Jamie McAllister

Describe it to design it - a valuable baby step towards user Nirvana in Power Automate

AI capabilities have burst onto the mainstream recently, and the pace of releases seems dizzying. One area of interest for me is the empowering of end users to create low code solutions, especially via Power Automate. The good news is there's already been a development here. I'm not talking about

Microsoft Teams Essential Training

For the past few years I've been delivering training face to face and online to get people up to speed with Microsoft Teams. Recently one of the attendees paid me a really nice compliment; She said they had MS Teams at her old place, but nobody really used it as

Covid

Life after the pandemic

History has a way of kicking you in the head when you're looking the other way.  2020 has been difficult year and there's likely to be more trouble to come. Here we look at ways the world is likely to change as a result of recent events. Fortune telling is

Flow

Power Automate - Flow to Add Update Delete SharePoint items from an Excel sheet Part01

A long awaited sequel to the Flow Uploading content to SharePoint from Excel has now been created.

Office 365

Enable Wiki on SharePoint Communication Site

SharePoint Communications sites don't have Wiki Libraries as an option by default. It's easy to enable as long as you ignore the warnings.

Recruitment

Recruitment with Ethics

Once on a lunchtime walk in Leeds city center whilst on a consulting engagement I saw a shuttered recruitment business whose tagline was "Recruitment with Ethics". It kind of amused me, as certain recruitment organizations sure seemed to struggle applying any ethical standards to their business model. Maybe that's why

Upload & Update Excel Values to SharePoint List

A Flow uploading Excel sheet values to SharePoint is useful, but nicer if it can Update too. This Flow achieves that.

MVP

MVP Renewal - Some Thoughts On The Experience

The other day I was renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the sixth time. This exceeds my own expectations by quite a few years, and it's pretty wild to still be a part of this amazing community. Some enterprising soul ran an analysis on the number of 'Office Server and

Pension

What British ex-pats need to know about Pensions

If you've ever lived or worked in the UK you might be entitled to a state pension. As an ex-pat or someone who has missed years of work you can still qualify. This advice changes April 2019 so act now!

PRINCE2

Becoming a PRINCE2 Practitioner

My days cutting code certainly aren't over, but I do increasingly manage larger scale efforts involving multiple coders and consultants. The best recent example of this was upgrading a SharePoint 2010 farm to SharePoint 2016. This is documented elsewhere but basically involved the work of ten different professionals over a

AI

Create an Interactive Chat Bot Part 1

QnA Maker is a (currently) free tool from Microsoft that allows you to create a Chatbot from semi-structured FAQ documents or web pages. This takes just a few minutes.

BlogEngine.NET

301 Redirection and SEO Blog Engine to Ghost

After the successful migration of content I needed to put in place 301 Redirects to move visitors from old blog to new. This needed .htaccess file changes, and jumping through hoops for Google.

BlogEngine.NET

Migrating from BlogEngine to Ghost Pro

Based on advice from Aussie MVP Troy Hunt I started looking into Ghost as a better blogging platform than Blogengine. The fella seemed to be right, it's offering a much better experience, but how to set it up and get your content across? Well, Troy himself offered great advice on

Cognitive Services

Real Time Presentation Subtitles and Translation

As I mentioned in a prior article, Microsoft have managed to create some impressive AI capabilities in their Cognitive Services offering. Thousands of people at Microsoft have been developing this, and continue to do so. Of course such a huge investment deserves to be used. Apparently the Big Cheeses at

Office 365

Deep Impact - Why SharePoint Developers are extinct

The new wave of software talent who answered the StackOverflow survey don't like SharePoint as a development platform because it isn't one, and in isolation it allows a fraction of the innovation the true ecosystem enables.

Conference

Time for a new Blog

A recent change of Blog platform to Ghost has been pain free, and the new experience is a big improvement.

Conference

Amazing MVP Summit - Machine Intelligence is ready for Prime Time!

Time has a way of flying by when you're not paying attention. It was recently the fifth anniversary of my first MVP award and as a result I just attended my fifth MVP Summit! Now any seasoned MVP tell you that some summits are good, and some are bad. We

Bug

SharePoint 2016 Versioning Bug after upgrade

I recently did an upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016 on-prem via an SP 2013 staging farm. This was smoother than you might expect, largely because I banned the most troublesome elements such as copious full trust solutions and Infopath forms a long time ago in anticipation of this

Content Matrix

Trapping Errors when Automating Metalogix Content Matrix via Powershell

One thing I sometimes need to do is move content around my SharePoint environment, and in some cases this is a regular thing. To help I have the migration tool Metalogix Content Matrix, which allows me to move content with it's metadata intact. A cool feature of Content Matrix is

CSOM

Deleting SharePoint Items remotely via Powershell

Recently I was trying to put together a really quick solution to delete some SharePoint 2010 items remotely using Powershell script. It'd be quite usual to incorporate CSOM into such a solution, but as I had some legacy powershell performing actions via the SharePoint web services (lists.asmx) it seemed

Performance

Deep Dive into SharePoint 2013 Performance Issues Troubleshooting - From Bogdan Coamesu

At our recent SharePoint User Group, Bogdan Coamesu delivered a great session on Performance Issues Troubleshooting. This included a very detailed slide deck, and complimentary files to help you perform the troubleshooting in your own environment. We've decided to post those files here for easy access by the SUG and

Different approach to SharePoint Migration using Powershell

Many of my SharePoint requirements recently involve moving content around or retro-fitting metadata from legacy systems. Mini-migrations might be the term I'm looking for there. I have a migration tool which is good for bulk movement of content e.g. from File Shares into SharePoint. The issue is that it's

sharepoint 2010

SharePoint 403s and the PermissionMask Mystery

The below is posted to help anyone else facing the same issue with 403's or PermissionMask messages in ULS. After some routine maintenance on our SP2010 SP2 farm (which involved a reboot of servers) we noticed an intermittent 403 error on the main intranet page. This was quickly identified as

Office 365

Print Multiple Documents from SharePoint

I got a query from a colleague who monthly needs to print many documents from a folder in a document library. This was taking them a lot of time, and they asked me to enable 'something' to print all the documents at once. There are commercial products to achieve this,

Document Management

Add Search for Current Document Set

Document Sets were first introduced in SharePoint 2010 and are an excellent way to organize content. I've gained many enthusiastic users of Doc Sets, but there is one feature they often ask for - the ability to search inside a particular Document Set. The issue is that Document Sets can