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Ben is the Vice President of Engineering at Miller Systems. |
July 28th, 2014
You want to query AD, Exchange, SharePoint, etc. to quickly retrieve some basic, but really useful information about something really common. Examples: users, sites, etc. And of course you want to export these values to a CSV so you can sort, filter, aggregate, count, etc. in Excel or some similar tool. One or more of the values that you’ll retrieve – usually the most important ones, in our experience – is not a single value, but instead, a set of values (e.g., a user belongs to multiple groups, or multiple distribution lists.) Easy, right? Not so much.
PowerShell queries on fields/objects that naturally yield multiple results don’t return the values when you use the Export-Csv cmdlet, even when the values are displayed in the PowerShell console itself.
November 14th, 2012
The (excellent) Tuesday morning session at SPC 12, “Best Practices for Designing Websites with SharePoint 2013” was presented to an elbow-to-elbow standing room only crowd of SharePoint professionals, and the new features and best practices presented in the session elicited applause from the crowd (and frequent hooting from one person in front of me). On the surface it’s a strange room to find an Engineer in, whether SP Practice Lead or no, but I suspect the crowd represented a cross-section of SP pros of all different disciplines.
November 13th, 2012
To borrow an old, bad joke; “When is an app not an app? When it’s a document library!”
It’s obvious that Microsoft has invested a tremendous amount of time and mindshare into making the Wave 15 (SharePoint 2013) products “app friendly.” This is an exciting shift in focus for the SharePoint platform, as well as for the Office products, and especially Office 365. The investment they’ve made in enabling developers to build solutions that can function in hybrid cloud deployments with online and offline capabilities is critical, and is likely to yield a fantastic App ecosystem in the future.
October 26th, 2012
Out of the box a My Site is limited to a maximum of 100 MBs, and generates a size warning at 80 MBs. Those last 20 MBs can .go quickly, and SharePoint will not allow users to create or upload new documents once they’ve hit that limit… Worse yet, that limit may present as other types of errors, making it difficult to pinpoint – for example, auto-syncing OneNote 2010 Notebooks will simply generate errors during sync, and the errors you get are not clear and obvious. (This, in fact, is the use case that inspired this post).