Consulting Questions

Time for a quick brain share.
My years of consulting have harvested some common questions that can quickly get to the point and help you as a consultant, understand what your client is in need of and then hopefully you are positioned to offer solutions to their needs.

Questions for IT

• How is your organization planning to handle the business expansion into new markets, retail locations, and product lines?

• Do you need to own data in private cloud or public cloud?

• What are your 2 biggest pain points?

Questions for CEO

• What are the top 2 or 3 initiatives of your company?

•  What the top KPI’s that you use to manage your organization and what are you missing?

• You just acquired a new company what are the 2 biggest challenges of the acquisition?

• How do you view the (IT) dept's strategic role in the business. 

• What are the root causes of deficiencies in culture of collaboration , delayed product launches, recruiting and customer service?

•  Have you considered outsourcing any business functions?

Questions for the CFO

• What are you top 2 or 3 pain points?

• Is your current cost structure appropriate?

• Any compliance issues or concerns related to reporting and tax?

• What are the difficulties in your month-end close and reporting process?

Questions for VP of Operations

• What are 2 or 3 goals for company operations?

• What level of integration is planned into the current processes?

• Do you feel you have the resources today to accomplish this in the timeline desired?

• Do you or the organization have any preconceived opinions of NetSuite or other ERP solutions

• What are the top KPI’s you monitor to manage the business?  Are you getting this information today?

• What do you think is the root cause of the issues?

The Modern vs Standard SharePoint site nav disparity

References:

• Jeremy Thake's article
• SharePoint blog on Communication sites
• ShareGate blog on Communication Sites

I have been struggling with this.
If you are an 'Explainer', then  Please explain/comment/opine/discuss on the following navigation disparity. 

A user logs into their office.com tenant using their domain account, and they have a full app launcher experience.

When a user selects the  "SharePoint" app  from the App Launcher tile, they are directed to the "SharePoint Home Screen" which is the new Modern landing page for Modern site creation, with News and sites that you are "Following".

The URL for this landing page is:   /_layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx 

Any sites that you have "Followed" show up here as well as "Featured" sites that an Admin has added (Edit)

There are two types of sites that a user can create from this page using the prominently links:
 The +Create button;
 The Team & Communication site cards

These 2 types of sites are both created using the prefix of "/sites/" or "/teams/" or whatever their SharePoint admin tenant setting "Site Creation"  has been modified to, from inside the SharePoint Admin console.

https://[tenant]-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/online/TenantSettings.aspx

A disparity in Functionality, URL and Navigation

The new Modern UI sites that are created in the above scenario are terrific, but there is a huge disconnect with the default SharePoint sites. 

Any of the above sites created using the new +Create button:

   1) Do not show in the SharePoint admin console on the right >

   2) Are NOT supported to open and customize in SharePoint Designer.

   3) They do not show automatically in any site navigation, 
        including the standard SharePoint site nav.

   4) Only these Modern sites are surfaced in the Graph and Delve.

The Standard SharePoint sites, at the base tenant [tenant].sharepoint.com have a totally different Site Creation mechanism.

To create a SubSite in here, you choose +New from Site Contents

Standard SharePoint sites have a Fully Customizable UI and can open in SharePoint Designer.

You can program the SharePoint home page as the starting point

See: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/Reach-your-audience-via-SharePoint-communication-sites-in-Office/ba-p/70079 

Office 365 Performance Readiness

When transitioning to a cloud first strategy for their organization, many CIOs are reluctant to consider infrastructure upgrades as a preliminary step in migrating from a current On-premises server solution. We have created some guidelines to help you prepare for an increase in internet traffic from your user base.

The benefits of workloads on Office 365 over Hosted applications are clear.

• Best of class collaboration among employees scattered across various locations and geographical areas.
• Better productivity by using multiple devices to access applications.
• Great visibility on compliance reporting.
• Easier setup, little to zero end user maintenance from IT.
• IT resources are freed up from performing server and software upgrades, dealing with licensing from vendors, and general server management.

Your company will experience an fairly significant increase in Internet based traffic. We see an average 40 percent increase in internet traffic across most organizations. This is because all Office 365 traffic is Internet based. You know that users can get to the internet in the office, but your current Internet workloads may not be as heavily used as Office 365 will be. For instance, Your SaleForce.com usage might be representative of a very limited subset of employees. Simply increasing your network capacity is not the panacea that will bring about any Networking Nirvana.

  Routing your desktop users through your network firewalls, proxies and Internet gateways before sending them to Office 365 may just be limiting their experience and could have your end users screaming at you. During the initial migration phases it is the internal networking architecture limitations that’s one of the biggest challenges, especially when users are initially synching their 50GB .ost file!

Readiness To Do List:

• Read Microsoft's network performance guidance
• Upgrade your firewalls
• Increase bandwidth
• Run Office 365 Health, Readiness & Connectivity checks
• Model and test your network capacity or move to an Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 circuit for a more predictable experience.
• Review your current Firewall software and revise its rules for Office 365.

Management Reporter SharePoint Integration

This post was originally written and published through my former employer McGladrey...
http://www.rsmusconsultingpros.com/how-to-integrate-management-reporter-reports-into-a-sharepoint-library/

This article describes how to integrate Management Reporter reports into a SharePoint library.

Publishing your Management Reporter 2012 reports to SharePoint is fairly straightforward to configure.

When you generate a report to your MR report library, you can also generate a link to a SharePoint site or another network location. The related report link can open the report in one of the supported report output types. (XPS, Excel, XBRL).  Note that a lot of our clients ask for PDF reports and honestly, you will be losing the rich drill down capability that XPS or Excel supports.  MS Word and PDF file types can also be added using MR2012 CU8. As of this writing, CU10 was made available Sept 2014

Each report library location can create multiple related report links. Security settings for the report library folder are applied when the related report link is opened.

NOTE: If you are using a computer that has Windows Server® 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2, you must have the Desktop Experience feature turned on in order to post a report to a SharePoint site. Open Server Manager, click Features, click Add Features, and then select Desktop Experience. This may require a restart.

IE 10 is also a requirement.

SharePoint Configuration

On the Management Reporter server, go to Services and verify the name of the account that is running the Management Reporter 2012 Process Service.

On the SharePoint site, go to the document library  that you want to publish reports into and add  permissions for that Service Account with Contribute permissions.

Go to Library Settings > Advanced Settings > and check Allow Management of Content Types.

Go to Library Settings >Content Types > and add Link To Document as an available Content Type.

Management Reporter Configuration

1. In Report Designer, open the report to generate. Click the Output and Distribution tab.
2. In the Output name field, enter a name for the report after it is generated. This name does not have to be the same as the report definition name.
3. To view the report after it is generated, select the View report when generated check box.
4. Select Generate to multiple report library locations.
5. Click in the Report Library Location pane, and then enter the destination for the generated report. At least one report library location must be selected in order to generate a related report link.
6. Double-click in the Related Report Link Location pane, and then type an address to a network location or a SharePoint site. You can also click Browse to browse to a destination folder, and then click OK to add the location to the report definition. These address paths can also be copied into or from other report definitions.

7. Select the options to include in the report under the appropriate output heading

The following table describes options that are available for all report output types.

8. If you want this report to be automatically published to SharePoint, You can setup a report schedule in Report scheduler

Viewing reports in SharePoint

This is how users in SharePoint will see the Reports:

When you click any report, you can have the option of viewing it in Excel, Report viewer or XPS document. You can also set a default view so that next time it won't ask for a choice.

 In MR version 2013 the reports will open automatically in the Web Viewer from SharePoint links, Please assure a minimum that IE10 is being used.

 To not open automatically in WebViewer and have the user choose,  in Management Reporter Report Designer if you go to Tools --> Options you can choose the check box to use the native MR Report Viewer.   If they don't have the MR Client installed on the local workstation then the web would be the only option.  If using version 2.1.1.1030.2 without RU6, this option is not available.

Office 365 tenant name

You're stuck with it.



Unless the O365 team provides a support feature to change or add to your default tenancy name, the initial tenancy name that you choose on the sign up screen will be the same and only URL that works for all browser based sign on sites including SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, etc.

I bet you all think this doesn't happen a lot but I think I can name about 50 tenancy's like BrandName1.sharepoint.com right now and I can see plenty of room for;

• 'Oops, I typo'ed it'
• 'I thought we could change it later'
• 'Had I known that I couldn't change it, I would have stopped right there'

There are no plans that I see on the roadmap to change this.

You should utilize the 6 P's of O365 on boarding and migrations.

Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance

Ask your client "Are you OK with this tenant name for ever and ever, through sickness and health?
Then check the names she suggests while on the phone with her using... PowerShell to the rescue!

http://pastebin.com/raw/5Y0dXnEa

Copy and Save the code with a meaningful name and run  as such: :

Get-TenantStatus.ps1 -name "leekspin"

This displays either "Taken" or "Available" ...so try putting your ex girlfriend's name in there.

Shout Out to Microsoft Engineer Aaron Dinnage with his awesome parenting post:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-check-office-365-tenant-name-availability-aaron-dinnage

O365 - Explorer Views & Mapped Drives

Users who are comfortable with Windows Explorer and the inherent ease of drag/drop & expanding tree structures will find using a SharePoint Library in a traditional “Explorer View” to be more familiar to them and easier to work with than SharePoint default libraries and metadata. Although the latter provides a world of search and display benefits, the former is an everyday familiarity use case for some.

Using Explorer View works especially well in Windows 10 where you have joined your company's Azure Active Directory.

Yes there are two paths you can go by …

   1. Open the Library in Explorer view each time you want to view it.

   2. Map a drive from Windows explorer for continued access to the Library.

Open in Windows Explorer

Before you map a network drive, follow these steps to Open in Windows Explorer

a. In Internet Explorer - Sign in to the SharePoint Online site by using your Office 365 creds. Make sure that you select the Keep me signed in check box. That little step is important.

b. Open a document library in Explorer View.

c. From your Team Site, go into your Document Library.

d. Under the Library Tools section in the Ribbon, click the Library tab.

e. In the Actions group, click Open with Explorer and Explorer should now Launch.

Mapping a network drive

Windows 7

To map a network drive to a SharePoint Online site, follow these steps:

a. Sign in to the SharePoint Online site by using your Office 365 credentials. Make sure that you click to select the Keep me signed in check box.

b. Open a document library in Explorer View as above – we need to do this to obtain the URL.

c. From your Team Site, select your Document Library.

d. Under the Library Tools section in the Ribbon, click the Library tab.

e. In the Actions group, click Open with Explorer.

f. Explorer should now Launch with your chosen Library

g. Right-click and Copy the URL from the Explorer window

h. From the tools menu click Map Network Drive.

i. Click the Connect to a Web site that you can store your documents and pictures link, and then click Next two times.

j. Paste the site URL, click Next, and then follow the instructions in the wizard.
For example: https://mycompany.sharepoint.com/Documents



This location will now be added as a Network Location in Windows Explorer

Note: You may need to enable the tools menu on Windows 7

1. Open a Windows Explorer window.

2. Click on Organize and Layout. (See screenshot below)

3. To Enable the Menu Bar

4. Click on Menu Bar to check it.

Windows 8/8.1

To map a network drive to a SharePoint Online site, follow these steps:

a. User Internet Explorer and Sign in to the SharePoint Online site by using your Office 365 credentials. Make sure that you click to select the Keep me signed in check box.

b. Open a document library in Explorer View as above – we need to do this for the URL.

c. From your Team Site, select your Document Library.

d. Under the Library Tools section in the Ribbon, click the Library tab.

e. In the Actions group, click Open with Explorer.

Explorer should now Launch with your chosen Library

f. Right-click and Copy the URL from the Explorer window

g. From the tools menu click Map Network Drive.

h. Click the Connect to a Web site that you can store your documents and pictures link, and then click Next two times.

i. Paste the site URL, click Next, and then follow the instructions in the wizard. For example, https://mycompany.sharepoint.com/Documents

This location will now be added as a Network Location in Windows Explorer

Note: You may need to enable the tools menu on Windows 8

1. Open a Windows Explorer window.

2. Click on Organize and Layout. (See screenshot below)

3. To Enable the Menu Bar

4. Click on Menu Bar to check it.

Windows 10

To map a network drive to a SharePoint Online site, follow these steps:

a. User Internet Explorer and Sign in to the SharePoint Online site by using your Office 365 credentials. Make sure that you click to select the Keep me signed in check box.

b. Open a document library in Explorer View as above – we need to do this to obtain the URL.

c. From your Team Site, select your Document Library.

d. Under the Library Tools section in the Ribbon, click the Library tab.

e. In the Actions group, click Open with Explorer.

Explorer should now Launch with your chosen Library

f. Right-click and Copy the URL from the Explorer window

g. From the tools menu click Map Network Drive.

h. Click the Connect to a Web site that you can store your documents and pictures link, and then click Next two times.

i. Paste the site URL, click Next, and then follow the instructions in the wizard.

For example, https://mycompany.sharepoint.com/Documents

This location will now be added as a Network Location in Windows Explorer

Note: You may need to enable the tools menu on Windows 8

1. Open a Windows Explorer window.

2. Click on Organize and Layout. (See screenshot below)

3. To Enable the Menu Bar

4. Click on Menu Bar to check it.

Troubleshooting & Known Issues

Note: There are some known issues with Mapping network drives.


Known Issues include:

1. Internet Explorer 10 (32 bit) on Windows 7 - does not work

2. Internet Explorer (64 bit) - does not work

3. Mapped drives will timeout after 8 hours


Troubleshooting Suggestions from Microsoft

How to troubleshoot mapped network drive issues




When using Open with Explorer, make sure that you are using IE 7 through 9 in the 32-bit version.

Note: IE 10 on Windows 7 is not fully compatible with some of the SharePoint Online features, but IE 10 is compatible on Windows 8.



Try running IE 10 in compatibility mode.

1. Open Internet Explorer.
2. Press the Alt key to display the Menu bar (or right-click the Address bar and then select Menu bar).
3. Tap or click Tools, and then tap or click Compatibility View settings.

Make sure that you have lowered UAC to the lowest setting. For more information on UAC and how to change its settings, please refer to the below URL:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/Windows7/What-are-User-Account-Control-settings


Ensure that you have added the following URLs to your Trusted Sites zone in IE:

      In your IE browser, select the "Tools" option (alt + x) and select "Internet Options" from the drop-down menu.

     1. Select the "Security" tab.

     2. Click on "Trusted Sites"

     3. Click on the "Sites" button

     4. Add the following sites:

       https://*.sharepoint.com

       https://*.microsoftonline.com

5. Click close and OK



In the Trusted Sites zone in IE, make sure that Enabled Protected Mode is unchecked.



Make sure that IE is passing through your credentials correctly:

In IE, select the "Tools" option (alt + x) and select "Internet Options" from the drop-down menu.

1. Select the "Security" tab.

2. Select "Custom level."

3. From here, scroll all the way down to the bottom to the "User Authentication" section.

4. Under the "Logon" section, choose the "Automatic logon with current username and password" option.

5. Select "ok."



When you are signing in to SharePoint, make sure that you are checking the option to use Keep Me Signed In.

1. Navigate to https://portal.onmicrosoft.com

2. When signing into the portal, check the option for "Keep me signed in."

3. Log in.

4. This will apply the settings needed.



Also, there may be third-party add-ins in IE which are interfering with the Open with Explorer feature.

It might be a good idea to reset IE back to its default settings by performing the following:

1. Open Internet Explorer.

2. Click Tools, in Internet Explorer 9 or above it is a gear icon located in the upper-right hand corner of the screen, and then click Internet Options.

3. Click the Advanced tab.

4. Under Reset Internet Explorer Settings, click Reset.

5. Select the Delete personal settings check box to remove browsing history, search providers, Accelerators, home pages, Tracking Protection, and ActiveX Filtering data.

Note: You will need to set-up your homepage again. However, your favorites will not be deleted

6. Exit Internet Explorer and then restart the program again as the changes will take effect once the browser is restarted.

MMC cannot open the file

MMC cannot open the file C:\Windows\system32\taskschd.msc
Well, that stinks...I just had it open yesterday.

This is a known bug in certain versions of Windows 2008 or 2008 R2

To Fix:
Open Explorer and go to directory:
  C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\MMC\
and delete the taskschd file, (it has no file extension).
 Or if you are Nervous Nellie, just rename it.

run taskscd.msc again and voila! It opens.

How to enable automatic opening of Office documents from SharePoint for Chrome, I.E. & FireFox

And you may ask yourself...

Why am I unable to open documents in SharePoint?  
I see this browser message when trying to open Office documents from SharePoint...

Others in my organization can view files without issue, but some cannot. And I certainly do have Excel!

Well, the first part of the pop up message is true, you do have a version of Excel installed.

The reason you are seeing this is because second part of the message is false for you; your browser is misconfigured! You will need to enable two Browser Helper Objects in Internet Explorer, or use an AddOn for Chrome or FireFox.

How to enable automatic opening of Office documents from SharePoint for Chrome, IE & FireFox.

Instructions for Internet Explorer:

1. Open Internet Explore open the Tools menu by click Alt-T (or click the gear icon)
2. Choose Internet Options (or press o)
3. Choose the Programs Tab
4. Click the Manage add-ons button
5. Scroll to the Microsoft Corporation section
6. Highlight SharePoint OpenDocuments Class and assure it is enabled.
7. Highlight the Office Document Cache Handler and assure it is enabled
8. Click Close
9. Refresh your webpage and you will now be able to open documents in your full MSOffice rich client application from within SharePoint when prompted.

Instructions for Chrome:

You will need to install the add-on IETab

1. Get the Add On by searching add-ons for IETab, or here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ie-tab/hehijbfgiekmjfkfjpbkbammjbdenadd?hl=en
2. Click Add To Chrome
3. A new IE folder icon will appear at the end of the URL address area in the browser

Instructions for FireFox:

Similar to Chrome IE-Tab, you will need to install the Add-On IE-TAB https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ie-tab/

You have reached the maximum resource usage limit

Our organization's O365 tenancy has a lot of Global Administrators.

Global admins have the ability to set among other things, SharePoint Site Collection Storage Quotas and the often misunderstood Server Resource Quota.

There has been misunderstood thought that by increasing this setting to some really big number, their site collection will have blazingly fast performance and every other site collection will chug along at their slow dial-up rate.

This is not at all true, and in fact you can really mess things up by setting these numbers too high.

Consider this:

A Site Collection is created and then assigned a huge number of resources. Then it is deleted.

This happens a few times and before long, your SharePoint Admin Center displays this ugly error and you are unable to manage resources on any of the collections.

You have reached the maximum resource usage limit. - Well dang!

And... you can't increase or decrease any site collection resource! Sort of a Catch 22, right? So you decide to start deleting site collections thinking this might help!

You would expect those resources to free up since you deleted them, right? But they just don’t and that mean ol' red bar stays red.

The deleted collection is in the Site Collection Recycle bin. Those resources are not reallocated just because you deleted it. They are still awaiting to be purged and those resources need to stay allocated until then.

 So what do you do?

PowerShell to the rescue!

Here is what we had to do to return our site back to normal.

First, query the site owners and ask if they have any sandboxed or custom code on their sites and need those extra resources to debug or step thought their code.
 If they do, understand their burden and pity them. Leave them to their debugging, and focus on the deleted sites and the sites where there is no custom code.

Then fire up a SharePoint Online or Azure PowerShell command prompt and connect to your admin portal,

connect spo-service http://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com 

…notice the -admin, it’s the URL of the admin portal.

Authenticate with a Global Admin account.

Open the admin console and look in the Site Collection recycle bin:

 

Grab the URL of a deleted site.

Then delete it, with extreme prejudice.

Remove-SPODeletedSite -Identity [URL of site in recycle bin]

Do this for each site in the recycle bin.

When that’s done, the ugly error "You have reached the maximum blah blah" and red bar ought to go away!

Nbow you need to attempt to set the resource quota for one of those collections that are set to some large number.

You might try reassigning it in the admin portal, but what fun is that? You still have that console open, so…

Set-SPOSite -Identity https://BigSite/sites/ituneslibrary  -ResourceQuota 300

Now all should be right in the world.

The resource usage quota is a site collection metric calculated by SharePoint Online. The main purpose of resource quotas is to limit the risk that sand-boxed custom code can have on available resources on a site collection, bad code causing excessive CPU use for example.

The actual resource quota used to be determined by the number of user seats in your company's subscription (#seats×200) +300 (may have changed now). 

So for a 10 seat license, the resource quota would be 2300 split across all site collections you own. 

HopeThisHelps,

John

Migrations from the Crypt

Despite what each 3^rd party SharePoint Migration software company tells you, you may need to use a combination of tools to successfully migrate and overcome the limitations of each tool. On top of that, there are just some things that won’t migrate.
I am currently presenting these limitations and how to effectively use any and all of the available migration tools as well as Azure-PowerShell, iTunes, Peapod and your wits to get your migration accomplished with success.

Tuesday 6pm Portland ME
SharePoint Maine User Group                   

and    SharePoint Saturday New Hampshire

Auto-Tune and issues downloading large files form SharePoint Online

Some O365 clients may experience errors or disconnects or slowness with uploading/downloading large (>10MB) files from SharePoint Online. There is a workaround on client side. Need to disable Auto-Tune.
This will stay at some small % for a long time :

 Then eventually:


To fix this, from a command prompt ->
netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled  

Shout out: http://sharepoint-community.net/profiles/blogs/o365-sharepoint-online-not-able-to-download-upload-large-file

Resolve Sync issues with OneDrive for Business

I recently had an issue that I still do not understand the root cause of. My OneDrive for Business folder was not syncing and certain files displayed with a red X icon, instead of the happy green Synced icon. I Uninstalled/Reinstalled 1D4B but still had the issue.

 I also found some un-synced files in the Archive folder at:
 C:\Users\John Mongell\OneDrive for Business Archives\Thursday, September 25, 2014 - 1\OneDrive

Whats more, each time I tried to access the 1D4B folder in Windows Explorer, a popup for each file would quickly appear and disappear: It said OneDrive for Business is not responding. Try again in a few minutes.

So, At last, I surfed to the file location C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\root\office15
And typed Groove.exe /clean /all Then I restarted Groove (OneDrive) by simply typing groove.exe 

This caused it to start correctly and asked me to resync my local library.
 I confirmed the file locations and resynced, all is good now!

Hope This Helps.

MCSE and MCSD SharePoint Certifications

"Yes, there are 2 paths you can go by, but in the long run, there's still time to change the road you're on." 

- Robert Plant

https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/sharepoint-certification.aspx

MCSE: SharePoint Solutions Expert

Recertification exam every three years.

https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/mcse-sharepoint-certification.aspx>

Step	Title	Optional training	Required exam
1	Installing and Configuring Windows Server 2012	410	410
2	Administering Windows Server 2012	411	411
3	Configuring Advanced Windows Server 2012 Services NOTE : After successfully completing steps 1-3, you'll earn a Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA): Windows Server 2012 certification.	412	412
4	Core Solutions of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013	331	331
5	Advanced Solutions of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013	332	332

---

MCSD: SharePoint Applications Solutions Developer

Recertification exam every two years.

https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/mcsd-sharepoint-apps-certification.aspx

Step	Title	Optional training	Required exam
1	Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3	480	480
2	Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications	486	486
3	Developing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Core Solutions	488	488
4	Developing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Advanced Solutions	489	489

---

Also, there is this MCSD cert for SharePoint Apps.

MCSD: Web Applications - SharePoint Apps

Recertification exam every two years.

https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/mcsd-web-apps-certification.aspx

Step	Title	Optional training	Required exam
1	Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3	480	480
2	Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications	486	486
3	Developing Microsoft Azure and Web Services	487	487

GOOD LUCK