SharePoint 2013

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.

A couple of weeks back I was interviewed by Andrew Connell for the Microsoft Cloud Show. The Microsoft Cloud Show is an (almost) weekly podcast where Andrew (AC) and his wingman Chris Johnson (CJ) discusses everything related to Microsoft cloud offerings including benchmarks with other cloud vendors. If you’re not subscribing and listening to the show already then I urge you to do that as soon as possible! Me and AC sat down for almost an hour discussing Microsoft Azure IAAS and specifically when running SharePoint 2013 in that service. We had a great talk, as usual when it comes to AC, and I think we covered a lot of the issues and gotchas and things to think about when building a SharePoint 2013 infrastructure on Azure IAAS.

Introduction The other day I posted about the patching procedure for the SharePoint 2013 Distributed Cache (Microsoft AppFabric 1.1) and on that post I got a great comment from Riccardo: Hi Wictor, is it possible to discover the patch level of the Distributed Cache without looking at control panel? Powershell? That is a great question Riccardo! But the answer is not that simple… Check the version using Installed Updates The easiest way to manually check what version of AppFabric you are using, or rather which CU that is applied to AppFabric 1.1, is to use the Program and Features tool in Windows Server and then click on View installed updates.

Introduction In SharePoint 2013 the Distributed Cache plays a very important role, it is a key component for performance and caching. An incorrectly configured or managed Distributed Cache will cause issues, with your farm. I’ve even seen blogs recommending turning it off, most likely due to that they don’t manage the cache properly and get into a situation where it causes even worse performance problems. One of the good things with the Distributed Cache is that is not a SharePoint service, it is a standalone service called AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server. Initially the guidance from Microsoft was that the Distributed Cache (DC) would be patched together with SharePoint and we should keep our hands off it. But that has over the time changed and allowed us to take advantage of the fixes and improvements that the AppFabric team does to the service. So, it is our responsibility to patch the Distributed Cache. But how do we do it?

Introduction SharePoint 2013 (and earlier versions) allows you to use alternative authentication “sources” than Windows. We can part from the different options with Windows login, use Forms Based Authentication (FBA) or use a federated/trusted identity provider. Forms based authentication is a good approach if you don’t want to manage your users in Active Directory or if you don’t want to use Windows Login. The downside with FBA is that you must manually do some web.config modifications, there isn’t any UI for managing the users (yes, I know you can use LDAP or just download something from the tubez, but you get my point). Using a federated approach is more interesting, that allows you to get the identity management and authentication away from your SharePoint farm (and this is a really good thing, SharePoint admins are generally not identity management people!). A trusted identity provider is a service such as Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), Microsoft Azure Access Control Services (ACS) or any other SAML 1.1 compatible Identity Provider (IdP).

Introduction The other week I posted an article about how to use SharePoint Hosted Apps when using SAML Claims, I did not expect that amount of feedback I had on that blog post, in e-mail, comments, tweets etc. Some of that feedback was how do you do it with Provider Hosted apps. Well you’re about to find out. It took me a while to get it properly done and there are some things that you should be aware of. In this post I will walk you through the simplest scenario and you will notice that there are a couple of moving parts. But, since I am such an influencer I thought I should make it easier for you. I will show you how to do this without the minimal changes to your current provider hosted apps – you only have to add an extension file to your solution, make a small modification to the helper files that Visual Studio gives you and a couple of web.config modifications! All the code you need will be published in a Github repository (https://github.com/wictorwilen/SharePointContextSaml) for you to consume and do all the fancy gitty stuff that you code dweebs out there like.

Introduction By now each and every SharePoint developer out there should spend their time building SharePoint Apps instead of the old trusted friend of ours; Full Trust Code. Ok, Apps doesn’t solve the equivalent of world hunger in SharePoint at the moment, but that’s a discussion for another time. I assume you get my point. We have two types of apps (we used to have three little monkeys jumping in the bed, but one just bumped his head); Provider hosted apps and SharePoint hosted apps. Without going into details, Provider hosted apps are the apps that are hosted outside of SharePoint on a specific location (URL) and SharePoint hosted apps are running on top of SharePoint (using JavaScript) on a “random” location. This location is called the App Web and is a SharePoint SPWeb with a specific randomly generated URL. That URL could look something like this:

Introduction Welcome to a new series of blog posts in which we will focus on the Disaster and Recovery (DR) routines for Workflow Manager 1.0 in combination with SharePoint 2013. During SharePoint Conference 2013 me and SharePoint sensei Spencer Harbar presented a session called “Designing, deploying, and managing Workflow Manager farms” (watch the video recording). During that session we discussed different DR options for Workflow Manager and the Service Bus and we got tons of questions on that specific topic. We did not have time to go into details and we did not show any of the necessary scripts/routines you need to do when restoring a Workflow Farm or Workflow Scopes, and there is very little information available on that topic on the interwebs – so that is why this new blog series is being posted.

Introduction When using the Web Platform Installer to download and/or install Workflow Manager you can no longer download and install Workflow Manager 1.0 and Workflow Manager 1.0 CU1. The only option is to download Workflow Manager 1.0 Refresh (which essentially is CU2). So when installing a new Workflow Manager farm for SharePoint or just because you want to rock some workflows you have to use Workflow Manager (WFM) 1.0 Refresh. Unless you’ve been smart and previously downloaded and saved the original Workflow Manager. When using WFM 1.0 Refresh you also need to download Service Bus 1.1.

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 SharePoint 2013 (and previous versions) uses a client side “token” to validate posts back to SharePoint to prevent attacks where the user might be tricked into posting data back to the server. This token is known by many names; form digest or message digest or request digest. The token is unique to a user and a site and is only valid for a (configurable) limited time. When building Apps or customizations on top of SharePoint, especially using patterns such as Single Page Applications (SPA) or using frameworks such as knockout.js it is very common that you see errors due to that the token is invalidated, which is due to that you have not reloaded the page and the token has timed out. The purpose of this article is to show you how you can refresh this form digest using JavaScript.

Introduction A couple of weeks back I blogged about the March Update for Office Web Apps 2013 and also how you could use that update to show PDF previews in a SharePoint 2013 Search Center. Since then I’ve received a lot of requests on how to enable PDF Previews in a Document Library, which isn’t there by default. Of course it is not a WAC thing, it’s a SharePoint 2013 thing – but the SharePoint 2013 updates (up until now at least) does not provide this capability either.

Wow, 2013 was an interesting year and the time has come for my annual blog post to sum up the year that soon has passed us and looking a bit into the crystal ball for the next one. This is my seventh summary post and it is always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006). For me the year has been really intensive on all levels; I don’t think I´ve ever experienced such a huge demand for my professional services as of now, there is so much new stuff to learn and it´s harder and harder to keep up, I have a hard time resisting doing tons of community stuff and at the same time we had a huge construction work at our house, and of course having two soon-to-be teenager girls takes its toll!

Happy Holidays everyone! At the upcoming SharePoint Conference, next year in Las Vegas, I will be presenting a session called Real World SharePoint 2013 Architecture decisions. The session will discuss and give examples of real world decisions and trade-offs you might be faced with as a SharePoint Architect. In order to make the session even more interesting I would like you all to help out with some statistics. Therefore have I created a small survey with a few questions. Filling it out should not take you more than an a few minutes, so there is no excuse not to do it.

I remember a person who clearly stated “I will never ever write a book again”. Yup, twas me. I managed to hold that promise for a year and a half. But when an interesting opportunity appears, I’m usually all-in again. And so it was. Early this year I got the request from some dear friends to help with writing another book, fortunately this time not as the single responsible author but instead together with a really experienced bunch of SharePoint people, whose knowledge and resume are really impressive. I was asked to participate to write two chapters in the Inside Microsoft SharePoint 2013 book, published by Microsoft Press.

Introduction In this post I will show you how to fix the “Could not find Stored Procedure ‘Search_GetRepositoryTimePerCrawl’” exception in SharePoint 2013. This is an exception that you can get when looking at crawl log details for a Search Service Application. The error might go unnoticed since it will not affect indexing or querying. Symptoms In SharePoint 2013 when you are trying to inspect crawl logs and statistics for indexing and querying you might see exceptions that say “Could not find stored procedure ‘Search_????’”. You will also see critical errors in the ULS Trace Logs like this:

Introduction JavaScript is the future of SharePoint development (and please don’t quote me on that :-). JavaScript is everywhere in SharePoint 2013 and upcoming incarnations, and you will see a couple of posts on this topic from me in the future. The JavaScript language is easy (well, sort of), but the many different implementations and API’s built using JavaScript might cause confusion. One of the things in SharePoint 2013 that makes JavaScript development quite problematic is the Minimal Download Strategy (MDS) in SharePoint 2013. In this post I will show you what to think of when building JavaScript features on top of SharePoint and make them aware of MDS and make them work with MDS.

Introduction I’ve been reading and seeing a lot of blog posts, articles, videos etc over the last few months discussion Host Named site collections vs Path Based site collections in SharePoint 2013, and 2010 for that matter. What I find interesting is that a lot of those articles are either misinterpreting the official guidance and documentation on TechNet or are just plain wrong. In this post I will try to clear up some of the confusion, and hopefully I’m not that wrong in this post. And yes, I can agree that Microsoft could have been more clear on this topic, but what’s there is actually pretty decent.

It’s been over a week since I got home from an amazing trip to the other side of the globe (literally). It was a long way getting to New Zealand but definitely worth it. It was my first ever TechEd, both as attendee and presenter and first trip to New Zealand. I had a great couple of days meeting the SharePoint community and other Microsoft junkies, and also had the opportunity to have a quick breakfast with Scott Guthrie.

Overview and background This post is intended to show and explain why you see the intermittent (and annoying) “To start seeing previews, please log on by opening the document.” message when using previews from Office Web Apps Server 2013 (WAC) with SharePoint 2013. Unfortunately I do not have the magic bullet (yet) on how to solve it completely, this post is more on why you get it and how you can avoid seeing it too often.

For the fifth (if I recall correctly) year in a row I’m proud to present that I will speak at the annual SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2013 conference, September 30th to October 2nd. This year Office 365 MVP Göran Husman not only managed to bring some of the top-notch speakers around SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Office 365 to the conference, he also convinced them all to dress up in sailor suits and have the conference on a cruise ship between Stockholm, Sweden and Helsinki, Finland.

I’m proud to announce that I will be speaking at TechEd in New Zealand the 10-13th of September. This is really cool and my first trip down to Kiwi land. TechEd is a conference for all Microsoft technologies, not only SharePoint, but the lineup of SharePoint speakers and sessions at this conference just looks awesome; Dr. Search aka Neil Hodgkinson, MCA Wayne Ewington, MVP Mark Rhodes, MVP Debbie Ireland amongst others. If you live in the southern hemisphere and are just remotely interested in SharePoint you need to get your ticket ASAP!

Introduction I frequently see one specific question asked on distribution lists, Twitter, Yammer and other social networks: “How do I install Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC) on the same machine as SharePoint 2013”, very frequently also followed by “any hacks accepted”. Those who have tried have noticed that there is a hard block – SharePoint cannot be installed on an Office Web Apps machine and Office Web Apps cannot be installed on a SharePoint machine. This is purely by design and I will in this post show you why and why you shouldn’t try to hack it.

Here goes a post in the middle of the summer, directly taken from yet another e-mail conversation with information that I thought was well known. It has been blogged before, but perhaps you readers (thanks mum and the other one) don’t follow those blogs, so here we go. Introduction Who doesn’t like Excel? Most people love it so much that they can’t get enough of it and uploads the Excel files to SharePoint and view and edit them using Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC). The web view and editing can be very beneficial on slow networks, on machines and devices without any decent Office edition or just as nice widgets on your dashboards.

Introduction This is a follow-up post on the SharePoint 2013, Office Web Apps 2013 and Excel files with Data Connections post that I previously wrote. That post talked about how you needed to do, so called, WOPI Suppressions if you had Excel files with Data Connections and had those data connections configured to use the authenticated users account. The WOPI Suppression made sure that the rendering of the Excel book was done by Excel Services in SharePoint 2013 rather than with Office Web Apps 2013.

Over the last few months I’ve been asked numerous times and I’ve seen quite a few e-mail conversations on how to work with new Host Named Site Collections (HNSC) and Content Databases. In this post I will show you how I have solved the problem using the native API hooks in SharePoint. Background Host Named Site Collections are not a new thing in SharePoint, it has been with us for quite some time, but not been extensively used due to previous limitations (and there still are some). With SharePoint 2013 one strong recommendation is to consider using HNSC, in contrast to the traditional path based site collections. It gives you a couple of benefits in management, performance and is required for Apps to work properly. On the other hand it also has a couple of downsides such as not being able to create new Site Collections in the UI.

In SharePoint 2013 JavaScript is the new default language and all our (at least mine) solutions and projects are using JavaScript more and more, even though everything is not built as SharePoint Apps. Farm or Full-trust solutions built using JavaScript will in many situations create a better user interface and an improved perceived performance. The more we build user interfaces using JavaScript we cannot just forget about some of the basic UX rules, such as using localization. End-users really hate when they see mixed content in different languages. We’ve known for quite some time how to do localization server-side, but how do we do it in a smart way in JavaScript?

Yesterday I got the really cool news that I completed all recertification requirements for the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master: SharePoint certification. Couldn’t be a happier SharePoint professional right now! What is the MCSM and what about MCM? The Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) program has during the latest year transitioned into the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM) program. It is not only a change in name but also a change made to adapt to the new world order. The program is not longer focusing on one specific version of the product but instead focus on what’s in the market at the current moment and specifically it covers both on-premise and cloud solutions. This is good in many senses – this allows the program to always be current, always use the latest techniques and technologies etc. The MCM was a certification without expiration date (well eventually the product cease to exist, but you still have the cert) whereas the MCSM has a three year life span and you must recertify to stay on top.

Today at the SharePoint Evolutions 2013 Conference I announced my latest pet project called Open WOPI. Open WOPI is an open WOPI client that allows you to extend SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013 and Lync 2013 with file previews and editors for any type of file formats. The project is now (at least very, very soon) available to download from openwopi.codeplex.com and is published under the Ms-PL license. This is currently an early beta (or what you would like to call it) but will be improved over time.

Just discovered a really interesting and just awesome nugget in SharePoint 2013 that solves a problem that have been annoying me for a long time. The problem manifests itself when you’re having multiple URL’s for your SharePoint farm or when using SAML or Forms based login (like in Office 365 and SharePoint Online) and you’re using the profile pictures on sites not residing on the My Site Host Web Application (or host named site collection). Then the user profile picture is not shown, you get the default image not found image or you’re prompted to authenticate with the My Site Host.

Introduction SharePoint 2013 introduces a new model on how Site Collections are upgraded using the new Deferred Site Collection Upgrade. To keep it simple it means that SharePoint 2013 can run a Site Collection in either 2010 mode or 2013 mode, and SharePoint 2013 contains a lot of the SharePoint 2010 artifacts (JS files, Features, Site Definitions) to handle this. When you’re doing a content database attach to upgrade from 2010 to 2013, only the database schema is upgraded and not the actual sites (by default). The actual Site Collection upgrade is done by the Site Collection administrator when they feel that they are ready to do that and have verified the functionality of SharePoint 2013 (or you force them to upgrade anyways). But, the Site Collection admin might have to upgrade sooner than expected for some sites.

I’m really glad to see some patches being rolled out for Office 2013, SharePoint 2013 and Office Web Apps 2013. There’s some really important fixes and some very interesting fixes that I’ve been waiting for. In this post we’ll take a look at the first Office Web Apps 2013 (WAC) update – specifically we’re looking at how to patch your WAC farm to minimize the downtime. If you follow my instructions you will have zero downtime (except for a brief moment where Excel stuff will not be accessible).

In my last post (still smoking fresh) I showed you how to update your Office Web Apps 2013 farm to the March 2013 update, connect it to SharePoint 2013 and being able to view PDF documents in the browser. What I didn’t explain or show in that post was how to enable the PDF Previews in Search – but I’ll do it now. Pre-requisites Before you start fiddling with this, you need to make sure that you have the March 2013 update of Office Web Apps Server 2013 (WAC) installed and connected to your farm – if you don’t know for sure, ask your admins – sometimes they know…if they don’t give them the link to my previous blog post.

Introduction The search engine and search experience in SharePoint 2013 has been totally re-written, since its predecessors. In SharePoint 2010 we had something called Best Bets or Visual Best Bets if you worked with FAST for SharePoint. A best bet was a promoted result that was triggered by one or more keywords, used by the search admins to promote certain links or banners for specific search queries. In SharePoint 2013 this is now called a Promoted Results and the procedure of creating them is different and so much better – there’s more ways to trigger on, more ways to render the results etc, but the actual shown result isn’t that smart, until now…

Here’s a short post with a tip that I find very useful. In many scenarios you have several SharePoint 2013 installations to handle – it might be different farms, production environments, testing, staging, development etc. Do you know which Central Administration you’re working in at the moment? They all look the same, SharePoint Blue, the regular Status Bar warning that you’re running out of disk space etc. Unless countermeasures are taken you don’t know what environment you’re in unless you take a look at the URL – which in many cases is just another server name and port. It’s very easy to make a mistake and make a change in the production environment instead of in the test or dev environments.

In SharePoint 2013 the way Personal Sites (aka My Sites) are created have been totally rebuilt to support the new way of utilizing the Personal Sites. In this post I will go through how Personal Sites are provisioned, asynchronously, and bust a couple of myths about how interactive Personal Site instantiations should be “prioritized” and increase throughput. Background Personal Sites or My Sites were previously created “on-demand”. When a user went to his or hers non-existing My Site the provisioning started while the user waited for the site to be created, painfully watching the spinning animated gif. This worked fine in SharePoint 2010, and earlier, but now with SharePoint 2013 so much more are depending on the user having a Personal Site – everything from the social stuff in SharePoint 2013 (yes, not all SharePoint customers have yet wandered down the Yammer road) to the really great Office 2013 interaction (SkyDrive whatever). Requiring users to “manually” creating their Personal Sites is no longer a good option…

Last week the Forefront team finally released Service Pack 3 for Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) 2010. This is a long awaited release for us working with SharePoint 2013 and for those using non-legacy operating systems and browsers. In this post I will show you how to publish SharePoint 2013 Host Named Site Collections through UAG 2010 SP3 and consume the published site using Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8. What’s new in UAG 2010 Service Pack 3 Before diving into the interesting pieces let’s take a look at some of the new features of Service Pack 3. First of all, to be able to install SP3 you need to have your UAG at SP2 level – SP3 is NOT cumulative.

The SharePoint Health Score was introduced in SharePoint 2010 and plays an even more important role in SharePoint 2013. The Health Score determines the health of a SharePoint server/web application on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is the most healthy state. SharePoint automatically starts throttling request once the Health Score is to high. The Health Score is can be calculated using many parameters, such as memory usage, concurrent requests etc. In this post I will give you some details on how the Health Score works, how you can troubleshoot it and how you can use it and how you can configure it.

With this new wave of SharePoint, the Office Web Apps Server (WAC – I don’t like the OWA acronym, that’s something else in my opinion) is its own server product, implementing the WOPI client protocol, which allows a client to retrieve documents from SharePoint on the behalf of the user. Documents will flow from the WOPI servers (SharePoint, Lync, Exchange etc.) to the Office Web Apps Server – this means that potentially confidential information will be transferred from the SharePoint environment and stored/cached on another server. This could result in unnecessary information leakage and compromise the enterprise security.

SharePoint 2013 introduces a whole set of new and improved features. One of the things that is both new and vastly improved is the Workflow platform. Workflow is no longer a part of the SharePoint core infrastructure, but instead a separate server product. Even though ye olde Workflow platform, 2010 style, is still in the product for backwards compatibility. SharePoint 2013 leverages the Azure service called Workflow Manager 1.0. (Not the cloud version but a local on-premises installation).

Only one day and a few hours left of the year of 2012 and the time has come for me to make my (now traditional) summary post. I’ve done it now for six years (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006) and it’s always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months. This year has been an interesting year to me and contained some really interesting milestones, happenings and events.

You all know that you need to install the SharePoint 2013 pre-requisites before installing SharePoint 2013 – this is done either online or offline using the pre-req installer. All the requirements are listed in the Hardware and Software requirements for SharePoint 2013 Technet article. Once in a while you need to do the installation on a disconnected machine, that is a machine that is not connected to the interwebz. Then you typically Bing for a fancy script that downloads all the pre-reqs for you and you run the pre-reqs installer in unattended mode. That is where you pass in the local path to all the downloads either through a file or through the command line (I’m not going to cover that – it’s all over the web and even in the TechNet article mentioned before).

Well, I thought I should write another episode of my Building your own WOPI Client series, here’s the links to the previous episodes part 1, part 2 and part 3. This time around we’ll dig into another of the different actions that a WOPI Client can surface – the interactivepreview mode. Background As you’ve seen in the previous posts we can build a viewer and an editor for C# files, to be used in document libraries for instance. What if we would like to lift up and enhance our custom file formats in search, just like Office Web Apps Server does with the Office files. We’ll you can do that very easy, and you should! In this post I’ll show you how to surface the preview mode in a Search flyout. This also means that we’re going to take a look at the new SharePoint 2013 Search Engine, the Design Manager and some funky HTML syntax.

This is part three (and counting) of my Building your own WOPI Client series. In part 1 I discussed the WOPI Protocol and especially how to implement the Discovery process of a WOPI Client. In part 2 we built a viewer application as a WOPI Client and connected it to SharePoint. In this part we’re modifying our WOPI Client to support basic editing of the files. Modyfing the WOPI Client Discovery data The first thing that we need to do is to modify our Discovery method, in our case the static XML file, to tell the WOPI Server that we support editing of the files. It’s a simple procedure and we just add another line of XML like this to the app element:

Welcome back to another part in my Building a WOPI Client series. In the previous and first post I walked you through the basics of the WOPI protocol, how the WOPI Discovery mechanism worked and how to implement it and finally how to register a WOPI Client with SharePoint 2013 as WOPI Server. In this post we’ll continue to build on our C# Viewer and now actually add the viewer – we ended the last post quite dull with just showing a simple Hello WOPI web page which we now are going to turn into a real C# viewer.

Hi friends, finally time for some posts with some real code samples, and not some silly scripts. In this post, and a couple of follow up posts, I will walk you through the basics behind the WOPI protocol and WOPI Apps and WOPI Hosts. In the end you will see how we can create our own viewers and editors for files just like the WAC Server 2013 can view and edit Microsoft Office files in SharePoint 2013.

In todays episode of discovering awesome features in SharePoint 2013 we’re going to take a look at something really interesting, a feature that has been requested for years, a better management of end-user licensing in SharePoint. Even though this article contains a lot about SharePoint 2013 licensing I must make it very clear that nothing has yet been communicated from Microsoft regarding licensing on SharePoint 2013, and I am no expert on licensing and this is a Preview and this article must be considered as-is, things will and might change over the course of time. Remind me to go back to this article once SharePoint 2013 has gone gold. Microsoft has not made any statements about this and it might be so that you can forget about this article after RTM.

Introduction SharePoint is based on a very rich web interface containing lots of moving parts and lots of customizable areas. As you know the Interwebz is based on a request-response approach where you request a page and get a response back. The approach is the same whether you update the whole page or portions of it. The last decade we’ve seen smart approaches working around this “problem” using DHTML, JavaScript, AJAX, UpdatePanels, you name it. Facebook, which also contains a very rich and dynamic interface, has been excellent in making a dynamic web interface minimizing the amount of data downloaded for each user interaction and in this way also increasing the perceived performance.

Introduction In this small post I’m going to show you a really nice new feature to SharePoint 2013. It’s the Access Request and Invitations feature that allows you to easier manage access requests to your sites. Access Requests has been in the product for quite some time but required that your admins checked their e-mails once in a while. Using the new Share feature in SharePoint 2010 this process is so much easier. This has somewhat been blogged by the SharePoint team, but I would like to share my view of it.

Introduction SharePoint 2010 introduced the Service Application concept and that architecture model also includes the possibility to publish and consume service applications between farms. For instance you could have the Managed Metadata service application in one of your farms and use it in another farm. There are several interesting and valid scenarios for this and some of them include having dedicated Shared Services farms, that is a farm that’s only hosting service applications and not any content applications. If you have one of these farms, or farms that publishes or consumes service applications you are facing an interesting upgrade scenario when looking at SharePoint 2013. In this Visual Guide I’ll try to go through all the required steps for a successful upgrade to SharePoint 2013

One of the best things introduced for developers in SharePoint 2010 was the SPMonitoredScope, which can be used to trace your application, and to pin down potential bottlenecks. I wrote a post on how to use it way back in 2009 – Improve you SharePoint 2010 applications with monitoring using SPMonitoredScope. It’s still worth a read and still true for SharePoint 2013. But the SharePoint team has continued to evolve the SPMonitoredScope in SharePoint 2013, with two small but interesting changes.

I hope you all had the pleasure to try out the new and improved Developer Dashboard in SharePoint 2013 Preview. It’s a fantastic improvement to its predecessor and contains a huge number of improvements. One of the most notable ones is that it’s no longer a control on your page which only shows you information about the current request. It’s now a separate window which shows you all requests since you started the developer dashboard session. It can actually compete somewhat with ULSViewer!

As usual a new version of a product has new requirements of all different kinds; especially when it comes to resource usage. With SharePoint 2013 there is no difference. The Hardware and Software requirements for SharePoint 2013 Preview is published and I thought I should walk through the new and updated requirements and compare them with SharePoint 2010. And also talk about some other key changes that you need to be aware of when planning your SharePoint 2013 installations.

Well, by know everybody living in the SharePoint world are sitting with their best tin foil hats on and installing, configuring and fiddling with SharePoint 2013 Preview, which was announced today by mister Steve. I’ve been fortunate to be a part of the (debated) closed beta for some time and have been trying out the new version of our favorite product. You probably will be overwhelmed with blog posts over the next couple of months, up until the SharePoint Conference 2012, and continuing after that. And I aim to be a part of the flooding (at least partly)…starting with a topic that I think is profoundly important - Authentication.