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

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.

Simplifying Single Sign On for Office 365 users

There are a lot of guides for federation enabling in Office 365.

This is a good example: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj631606.aspx

But almost all of them hide from you some unpleasant true: first time users enter Office 365, they should enter their login. Or at least domain, because login page uses domain name to redirect browser to corresponding federation service.

I think it is not really convenient and fortunately, I have managed to find workaround for this.

We can specify certain url for home page in Internet Explorer via group policy. For example, we want to direct user to SharePoint host, like http://sapozhkovtest.sharepoint.com, and our upn-suffix (login domain) is sapozhkov.net. Then we need to put following url as a default page via group policy:

https://login.microsoftonline.com/?whr=sapozhkov.net&wreply=https:%2f%2fsapozhkovtest%2esharepoint%2ecom

In this case user will be automatically redirected to ADFS, then back to login page and then finally to SharePoint url.