If you are happy with the functionality of the solutions and the support that I provide in these pages, I would be happy if you could write a few lines to help others to decide whether to start using them.
Write any feedback in the comments below. If you like, you can include the line of business and a bit about how it has helped to improve the SharePoint user experience in your company.
Best regards,
Alexander
I have made some changes to how jQuery loads using the “noConflict” loading option to ensure the correct version of jQuery is loaded, and that it’s not killed by other third party code loading jQuery again in the same page.
I need some feedback on how this performs before I can move it out of BETA. Please post any findings in the forum.
If it for some reason fails to load, please open the developer console by hitting F12 > Console and post any error messages you find there.
I have also added a new functionality to DFFS that lets “Linked rules and functions” (previously “And these rules or functions are true / false”) work “on change” to trigger the parent rule when the parent rule and all linked rules are validated to “true”. This setting must be turned on for each rule by checking the “Let linked rules trigger the parent rule on change” checkbox.
This functionality should make it easier to set up more complex rules.
You find the full changelog here.
Best regards,
Alexander
I am extremely happy to announce that my 8th Pluralsight course and already second one of 2017 is published and this one is on how to Install and Configure Office Online Server.
Office Online Server, previously known as Office Web Apps, is an Office server product that delivers browser-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. By connecting Office Online Server to SharePoint, Exchange, and Skype for Business, you will add more features to your existing deployment and deliver a better collaboration experience to your users. Furthermore, Office Online Server is a mandatory prerequisite for offering most Business Intelligence features in your SharePoint 2016 environment and also enables the Durable Links functionality in SharePoint.
In this course, Installing and Configuring Office Online Server, you’ll learn foundational knowledge of Office Online Server. First, you will learn how to architect and create an Office Online Server farm. Next, you’ll learn how to connect SharePoint, Exchange, and Skype for Business Server to your Office Online Server farm. Finally, you’ll learn how to maintain, patch, and troubleshoot your Office Online Server deployment.
When you’re finished with this course, you will have the skills and knowledge of Office Online Server needed to install, configure, and maintain Office Online Server in your organization. This course also covers the objectives related to Office Online Server in the 70-339, 70-334, and 70-345 exams for SharePoint Server 2016, Exchange Server 2016, and Skype for Business Server 2015 respectively.
This course is aimed at the SharePoint, Exchange, Skype for Business or general SysAdmin who needs to install, configure and maintain Office Online Server in their organization. This course is also useful if you want to pass the 70-339, 70-345 or 70-334 exams towards your MCSE: Productivity
You can find the course on Pluralsight at : http://spvlad.com/InstallConfigureOOS or by clicking the banner below. You can also view all my other Pluralsight courses on SharePoint 2016, PowerShell and Office 365 on my author page
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The post New Pluralsight Course: Installing and Configuring Office Online Server appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.
Lots of times when I’m working on a content migration in SharePoint – almost always with Sharegate! – some stuff happens. Probably the most common thing is that someone edits content in the old location before we manage to shut off permissions. People – yeesh!
Here’s a little trick that not a lot of people know about that can really help. As we all know, folders are bad except when they aren’t. Oftentimes, Document Libraries have a lot of folders containing a lot of documents, for better or worse. If you want to hunt down documents someone has changed during a migration, you can set up a “flat” view, sort by Modified (descending) and see what they have been up to.
Here’s how…
Go into Library settings (how you get here will vary based on SharePoint version) and create a Standard view – or more likely start with one of the existing views, like All documents.
Give your view a name (I like Temp – because I’m probably going to delete it), scroll down to the Folders section, and expand it. Click on the Show all items without folders radio button and save your view.
Now you’ll see ALL the documents in a “flat” view (assuming you don’t have any filters set). You can add/remove any columns in the view, but the key thing here is you can sort ALL documents by things like Modified date (descending) in the UI to look for stragglers.
As a consultant, on a daily basis I’m working in multiple Office 365 tenants. In some of those tenants I have an account (license) with my own Sympraxis email, and in many others, I have an email address within the client organization’s domain.
Believe me, it all gets pretty confusing – if it weren’t for LastPass keeping track of my logins, I’d be doomed!
With all the Office 365 Groups goodness going on, it’s great to try to keep track of “Group conversations” in a central place. By including the email alias for a Group in email-based exchanges, we can save those conversations for posterity.
Given the complexity of my account setup across clients (let me know if you have suggestions on how to make that easier!), it’s really helpful for me to use my Sympraxis email account to centralize *my* conversation activity, at least.
To do this in a given Office 365 Group, you can change the Let people outside the organization email the group setting for the Group, as shown below. This allows me to be a member of the group with whatever account I have in that tenant, but also to email in with my Sympraxis account.
In theory, this opens up your Group conversation to “spam” or other unwanted outside emails. In practice, it’s probably not a problem, especially for a Group which has a relatively limited lifespan. You’ll probably want to consider which Groups really need this setting enabled.
In any case, it was a little tricky to find the setting after the Group was set up, so I figured I’d share.
Now, if I could only choose the color for the Group! I’m sure that setting is somewhere, too. Any ideas?
Product analysis by Vlad Catrinescu – requested by KWizCom , but thoughts are my own.
One of the benefits of SharePoint is to make it easier for users to do their day to day tasks, and to automate as many processes as possible. While SharePoint allows developers to create advanced workflows and custom actions, Business Users that do not have a deep knowledge of SharePoint are often left powerless and do not customize their SharePoint experience to make them more productive. Luckily, the Microsoft partner ecosystem stepped up and created a lot of solutions to add features on top of SharePoint and allow business users to get the most out of it.
In this blog post, we will talk about KWizCom Custom Actions. KWizCom Custom Actions, part of KWizCom Forms (Ent. edition) enable non-technical users to implement their required use-cases, without having to deal with technical workflow tools. These implemented business scenarios can include a mixture of automated activities with manual user input.
For this review, I have logged in a KWizCom demo environment that has some built in lists so we have some content to play with. One of those lists is a IT Helpdesk list, so let’s see what we can automate and make easier for our users. KWizCom Custom Actions allow us to create both List Custom Actions, as well as Item Custom Actions. List custom actions allow us to create custom actions at the list level, such as “Create a new Hardware Bug”. The Item Custom Actions apply to a certain item only for example “Assign Ticket to Me” and this will be displayed in the context of a ticket only.
Before creating the custom action, here is what the form looks like. As you see, it’s already a bit customized with KWizCom Forms, but that is not a prerequisite for using KWizCom Custom Actions. (You need to have KWizCom Forms installed, but this specific form does not need to use them in order to use custom actions)
My goal on what to create is a custom action, that will create a New Hardware Bug, and only show me the fields about the Issue Details. Since I am submitting a support ticket, I don’t have any information about the Issue Resolution Details yet. So, let’s see how we can build it. First, I will go to the List Custom Actions settings page, and add a new Custom Action. As you see I can enter the Title, a Description (which is displayed as a tooltip when hovering over the custom action in the ribbon), a confirmation if I want my user to confirm before activating the custom action as well as a custom icon for my custom action, so it’s easily recognizable in the ribbon. I can also redirect my user to for example the Edit Item view of the item I am creating, or to a different view. Lastly, I can use KWizCom Custom Actions to overwrite the “New Item” button from the ribbon. If I would select that checkbox, every time someone would click on New Item, it would activate this Custom Action and do whatever I will configure this Custom Action to do.
A bit lower on the page, I can choose to whom this action will be visible. For example, I have selected below that this action should only be visible to the users that are part of the Helpdesk Customers group, and create a new List item and automatically update the field Category to Hardware. Also, don’t show me all the columns, but only the “Issue Detail” field group, because when I open a new ticket, I don’t need to see/enter information about the resolution.
Lastly, KWizCom Custom Action allows me to start certain workflows after a custom action is done. By Default, with SharePoint Designer, I can start a workflow when an item is created, modified or manually start it. With KWizCom Custom Actions I can start a workflow automatically after running a certain action on an item. Maybe opening a hardware bug, a software bug and a change request shouldn’t all trigger the same workflow.
After clicking Save, I can now see the “New Hardware bug” custom action in my Ribbon
When clicking on the New Hardware Bug Custom Action, I have a form that only displays the issue Details group as we wanted it to, the category is Hardware, and since we told our Custom Action to auto-update it, as you see it doesn’t even show up on the columns we need to fill. This make sure that the maximum number of information is filled in by the Custom Action, and users only see the relevant columns they need to enter information on. The less time they will spend on filling this form, the more time they will have to be productive.
After entering the information and clicking on Save, the item got created and the new Helpdesk ticket workflow started! Pretty awesome!
Now let’s take a look at an Item-level Custom Action. For example, let’s create a Custom Action that would “Close Ticket”. The goal of this action would be to close the ticket, and only show the helpdesk technician the information needed to close the ticket such as Issue Resolution. Furthermore, this custom action should only be visible to tickets that are in progress, and that are assigned to the Helpdesk technician currently looking at the ticket. Let’s go to the Item Custom Actions settings page and create a new custom action. We will enter a title, a description as well as a confirmation ticket to make sure that Helpdesk technicians really want to close the current ticket. I could set this action to overwrite the default Edit Item form, but I don’t want to in this specific business case.
We will then enter the Action visibility criteria. We want to make this custom action only visible to Helpdesk technicians part of the Support Active Directory group. Furthermore, it should only be visible when the issue status is assigned, and when it’s assigned to the Helpdesk technician currently opening the list item. Note that even if everything worked perfectly, it seems that the [Me] in the people picker has an error, but everything worked, so it must be a small UI error.
Next up we need to decide what this custom action will do. We will edit the list item, change the Issue status to Closed as well as the Issue closing status to [Today]. I really like the fact that KWizCom Custom actions supports tokens such as [Me] or [Today], it truly makes custom actions more dynamic. Next up, we only want to show the Resolution details field group, because no use in seeing the issue details, then switching to the issue resolution tab to enter the required information. When we close a ticket, we simply want to enter the information about the resolution and that’s it. Lastly, I will start a Customer Feedback Workflow. This is a great example where I could not really have done this without the Out of the Box SharePoint Designer workflows, because an item might be edited 50 times before being closed, so I would have had to left this workflow at “Manually Started”. With this custom action, I know that every time a Helpdesk Technician closes a ticket using this custom action, not only will they only see the required fields and save them a few clicks every time, it will also automatically start the correct workflow. Something that I realized is that in the Available Workflows, it seems that all workflow versions are displayed in the KWizCom Custom Actions version I tested, even older versions of a workflow. If a workflow has been edited a lot, it might appear multiple times in the Available Workflows box with a (Previous Version #date) near it.
So now I will go to one of my ticket and let’s look at the result. I logged in with a user in the Support group (Support One) and assigned the ticket to that user. As you see, the Close Ticket Custom action appeared in my ribbon under Item Actions.
Now when I click that Custom Action, I will first have to confirm that I really want to do that. This pop-up is displayed because we have set this text as confirmation earlier, when configuring the Custom Action.
Once we click on OK, we will have to enter the missing information needed to close the ticket, so the Resolution Details. We didn’t have to change the Issue Status, or specify the Closing date because all those are automatically managed by the Custom Action engine.
The ticket is now closed, and our Customer Feedback Workflow has been started! Pretty awesome time saver to be able to click one button, and have all this done for you.
Another thing that I can do with KWizCom Custom Actions is bulk change items. For example, I have a task list, and I create a custom action called “Assign to me”. The goal of this Custom Action is to have a button to assign a task to myself, so I don’t have to edit the task, choose myself from the people picker, and save it. I entered a Title and Description, and I specified the Redirect on Complete to go to the “My Tasks” View. This way, after I assign myself to a task, I will go to the view where all my tasks are.
What this Custom Action will do is change the “Assigned To” field to myself, the currently logged in user. After clicking Add, in this version of KWizCom Custom Action I see that the people picker displays a little error, however everything was successfully added.
Now let me go back to my list and test it out. The beauty is that with Item Custom Actions that require no Input, I can run them on multiple items at once.
By default, when running a Custom Action on multiple items you need to confirm it.
Once you click on OK, it will take a few seconds to run this on multiple items, but you will see the progress in real time.
Finally, I was redirected to the My Tasks view, and as you can see both tasks have been assigned to me! One click on the custom action and it saved me about 10 clicks!
In this blog post we have reviewed KWizCom Custom Actions, which is part of KWizCom Forms (Enterprise Edition). KWizCom Custom Actions allow us to create Custom Actions (buttons in the ribbon) that will do multiple things, with a single click. In this blog post we have seen how to create both List Custom Actions as well as Item Custom actions that allowed us to create items, or edit them and fill in most of the details that we needed automatically. Furthermore, KWizCom Custom Actions allows us to only display Custom Actions to certain people, or in certain cases with dynamic conditions.
I found KWizCom Custom Actions to be really easy to use and without having to read the documentation, I was able to create some pretty cool Custom Actions! If you’re looking to allow your business users to create powerful custom actions without the need of a developer, definitely check out KWizCom Custom Actions by clicking on the logo below!
The post Review of KWizCom Custom Actions: Implementing Business Use-Cases the Easiest Way appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.
