Review of CloudShare: cloud-computing platform for developing and testing IT applications, software, and systems.

Product analysis by Vlad Catrinescu – requested by CloudShare, but thoughts are my own.

There are two things that almost everybody working with SharePoint agrees on; first one is that SharePoint is a development platform. Every company has different problems to solve, and with a little (or a lot) of custom Development, SharePoint can do it. Second is that SharePoint takes a lot of resources! A SharePoint 2013 development VM needs at least 12 GB of Ram, that’s if you don’t use Search or the User Profile! If you use those, you’re looking at about 24GB of ram and 4-8 cores easily. Furthermore, getting the required virtual machines when a new developer joins the project, or when a new project starts can sometimes take quite some time as the company’s SharePoint admin has to install and configure them properly. Another problem is that companies often cannot host all the virtual machines for SharePoint developers, and therefore, developers have to code on underperforming virtual machines and cannot fully reproduce a client’s environment before going to production.

CloudShare, a cloud computing company that provides an amazingly flexible and easy to use cloud-computing platform for developing and testing IT applications, software, and systems wants to make it easier for SharePoint developers to create development machines, and test their client solutions! Before we go in the review, here is a description of their offering:

CloudShare’s on-demand IT environments empower users to kickstart new projects, explore new technologies, develop complex applications, and collaborate across teams without battling for limited IT infrastructure resources. Our self-service SaaS platform enables you to build, freeze and share complex multi-VM environments. CloudShare is optimized for multi-VM applications that include Oracle, MSSQL, AD, Tomcat, JBoss, WebLogic and more. Use CloudShare Labs as a secure extension of your on-premise lab and expand as needed – start small, grow when you are ready.

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CloudShare Review

CloudShare offered me a temporary account so I could play with their platform. Once you login your CloudShare, you have a good looking dashboard of the current environments you have created, the current projects you are working on, as well as your latest activities.

If you want to create your first environment, you go on the Environments menu and select a new one. Then you will have the choice if you have a custom template for your project created by a team member, if you want to just do a “1 VM” machine, or if you want a three tier environment.

I looked at both the Custom Environment option, and the CloudShare Environment templates and found some pretty cool ones. For example, you can easily create a VM with SharePoint 2013, Visual Studio and Project Server installed! Everybody who installed Project Server in the past knows how much fun it is to installJ.

As you can see there are plenty of choices to choose from to match your needs! In the CloudShare Environments I found some interesting ones as well such as the small SharePoint farm that separates your AD, SQL and SharePoint.

I decided to install the small farm and play with it. One thing I realized, is that in my opinion, the ram given to the virtual machines for the Custom Environment option is a bit too low. However, this can easily be customized after if you want more horsepower. Also, some “permalinks” from the text descriptions do not link to anything. After you add the environment you want to your “cart” and click confirm, CloudShare will start creating it.

 

I was amazed, at how fast the virtual machines were created. Creating all the three virtual machines took a total of less than 10 minutes! In less than 10 minutes I had a full working SharePoint environment I was able to connect to in remote and start using it for my project. Before we open the virtual machines, let’s take a look at the interface. From your “Environment Dashboard”. As you can see in the screenshot below, in your environment dashboard you see the following:

1. The Virtual Machine List as well as what software is included on each machine
2. The different ways to connect to the virtual machine. You can either download an RDP file or connect remotely to it with your favorite RDP client, or you can use the VM directly from your web browser.
3. Here is where you can add extra RAM / CPU / disk space to your virtual machines.
4. This is in how much time of inactivity the Virtual Machine will shut down, which is very useful to not waste money when you’re not working. You can click on the “Extend Suspend” button if you’re going away for more than 1 hour, but want to keep the VM up. Otherwise, you can create a new policy that sets the suspend inactivity bar higher! Also, the environment gets auto deleted in 30 days unless you extend it!

I connected to the SharePoint virtual machine and the performance was really quite good. I didn’t see any lag in SharePoint, or a lot of “waiting on it” while browsing on the site.

One thing to note is that of course, if you manage your Virtual Machines through the web browser, the video quality is a lot more laggy than if you connect directly in remote desktop. Also, the search is a bit slow to start up after you resume your Virtual Machines.

Another part of CloudShare that I found really cool is that you can easily share the environment with other members of your team by clicking the “Share” button in your Dashboard. This will allow them to see your environment in their own dashboard as well as access it! You can also give them either Basic rights that allows them to start/stop the environment, or give them full rights to take snapshot and revert to an old snapshot.

Furthermore, you can also share a snapshot, or a blueprint of your environment with everyone by simply creating a permalink. A permalink is a permanent link to your environment. Each time someone clicks on your permalink, an independent, separate copy of your environment will be instantiated for that user to view, test and edit – without affecting your original prototype. The same permalink can be used over and over again.

There are a lot of billing options to fit everyone. If you just want to use it from time to time, you can use the On Demand option, however if you’re a team of developers working on projects, I recommend the Team option as it has 1200GB hours included! To learn more about the On Demand option, visit this link: http://spvlad.com/1F0T8Uc

Conclusion

As a resource-intensive development platform, SharePoint makes it tough for developers to get fast access to development machines, and even tougher to being able to simulate client environments. CloudShare wants to change that by offering an easy to use platform which allows developers to easily and rapidly create virtual machines that have everything installed without having to wait for the SharePoint Administrator to configure them properly. In my tests, I found the CloudShare Virtual Machines to be really performant and did not see any lag. I highly recommend trying their on-demand option, as you will only pay for the virtual machines that you use, without a contract and you can see if CloudShare is right for you!

To learn more about CloudShare, click the logo below:

The post Review of CloudShare: cloud-computing platform for developing and testing IT applications, software, and systems. appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.

by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu

SharePoint 2013 Designer and Workflow Tips, Tricks & Traps

In this article, I want to share my experience working with SharePoint Workflows via SharePoint Designer. Sometimes it may be very painful, but I hope after reading the article you will not step on same rake.

Do not log Dictionary variable to Log to History

This is very common issue, your workflow just stuck in started state with following error:

Retrying last request. Next attempt scheduled in less than one minute. Details of last request: HTTP InternalServerError to http://ift.tt/1cg6PXY(guid'04dc3f6a-968e-4ce0-a7cc-10949dfb15db')/Items Correlation Id: f54b9d7e-5242-1408-b066-5239a7b01c0a Instance Id: 967e7b1b-96cd-4fbf-b6d4-4df91199831b 
Invalid text value.

A text field contains invalid data. Please check the value and try again. 
Retry now

It occur because your data is too big. This workflow action can display limited number of symbols. Otherwise such error occurs. As a workaround, you can use Send E-Mail with Attachments (SMTP) instead of log to history.

If you send dictionary by email you can receive it’s structure in JSON format. It is very helpful to understand the structure.

Be careful using Get an Item from Dictionary

Usually you need to get an item from array and you use ‘Get an Item from Dictionary’ workflow action like this:

However, please be careful because if you have extra whitespace in path, your workflow can be stuck into suspended status with following error:

RequestorId: 261892b4-cf71-e580-0000-000000000000. Details: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the workflow instance. 
Exception details: System.FormatException: The DynamicValue property '(0) ' was incorrectly formatted. at Microsoft.Activities.Dynamic.DynamicValueBuilder.PathSegmentFactory.Parse(String segmentText, String fullPathName) at Microsoft.Activities.Dynamic.DynamicValueBuilder.PathSegmentFactory.Create(String segment, PathSegment next, String path) at Microsoft.Activities.Dynamic.DynamicValueBuilder.PathSegmentFactory.Create(String path) at Microsoft.Activities.GetDynamicValueProperty`1.Execute(CodeActivityContext context) at System.Activities.CodeActivity`1.InternalExecute(ActivityInstance instance, ActivityExecutor executor, BookmarkManager bookmarkManager) at System.Activities.Runtime.ActivityExecutor.ExecuteActivityWorkItem.ExecuteBody(ActivityExecutor executor, BookmarkManager bookmarkManager, Location resultLocation) Exception from activity GetDynamicValueProperty<DynamicValue> Sequence Microsoft.SharePoint.WorkflowServices.Activities.LoopNTimes Test WF Sequence Flowchart Sequence GetGroupMembers.WorkflowXaml_a9b1b4bd_9995_41a1_9da2_f8f57ce75c54

SharePoint Designer Cache Errors

The following error is very common when you work with SharePoint Designer:

“Failed to Load this workflow. To correct this problem, restart SharePoint Designer.”

To resolve it, you need to clear SharePoint Designer cache

And here are command for command line to do it:

rmdir "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WebsiteCache\" /s /q
rmdir "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\SharePoint Designer\ProxyAssemblyCache\" /s /q

Create self-documented workflow using stages

You should know how fast you can forget something what you did some time ago, when you are using workflow please try to use correct stage names and divide your workflow into small pieces of actions (like procedures in programming languages). In addition, you can use ‘Add a Comment’ workflow action to leave additional comments in your workflow.

As an example of the self documented workflow I can provide a notification workflow which I was described in my previous article.

Use Dynamic Value Evaluator to check your expression

It is useful when you use ‘Get an Item from Dictionary’, you can easily check your expression using Dynamic Value Evaluator. For example you have some data in your dictionary and want to build path to retrieve it. This is a tool which can help you to do it. Just past JSON structure of your dictionary into textbox and write your path, then click ‘Run’. It will show what result you can expect.

Lookup User Name/Login/Email by ID

Indeed this is one of my favorite features you can use any string variable with integer value and lookup user data by ID. The example below returns correct display name of the user by specific ID.

You just have ID, but retrieve display name.

Get Date in required format

You can use out of the box method as on figure below:

Additionally you can use free custom action ‘Format Date’ from Plumsail Workflow Actions Pack.

Use Requestb.in to check your query

When you use ‘Call HTTP Web Service’ you need to see how your request looks. RequestBin service can help you with that, it just logs all queries and shows them to you. 

Use App Step to get access

This is hard to use feature, but in some situations, it is the only way to get required data. Moreover, you can use app-step to get data (for example via REST request) from other web. To use it you have to activate the feature that is called 'Workflows can use app permissions'. After that, you need to manually grant necessary permissions to your workflow via AppInv.aspx page. You can find more info on MSDN.

Conclusion

In this article, I have tried to collect most interesting notes, which I hope can save a huge amount of your time while creating your workflows. SharePoint 2013 workflows are quite flexible and allow you to use complex objects and loops, but sometime they just hit you to the stomach with some non-obvious errors.

The Original article is available on our blog

by Roman Rylov via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Holiday Weekend SharePoint Learning The Easy Way

Continuing our short series of interviews with speakers at SPBiz, this weekend I wanted to share our recent interview with Richard Harbridge - CTO of 2tolead. 

Its not a bad way to spend a few minutes on a (hopefully) sunny holiday weekend, I certainly enjoyed what he had to say. I hope you will too. 

SPBiz: Hi Richard, thanks once again for agreeing to become one of our keynotes. The team is SUPER excited to have both yourself and Mark Kashman on board for what is now shaping up to be a feast of SharePoint! As always, we like to start light and then get into the nitty gritty of your views on SharePoint. So first up, as a thank you, we are taking you to a planet of your choosing for a holiday. It doesn’t have to be in our solar system…which one…and why?

Richard: Well this is exciting. My immediate concerns are radiation exposure and impact to my health (or accidently bringing something back)… but boy would it be interesting to visit another world.

Would I be able to return or is it a one way trip? If it’s a one way I unfortunately would have to stick to Earth as I love my family, friends, community and my work too much.

If it’s there and back I would love to visit Vulcan (Star Trek) as I think I could learn a lot and might be able to bring that knowledge back with me.

SPBiz: We managed to keep you alive so you could return to your day job after our little jaunt. What should SPBiz delegates know about the role that you perform with Microsoft?  

Richard: Oh good it was a return trip!

I love my role with Microsoft. It means that I work across ALL technologies that Microsoft provides as a service, server, or as a device. That means every article and product update for Office 365, Azure, Dynamics, System Center, SQL, Devices, and more are all relevant to me. So there is always an opportunity to learn more or work closer with the different product groups (plus it means people can ask me literally any question and I am also interested in the answer if I don’t have it readily available).

My actual role is to act as a strategic advisor to many partners while supporting thousands of customers. Beyond helping partners adopt and develop new services and business models, I manage a large team of executives, directors, consultants, and other resources through a sales and partner programs, extending the reach, impact, and capability of the Microsoft sales teams so that we can better service our customers.

SPBiz: How did you come to be working in the SharePoint world and working with such great companies.

I started consulting on SharePoint development with SharePoint 2003. We built this really amazing enterprise knowledge and project management solution that took half a year (90+ hour work weeks) and a few hard working developers… I can’t imagine how long it would have taken if we hadn’t used SharePoint as a base.

When the early beta of SharePoint 2007 came along I was consulting as a Business Analyst and decided I would try and recreate ‘most’ of what we had built in the latest version to see how long it would take. It took me only about 4 weeks of part time work to get ‘most’ of the functionality in. At that point I was hooked. SharePoint 2007 had gone through a single revision and enabled our customers to get nearly the same value in an exponentially shorter period of time with far less development.

As SharePoint grew so did I – I decided to work for a few years in large enterprise organizations leading SharePoint teams and doing a lot of business process improvement and people development and training. It was a great experience going from the one “Everything SharePoint” guy to a broader team as I moved onto another large enterprise. In this period of time I had to try and learn how to scale and lead (not just projects but enterprise strategies and teams).

However it seems consulting is in my blood. I missed it so much that I went back into consulting. I was spoiled and got to work on the beta of 2010, then the beta of 2013 and shhh don’t tell anyone but I am working on the early bits of 2016 as well right now. The best part of my work in consulting is that customers really wanted to know more about BPOS and what eventually became Office 365 and so their needs/questions push me to always keep up with the technology.

I personally see Office 365 as significant as the change I went through in that first big project on 2003 that I rebuilt in 2007. The impact it can have is extraordinary for businesses in saving money, time and getting value faster. I wanted to not just know about SharePoint, but about how Office 365’s other innovations could help customers do more with less. So I joined Microsoft and as a result now find that SharePoint combined with Office 365, Azure and Dynamics helps me provide even more value in the engagements I am involved in.

SPBiz: If you were to give a piece of advice to someone who is wants to follow in your footsteps, what would it be?

Richard: Never stop growing and never get too comfortable. Those are connected.

I had a colleague who once told me “when you get comfortable and your job is easy that means you aren’t learning or growing as much as you could be.” Learning and growing requires feeling a sense of uncertainty and accepting that you probably don’t know all that you could know. For me personally – that has been a great way to keep me changing things up and pushing myself to adapt and learn along the way.

Set audacious goals for yourself. I have constantly been setting new ones for myself to stretch me out of my comfort zone.

I feel a sense of responsibility in that I am lucky enough to be able to do work I love, and have great support from my company, community, friends and family. If I don’t try my best then it would be wasting that opportunity I have been afforded. So push yourself to not be comfortable and change/grow with the changes in technology and the changes in your industry – especially if you are lucky enough to have that great support network.

SPBiz: Who inspired you most? (Either in your professional or personal life)

Richard: Tie.

Bill Gates and my parents. I love that Bill Gates seems to always be maximizing his positive impact on the world. Trying to do as much as he can (as well as his lovely wife Melinda).

My parents? Similar just at a smaller scale I suppose.

SPBiz: If you could tell someone to avoid ONE thing in the world of SharePoint that could be a pain for their business what would it be?

Effective deployment and implementation is critical for your organizations success, but it’s not enough on its own. Please plan for adoption and invest effort in running adoption activities to educate, spread awareness and maximize meaningful adoption of SharePoint within your business. Visit http://ift.tt/1vq0248 if you haven’t done so already – great resources are available there and we are working hard at improving it even more in the coming months.

If you need help just give me a shout – Just email me at Richard@RHarbridge.com or msg me on LinkedIn. Even if you already deployed – it’s never too late to improve adoption.

SPBiz: Is there a tip you would give an emerging business out there about using SharePoint? e.g. which version is easiest to set up, which is the best product/app that helps you most during your day?

Richard: SharePoint Online/Office 365 is where it’s at in my personal opinion. For most emerging businesses especially. It’s easy to get started, constantly innovating as your business grows, and financially it makes a ton of sense.

In my daily work I use our SharePoint Search, Yammer and Delve to constantly find answers, insights, useful information or connections that help me to better help Microsoft customers/partners.

It’s rare that I create anything new. It’s almost always an act of adding context, highlighting relevant insights, and connecting people so that they can achieve their enterprise technology vision together. Those are typically the most impactful things I can do in my daily work.

Don’t get me wrong, I spend quite a bit of time in several SharePoint team sites updating documents, excel data, or building new reporting solutions or workflows. However it’s the search capabilities and sense of connected/responsiveness that we have due to the technology we use that helps me most during my day.

SPBiz: What would the Richard Harbridge in another dimension be doing for his day job?

Richard: I think I would enjoy teaching in a university, college or online education institution… or would be a zombie hunter, cyborg, or stay at home dad (or all 3) – I guess it depends on the other dimension.

SPBiz: Is there a common problem you observe when you are working with Microsoft Partners that you help to solve?

Richard: Absolutely. We have incredibly smart and capable Microsoft partners out there. Every one of them wants to better support their customers and lead within their field of expertise.

There are two common problems I run into time and time again. The first actually relates to our customers and the second relates to partners who are transforming their businesses.

1. Customers who want to do it themselves, but don’t have the expertise required (or the right support/strategy internally).
   Please, please work with a trusted partner or advisor – I can help you get introduced to one, two, or ten if it would help. The partner doesn’t need to do the work, but if you don’t have the expertise you need you should at a minimum involve a partner or someone who has that expertise so they can mentor, envision, plan or help you maximize your Microsoft technology investments.
2. Mobility and the Cloud provide incredible and accessible opportunities for your customers and your own business.
   As a partner and as customers we need to embrace the benefits that mobility solutions and the cloud solutions can provide. This requires investment in helping customers envision how to digitally transform their businesses in new ways. For many customers it’s not easy to understand what IoT scenarios might be a good fit, or how they can best use Hybrid Office 365 or Azure capabilities to not only offset costs, but improve experiences, security and capabilities.
   
   Partners should be leaning into this challenge and should think of how they can better help customers not just get ‘on’ the latest Microsoft technology but how to best ‘use’ and maximize meaningful adoption of that technology as well.

SPBiz: Music time..what’s the WORST or most embarrassing piece of music you have ever purchased (Mine was Harry Enfield by the way…”Loads ‘a Money”..truly awful, but I was 12 so there’s my excuse.

Richard: I couldn’t find it on the internet, but once at this garage sale I bought this ‘official’ mix CD of old cartoon theme songs – it has Mighty Mouse on the cover. Song on it are from Mighty Mouse, Transformers, Ghost Busters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, etc… I still have it in my car (I still also have a CD player in my car too).

I suppose that is the thing I am most embarrassed to play, especially because I can still sing the Transformers movie theme song which is on it when it’s played. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaVcpfncOWs

SPBiz: What advice would you give to a business who are looking to develop the capabilities of their SharePoint solution?

Richard: Understand your needs fully. As a business analyst at heart I absolutely love effective requirements gathering and think it’s always worthwhile.

It is also CRITICAL to develop your solution iteratively. That way you can deliver value sooner, people can begin using it, and you can iterate/improve based on their feedback so that the solution can be even better at meeting the needs of your users (including needs they weren’t able to codify/share effectively).

Lastly don’t do it on your own. Look to see if there are great 3^rd party products that already do what you are looking for, or that might help augment or compliment your solution. Ask others who have built similar solutions – most customers are happy to speak with other customers and share their insights/lessons learned – use that! Lastly consider working with a partner who has built a similar solution or the solution you are looking to develop.

SPBiz: Thank you so much for sharing your insights. We hope to bring the readers MUCH more from you during your keynote on 18^th June. We are still keeping the topic under wraps for now but if you wanted to tease…what would you tell SPbiz delegates about what they might hear if they signup and join us?

Let’s see… What’s coming in SharePoint 2016 is exciting! (All the things I wish I could share unfortunately are still confidential – but they won’t all be by June!!!). You know what else is exciting? All of the Office 365 innovations and new features that you can take advantage of to improve your SharePoint implementations today (you don’t have to wait!).

I can’t wait to share insights, solutions and strategy with all of you in June. Mark Kashman is a fantastic speaker and you won’t want to miss him as he and I share not only what is coming, but what is here, and how organizations are getting the most out of SharePoint today!

SPBiz: Brilliant, we cant wait either. Its going to be a great event. Thanks again Richard and see you there !

by Jon Manderville via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Annoying "The report server cannot process the report or shared dataset."

I was recently stuck with an annoying error in the solution that uses SSRS. We have a SharePoint application with SSRS report infrastructure - reports library, shared data sets library, shared data connections library. After several deployments and migrations of report files between environments I started getting an error "The report server cannot process the report or shared dataset. The shared data source '4ba55136-5726-4cc3-b5e8-51768f451583' for the report server or SharePoint site is not valid. Browse to the server or site and select a shared data source." It was an attempt to open a report file. GUIDs in your case will of course be different.

I downloaded report and shared data set files and was trying to find anything wrong in them. Nothing was helpful. No GUIDs like in the error text. The solution came when I started analyzing Reporting Service Application content database. When I opened the DataSource table I found the above mentioned data source GUID in the DSID field and what was suspicious - the Link field had no value for this Data Source. 

We use a single Data Connection in that scenario and its GUID was mentioned in the "Link" field in some other records (the one started from 14b91e87-...).  I copied this GUID value to the "Link" field of the record for the shared data source affected by the error and reopened the report web page. I've got no errors!

So that was a problem of Reporting Service content database and I have no idea why the information broke but it definitely can happen. Of course the easiest and more correct approach would be to redeploy the entire report project to SharePoint but it may not always be possible.

by Maxim Khoruzhiy via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

The Medium Has the Message and My Blog Is Trying to Catch Up

I’ve really been digging the content I’ve been finding through Medium for the last few months or so. The Web is ever-evolving and to me Medium represents a new paradigm for Web publishing and content consumption. It’s sort of blogging combined with content crowd-sourcing combined with highlighting like I have on my Kindle combined with… Well, it’s unique, so it’s not really just the sum of those parts.

“Now that I’m really high I finally understand Medium.” by @arlogilbert -> I'm really getting into @medium. https://t.co/a7rBYWwkEi

— Marc D Anderson (@sympmarc) May 24, 2015

To me, one of the best parts of Medium is the Staff Picks and Top Stories. These two categories give me solid content to read that is either vetted by the platform owners or popular with the platform readers. One of the cool things about this is that it cuts across all topic areas. I’m as likely to want to read one of Eric Elliott’s (@_ericelliott) excellent posts about JavaScript and its communities like this or this or something like When the heck did learning to code become cool? And why it sucks to be a beginner today… which are squarely in my own wheelhouse to interesting takes on Web design like Optical Adjustment – Logic vs. Designers.

But what makes it even more fun is the stuff I run across that to many people would seem sort of random. None of us is so one-dimensional that we cannot enjoy reading something completely new to us. Medium ensures that when we go off on one of those mental tangents, that it’s a higher quality one.

When I spot one of these seemingly random posts, I can see about how long it might take me to read it, so it’s clear going in if how much time I’ll need to invest. (I’m a pretty fast reader, so for me the number is usually an upper bound – YMMV.) Those times must be built up magically based on how long people really spend and the posts and seem pretty accurate to me.

The biggest thing I notice as I read posts on Medium is that I feel a need to up my own game, to write more pithy and valuable posts. Ever since I started blogging, I’ve had a little voice in my head that writes posts that come out of ordinary, every day experiences. These aren’t the “here’s a piece of code to fix a particular problem” posts, but often the softer stuff that makes the fact that the code exists have more purpose. It might have nothing to do with my professional life at all. (Maybe it’s hard to believe, but I do have a few other interests besides SharePoint.) I wish I actually spent the time to get more of those posts written.

I found an article that shows how to make your own blog a bit more “Medium-like” and I’ve added some new plugins to my blog here based on those suggestions. (See WordPressium: Creating a Medium-like Experience)

As of today, you can do a few new things on my blog…

Courtesy of Hans van Gent’s Selection Sharer plugin, you can now highlight any piece of text in one of my posts and send it as a Tweet, post it to LinkedIn, or send it in an email. (This assumes I ever say anything quotable, which I know is a huge assumption.) I would expect that he’ll add some more sharing options over time.

The Reading Time plugin adds some info on how long a post might take to read. You’ll see the estimate based on an average reading speed at the top of each post as you visit it. As you stay on the page, a little progress bar shows how much of that time has elapsed. Of course, reading a post full of code is different than just reading prose, so time will tell how useful this is. It can at least be a little game; can you beat the progress bar?

I hope that you find these two new capabilities useful. Let me know what you think!

by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog

Free Webinar: 14 Tips for Planning an ECM Content Migration to SharePoint

Join Joel Oleson (@joeloleson) and Tom Castiglia (@tomcastiglia) as they share top Tips and Tricks based on years of industry experience migrating from Legacy ECM environments to SharePoint and Office 365. Whether you are in the middle of a migration to SharePoint 2013 or looking to retire a legacy ECM environment or planning a migration [&hellip

The post Free Webinar: 14 Tips for Planning an ECM Content Migration to SharePoint appeared first on CollabShow.

by Joel Oleson via CollabShow

O365 - IOS - Swift - Unified API - Display the list of users from the tenant

After my recent switch over to Mac as my main laptop for O365 / SharePoint development, Finally I got an IOS native app running using the O365 IOS SDK and Swift. Nearly after 15 years of development using Microsoft Technologies and Tools, the mobile app development using XCode and Swift rekindles my memory of learning the Object Oriented Programming using C and C++.

Referenced Article:

• Office 365 IOS Apps using Swift - Sahil Malik - This article contains the step by step details about using O365 SDKs within the IOS app using Swift.
• O365 SDKs - GitHub - Contains the full list of O365 SDKs for files, onenote, exchange etc.
• Using the Office 365 Unified API in ASP.Net MVC - Vardhaman  - This article explains how to register an app with the Azure AD to access the unified api.

Step 1 : Register the app on the Azure AD 

Step 2: Create a Single View application in the XCode

Step 3 : Setup the Pod file to install the following

• pod 'ADALiOS', '~> 1.2.2'

• pod 'Office365', '~> 0.9.1'  (The previous versions does not have the unified api end point).

• run "pod install" on the terminal or "pod update" if you want to upgrade to the latest. (The below screen shot shows the output of the update - because I installed the old version first and updated to the latest).

Step 4: Create the Header file as below

• Include the ADAuthenticationContext.h, office365_odata_base.h and office365_graph_sdk.h (graph - unified api)

Step 5: Initialise the Azure AD app details

Step 6: Initialise the Authentication Context

Step 7: Implement the function to get the list of users using the unified api

Step 8 : Build & Run

by Balamurugan Kailasam via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community