Today Microsoft announced the next step for PowerApps integration with SharePoint – using PowerApps forms within the context of a SharePoint list or library. This is another way PowerApps is becoming a strong successor to InfoPath forms and will give your users a rich viewing, creating, and editing experience right within their SharePoint library or list. This feature will be coming to SharePoint Online & Office 365 this Summer and I expect we will immediately start using the functionality within my client organizations to improve the user experience. I highly recommend watching the new Microsoft Mechanics video “Zero code business process apps in SharePoint with PowerApps and Microsoft Flow” to…
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SharePoint Dashboards using Power BI – Nashville Excel & Power BI User Group
I am presenting at the Nashville Modern Excel user group on April 13, 2017 – come join us! My talk will focus on using SharePoint to build business intelligence dashboards with Power BI and Excel. Register on the user group site: Nashville Excel & Power BI User Group [UPDATE] Thank you to everyone who attended my presentation – what a great group!
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It May Be Time to Stop Building Access Web Apps
For years now, power users have created solutions using Access Services within SharePoint. These solutions have often been the backbone of many business processes for small to medium-sized organizations. Now that Office 365 is widely available and is fairly cost-effective for those organizations, we have new options to solve those business needs. Microsoft PowerApps is a new member of the Office 365 family and now that PowerApps is generally available within Office 365, Microsoft is recommending to organizations that solutions built with Access Services be migrated to the PowerApps service. Access Services & Access Web Apps shipped with SharePoint 2016 and will continue being supported as part of the SharePoint…
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Postpone the SharePoint Online Public Site Deadline
In October 2012, Microsoft released a feature called SharePoint Online Public Sites, which allowed the creation of a public-facing, anonymous ‘SharePoint-ish' site. It wasn't a full-featured SharePoint site – public sites had limited features, including static pages and generic theme capabilities – enough to make it useful for small companies with no web development resources. Microsoft targeted small and medium-sized business with this feature and it promised an easy to use method for generating content and modifying the web pages. However, the feature wasn't used by a majority of Office 365 customers and caused an abnormal amount of customer tickets. So in early 2015, Microsoft announced that the SharePoint Online…
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Convert SharePoint 2016 Trial to RTM License
It is generally a good idea to try software before you purchase or implement it fully. We have already seen a great interest in SharePoint Server 2016 and we have installed the trial version many times to give the ‘try before you buy' experience to our clients. Once you decide to go from the trial license to the ‘full' RTM version, the process to convert your license is simple and is the same as it has been in earlier SharePoint versions. The license conversion starts on the Central Administration site – you can do this via PowerShell, but we will be using the GUI this time. Select the Convert farm…
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SharePoint 2010 Site Experience With SharePoint 2016
While testing an upgrade today, I was reminded of a requirement when upgrading to SharePoint 2016 using the database attach method – you must upgrade all site collections to the SharePoint 2013 experience before you attempt to attach the database to a SharePoint 2016 farm. My test today is using a SharePoint 2010 content database and attempting an upgrade to SharePoint 2016. I first performed a database attach upgrade with a SharePoint 2013 farm, then performed the Test-SPContentDatabase PowerShell command on the database from my SharePoint 2016 farm. It is important to notice that the LegacySiteDetected error shown above is an UpgradeBlocking error, meaning the upgrade will fail if you…
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SharePoint Saturday Nashville 2016
I will be presenting at #SPSNashville on May 14th on the topic Business Intelligence with SharePoint & Power BI. I will show how to create BI solutions using SharePoint, Excel, Power BI, and a new Microsoft tool Flow. Join us! SPSNashville.org [UPDATE] I had a great time presenting at SharePoint Saturday Nashville. I had a great group of attendees and we discussed SharePoint list interaction with Excel, Power BI, and Microsoft Flow. I am not posting my slides because I didn't really show content on slides – I used demonstrations the majority of the time to show the power of the tools. Thank you everyone for coming to my BI…
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The Future of SharePoint Captured
Yesterday, May 4th 2016, Microsoft hosted “The Future of SharePoint” event in San Fransisco, USA. The host was Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for OneDrive and SharePoint, and along with other Microsoft presenters, Teper showcased the road-map for the SharePoint platform – both on-prem and in the cloud. Along with announcing the general availability for SharePoint 2016, Microsoft highlighted new SharePoint features and functionality. You can read all about the event and the announcements on the Microsoft Office Blogs post. I will in the days and weeks ahead, cover the new functionality with real-world examples. Before the event, Microsoft used the Twitter hashtag #FutureOfSharePoint to promote the event. Whenever I…
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SharePoint 2010 Workflows on a SharePoint 2016 Farm
[This is a quick post – it will be updated with more information soon] During a recent client meeting, I was asked if SharePoint 2010 version workflows, developed on a SharePoint Server 2013 farm, will continue to work if the server farm is upgraded to 2016. SharePoint Server 2016 has not been released at the time of this writing, but we do have the Release Candidate to test with, so I went about testing. On a SharePoint Server 2013 farm (version 15.0.4719.1002, which is SP1 with May 2015 CU) I created a SharePoint 2010 version workflow and associated it with a document library. I took a SQL backup of the content…
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Upgrade SharePoint 2010 to 2016 Release Candidate
It is a frequent question – can I skip a SharePoint version when upgrading? For example can I do a direct upgrade from SharePoint Server 2007 to 2013? The answer is no, you can't without having to use a migration product – which isn't really “upgrading.” The path to upgrade SharePoint 2007 to 2013 includes an upgrade to SharePoint 2010 first. In March of 2015, Bill Baer, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft, asked if there was any demand for skipping ahead when doing a SharePoint upgrade (a.k.a. N-2 upgrade). #SharePoint question…if you could N-2 upgrade would you? I.e. 2010 > 2016 without stopping at 2013 first… — Bill Baer (@williambaer) March…
