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

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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