Office 365 brings it all together, finally

SharePoint Online as part of Office 365 is the Enterprise product I have been waiting for since 1999.  Finally all the benefits of web, single location, access anywhere, shared community standards and online storage along with security and resiliency are in one place.

Make no mistake about it, this is going to be the Microsoft's biggest impact on the economy since Office and Windows 95.  With Office 365 it now possible for any firm, no matter how small, to start, on day one, with Enterprise level content management, VOIP, IM, and collaboration. (I wrote this in 2014 and clearly stand by it now)

The cost of starting a new business has just gotten a great deal smaller, and the ease that existing businesses can reconfigure themselves, collaborate with outside organisations, and to bring in contractors and prosumers is now a fraction of what it was.

A Windows with Linux under the hood

Opps update is that is story is now invalid, MS is out of this business.

,BR /> Actually for some time I have been predicting a MS-Linux machine of some kind. Windows, once the backbone of MS business, is becoming less and less important in a world dominated by multi-channels and Cloud, and as Windows is less and less important as a core product it becomes a difficult to maintain mass of legacy code. I have to be frank that I have given up on Windows, but I still work extensively with Microsoft. The two are no longer a contradiction. I think the X2 Android Microsoft phone could be the first step for a generation of new devices, that offer the UI experience of Windows Metro but via HTML, running Linux, Unix and Android under the table.

Basic SharePoint 2013 Build

A fairly good introduction to SharePoint 2013 build I found, go for a learner but this is not how you will set up a proper farm.

After you learn this take a look at this blog post which tell you more about Service configuration. A lot of sites use Service Configuration wizard, but its best to get the powershell scripts for Service Configuration, which you can get here.

Powershell to restore a site collection without changing the existing security group members

Recently I had an requirement to update a wiki site collection from live, using PowerShell backup and restore, to a training environment.  The requirement further stated that the memberships of the existing training site should be kept.

Though this seems like an fairly easy requirement it turned out not to be something that could be done with Backup-SPSite and Restore-SPSite code, so I developed the code below, which works in a test environment I created.

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell

$oldm = Get-SPuser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Group "Team Site Members"
$oldo = Get-SPuser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Group "Team Site Owners"
$oldv = Get-SPuser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Group "Team Site Visitors"

Restore-SPSite "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Path C:\backup\back.back -Force
$newm = Get-SPuser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Group "Team Site Members"
$newo = Get-SPuser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Group "Team Site Owners"
$newv = Get-SPuser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Group "Team Site Visitors"

foreach ($spuser in $newm){Remove-SPUser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Identity $spuser -Group "Team Site Members" -confirm:$false}
foreach ($spuser in $newo){Remove-SPUser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Identity $spuser -Group "Team Site Owners" -confirm:$false}
foreach ($spuser in $newv){Remove-SPUser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Identity $spuser -Group "Team Site Visitors" -confirm:$false}


foreach ($spuser in $oldm){Set-SPUser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Identity $spuser -Group "Team Site Members" -confirm:$false}
foreach ($spuser in $oldo){Set-SPUser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Identity $spuser -Group "Team Site Owners" -confirm:$false}
foreach ($spuser in $oldv){Set-SPUser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Identity $spuser -Group "Team Site Visitors" -confirm:$false}

write-host "Done"

AvePoint's DocAve 6 makes SharePoint administration better

Adding a user to large set of Document Libraries is now a snap

Over the years working with SharePoint some of the main user issues I get are these:

1. Can I manage the columns of folders in dozens of sites around the Enterprise?
2. Can I add a user to a large number of sites easily?
3. Can I move a large number of document libraries from different site collections in to one site collection, or the other way around?
4. Can I turn on versioning with a single click on every document library in the farm.

Using SharePoint Central Admin there are no ways to do this, you have to create complex PowerShell coding which is time consuming and frankly its hard to find PowerShell scripts.  Now I love PowerShell myself but it not really what you want your admins doing all day, you want them giving your users value.

That is why I am so excited about AvePoint's DocAve 6, which gives you a central admin UI, separate from SharePoint central Admin, that allows you to do these kinds of things, and many more.

Moving content from one site to another is easy with DocAve 6 rich UI

In my initial set of tests on DocAve 6 running against a SharePoint 2010 Foundation farm on a VM I was able to easily add and remove users from a large set of document libraries in one go, manage column of a large group of document libraries, and move content from a document library in one site collection to another.

This is really the right tool to be managing Central Admin for a large Enterprise estate.

A good case study, and one I see all the time, would be situation where each project got its own site collection with a template.  Now each site collection has edited its template so that the same information is encoded different between different projects.

With DocAve 6 its possible to clean up the document libraries, to make them more consistent and to clearly she what columns different teams have created.  You can also move all the document libraries in different site collections in to one managed site collection, making things more central.