Page Diagnostics Tool for SPO

What is Page Diagnostics Tool?

Defined as Chromium Browser Extension designed to help you identify site pages in SharePoint Online that may not be delivering optimal performance.

Where we can download the tool?

• Page Diagnostics Tool can be downloaded from here
• This tool can be also installed through chrome browser store

What can can be used for?

1. Compare characteristics of page to best practices to SharePoint Online and enlist the issues
2. Provide guidance to resolve these issues as per the best practices

What This Tool does?

• Identify total page load time
• Which actions needs attention
  1. It detects large images (Images which are larger than 300 KB)
  2. Content Delivery Network check – Which items from page are not using CDN
  3. How many request call went to SharePoint? It also indicates how many only to have like best practice is maximum 25
  4. Which web parts are using iFrames? iFrames slows down the performance
  5. Which web parts affecting performance
  6. Where improvements can be done. That means for example this tool enlists WebParts which take more than 2000 MS to render

It’s interesting to analyze performance of modern and classic sites before publishing them to production environments

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SharePoint Online: Not possible to add guest users

While I was doing a implementation in a customer, I faced a weird thing, I created a new Site Collection, and when I was trying to invite people that I had in the B2B tenant, I was not able to find them.

If I tried with an internal users, I was able to find them, so I was sure that the problem was with the external users.

The first thing that I checked, was the properties of the SC to be sure that I can invite external users, and of course I checked this parameter at tenant level, was with no luck.

So, I started to check commands in Docs, and I found a command very interesting: ShowpeoplepickerSuggestionForGuestUsers

So I decided to give it a shot:

Once executed the last command, I was able to find guest users

Mistery solved!!

Where to store my data in O365

Nowadays nobody likes file servers, probably because are often in a state of chaos, and accessing them from a mobile device is difficult.

But for our luck, we can use O365 to adress this problems in order to store and share files in other systems like OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint.

The key point here, is files are stored in the cloud, so can be accessed easly from any device and probably anywhere (depends on the security implemented at your organization). So… there is no need to use the corporate network or to log into a VPN.

So let’s take into smaller pieces:

• Personal Data OneDrive: This is not a surprise, all your personal data MUST be stored on your OneDrive (I am not talking about your personal OneDrive), your corporate OneDrive!! OneDrive is mobile accessible, syncs with the user desktop, allows to sync certain files. It’s easy to find what you’re looking for. For me, it’r a masterpiece in the user Adoption
• Collaborative Projects Microsoft Teams: Any data that is being shared and worked within a group of users, should be on Teams, in addition to sync, mobility and search capabilities, it integrates an IM solution and other features as notes, calendar, Planner, which provides a complete collaborative workspace.
• Corporate Data SharePoint: Final versions of data and files that are shared company wide, should be stored in SHarePoint. You can include several layers of securioty, which provices a safe place where store confidential documents.

As you can see, there are several options inside O365, but as always you will need to implement a Governance plan inside your tenant to be sure that your data is secured.

Copy and Move in O365

When we were having all our files in SHarePoint and OneDrive onPremises it was a nightmare to copy and move files between Document Libraries, sites, etc.. but fortunately this have been changed and new features have been introduces to bypass this.

The following table lists the behaviour of the Copy/Move functionality in OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online and of course Teams and other services associated:

 

Action	Behavior	Notes
Move File(s)	Moves the selected file(s) to the designated target container Retains metadata Retains sharing	Does not overwrite if filename exists, reports back error
Move Folder(s)	Moves the selected folder(s) to the designated target container Recreates a new copy of the folder Retains sharing	Does not overwrite if filename exists, reports back error
Copy File(s)	Copies the selected file(s) to the designated target container Recreates a new copy of the file(s) with new metadata Does not retain sharing	Does not overwrite if filename exists, reports back error
Copy Folder(s)	Copies the selected folder(s) to the designated target container Recreates a new copy of the folder with new metadata Does not retain sharing	Does not overwrite if filename exists, reports back error

As you can see i the table, If one or many of the files already exist at the target, they are not overwritten, not even with a new name or new version. You will instead get a note on this and the result

SharePoint Online: error deploying apps in the App catalog

Currently, I faced a weird problem, I was trying to implement an App solution into a customer catalog, but every time I tried to deploy the solution, it was impossible to be deployed.

The weird thing here, that I have a development tenant, were I am able to deploy the app without problem, so I was struggling into it to discover what was the real problem.

So after deploying several time the app into the catalog, I accessed to the “Integrated Apps” inside Services, and I realized that this was turned off. So… after turning on this feature I was able to deploy correctly the app and the problem was solved.

For more info for how to turn on the the apps: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/misc/integrated-apps?view=o365-worldwide

 

On-Premises Gateway

We are living in a digital transformation to O365, but by the time we are doing this, our customers still need to connect their On-Premises data like SharePoint or SQL to Office 365 applications (PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, Logic Apps, Power BI).

For that reason, Microsoft has introduced on-premises data gateway for providing a quick and secure connection between on premise data and Office 365 apps.

We must keep in mind that there are two different types of gateways, one of them is On-Premises and the other gateway, is the personal gateway, which only allows to connect to PowerBI and can be used as an individual without any administrator configuration.

In the following image, we can see the differences between the personal gateway and the On-Premises gateway:

Moreover, the current supported On-Premises applications are SharePoint 2016 and SQL 2016, as you can see in the diagram below, there are multiple O365 connections to On-Premises services:

The installation process is straightforward, and only is needed a server with the following requirement to use the gateway:

Hardware Requirements:

Hardware Requirements	Value
CPU	8 Cores
RAM	8 GB

Software Requirements:

Software Requirements	Value
.NET Framework	Version – 4.5
Operating System	Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2, or later

If you require more info about the gateway, you can follow the links:

https://flow.microsoft.com/es-es/blog/on-premises-data-gateway/

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/es-es/documentation/powerbi-gateway-onprem/

https://docs.microsoft.com/es-es/azure/analysis-services/analysis-services-gateway

Open and closed terms in Managed Metadata

As you will know, term sets allow users to create collections of terms, which it can be reuse to associate content. In this case, usually, the SPO admin or the site owner prepopulate the Term set for all the users. But what happen when we have created a term set and we want to allow the users to add their own values into an specific term set?

In one hand, we can talk about open and closed term sets, by default, term sets are closed, so the term manager, must create the term and users will need to use them. There is no possibility to add new terms

On the other hand, we have open term sets, in this case we allow users to add their own values to the term set from input forms, it’s like to say: Ok, I’m allowing to create new terms on the fly

This option is quite great, but you have to be careful, because this option probably will not fit with your SharePoint governance strategy…

 

What happens when external sharing is enabled?

Imagine that you’re in a project where external collaboration is needed, but first, you want to know what exactly happens when a document, site or whatever is shared with external users (users from other company, let’s say).

Firstly, someone has to send an invitation to this external user to collaborate. You have many options to select, to requiere wether user sign in or not

Secondly, the invitation arrives to the user, and he has to accept it.

Take into account that these kind of invitations remains in the request list in the site, so any admin could reject the invitation in the meantime.

Once the user, has accepted the invitationhe could access to the site with the permissions given (full control, contribute, etc…). For example, if you share a document with an external user with the permission “Full Control”, an entry is created in the “Team Site Owners” inside the site. So, you can revoke the acess by removing the user from the Owners group.

that’s all! Next day I will cover what happens with other things!

Cheers!

File Shares as Content Source in SharePoint 2013 On Premises

Hi all!

Another quick post about file shares and SharePoint:

1. Identify your crawl account, because this account will be used to index the file share (unless specified differently with a crawl rule), so it is necessary to have read access to the file share to this account
2. If crawled files in file share system contain metadata, this will be used by the search refiners in SharePoint
3. Security trimming is respected, so when end users search the document in the search site, it will be displayed according to the permissions given on the files and folders.
4. Only metadata of the documents will be stored in SharePoint, not the documents
5. It is not possible to get a preview from Office documents that are stored in File Shares, to get a preview, you’ll need to use third party tools.

That’s all!

Disable Mobile view

In case you need to disable the mobile view in all your SharePoint Sites, the following code can be used:

$sites = get-spwebapplication http://mss2013be | Get-spsite -limit ALL
foreach ($site in $sites) {
foreach ($web in $site.AllWebs) {

Disable-SPFeature -identity d95c97f3-e528-4da2-ae9f-32b3535fbb59 -URL $Web.URL -Force -Confirm:$false
write-host "Feature desactivada en el sitio: $($Web.Url)"
}
}

A similar code can be used for SharePoint Online, in this case will change the way how you connect to SPO and how you deactivate the feature from SPO, in this case the command is: Disable-SPOFeature

Enjoy!