My Life Is Good – Celebrating Ten Years of Sobriety

Today marks ten years to the day since I had my last drink of alcohol. That’s 3,654 days without a drink, or 87,696 hours, or 5,261,760 minutes. If you can’t live without a drink, you know how big those numbers are. I quit cold turkey on September 30, 2007. Most people can’t do that and it’s much harder for them. I was lucky that I could simply turn it off – but I had gotten to a point where if I didn’t turn it off, I might not have lived to write this post.

I tried Alcoholics Anonymous and an addiction therapy group for about six months after I quit, and for me they just didn’t feel right. I joined a men’s therapy group and spent over six years working on my demons and just normal issues to help make myself as whole as possible. You don’t have to use groups like this to get off the sauce, but for many people they can be great anchors.

It amazed me how much of my personal growth had been stunted by my alcohol abuse. I had moored myself in the age where I really got going with my drinking. The literature backs this up – many drunks stop maturing in their thoughts and actions once the booze takes over their lives. I was what many people call a “functional alcoholic”. I did my job – and not so badly – but when I got home, I had to have a drink. Over the years, I needed to drink more and more to make myself feel what I though of as “good”. The bottles became better friends to me than my actual friends, or even my wife.

When I first stopped drinking, it amazed me how embedded drinking is in our culture. Some of that embedding is simply about enjoying life to its fullest (think a French country meal without a nice glass of the local red), but far more often here in the USA, it’s about partying and going crazy. (If you’re doing a lot of the latter, you might want to think about your relationship with alcohol.) In many ways, we’re taught that alcohol = fun. Without drinking, we’re missing out.

After I quit, it amazed me:

• That going out with friends was actually more fun in many ways
• How good I could feel waking up in the morning
• How much more time there was in the day – drinking is a time consuming job
• How I no longer wrestled with my “oh, I could quit anytime if I wanted to” nonsense discussions with myself

This isn’t just a self-congratulatory post, though. (I admit – it does feel pretty good!) I want to help anyone I know out there who feels like they may have a problem. Addictions are crazy things; when we are in the middle of them, we can’t see them – once we stop, it’s like a grey cloud has been lifted.

I’m not here to preach to anyone about their own choices. For me, stopping my drinking was – I believe – a matter of life or death. But it doesn’t have to be that serious for it to be a good decision for you. Alcohol cheated me out of many good years, and probably many good relationships. When you’re a drinker, you don’t tend to blame the alcohol or yourself – you blame others.

In the last ten years, I:

• Started my own successful business
• Wrote an open source library used by thousands of people around the world – SPServices
• Became a Microsoft MVP for SharePoint
• Traveled the globe speaking about SharePoint, collaboration, and knowledge management – all my passions
• Regained the love of my wife (despite all my other failings)
• Tried to be the best Father I can be to our awesome son Calder (aka “The Dude)
• Took back control of my life

Most importantly, I’ve enjoyed so much of that time. (Into every life some rain must fall.) For many years, I had thought I needed the booze to keep me grounded and happy. The image I had in my head was of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol. I don’t know why it was that image, but it stuck with me for years. Without the booze, I’d no longer be grounded, plus the booze was a burden I deserved. By casting off my alcohol-laden Jacob Marley chains, I have felt lighter, and breathed more clearly than I did in the time I was drinking.

Now that I look back at that thinking, I can’t believe it made any sense to me. I consider myself reasonably intelligent, yet I was able to convince myself of the value of a way of life which was totally not what I thought. That’s the insidious nature of a substance like alcohol – it rearranges the way your mind works so that you can make sense of your own behavior.

If you ever want to have a conversation with me about what my journey was like, I’m here. No one should go through the suffering addition causes without an opportunity to make big changes. But the only person who can make those changes is you. Oddly, there’s little stigma to drinking, yet considerable stigma to being an alcoholic, even if you can quit. I’m here to tell you that any amount of stigma is worth it to live the full and happy life you deserve, despite yourself.

Thank you to everyone who has been with me on this grand journey. I’m not going to list names, but many people in my life have been important parts of what amounts to my rebirth. I also want to thank all of the people who read this blog, because your thanks and knowing I’m helping some of you do better things with the technology I love to work with give me sustenance every day. If you’ve made it all the way to this point, thanks for spending a little time with me on what is – for me – an important day.

Next time you see me, let’s raise a glass of club soda together. And m. and C. – I’m here for you.

by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog

Setting Up Office 365 Extranet

     While trying to configure a 2016 hybrid SharePoint environment, I wanted to explore the features of a O365 Extranet. Having never set one up before, I turned to Microsoft for articles on how to simply set it up. I found many articles on what they were and why they would be useful, even pitfalls to avoid. However, I never came across a step by step guide, or if I did, it seemed like it was written pretty early in the lifecycle and Microsoft had already made changes to the product that made the article null and void. So, I ended up spending vast amounts of time getting my environment set up and configured as securely as possible. It is possible that I am spoiled as Extranet Collaboration Manger for On Prem takes about 10 minutes using the helpful wizard. What you find below are the notes of the steps that I took. Hopefully you find these instructions and are able to get your o365 extranet configured in much less time than it took me!

     I should note that before enabling external sharing for SharePoint, you'll have to make sure it's enabled for your Office 365 tenant as a whole. This can be found under the Security & Privacy tab of your Settings menu within your Tenant Admin Console. There, you can control external sharing globally first.

1. From the Tile screen click on admin
2. Next click on Security & privacy link in the left Nav

3. Click the Edit button and ensure that “Let users add new guests to the organization” is set to.

4. From your Office 365 home screen, navigate to your Admin center

5. From the Admin center, choose the "Admin Centers" tab on the left-hand side and then "SharePoint .” This will take you to the SharePoint admin settings page, where you can configure external sharing.

6. Click the "Sharing " link to view all of the sharing options.

The image you see is not the default image but the settings that were chosen for our specific environment.

Here are the available options that you can choose from when configuring external sharing:

"Don’t allow sharing outside of your organization."

This option will turn off sharing to anyone outside your organization – Very well named

"Allow sharing only with the external users that already exist in your organization’s directory."

This option tells your SharePoint environment that only existing users can be granted access to content in your tenant. But you may be saying to yourself that you do not want external users in your Azure AD. When an External User is added to your organization, They are added to your Azure Active Directory, just as a guest.  In the below image you can see two users that were invited and added as Guest users in my Azure AD.

An admin can manually create these external users in their Azure Active Directory via the Azure Portal, but SharePoint will not facilitate the creation of new users through its' sharing interface. For some, this option may be desireable as you may want your SharePoint Admin to create all the external users. If you want to delegate some onboarding to internal users, keep reading.

"Allow users to invite and share with authenticated external users."

Enabling sharing with authenticated external users means allowing your employees to invite new guest users to your directory and share specific content with them, without an administrator’s direct approval.

"Allow users to invite and share with authenticated external users and using anonymous access links."

Authenticated external users can be invited to log in and view or edit documents, but anonymous users can also be shared with if the owner of the document chooses to share an anonymous link. Be VERY careful with this option. For the most part, I think you will want to avoid this option.

Depending on which option you chose, you should now be able to browse out to a SharePoint site and click the Share option on the page and start your external collaboration.

by noreply@blogger.com (Johnathan Horton) via SharePoint Solutions Blog

Microsoft Flow: Updating File Metadata When You Have More Than 5000 Items

It’s been way too long since I did a blog post. Let’s remedy that, shall we?

Paul Culmsee (@paulculmsee) has been doing some great work with Microsoft Flow and PowerApps. His daughter Ashlee even won a contest put on by the PowerApps team to make a fidget spinner app! When Paul digs into a technology, stand back, because he beats it into submission like few others. If there is a Clever Workaround – and we need those way too often – he’ll find it.

Paul did a post back in August I’ve referred to multiple times as I’ve tried to use Microsoft Flow. My approach with Flow here is that I try to use it for anything new I need to automate in Office 365. If I hit a roadblock, then I revert to SharePoint Designer workflows. The good news is that I’m finding I revert less and less, though it still happens maybe a third of the time at this point. (I’m guessing, but that’s about what it feels like. I would love it to be 0%!) Unfortunately, that means rework down the road if we want to be fully “modern”.

Paul’s article The (currently) best way to update SharePoint document metadata using Flow shows us the unfortunately byzantine way we need to do things in order to update metadata on a file we’ve just created. The fact that we don’t get a useful “handle” back to the file we just created is sorta crazy, and the Microsoft Flow team knows this. In the meantime, Paul’s approach works. Well, it works unless you have more than 5000 items in a library.

I had exactly that situation. At one of my clients, we have an automated process which dumps files into a library I’ve inventively called __Temp. When a new file shows up, I run a Flow to copy the file into a place where we want to store it and apply metadata to the copied file. My problem arose when I tried Paul’s second step. Because my library has way over 5000 items, that step failed.

So, until we are able to get the ID or some other useful handle for the newly created file, I needed to come up with a cleaver workaround on top of Paul’s clever workaround.

The trick was to do the following:

• Add an index to the Modified column in the destination list.
• Set up a TimeStamp variable in my Flow to capture the startOfDay() when the Flow is running
• In the GetItems step, use a filter based on the Modified column, and *then* the FileLeafRef to find the file I just created

Here it is in pictures…

Make sure you have an index on the Modified column in the target list. In my case, I have indices on several other columns as well.

In the flow, set up a variable to hold

startOfDay(utcnow())

 . You set this up in the Expression Builder. I initially tried to set the variable just before I created the new file, setting it to

utcnow()

 . In theory, this should have worked, but I found I had about a 50% failure rate. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, but to be safe, I switched to

startOfDay()

 , which has proved reliable.

Just like Paul’s example, I then create the new file.

In the GetItems step, I use the more complex filter: 

Modified gt datetime'TimeStamp​​' and FileLeafRef eq 'Name'

Because Modified is an indexed column, and it is the first filter in my expression, the result set is reduced to fewer than 5000 items and the query works.

Now everything works reliably. I can’t wait to reduce the complexity of this Flow when we get a handle to the newly created file in the Create File step!

Aren’t you proud of me? I wrote this whole post without whining about the 5000 item limit.

by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog

Vlad at Microsoft Ignite!

Are you going to be at Microsoft Ignite in only two weeks in Orlando? If you are, I am really looking forward to seeing you during the conference, or at one of the numerous after-hours event that are planned. This year will be my first time speaking at Microsoft’s big conference so this will for sure be a very special Ignite for me!

I will be giving two Expo Hall sessions on the Thursday, and for those of you who don’t know what the Expo Hall sessions are, it’s basically 20-minute sessions so all the awesome content I want to share with you will have to fit in only 20 minutes. The first session that I have is THR2058: Five cool things you can do with Windows PowerShell on Office 365. Here is the Description:

As an IT professional, you have probably heard 1,000 times that you need to master PowerShell to do your job efficiently. This is even more accurate when we talk about Office 365! While the Office 365 Admin Center exists, more advanced administration tasks can only be done by PowerShell. PowerShell will also allow you to automate boring repetitive tasks so you can focus on things that will really help your users become more productive. In this short 20-minute session, we show you five awesome things you can do with PowerShell and Office 365.

If you didn’t find this on your agenda yet, you can find it over here: http://ift.tt/2xxRbqm or by searching for THR2058 in the agenda builder!

My second session which is more SharePoint focused is THR1019: What do YOU get from SharePoint Hybrid? Which you can find on the agenda over here: http://ift.tt/2y5iRQB

Every time you see a blog post about SharePoint 2016, you see the word hybrid. But what exactly is a hybrid infrastructure and what features does the business user get? In this short 20-minute session, we look at SharePoint Hybrid from a business user point of view to understand what features we get out of it. We look at Hybrid Team Sites, Hybrid Search, Hybrid Extranet sites and more!

If I don’t see you at one of my sessions, I will probably be hanging out in the expo hall most of the time, and for the after hour events, make sure you check out The Ultimate Ignite 2017 Party List by Nick Brattoli on Collab365 Community for a bunch of great parties with the invite links!

Looking forward to see all of you at Ignite!

The post Vlad at Microsoft Ignite! appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.

by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu

Allowing Site Sponsors to View Registrations and Invitations Lists

“Extranet Collaboration Manager,” or ExCM, was designed to have the same Administrator permissions as a SharePoint environment, meaning that a Farm Administrator or a Site Administrator would be able to monitor the extranet with the same resources as a SharePoint Administrator.


SharePoint allows Administrators to put in place security policies, maintain the web applications and sites by using many tools, such as managing accounts, which includes allowing a password change, edit user information, and monitor which extranet users are accessing the sites.


Because there is so much information to monitor and so many resources that can be utilized, ExCM Administrators have been given the resources to use a Site Sponsor to help manage the extranet sites. Site Sponsors can be utilized for managing accounts by changing passwords, updating users’ information, and sending out site invitations. See more information on ExCM Site Sponsors.


Viewing site Registrations and Invitations lists are at the site collection level and, by default, the site collection Administrators have access to the lists. The viewing of this information was limited to Administrators because it allows them to view all the Registrations and Invitations for a site, no matter who registered or sent an invitation for a site.


We have had some situations where an Administrator has asked for the Site Sponsor to also have access to view the Extranet Registrations or Invitations list. You might ask why? Well, like we said previously, a Site Sponsor does have the ability to invite users, and they can also manage accounts for the users they have invited. However, they do not have the ability to view and manage all Registrations and Invitations for a site.


By giving them this capability, it would allow the Site Sponsor to keep an audit of which users are registered for the site, and who might have been overlooked or added to the site by accident by themselves or other Site Sponsors or Administrators.


Below are the steps you can use to set up your Site Sponsor to view the Registrations and Invitations for a site collection:


From your Windows Explorer, open your “SharePoint Designer” program.



Once your SharePoint Designer is open, click on “Open Site.”



Once you are in “Open Site,” choose the http extranet site that the Site Sponsor will need access to, then click open.

*In some cases this http will not appear as a selection. If this is the case, you can copy and paste your extranet http and then open it.



When the Sign In page appears, choose the Windows Authentication.



Log in as the Administrator, then click OK.




Next select “Lists,” then Open.





You will then see the prompt indicating that the site data is being loaded.



Once the data is loaded, select “All Files.”





Then select “Lists.”





Then right click on “ExtranetRegistrations,” and select Properties.





Next, UNCHECK “Hide From Browser.”
                                                                                                                                                                                          




Next, click on the “Web Address.”





Once the Registration page opens, select the gear icon, then “Site Content.”



Next, select the properties to the right of “Registrations.”


 

Then select “Settings.”           
                                             




Then select “Permissions for this list.”



Next, select “Grant Permissions,” then type in either the “Site Sponsor’s” email, or the group that that Site Sponsor is a part of. In many cases, selecting a group is a better policy than an individual user.




Once you have added the “Site Sponsor,” click Share.

   
Close out of your web browser.




Next re-open your web browser in “Start InPrivate Browsing” or, for Chrome, open in “Incognito.”





Browse out to your extranet site.





Then log in as the “Site Sponsor.”





Select the gear icon, then “Site Contents.”





Next select “Registrations.”





Now the “Site Sponsor” can view the “registrations.”




Giving a Site Sponsor access to view the Registration and Invitations List is just another way that ExCM gives you as an Administrator the tools you require to better utilize and delegate your extranet efficiency and governance. ExCM provides your corporation with an extranet solution that not only gives the security it requires but the auditing capabilities it needs.

by noreply@blogger.com (Mark Lewis) via SharePoint Solutions Blog

Setting up Anonymous Registration

SPJS Charts – automatic dashboard builder v1.1

I have updated the “DashboardSelectorAndBuilder” example file with support for editing existing dashboards, using colspan and optionally restricting the “Add new” and “Edit” of dashboards.

See change log here.

Alexander

by Alexander Bautz via SharePoint JavaScripts

Making ESPC as Easy as 1.2.3

This November I will be speaking at the European SharePoint Conference (Also known as ESPC)  in Dublin! I have a session on How to design a SharePoint 2016 Infrastructure, as well as a Full Day Workshop with my good friend Gokan Ozcifci. Here are a few tips from the conference organizers at how to get the best out of the conference!

Europe’s Largest SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference is approaching fast. Here’s a few handy tips on how to make the most of your time at the conference.

1. Find out who’s going  

   Check out Twitter #ESPC17 to find out who’s going or visit the ESPC17 delegates page. If you would like to be added to this page, email your image and details to sarah@sharepointeurope.com There’s no better time to network with your peers, connect with new prospects, or touch base with customers than ESPC17. Don’t bank on running into them at the conference, reach out to them before and arrange a meeting.

2. Plan Ahead
   Take a look at the conference schedule and decide the sessions and tutorials you would like to attend. Take note of their time so you can plan your meetings accordingly. If you are travelling with co-workers, split up and attend different sessions. You can swap notes after, allowing your company to get the most out of the conference.
   
3. Learn
   Before the session, think of some questions you would like the answers to. Don’t be afraid to ask them during the Q&A, or alternatively go up and have a chat with the speaker afterwards. It is also important to take notes. A good practice is to write down the 3 most important takeaways from each session.
   
4. Socialise
   With 2,000 people from the SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure community estimated to attend ESPC17, it is worth going to the after parties (The Black & White Party at the Guinness Storehouse on Wednesday 15^th) and the many other great side-line and networking sessions, you never know who you’ll meet. Swap ideas, get advice and make those all-important contacts. Don’t be afraid to go up to a speaker or blogger and introduce yourself – they expect this at a conference.
   
5. Share what you learn
   To capture maximum value for you and your company, schedule time to share what you’ve learned and even better, to go ahead and implement, as soon as you get back to the office. Organise an informal meeting with your colleagues and managers and share important takeaways from the conference.
   

Still haven’t made up your mind? Then visit 10 reasons to attend ESPC17 to see why you should be there. Then book your ticket today. Use coupon code ESPC17Speak on checkout to avail of a further 10% discount.

The post Making ESPC as Easy as 1.2.3 appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.

by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu