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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Restore Deleted Site Collection

One of my colleagues came to me in a flustered state recently, having accidentally deleted one of our main site collections. Alas this was very easily done - when trying to delete a

Cloud

My SharePoint Online Sessions Now Available at Channel9

During the recent MVP summit in Redmond I was invited to co-present some SharePoint Online sessions for posting on Microsoft Virtual Academy. It turned out this would be a little nerve wracking as

MVP

Another MVP Summit

It was my privilege to attend the MVP Summit in Redmond again this year. Of the many great things about being an MVP this has to be the best. We had a gathering

SUG

Next SharePoint User Group Switzerland is Imminent!

Our next meet-up of 2014 is scheduled! SharePoint MCM and MVP Francesco Sodano is joining us to deliver a session on how to Use Azure to Host your SharePoint 2013 Farm. Then we

Powershell

Powershell Find Items with no checked in version

When a user adds a document to a library for the first time, but omits to check in that file that information risks getting lost. This can happen for a variety of reasons

Excel

Calculating Storage Trends with a Pivot Table

If you have a heavily used Site Collection you have to keep an eye on content database size. Generally speaking the content database for a single site collection should not exceed 200Gb, and

Powershell

Create Multiple Document Sets with Powershell

Just recently I've been having a heap of fun writing Powershell to aid a SharePoint content migration. Looking at one of the scripts I figured it's a nicely condensed way to demonstrate a