Jamie McAllister

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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 sub site they'd gone into site settings, but from force of habit then clicked into

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 the format was on-camera! I usually provide voice overs for my videos, not 'star' in

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 that included just under half of all the MVPs in the world! There are many familiar faces

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 have local Dynamics CRM expert Kevin Crampton to talk about how to CRM and SharePoint can be

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 such as missing mandatory fields or simple forgetfulness. The user who added the file can see it

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 the limit is lower when you have multiple site collections in a single content DB; Here'

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 few useful Powershell goodies whilst serving a useful purpose in SharePoint. The full

.NET

How to Write SharePoint Code for Bad Performance

Whilst browsing some SharePoint blogs I came across an interesting code sample. The code showed how to edit item properties in an Event Receiver on a library.Here's a partial excerpt; using (SPSite site = new SPSite(properties.Web.Site.ID)) { using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb(properties.Web.ID)

Latest SharePoint User Group - Office 365 and SP2013 Search

Our first meet-up of 2014 promises to start the year in good form! Office 365 expert Mark Stokes will be coming over from England specially to deliver a session on what Cloud can do for you. Then we have local MVP Marius Constantinescu to explain the new Search goodies in

Sharepoint

Hiding Multiple Ribbon Buttons

For a particular Form Library I was interested in making it difficult to do too much with the Forms except add them. I employed a range of measures, one of which was to hide the ribbon buttons for Sharing or opening with Explorer View. This can be done by creating

MVP

SharePoint MVP for 2014

Yesterday I received the legendary email from Microsoft telling me I'd made the MVP grade for another year. I'm thrilled to be selected again, as I'd assumed my getting the MVP last year was some sort of administrative error that they'd hopefully

Detect Choice Value on Form

If you want to do anything clever with a Document Library form it can be harder than you'd like. There was a requirement recently to disable changes to a Library item if the status of the item (a Choice field) was a certain value. To do this I

Harmon.ie: SharePoint Outlook integration

I've been set an interesting task today in that I'm reviewing harmon.ie for Outlook [http://harmon.ie/integrate-sharepoint-outlook] at the behest of Harmon.ie [not that sponsorship ever stops me letting rip >;)) ]. This is a tool I use daily at work and train other

.NET

Alternatives to SharePoint Timer Jobs

Note to reader [28th March 2018] - the following article is still valid if you're on SharePoint 2010 or older and unable to use Cloud. However if those conditions don't apply then you now have access to Flow, Azure Functions and all that good stuff, making

.NET

Update Choice Field using CSOM (Client-side Object Model)

I was putting together some CSOM Managed code to update an existing Choice column in SharePoint. Noticed that existing online examples show creating a new column or reading the values in a column, but nothing about update. The Red Herring that is the SchemaXml property on Field sent me the

Cloud

SharePoint On-Premises Lives

Over the past year or so I've spoken to some SharePoint customers who have been confused by the SharePoint message coming out of Redmond. Microsoft, in their enthusiasm to promote Office 365 have not really assured customers on the future of SharePoint On-premises. There's been a