Fractal Provisioner to improve your SharePoint solutions

Take a look at this builder for light customizations:
https://fractalprovisioner.codeplex.com/

Instead of manual configuring web sites hierarchy, lists and web parts, you can package your customizations and deploy them as many times as you want for example for several customers. Or you can deploy it several times in test environment and then finally deploy accepted package in Production.

Replicating documents from file share into SharePoint folder

Features:

• Uploads documents from file share (or local disk) to SharePoint library folder.
• Creates folder structure.
• Deletes documents and folders that are not available on file share.
• Can replicate documents into SharePoint on-premise and SharePoint online (Office 365)
• Can work with several folder pairs (source-destination)
• Designed to be scheduled
• Handles logging
• Provides errors log

Here is a solution:
https://github.com/shurick81/Sharepoint-powershell-scripts/blob/master/docreplica

SharePoint limits monitoring

SharePoint has a number of limits that may cause versatile problems in case of you cross them.
Here is a description of these limits for SharePoint 2013:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787.aspx
But how easy you can control that you can stay calm? SharePoint is usually a platform that has many owners and administrators for each site collection/site/list. Thus responsibility is blurred. It is not so easy to teach them all how to stay in boundaries and how to control overall limits.
Here is a solution: PowerShell script that allows you to receive an alert when any is crossed or about to be crossed.
https://github.com/shurick81/Sharepoint-powershell-scripts/blob/master/limitsandtrasholdsmonitoring
Currently monitored limits (to be extended if you like this solution):

• Number of web applications
• Number of alternative Urls
• Number of Host Named Managed Paths
• Number of Path Based Managed Paths
• Number of App Pools
• Number of Databases
• Size of Database
• Number of items in DB
• Number of items in list
• Number of items in list view
• Number of lookup fields in list view

PDF-documents preview automated configuration

If your farm has been bound to Office Web Application Server, then you already got nice preview functions for such office document like DOCX, XLSX and PPTX:

By default you do not have the same function for PDF files.

You also may find good articles about how to get this behavior for PDF. For example, here is an article about how to configure PDF preview in libraries: http://www.wictorwilen.se/sharepoint-2013-enabling-pdf-previews-in-document-libraries-with-office-web-apps-2013. And here – about preview in search results: http://www.wictorwilen.se/sharepoint-2013-enabling-pdf-previews-with-office-web-apps-2013-march-2013-update.

The last one supposes that you need to manually copy search result type in each site collection where search results are rendered (all site collections potentially).

All these configurations are quite boring and may lead to mistakes. Here is the script that does configuration automatically:

https://github.com/shurick81/Sharepoint-powershell-scripts/blob/master/configure-PDF-preview

How to get know if Managed Metadata Service Application is created for multi tenancy

If you have got a farm with already Managed Metadata Service Application created, how can you check whether or not this service application was created partitioned for site subscriptions?
According to Microsoft Technet article https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff608097.aspx for creating new multi-tenant service application you usually use following command:
New-SPMetadataServiceApplicationProxy -Name "MetadataServiceProxy3" -ServiceApplication "MetadataServiceApp3" –PartitionMode
But what if service application is already created and you do not know is it site subscription (SPSiteSubscription) aware or not.
When you open service application administration page, there is no any distinguishing attribute you can use.
And there is no any PowerShell command to examine existing service application.
The only way I found is to look at service application properties.


The only difference I found is Content Type Hub parameter that is visible in case if service application was created without partitioning. Otherwise there is no way to specify Content Type Hub because it should be assigned for each tenant separately, using command Set-SPSiteSubscriptionMetadataConfig.
So now you know at least one approach how to get know if existing Managed Metadata Application Service supports multi tenancy or not. Would be great if you know any other ways to do that, I am looking forward to your comments!

Office 365 user without license

When you add new O365 user, there is an option to assign no license. But what exactly features will be available for such users?

First, when I logged in to https://portal.office.com I got this:

No nice tiles, no App Launcher icon, no links to any O365 service at all.

I started to open direct URLs for different applications.

I could not open mailbox. I manually requested https://outlook.office365.com and got this:

Newsfeed was not working. I tried only SharePoint Newsfeed, not Yammer.

I was redirected to profile page:

I attempted to request this URL for OneDrive:

https://tenantname-my.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/MySite.aspx?MySiteRedirect=AllDocuments

But it redirected me to profile page again.

SharePoint site was available without a problem: I uploaded documents, used office web apps to edit documents, etc. When I tried to go to “About me” to look at profile, I got this:

On the other hand, I could manually type my site url and open my profile, edit it, add picture, etc.:

It seems like user can get almost all SharePoint Online functionality, but not other O365 services, like Exchange and Skype for Business.

Eliminating 10016 event id errors

Symptoms

In Windows System Log you have this error: The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1} and APPID {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1} to the user <domain>\<account>

Solution

This is very common error. You can manually add activation permissions or use any PowerShell script from Internet. My script is better because it does not require any parameter input from you. All user accounts are taken from SharePoint configuration automatically. So all you need is just to run this PowerShell script on all SharePoint servers: https://github.com/shurick81/Sharepoint-powershell-scripts/tree/master/Eliminating-DCOM-activation-errors.
Appreciate when you share your feedback in comments, Watch and Star in GitHub.