Things to know about a Cumulative Update:

In addition to the SharePoint patching installation guide that was published by me few days back I’ve come up with a new article that gives a detailed description about what a Cumulative Update is all about and the things you need to know about a CU.

Please find the details below …

What is a CU?

 A  CU (i.e. Cumulative Update) is a software package which includes fixes for problems with Microsoft products that have been reported by customers to Microsoft support in the form of support cases.

What is included?

As the name says, the updates/fixes that are included in the package are always Cumulative (meaning, it includes all the new and all previously released fixes (CUs and PUs) since the oldest supported service pack (within the first 12 months after a Service Pack has been released the CU includes also fixes released after the previous service pack).

How often does Microsoft release SharePoint Cumulative Updates?

 Microsoft releases Cumulative Updates (CUs) once in every month.

How does Microsoft test Cumulative Updates before deployment?

All Cumulative Updates are tested extensively before each public release. If an issue, such as a regression, is discovered on a CU that could potentially impact the application, the CU will be cancelled and will be rescheduled to a later CU.

Are CU’s Multilingual?

Yes. The CU package includes fixes for all the languages. So no matter whatever language you download the CU package on, the fixes/updates in the package will remain the same.

What is the prerequisite?

The oldest supported service pack. For instance, all the SharePoint CU‘s post the SP1 release need the SP1 to be installed for SP 2013 .In case of SP 2010, all the CU’s that were released post SP2 need SP2 to be installed first after which you can install those CU’s .

When to install?

CU’s should only be installed to resolve specific issues fixed with the CUs as mentioned in each CU KB article: "Apply this hotfix only to systems that are experiencing the problems described in this article. This hotfix might receive additional testing. Therefore, if you are not severely affected by this problem, we recommend that you wait for the next software update that contains this hotfix.” Or if advised to install by Microsoft Support.

Impact on future fixes: In general, a CU is not a prerequisite of future CUs and PUs. However this may not be the case always .There has been few scenarios where a CU that was released few months back tends to become a pre-requisite for the later CU’s. So before installing any CU please take a look at the related KB article and make sure you have all the necessary pre-requisites in place.

Installation sequence: Installing the CU doesn’t require any specific order, you can do it on any server in the farm and then go on by installing it on other servers in the farm (meaning you can do it on the WFE server first and then on the APP server). Although it’s ok to go ahead and install the CU in any order on the server based on my experience with installing the CU I would suggest you to do it on the WFE server first. Ensure that the WFE is taken out of the Load balancer pool so that it’s not serving user traffic and then go ahead and install the CU and reboot the server. Once the server comes back online verify whether all the components have been installed correctly under Control Panel and the Central administration site is accessible. This is just to ensure that the installed CU didn’t do any harm to the server. It’s ok to lose a WFE but not a APP server, I hope you’re getting the idea here J .Also by any chance if you’re patching the farm on the business hours (which might ideally not be the case unless it’s a TEST /UAT farm) then make sure that the server on which you’re installing the CU is taken out of the load balancer so that the user traffic doesn’t goes to that server. So, the idea to keep in mind is, do it on the WFE servers first and then on the APP server.

Running the SharePoint Configuration Wizard:

Unlike the CU installation you can’t run the “SharePoint Configuration Wizard” in any order, it must be running on the server which is hosting “Central Administration” site first and then on the WFE and APP servers.  It’s a 6-step process which might take an hour at the max (in an ideal scenario) to run and complete. Once it’s completed successfully on the server where CA is hosted, please try opening the CA site and make sure everything looks fine and make sure you’re able to access the SharePoint sites. By any chance if the CA site is not coming up, please stop right there and fix it. Without fixing the CA site issue, please don’t proceed further with running the Configuration wizard on the other servers. This is the basic thumb rule to be followed while patching a SharePoint farm. You need to follow the same procedure for all the servers in the farm.

 

 

 

by Vignesh Ganesan via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Movement on the SharePoint List 5000 Item Limit!

In October, Eric Alexander (@ejaya2) posted an idea to the SharePoint UserVoice called Prioritize large list management in SharePoint Online. Yesterday I received an alert about it because I had voted for it.

'Prioritize large list management in SharePoint Online' https://t.co/L1NQ0Gpsyc -> Status went from 'unlikely' to 'Working on it'!

— Marc D Anderson (@sympmarc) November 15, 2016

The 5000 item limit has been an albatross around our necks since SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2007 was the wild west days: we could pile as many items into a list as we wanted and retrieve them without a problem, though perhaps at the expense of performance.

I’ve railed about this limit many times in the past, like here.

If you search the SharePoint UserVoice for “5000“, you’ll find no fewer than 14 suggestions circling this topic. There are probably even more, but without the number 5000 in them.

Luckily, our good friends in Redmond know this is an issue for us. As of yesterday, Eric’s suggestion moved to “Working on it”, at least for SharePoint Online.

 

 

 

I’m looking forward to what happens here. As Eric notes in his suggestion:

If nothing can be done, then TechNet NEEDS to indicate that the actual limit of SharePoint Online lists and libraries is 5,000 items, not the current architectural limit of 30 million.

The more we want to use SharePoint as a service (SPaaS?), the more important it becomes to get past this limitation.

I’m certain that the work Dan Kogan (@kogandan) and his team are doing on the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) has made it obvious that this limit is a serious issue. (Sometimes you have to take the albatross off your neck and slap someone with it.)

Image from http://ift.tt/2f3Bs8g

by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog

How Can I Customize List Forms in SharePoint Online?

The other day, a client asked me a pretty classic set of questions about customizing SharePoint Online list forms. As with some other arenas of endeavor in Office 365, there is more than one way of doing things and it can be confusing.

I am looking at options to customize List forms on sites in SPO and I am trying not to have to deal with code.

My first choice has been InfoPath Designer but I know this is being deprecated and it seems like some of my sites are not allowing the use of InfoPath to customize my forms. [This was an internal issue, not an InfoPath issue.]

I know I could add web parts to the form pages and use JavaScript / jQuery or I could try and edit in [SharePoint] Designer but without the design view I am hesitant to mess around there too much.

Do you have any other tools you recommend for customizing List Forms?

Here’s an expanded version of the answer I gave my client, which incorporates some additional ideas and feedback I gleaned from Dan Holme (@DanHolme) and Chris McNulty (@cmcnulty2000) at Microsoft. (It’s nice being in Redmond for MVP Summit this week, where I can easily catch these guys in the hallway!)

---

The answer is the classic “it depends”. The main thing it depends on is what type of customization you actually want to do. There are a number of approaches and each has its pros and cons.

Adding JavaScript to the out-of-the-box forms

This is still possible, but I would discourage it in many cases, even though this has been my bread and butter approach for years. The out-of-the-box forms are changing, and “script injection” to do DOM manipulation is less safe. Remember you’re working on a service now, and it can change anytime.

Unfortunately, this means that getting things like cascading dropdowns into forms is becoming harder than it used to be with SPServices. It’s not that you shouldn’t use that approach, but it does mean that the clock is ticking on how long it will continue to work. At lthis point. I’m recommending building entirely bespoke custom forms rather than adding JavaScript to the existing forms, though I still do plenty of the latter.

InfoPath

Yes, it’s deprecated or retired or whatever, but Microsoft will support InfoPath through 2026 at this point. InfoPath is often overkill – you can do a lot with list settings – but at the same time, it can still be useful. Keep in mind that using InfoPath means you’ll need to stick with the classic view for the list or library.

PowerApps + Flow

These new kids on the block are the successors to InfoPath, as announced at Microsoft Ignite. They can do a lot, but they may or may not meet your needs at this point. They did reach GA recently.

PowerApps would be how you would build the forms themselves and with Flow you can add automation – what we’ve called workflow in the past.

PowerApps embedding is “coming soon”. This will allow us to embed PowerApps into the list form context, as shown in the screenshot below. This will be a GREAT thing for a lot of list scenarios. At that point, I think the need for InfoPath will be greatly diminished.

SharePoint Framework (SPFx)

The SharePoint Framework is the next gen development model for things like custom Web Parts, which will run client side. We can build pretty much anything you want with this, but it’s still in preview. At some point in the not-too-distant future, I think we’ll be building a lot of custom forms using SPFx.

Fully custom forms

To create fully custom forms today, you might use development frameworks like AngularJS or KnockoutJS (to name only a few). This can be the right answer, with the goal being to build in a way that can eventually merge into SPFx and the new “modern” pages. Knowing a bit about SPFx is a *very* good idea if you are going to go this route today. You’ll want to build your custom forms in such a way that you aren’t locking yourself out of wrapping them up into the SPFX for improved packaging and deployment down the road.

Third party tools

Because of how I roll, I haven’t used any of the third party tools out there, but there are many. The ones I hear come up most often are Nintex Forms, K2 Appit, and Stratus Forms. Obviously, there’s a economic investment with these choices, as well as a learning curve, so it’s always “your mileage may vary”.

---

The landscape here continues to change, so keep your eyes and ears open for more news from Microsoft and bloggers like me in the future!

by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog

SHAREPOINT COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER - US election is not the only news!!

Hi everyone,

As ever we have some fantastic news and links from around the community. Other than the US election result, the recent launch of Microsoft's Teams is getting a LOT of headlines. We've shared some below :)

[Sponsored] SharePoint Permissions Management Tool Certified for Code Quality

DeliverPoint by Lightning Tools is a SharePoint Permissions Management Tool for SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online. DeliverPoint allows Site Owners and Site Collection Administrators to report and manage permissions with ease. The reporting is accurate and shows everyone who has permissions even if they were granted through Active Directory Groups. Management features allow for Copy, Transfer, Delete, Clone, Revoking of permissions along with Dead Account Removal, Auditing of Permissions and Alerts. We are proud to announce that DeliverPoint for SharePoint On-Premises and the Add-In for SharePoint Online has now also been awarded the code quality certification by Rencore. Find out more

[Sponsored] Are You One of the 17.4% with a Data Breach? How Do You Know?

17.4% of content uploaded to Office 365 contains a security exposure. The problem is finding what’s inside your content, where standard descriptors aren’t available. Using conceptClassifier for SharePoint or conceptClassifier for Office 365 means you have a 0% likelihood of a data breach. Define the phrases or descriptors that you want identified and protected, and classify your content as it is created or ingested. Automatically identified exposures will be routed to a secure repository, and prevented from being downloaded. You are safe. Read about it here. 

Introducing Microsoft Teams—the chat-based workspace in Office 365

Hot news of the Microsoft Teams launch and a good overview to introduce you to the concept. - Read more 

Dear Microsoft: I’m Confused. Can You Help Me Collaborate Well?

A great post from Marc D Anderson explaining how he generally loves MS Teams but also finds the communications story still a little confusing. - Read more

FAQ about Microsoft Teams

We took MS Teams for a test-drive last week and loved it. At Collaboris, we currently use Slack and if the story for external users improves, we'll be making the switch. With Teams, Microsoft are finally pulling all their Office 365 tech together under one 'collaboration roof'. However, the more you 'play' the more questions you start to have, so here is a good set of FAQ's from Microsoft. - Read more

SharePoint Server 2016 Feature Pack

We don't want to make this all about MS teams. Here we have a great post about the roll out of the first feature pack for SharePoint Server 2016.- Read more

Questions from the Community

Can you help with any of these questions from the community?

• Help on SharePoint 2016 web address creation - http://sharepoint-community.net/forum/topics/sharepoint-2016-2
• A web part error in SP 2013 - http://sharepoint-community.net/forum/topics/web-part-error-in-sp-2013
• SharePoint 2016 - Apps challenge for authentication - http://sharepoint-community.net/forum/topics/sharepoint-2016-apps-challenge-for-authentication

Thanks for taking the time to read the newsletter, that’s all for this week

by Fraser Beadle via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

PowerApps for SharePoint

So, this past week Microsoft announced that PowerApps was now available for all to use within Office 365. This is a huge milestone in products being released into Office 365. Now you know it is available, what is it all about?

read more

by via SharePoint Pro

Building Dashboards in SharePoint and Office 365

So, what does every organization need to do with SharePoint and Office 365, build dashboards!! This has a been a requirement for I think every client I have ever worked with over the past few years. The ability to create dashboards of content, that contains reports for the executives is more important than often the core functionality.

read more

by via SharePoint Pro

Understanding Timer Jobs for SharePoint On-Premises and Azure Web Jobs for Office 365

One of the core building blocks when designing solutions for SharePoint is Timer Jobs. These have been a part of the core product for many years now. Microsoft themselves use these within SharePoint for most of the long running processes as well as what I would call the “heavy lifting” elements of SharePoint. An example would be things like content type syndication which utilizes multiple jobs for pushing the content types, as well as the subscriber jobs allow the content types to be bought down to the site.

read more

by via SharePoint Pro