Wictor Wilen

The time has come for me to do, as I’ve done now for eight years (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006), my annual post to sum up the year. It is always fun to look back to what happened the past 12 months. This past year has been a somewhat “in-betweeners” year. We (me, my clients, colleagues etc.) are standing on the edge of something big and the bridge over to the other side is really, really long. Some hesitate to pass the bridge, thinks it is to steep down, some people are running across it in fear, some take it just easy and some pass it half-ways and then stalls there not knowing which direction to go. Microsoft has already passed the bridge to the other side, they ran as fast as they could. But, they dropped so many things on the way over, things that I and others need to pick up and fix and very often even remind Microsoft that they dropped it at all!

Here’s a quick tip/solution on how to shut down your VMWare Workstation 10 and 11 Virtual Machines if you’re using the Windows 10 Tech Preview (basically all builds, but only tested on 9879). Currently if you’re using Windows 10 Tech Preview as your host operating system and if you’re trying to shut down a VMWare Workstation Virtual Machine you will crash Windows 10, and potentially corrupt your machine and virtual machines. You’ll see a Blue Screen of Death with a DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION exception.

You should mark the 29th of October at 1pm EST (18:00 CET) in your calendar. The MVP Chats are back! A couple of years back we regularly held MVP chats where anyone could ask SharePoint MVPs anything (almost at least). These chats was really successful and we received really good feedback. Unfortunately the tool we used for the chats was abandoned and we have been looking for a new way to do this. We think we’ve found a really interesting format for this by using the AMA format at Reddit (/r/sharepoint).

Today the Office Updates blog added a new blog post titled “Web Apps Server Removal from Download Center”. The contents of that blog post is short: As of 11-24-2014 Office Web Apps Server will be removed from the Microsoft Download Center. At that time it will only be available for download under Volume Licensing agreements. For more information please visit the site Volume Licensing Service Center. Office Web Apps Server, used by SharePoint, Exchange and Lync to view, preview and edit Office documents is and has been one of the key features/add-ons of these products and allows for browser based editing and collaboration. It has up until now been available as a free download, free from licensing for reading but requiring Office client licensing for editing.

I’m so excited to be once again going to Singapore and speak at the Share-The-Point Southeast Asia 2014, held November 25-26 2014. It is one of my favorite conferences and this will be my third time in the awesome country and city of Singapore! Everything is just great about this; the people, the speakers, the attendees, the city, the food – you name it! This year I will have two sessions:

I’m thrilled to be presenting at TechDays 2014 in Stockholm the 19-20 November. This is the 5th time the TechDays conference is held here in Sweden and I know that this years edition will be even more awesome than the previous times. As usual the best speakers from Sweden will be there and some international really interesting speakers, such as the well-known Mary Jo Foley. I will be presenting a session about the new and interesting Office 365 APIs. We will walk through what these new APIs do, what they can be used for, how to do authentication and why you should invest your time in these APIs. It will be a developer focused session and we will look at code as much as possible – and we will have as much fun as possible.

There’s a lot of stuff happening right now at Microsoft, they innovate, create great software and services, the new CEO accepts and wins almost all challenges and the SharePoint and Office team is listening! This is the Microsoft that I like and this is how I want Microsoft to continue to be. But Microsoft and the SharePoint team can’t just listen in blind – they listens to us out here in the real world, customers, clients etc. and we need to make our voice heard. This can be done in several ways, we can talk to our Microsoft representatives, we can whine on our blogs and on social networks OR we could make ourselves heard at UserVoice.

Introduction One of the blog post I receive the most e-mails about is the How to do active authentication to Office 365 and SharePoint Online. Some of the feedback I get is “thank you” etc. and some of them are people that are modifying it for all kind of things, especially when trying to do “background jobs” or integrations using user credentials. And this is what this post is all about. My standard answer to that question is that you do not want to use the methods in that post for those scenarios, nowadays, since you can actually build an App for that. And even better you can build an App with a so called App Only policy – which means that we do not need to have any user credentials or anything like that. So in order to save me some time in replying that and then another reply on the “how do I do that?” question I can from now on only link to this post :-)

After doing the Microsoft Cloud Show interview with Andrew Connell I thought it might be a good idea to write some of my tips and tricks for running SharePoint 2013 on Azure IAAS. Some of the stuff in this post are discussed in more depth in the interview and some things we just didn’t have time to talk about (or I forgot). I really recommend you to listen to the podcast as well and not just read this post.