Wictor Wilen

When I first heard about SharePoint Online at the PDC 2008 I was a bit disappointed that you could not use custom code but had to rely on the built-in functionality and the things you could do with SharePoint Designer (which is quite powerful anyway, especially with jQuery). To read more about SharePoint online, head over to Tobias Zimmergrens blog. But with some clever techniques you can take advantage of the Windows Azure Hosted Services and create your custom code. I will show you how to create some custom code, which normally is done by SharePoint event receivers or timer jobs, using a Worker Role in Windows Azure.

Here’s another post with scripts from my sessions at SharePoint Conference 2014 – this time from the Mastering Office Web Apps 2013 Operations and Deployments session (SPC383). To get a more in-depth explanation of all the details, please watch the recording at Channel 9. Let’s start…but first! OWA = Outlook Web App and WAC = Office Web Apps (Web Application Companion). Preparing the machine before installing Office Web Apps Before you install the Office Web Apps bits on the machine you need to install a set of Windows Features. The following script is the one you should use (not the one on TechNet) and it works for Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2.

As promised I will hand out all the scripts I used in my SharePoint Conference 2014 sessions. The first set of scripts are from the demo used in the Real-world SharePoint Architecture decisions session (SPC334). This session only contained one demo in which I showed how to set up a Single Content Web Application and using Host Named Site Collections when creating Site Collections. Creating the Web Application and the Root Site Collection The first part of the script was to create the Web Application using SSL, configure the certificate in IIS and then create the Root Site Collection. The Web Application is created using the –Url parameter pointing to a FQDN, instead of using the server name (which is used in the TechNet documentation, and causes a dependency on that specific first server). Secondly the script assumes that the correct certificate is installed on the machine and we grab that certificate using the friendly name (yes, always have a friendly name on your certificates, it will make everything much easier for you). A new binding is then created in IIS using the certificate. Finally the Root Site Collection is created (it is a support requirement) – the Root Site Collection uses the same URL as the Web Application and we should not specify any template or anything. This will be a site collection that no end-user should ever use.

Wow, that was an awesome conference! SharePoint Conference 2014 is over and I’m very glad I attended the conference – both as a speaker and attendee. Finally Microsoft and the SharePoint Product Group told us about their future and vision for SharePoint and SharePoint Online. If you knew how long we have waited for this… I’m glad they start to sort out the service (ie Office 365) and now can add new capabilities into the platform. I’m glad Jeff Teper officially said that there will be at least one more version of SharePoint on-premises. I’m glad that the product group is listening to our and our customers feedback. I’m glad that we have such a strong community I’m excited about the future of SharePoint (to be honest, it’s been some time since I had that feeling).

I’m really proud to announce that I will be speaking at the long anticipated SharePoint Conference 2014 in Las Vegas, March 3-6 2014. The SharePoint Conference hosted by Microsoft is returning to Las Vegas, but this time located at the Venetian, bigger and perhaps more interesting than in a long time. If you are in the SharePoint business as a developer, IT-Pro, architect, business analyst, power user or executive, then this is the conference where you would like to be next year.

Introduction We all know that one of the most important parts of SharePoint 2013 (and 2003, 2007 and 2010) are SQL Server. Bad SQL Server performance will lead to bad SharePoint performance! That’s just how it is! There are tons of ways of doing this by having enough cores, adding more RAM, using fast disks, using multiple instances and even servers. You should all already be familiar with this. Search is one of the components in SharePoint that requires A LOT of resources, especially when crawling and doing analytics. For both SQL Server and SharePoint Search there are plenty of documentation on how to optimize both the hardware and configuration of these components. In this post I will explain and show you how to use the SQL Server Resource Governor to optimize the usage of SQL Server, especially for Search.

Introduction We all know that one of the most important parts of SharePoint 2013 (and 2003, 2007 and 2010) are SQL Server. Bad SQL Server performance will lead to bad SharePoint performance! That’s just how it is! There are tons of ways of doing this by having enough cores, adding more RAM, using fast disks, using multiple instances and even servers. You should all already be familiar with this. Search is one of the components in SharePoint that requires A LOT of resources, especially when crawling and doing analytics. For both SQL Server and SharePoint Search there are plenty of documentation on how to optimize both the hardware and configuration of these components. In this post I will explain and show you how to use the SQL Server Resource Governor to optimize the usage of SQL Server, especially for Search.

Introduction This is a story from the trenches where Excel Web App in Office Web Apps 2013 refuses to render Excel documents, while other Apps such as Word and PowerPoint works just fine. The end-users are met with the generic error message: “We’re sorry. We ran into a problem completing your request.” The problem is easy to solve but can be somewhat difficult to locate and in this post I will show you how to find the issue and fix it.

If you have been working with SharePoint you should know by now how to get the build version of an installation using PowerShell. Knowing the version of the installation is crucial for troubleshooting and knowing what features or limitations the current installation has, given the new release cadence. If you don’t know how to do it then Bing for it and then return here. But how do you do the same for Office Web Apps Server 2013?