BIFocal LLC

Author: jhimmel

  • Setting up SharePoint Online collaboration with external users

    One of the key enhancement in SharePoint 2013 is the ease of sharing. Being able to share a site, library, or piece of content is as easy as clicking on the Share button and specifying a user and assigning the rights you want them to have. This, along with the new licensing model that allows non-organizational users to use your SharePoint environment without requiring a CAL or FIS licensing for the farm, have made SharePoint 2013 target for extranets.

    Once a site collection is established sharing with external users is quick and easy. The one thing that is that upon intial setup of a private site collection in SharePoint Online is to setup sharing with external parties. By default sharing is set to “Don’t allow sharing outside your organization”. When you attempt to share with outside people from a site collection that still has this set you get a message that no results are found when typing in an email address.

    no sharing

    To change this you need to log into the SharePoint admin center select the site collections tab on the left nav and then select the site collection you wish to enable external sharing for.

    O365 Site Collections

    Once selected click on the Sharing option in the ribbon and set the option to “Allow external users who accept sharing invitations and sign in as authenticated users”. This will allow you to share securely with specified users.

    SPO External sharing

    Once this is set return to your site collection and attempt to share again. You should find a result based upon the email address that you entered now.

    yes sharing

    If you prefer to allow users to share links and allow external parties to access the site collection without having to authenticate you can chose the “Allow both external users who accept sharing invitations and anonymous guest links”.

  • Setting up open Lync Federation in Office 365

    When I made the decision to use Office 365 one of the drivers for this decision was getting to use Lync under my own domain. The benefit of being able to use a single account for ease of reach now that Lync and Skype are federated along with the ability to archive conversations in my Exchange account were just too good to pass up.

    Setting up Lync was a seemless process, but I was not able to communicate with anyone outside of my own domain, and talking to myself tends to get boring after a while. Not being a Lync guy I had to do so

    me digging to figure out what the right settings were to enable the federation with external domain.

    From the Admin drop down select the Lync menu. Once in the Lync admin center select the organization menu on the left nav. Once in the organization menu you will select the external communication tab. Here you will be able to set external access. For my purposes I have opted to enable “On except for blocked domains” as I want to be able to communicat with anyone. If I were in an organization that I wanted to limit communications between specific domains I would select the “On only for selected domains”.

    The other option that can be set here is the public IM connectivity setting that will allow Lync users to communicate with Skype users and other public Instant Message providers supported by Office 365.

    The set of options here is what domains you want to block if following the open model, or what domains to allow communications with if you are using the restrictive model.

    nc federation

    Once these options are set active users should log out and log back to take advantage of the new permissions.

    Happy Lync’ing!

  • PowerShell Script: SharePoint Farm Creation

    For a long time I have been meaning to rewrite the PowerShell script that I have been using to do my SharePoint farm creation and just haven’t gotten around to completing the necessary effort to make it all that I want it to be. I have leveraged the work of others, borrowing a piece here and a snippet there but to honest I haven’t been satisfied.

    What I really wanted was a script that I can use in my consulting practice as a normalized practice of how a farm should be deployed as well as a script that I could use in the highly repetitive process of doing ITPro dev work. I wanted something that was flexible enough to use for client installs, but repeatable enough that I could use it in my dozens of farm builds that I do in my spare time for troubleshooting and fun.

    Here are the key points of what I did differently with this script:

    1. use temporary variables that can be accepted or overridden at the PowerShell command-line when the script is called
      SNAGHTML37d3721b
    2. validate if the pieces have been implemented correctly & gives information about what piece failed, not just throwing the ugly PowerShell errors that we are used to seeing
      SNAGHTML37d4db9e
    3. validate that you are using PowerShell running as Administrator to ensure that you won’t fail for that silly reason
      SNAGHTML37d64475
    4. pulls the system & domain variables rather than having to set those parameters manually
      SNAGHTML37d7b73f

    I am happy to report that I was able to accomplish all of these things in my script and am happy to offer it up for others to use if you see fit. I highly recommend that you consider using the PowerShell profile that I laid out in my previous article “How to: Automatically log your PowerShell session everytime” so that you can, among other things, capture the output of building your farm.

    There are very few people who can honestly say that they created their PowerShell scripts completely from scratch, and I am certainly not among them. Credit is due for snippets & reference to Shannon Bray, Gary LaPointe, Brian Lalancette, Todd Klindt, & I’m sure others. Special appreciation to Evan Riser for helping me QA this script. 

    One last thing to note about this script… it does just what it says it does. It creates a SharePoint farm.  This is not an all inclusive build your farm & configure every setting script. If you are looking for the all inclusive, über build & configure script please go visit Brian’s codeplex project: AutoSPInstaller. There is no need for anyone to recreate the amazing work that he has done. 

    The reason I create this scripts like this is that I prefer to break my scripts down into pieces and keep them highly modular. This is partly because I consult on such a wide variety of projects that it makes my life easier to be able to deploy pieces at a time using different scripts. It also could be that I am a neurotic, lunatic control freak who is a bit over obsessed with developing in PowerShell for fun.  Hopefully it’s more the first thing than the second thing… 🙂

    I will continue to publish the scripts that I find useful here in the hopes that it helps someone else along the way. You can find my SharePoint Farm Creation PowerShell script here on my SkyDrive.

  • Updated PowerShell Profiles Creation Script

     

     

    While enjoying Doug Hemminger’s presentation at the SharePoSH meeting tonight I realized that I hadn’t published an update to my How to: Automatically log your PowerShell session every time post, even though I had fixed some issues with the script more than 2 months ago. FYI, I still blame Todd Klindt for prompting me to write this thing in the first place by introducing me to start-transcript…

    I updated the version of code in the previous post from v1.8 to v1.14 without posting about it, however the output formatting was poor.

    The major changes from v1.8 to v1.15 are:

    1.) Proper formatting of screen outputs
    2.) Added PowerShell Active Directory modules
    3.) Outputting a validated list of snap-ins & modules that are actually loaded instead of just printing on screen that the SharePoint module loaded even when it hadn’t
    4.) Validation that the user is running in the context of an Administrator
    5.) Removed unnecessary code & added proper commenting inline

    You can find the updated code at on SkyDrive here.

  • Creating hotkeys for functions in Word 2013

    In my previous posts on Enabling the “Mark Comment Done” & “Quick Switching between Review Markup Styles” I made reference to repetitive stress injury inducing activities and how to avoid them, but the biggest single improvement I made to my editing process for the book was creating a hotkey for Approving Comments.

    I have long been a fan of Office Application allowing me to customize my toolbar and tabs, but until recently I did not realize what I was missing with creating hotkeys.  The operation is simple and intuitive and makes repetitive functions significantly easier to live with.

    Simply right-click in the ribbon and select “Customize the Ribbon”

    1

    This will open the Word Options window where you will select the “Keyboard shortcuts:” customize button.

    2

    Once open you will select the tab that contains the feature you are looking to create a hotkey for.  In this case I selected the Review Tab and chose the AcceptChangesOrAdvance option.

    3

    To avoid the aforementioned repetitive stress injury inducing activity I chose to employ multiple key combinations so that I could switch hands as I went so that I didn’t over use one combination and cause myself to be a claw-handed, arthritis riddled, angry author.  The nice thing about the Customize Keyboard window is that it lets you know when key combination is already in use so that you can decide whether or not you want to override the existing hotkey or add an additional hotkey.

    4

    Once I assigned the changes I was able to go back to Word and use the hotkey right away.  This saved me a decent chunk of time as it allowed me to keep both hands on the keyboard and not to have to use the touch screen or the mouse.

  • Quick switching between Review Markup styles in Word 2013

    This is the second in a shorts series of helpful hits for editing using Word 2013.  You can find the first in the series Enabling the “Mark Comment Done” here. 

    When I first started with the copyedit review of my book I used to go into the Review tab for each chapter and select to show All Markup each time.  This repetitive stress injury inducing activity was not only annoying, but it was counter productive as it made it difficult to understand the full context of the changes that were being proposed.

    Happily I stumbled upon a feature that was previously unknown to me.  It is possible that this has been a part of Word in previous versions, but as I have not had to review documents in such a massive way until the book, I hadn’t ever bothered to look into the Markup features.

    The feature that I am referring to is the inline show/hide side bar.

    1

    This side bar is grey when All Markup is being show and red when Simple Markup is employed.  To toggle between the two simply click on the side bar.

    2

    This will allow you to quickly and easily see what changes are being made and what the output will look like without having to hit the toolbar, which is optimal when you are in a touch enabled environment such as a Surface or other tablet.

    I found this feature to be invaluable when working on edits and reviews for the book.  Since no one had pointed it out to me before, I figured it was worth sharing.

  • Enabling the “Mark Comment Done” feature in Word 2013

    I am finally at the end of the first copyedit review for my book “Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint” and the experience has left me with some valuable tidbits about how best to edit 400+ page word documents.  I will post these during the course of the next week.

    While co-author, Dave Feldman, and I are both using Office 2013 and had every intention of leveraging all of the great features that come as a part of the .docx format, we found that people in the book publishing biz tend to be on less up to date software and would send us drafts in .doc format.  This made it so that the “Mark Comment as Done” feature is not available.

    1

    Convert from Compatibility Mode

    To solve this go to the File Menu (or Backstage) and select convert.

    2

     

    You will get a warning that you are about to upgrade to the newest file format to which you will say OK.

    3

    This will light up “Mark Comment Done”.

    4 

  • Speaking at RISPUG on 4/3/2013

    If you are in the Southern Massachusetts/Rhode Island/Eastern Connecticut area Wednesday night (or even if you aren’t, it might still be worth the road trip… I’m doing it!) and are interested in learning about what’s new in SharePoint 2013 for ITPros, then come out to the Rhode Island SharePoint Users Group at Providence College.  In it’s seventh month RISPUG is alive and thriving, so come out and join us for a good old fashion geeky evening of SharePoint talk!

    I will be presenting my ITPro’s taking the SharePoint 2013 Red Pill deck which is available on my on my SlideShare site.

  • Upgrading an existing Office 365 Tenant to the latest SharePoint Online

    After a very long wait I finally had a SharePoint Online tenant that was ready for upgrade.  For those who have not yet been blessed with this gift from Microsoft, I have screen captured the process for you to check out.  Sadly, SharePointLonghorn.onmicrosoft.com has not yet received the upgrade so I have not yet cut over completely to the cloud.

    Enjoy!

  • SharePoint Road Show Presentations

    For the last few weeks I have been lucky enough to speak at some amazing events, specifically SharePoint Saturday Philly, SharePoint Saturday Austin, SPTechCon & SharePoint Fest Denver.  Doing shows like this always remind me just how amazing the SharePoint Community is.  I get a chance to interact with people from all walks of life, all different experiences with technology, and all different levels of knowledge within the sphere.  Thank to everyone who attended my sessions at these events.  As promised, I have uploaded my decks to SlideShare. 

    I am excited to present for SPTechCon Boston & SharePoint Fest DC again, and on the East Coast this time, later this summer.