invoice number. These columns allow a user to locate a specific Invoice so long as they know some of this information.

And once users understand how easy it is to locate specific invoices using metadata, adoption and acceptance to the platform is only a matter of time. Ultimately, that’s what we all want. An easier and less bothersome way to perform our daily tasks. SharePoint document libraries, when using appropriately assigned metadata, accomplishes this.

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How to Troubleshoot SharePoint Errors – Part 2: Digging into ULS

Lauren Schmitt — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 18:59:44 +0000

In part 1 of the series we looked at a common SharePoint issue (503 service unavailable) and how to troubleshoot using IIS logs. The 503 can be caused by a number of things including patching and other SharePoint maintenance. In this article we are going to dig into another critical troubleshooting tool for SharePoint administrators – the SharePoint ULS trace logs. When troubleshooting correlation IDs and pretty much any other SharePoint application error or performance issue you’ll want to take a look at ULD logs.

Let’s start out by looking at how to configure the SharePoint ULS logging via PowerShell and Central Administration.

SharePoint has hundreds of component categories that you can individually configure to record more information in the logs. One way to take a look at these categories is with Powershell.

As a SharePoint farm administrator with shell access you can type the following in the SharePoint management shell.

Get-SPLogLevel

As you can see you can get very granular based on what SharePoint component you are troubleshooting.

There a several severity levels you can set with the ULS trace level default being medium:

Unexpected – these are typically exceptions that indicate a problem
Monitorable- these are errors that may not explicitly break functionality but should be monitored over time
High – these are high level changes in configurations, starts and stops of services
Medium – these will capture succeeding or failing out of the box functionality like creating site or list assets or enabling features
Verbose – these are typically used by developers to dig into code issues and should not be left on for long periods of time
VerboseEx – these are the most verbose and can be useful for debugging tracing in code such as loops, database calls, etc

If we wanted to make the trace logs more verbose for a specific SharePoint component you have a couple options – PowerShell or Central administration.

An example with PowerShell:

Set-SPLogLevel -Identity “SharePoint Foundation:Monitoring” -TraceSeverity Verbose

To double check that our change took effect we can run:

Get-SPLogLevel -Identity “SharePoint Foundation:Monitoring”

You’ll also notice the EventSev property. This controls the verbosity of events written to the Windows Application event log.

To set all category severity levels back to the default values you can run:

Clear-SPLogLevel

Now let’s hop on over to Central Administration and look at another way of configuring your ULS Logging. If you open up Central Administration and click on Monitoring > Configuration Diagnostic Logging you’ll see the other way to configure ULS Logging

You would just select the category check box and at the bottom select the Least critical event to report to the event/trace logs. Here is also where you configure the ULS log location on disk and how many days of data to keep on the farm servers:

If we hop on over to the folder path of the ULS logs you’ll find several log files with the naming convention of Server name – date. Let’s sort by newest first and open up the latest using notepad. You should see a table with many lines and columns

Notepad is a quick way to take a look at these log files, but the best practice is to use a utility like ULSViewer which gives you the ability to sort and filter these massive files. You can download this directly from Microsoft here. Once downloaded you can open up the application and choose File > open from > ULS and get real time log parsing. This tool is a must have for all SharePoint administrators.

If an end users receives an error that includes a Correlation ID you can use this tool to find that correlation ID and figure out what the problem really is. You can also use this tool to search for the URL the user was hitting at the time of the error. It is extremely useful. There are several ways to filter your view of these logs based on any of the fields. One of my favorites is to right click on an interesting line item > Filter by this item then select the fields to filter on.

Instead of manually digging through log files you can also search the logs using PowerShell. You can export relevant log entries based on a correlation ID. Every transaction within SharePoint is assigned a unique GUID called the correlation ID that allow you to drill down into what exactly was happening at the initiation of the process through the end. To export all events with a specific correlation ID to a new files you can run:

Merge-SPLogFile –Path “E:\error.log” –Correlation “9a376f9e-ac5a-e094-c353-dcba72ad6c9e”

Merge-SPLogFile is helpful if your SharePoint farm has multiple servers. It will go grab all events with this correlation ID from every server in the farm and put a copy into this new file.

If you have a very large farm we recommend implementing an enterprise log aggregation solution such as Splunk. This allows you to import IIS, Windows events, and SharePoint logs all into one place for troubleshooting and trend analysis. It is very powerful and helpful for larger SharePoint deployments.

I hope you found this helpful and good luck fixing SharePoint!

Let’s discuss your unique needs!

The post How to Troubleshoot SharePoint Errors – Part 2: Digging into ULS appeared first on fpweb.net.

SharePoint 2019 Features

Lauren Schmitt — Thu, 31 May 2018 20:03:47 +0000

SharePoint 2019 is on the horizon. It’s slated to be released in the second half of 2018. Although SharePoint 2016 proved a capable business platform, there is always room for improvement. Let’s take a quick look at the features expected in the next iteration of SharePoint.

Microsoft lists the Key Features as:

Modern Sites, Pages, Lists and Libraries
Team News
SharePoint Home
Communication Sites
OneDrive Sync Client
Improved hybrid support and scenarios
New developer options
Improved support for business process with PowerApps and Flow

User Interface Improvements

Let’s face it. Native SharePoint, though functional, is quite ugly and dated. SharePoint 2019 hopes to rectify this by bringing in UI features from SharePoint online. There is a new home screen where you can find all relevant sites and news in a single location. SharePoint 2019 will have Modern Team and Communication Sites. This is a big improvement over SharePoint 2016. I’ve been a user of Office 365 for some time, and although it admittedly took me a little while to get used to the Modern UI, I have found the modern Lists and Libraries sleeker and more functional. One of the more interesting features is a Modern Sharing Experience.

Administration Improvements

This is the subject I’m most interested in. Users have either at this point adopted, or chosen not to, SharePoint. Some begrudgingly dive deep in their Enterprise’s SharePoint content only when necessary. Others enjoy the sharing, collaborative features SharePoint provides. So, really, administration is key. How easy is it to maintain? What new features, if any, will make SharePoint more manageable.

SMTP authentication when sending emails. The only thing to say about this is: it’s about time. If you’ve ever had to work with relays, you’ll understand what I mean.

Workflow Manager 2019. This replaces, obviously Workflow Manager 1.0. So even though PowerApps and Flow Integration are finally happening, Microsoft understands SharePoint workflows are probably here for good… at least for the next couple versions of SharePoint. I’m not really sure what specific features Workflow Manager 2019 brings, but suffice to say based off previous experience it will be a hybrid of a few really useful features, a lot of “why is this here” and some frustration when thinking “why did they remove this feature?”

PowerApps and Flow Integration. There will be deeper integration to allow for process automation using cloud technologies to connect with on-premise data in SharePoint 2019. This is another feature that – if successfully implemented – will make it easier to create more complex automation. The only downside is all the SharePoint Designer Workflow people will have to learn something new.

Hybrid Features

Despite Microsoft’s best efforts, not all enterprises have moved to the cloud. Conceding this fact one of the major improvements with SharePoint 2019 will be native support for hybrid configurations. Some specific features related to hybrid are: a new SharePoint Hybrid status bar, OneDrive in Office 365 by Default, and “Modern Search.” I have yet to read anything from Microsoft what specifically modern search means, but I’m hoping it resolves many issues of search being wonky in current hybrid environments.

I feel the UI improvements will make this seem like a big leap for SharePoint. Ultimately, I don’t think SharePoint 2016 brought that much more than SharePoint 2013. Of course, that could be a result of where I’ve worked, and what implementations I’ve seen firsthand. But the “modern look” should give SharePoint on-premise a well needed makeover. I’m not so sure the infrastructure features add too much value to most SharePoint implementations. The hybrid feature may be useful. But hybrid is something that has been promised previously, and all former attempts fell short of the mark (my opinion only). Hopefully they get this right, from both an administrative perspective and a user perspective. SharePoint 2019 should please most users with the improved UI. Administrators will probably be fine either way. It just depends on how the migration goes…

The post SharePoint 2019 Features appeared first on fpweb.net.

Managed SharePoint Services Pricing

Bill Newton — Wed, 23 May 2018 17:36:07 +0000

As a business IT leader you are tasked with many important decisions around your company’s collaboration technology and SharePoint digital transformation. To make the right decisions for the strategic direction of your SharePoint estate and accompanying budget there are several things to keep in mind to obtain the complete picture.

The total economic impact of deploying and operating a SharePoint environment will consist of hard costs, soft costs, and you also must consider the risk. The soft costs and potential risk can at times exceed the relatively straight forward anticipated hard costs of standing up and running a SharePoint environment.

Hard costs examples

Hardware
SharePoint and SQL Server Licensing
Deployment and operational man hours

For a scenario of 500 SharePoint users and if you require high availability, you would need to follow Microsoft’s example of the smallest HA MinRole SharePoint farm:

2 x Front end web servers with Distributed Cache @$10,000\server
2 x Application Servers that also run Search @10,000\server
2 x SQL servers running SQL Always On Cluster @ $10,000\server
16 x SQL Server Enterprise licensing @ $7,000\core
4 x SharePoint Server Enterprise server licenses @ $7,000\server
500 x SharePoint User CALs @ $90\user

If this infrastructure takes 1 month to setup and deploy you can estimate it would take various IT resources 640 hours @ $65\hour, or $41,600.

These costs alone would add up to about $286,000 up front, not including management, monitoring, backup, security systems. The hardware specs could increase significantly based on your usage of SharePoint. If you require multi-datacenter resiliency, you could at least double this.

* Note these are merely estimates. Your hardware and software costs could vary greatly depending on a number of factors and economies of scale.

Soft cost examples

Vendor support
Third party SharePoint tools (Migration, Governance, Antivirus, BLOB Externalization, and more)
Operational support systems like monitoring, backup, patching, security, CDN
Employee Turnover
Inability to hire qualified SharePoint resources
Lost productivity
Low morale
Lost sales/missed opportunities

These soft cost examples will impact the ROI of your SharePoint investment and can ultimately lead to adoption failure of the technology. If you do not properly architect, deploy, and maintain SharePoint, you may never fully realize and enjoy all benefits and features the platform offers.

Examples of risk when choosing your SharePoint architecture design, business requirements and hosting parter

Risk of service outage
Risk of losing data
Risk of confidential data breach
Risk of contractual breach with your clients data hosted on your SharePoint environment

If your SharePoint environment is business critical where parts of your company cannot operate without it; any down time, data loss, or security breaches can be much more expensive than the hard costs simply deploying and running the platform (think Edward Snowden’s release of thousands of classified NSA documents).

If the platform will be used in collaboration with customers or partners you probably have contractual obligations of security and availability of the platform. Failure to adhere to these presents risk of lawsuits and lost revenue.

This article is not to scare you, but to bring to light all the pieces you must think about when planning a SharePoint deployment and choosing your managed SharePoint hosting partner.

Fpweb has been in the business for nearly two decades having built and supported over 1,000 SharePoint environments. We can help mitigate the risk and jump start the ROI of your SharePoint investment. Lean on our Microsoft Certified Gold Partner team of experts, providing all-USA-based managed SharePoint services, on-premises or in any cloud, with a live, six-minute ticket response, 24/7/365.

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The Benefits of Managed SharePoint Services

Bill Newton — Wed, 16 May 2018 13:05:52 +0000

From a SharePoint administrator’s perspective there are several advantages of partnering with a managed SharePoint services provider such as Fpweb.

There are direct benefits of outsourcing managed SharePoint services, but there are also implicit benefits that may unrealized until you are fully integrated into the service. In this article we’ll discuss a majority of these and how SharePoint managed services makes your life easier as a SharePoint administrator.

One of the immediate benefits will be cost savings in Microsoft licensing and extensive internal tiers of SharePoint support teams. The managed services provider utilizes a SPLA licensing model from Microsoft which makes licensing terms and costs much more flexible and cheaper up front for their clients.

Another cost and headache saving benefit is that you get experienced SharePoint IT professionals right out of the gate that are knowledgeable of your environment as they help you build and migrate data to it. They will do as much or as little as you need based on your support package allowing you to complete your daily administration. If you are caught in a bind, they can do deployments for you as a one off, or do all of them.

For hiring managers, you probably know how difficult it is to find qualified talent that is not demanding six figure salaries. These people are already employed and available resources from day 1 with a SharePoint managed services provider.

Not only do you get expert SharePoint engineers that help you build the environment and work hand in hand until go live, but you also get their eyes and ears and phone numbers once the platform is in production. All the monitoring, backup, patching, and antivirus tools are typically included in the services package and all handled for you. This means that you don’t have to deploy and maintain all these complex tools which in most cases never get fully deployed or maintained properly.

The not so obvious benefits would be having a 24/7 team on call that can act as your SharePoint NOC and take care of the initial incident troubleshooting and remediation without waking you at 3am on Christmas morning. Our all-USA-based, Microsoft certified support team has the ability to fix common SharePoint problems. If it is a complex problem, they can escalate within, or to you, based on how you want to work. Again, it is a flexible partnership.

Monthly security patching and quarterly SharePoint cumulative update patching is very time consuming and in some cases a full time job by itself depending on the number of SharePoint servers in your estate. The managed services team handles the tedious process of testing, patching, psconfig execution, remediation, and upgrades that without the proper automation tools and skills may not even be possible in your current scenario.

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How to Use SharePoint – Metadata

Bill Newton — Wed, 09 May 2018 14:53:17 +0000

(Part 7 of How to Use SharePoint series)

Before looking at document libraries, there should be a discussion on metadata. Understanding metadata and its uses will go a long way to successfully planning and using document libraries. Most SharePoint implementations I’ve seen take a rather rudimentary route regarding document libraries. I’ve said it many times before: they are used as glorified file shares.

In fact, a document library is probably worse than a pure data share, because your file size is restricted.

Only when you start using metadata will you fully grasp why SharePoint document libraries are so beneficial. You’ve probably heard by now the standard definition of metadata: “It’s data about data.” Um. Okay. What does that really mean? And more importantly: how does metadata help me do my job faster and easier?

Data About Data

Chances are you’ve been using metadata in a computer setting for quite some time, even if you didn’t know it. Create a Word document, give it a name, save it, and then browse to it with Windows Explorer. The actual content of the file is data. The filename helps identify the contents of the file. If you use Details View in Windows Explorer even more metadata is displayed. Created By, Modified By, File Size – this information is all considered metadata.

Metadata helps identify the contents of the data.

If you’re looking for a Word doc, most of the time you’re looking for the filename, because that’s how you remember it. But really, you are looking for the contents of the file, whether it be an invoice, a product manual, or a contract. The filename is just something that helps you locate the content.

But you can use any of the other metadata to help. If you remember the invoice you’re looking for was created last week, you can sort by Created Date and find the file. If it was a product manual that you changed just yesterday, sort by Modified Date and easily locate the correct document.

This is how most computer users have become accustomed to locating their files, by using the metadata.

SharePoint allows for the same methodology, but the concept is taken even further.

SharePoint Metadata

Let’s have a look. This is a sample of a typical SharePoint document library in use in enterprises (and small companies) all over the world. I know. I’ve seen many of them. This library stores invoices. As you can see, the idea of folders has been brought over from the days of file shares. Because that’s what we’re used to, that’s what most people do with document libraries – create folders. Again, this sample is typical in that the folders are by year.

Let’s say you need to find an Invoice from Arnold Insect Terminators from last year that was over $500.00. It’s relatively easy to do so:

Click on last year’s folder
Sort by Created Date
Scroll and find the invoice
Because there’s multiple ones, open each one
Find the one(s) that are over $500.00

Let’s take a look at how this could have been made easier. Because we knew when we created this library that it would be storing invoices, we had a little pow-wow and answered one simple question: What criteria do people use most often when searching invoices? After a little brain-storming we came up with this:

They search by Created Date
They search by Company
They search by Invoice Amount
They search by Invoice Number

Using any combination of the above, someone should be able to easily find the invoice they need. Even better, using any combination of the above, someone should be able to easily find the INVOICES they need.

In the next post I’ll illustrate how this translates to metadata in a SharePoint document library and how applying metadata makes your life easier.

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How to Troubleshoot SharePoint Errors – Part 1

Bill Newton — Wed, 02 May 2018 15:18:11 +0000

Microsoft SharePoint is a complex platform consisting of ASP.Net websites, WCF web services, SQL Server databases, Windows Services, DNS records, SSL certificates, and much more. Based on your application, it can be an enterprise content management system, records management system, workflow hosting solution, enterprise search gateway, a business intelligence portal, your company’s intranet, your company’s public website, a corporate social media platform, or even your IT help desk ticketing system.

SharePoint is a very powerful and flexible technology hub that almost every Fortune 500 company has running in its datacenters. For new SharePoint administrators or help desk professionals, it can seem like a daunting task to fully understand the intricacies, integrations, and dependencies that may lead to end user errors when accessing a site, saving a file, or publishing page content.

As a SharePoint administrator with a decade of experience digging into error codes, event logs, ULS logs and other failure indication sources I’d like to bestow upon you some of my lessons learned and the strategy I follow when troubleshooting errors reported by an end user, SCOM monitoring alert, or just plain funkiness when browsing through SharePoint sites. Due to the sheer complexity of SharePoint, its dependencies, and all the bells and whistles you can enable, the list of possible errors is endless. Throughout this series we will discuss tools that will help you decode issues and how to logically dig deeper and deeper into the root cause of an error.

Let’s start with a common error which would indicate a complete SharePoint site outage – HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.

This would classify as a major problem as the SharePoint site is completely inaccessible, but it is probably not that difficult to fix. If you load developer tools in Internet Explorer or in Google Chrome by hitting F12, click the Network tab, and click enable capturing you’ll get a little more information about what is\is not returned from the web server. The browser developer tools are very useful when troubleshooting partially loading pages or slow pages.

So it seems like our web request is probable making it to the web server, but IIS is not responding. Assuming you have access to remote into the SharePoint web server we can verify this by finding and opening the IIS logs. You can find Internet Information Services (IIS) management console by clicking Start > RUN > IIS and clicking on IIS.

Once the console opens you can locate the IIS logs by clicking the server name in the tree view and then on the main panel finding “Logging.”

Double click on Logging and you’ll see the IIS log location under the Directory field. In our case they are saved to L:\IISLogs

Before we hop over to the log location on the L drive we need to find the ID of the IIS site. To do this click on “Sites” in the IIS tree view. This will open a new panel that has a column for site ID. The one we are interested is US Cloud Demo 1604 site. Note the ID ends in 9448.

Let’s go find the IIS log for this IIS Site in L:\IISLogs.

You’ll find a folder corresponding to the IIS Site ID we just looked at above.

Let’s open up the folder for our demo site and open the most recent .log file.

As you can see there are no 503 errors reported in the log so the request never made it to our IIS site. There has to be something preventing the request within IIS. If you are not familiar with IIS, there is something called an application pool that manages the threads used for one or more IIS sites. Each application pool has a service account that it runs. Let’s go back to IIS and click on Application pools.

In this case we have an application pool with a descriptive name that is stopped. This should not be stopped. To verify this app pool in fact controls our SharePoint IIS site named USCloud Demo 6104, highlight the application pool and click on view applications.

You can see here that our application pool is mapped to the US Cloud Demo 1604 SharePoint site which is not responding. Let’s click back on Application pools and then right click on the usclouddemo1604 pool. Then click start.

If you now try and browse to the SharePoint site in your internet browser of choice the site will load!

This is just one example of a common error and fix that a SharePoint user could encounter. There could be other causes for 503 errors and for the application pool to be stopped or crashing. Usually if the application pool continuously crashes on every web request you may have a permission missing on the filesystem for the application pool account.

We hope you found this article and walkthrough helpful. Stay tuned for more SharePoint troubleshooting goodness!

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The post How to Troubleshoot SharePoint Errors – Part 1 appeared first on fpweb.net.

How to Use SharePoint – Document Libraries

Bill Newton — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 13:43:52 +0000

(Part 7 of How to Use SharePoint series)

We’ve covered SharePoint lists… why you should use them, how to use them, and how to create views. We’ve also looked at some more advanced user features like Exporting to Excel, creating alerts, and understanding versioning. Now we are going to look at SharePoint document libraries. Fortunately, many of the list features we covered translate to document libraries, so most of this content won’t be entirely foreign.

A SharePoint document library is a place to store files. That’s it. Easy, right?

Many times it’s viewed within an organization as something similar as a file share. I can store files and other people can see and edit them… if they have the correct permissions. Unfortunately, this is the extent of many organizations’ use of a document library. Ultimately, it becomes a glorified file share. A digital dumping ground where employees store documents they *think* may be needed by team members. After a couple years, the libraries often become an outdated mess, and the library becomes as convoluted as a file share in the 90s.

There are advantages to using a SharePoint document library as opposed to a file share. You’ll find many of them are the same as a SharePoint list.

Single Source of Truth

One of the big advantages is a library can store documents that represent a Single Source of Truth. Although people may have downloaded a local copy and made modifications to their own version on their desktop, the one in the library is the truth. You could, of course, do this on a file share. But you don’t have the checks in place SharePoint can impose to ensure the Single Source of Truth remains, in fact, the single source of truth.

Check-In/Check-Out

A library can be configured to require check-out prior to making any modifications to a document. While a document is checked-out, other users can view the most recently published copy. After the changes have been made, the document can be either checked-in, or the changes can be discarded. If it is checked in, this version of the document is made available to everyone. Using check-out prevents locked files and the confusion of multiple people editing the same document.

Versioning

Along similar lines as check-in/check-out is versioning. When versioning is enabled, anytime a document is uploaded that already exists, rather than overwrite the existing document, a new version is created. This prevents the dreaded overwrite mistake, where a person accidentally overwrites an important file with a blank document, or one with entirely different content. With versioning, all you need to do is revert the document back to a correct version. SharePoint can be configured to allow for any number of major and minor versions. This allows you to publish a version of the document all can see, while also maintaining a space for your drafts. Versioning will be covered in more detail in a later module.

Workflow

You can automate processes in a document library by creating an associated workflow. The most often used scenario is an approval workflow. You post a document to a library, but before it is made publicly accessible, it must be approved. Rather than sending emails and various copies of the documents back and forth, SharePoint handles and standardizes the process. Although this is a common scenario, custom workflows can be created to solve for many business’s pain points.

Metadata

A significant, but often overlooked, feature of a SharePoint document library is the ability to use metadata. Metadata is data about data… something that aids in understanding the content of a document that isn’t necessarily contained within the document. On a file share, think of Size and Date Modified as metadata. They help identify the content. In a SharePoint document library you can add any number of metadata columns, though it is recommended to maintain no more than six metadata columns. With few exceptions, six provides enough columns to find the necessary content, without overwhelming users when uploading content.

In the next few blog posts I will review some of these features in more detail. You now have a high-level understanding of document libraries and understand why they are more beneficial than a traditional file share.

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