My experiences as a Microsoft MVP, Office 365 & SharePoint Architect, Administrator, and Consultant
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!
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 product life-cycle.
Moving forward, information workers should build their apps using PowerApps on top of SharePoint lists to give the feature-rich solutions their users need with the full on-going support of Microsoft and the tech community.
Last December I posted the news that Microsoft will allow Office 365 admins to postpone the removal of their Office 365 public sites – which are special SharePoint Online site collections that can be used as an internet site for companies.
There wasn’t a big announcement on how to actually do the postponing, which is understandable as Microsoft would rather you not keep your public site so they don’t have to support it.
To postpone the deletion of your SharePoint Online public site, go to the SharePoint admin center – the URL location is in the format: https://[ReplaceWithYourTenantName]-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/online/SiteCollections.aspx – and go to the settings page. For the setting “Postpone deletion of SharePoint Online public websites”, select I’d like to keep my public website until March 31, 2018.
As the setting notes, you will have until March 31, 2018 to find a replacement for your public internet site. Don’t wait! Start a project now to make the change so next March doesn’t sneak up on you. Contact me if I can help with your transition.
The business intelligence landscape in SharePoint has a new and improved story to tell with Power BI! Join me on April 13th at the Nashville Excel & Power BI User Group – I present a session on Power BI Dashboards in SharePoint Online.
The presentation will be heavy on demos as I walk through the BI options in SharePoint – using list views, Excel, and Power BI – to tell great data stories. I will also show the awesomeness of the Power BI mobile app on iOS!
The meeting is free and lunch is provided! Register: Nashville Excel & Power BI Meetup
SQL Saturday Birmingham is on March 18th and I will be there! We will be looking at Power BI and the new features it brings to SharePoint modern pages!
You can find out more about the event, as well as register on their website.
[UPDATED]
The #SQLSatBham event was great – a well-run program! I really enjoyed my time in Birmingham and if you have the chance to attend next time you should!
Good crowd #sqlsatbham pic.twitter.com/Ac2uO3sLjc
— Daniel Glenn (@DanielGlenn) March 18, 2017
My session was fun and I had a great turnout. Talking about how Power BI and SharePoint together can tell a great data story is always fun!
@DanielGlenn #SQLSatBham #sqlsaturday #sphelp pic.twitter.com/rEC5pQQQ4z
— James Vance (@vancejf) March 18, 2017
Use code GlennDC200 for $200 off registration!
I am so pumped up about the upcoming SharePoint Fest in Washington D.C.! First, I am once again joining the #SPFest team and delivering two SharePoint sessions! Second, the #SPFest events are great for networking and connecting with vendors. Third, it has been a while since I have been to the nation’s capital and I am looking forward to meeting new friends!
Go ahead and register for the event on the SharePoint Fest website. This fantastic event will not disappoint!
I was a speaker at five SQL Saturdays this year and at each one of them I was asked why SharePoint requires the SQL Server Maximum Degree Of Parallelism setting to be set equal to 1. After explaining the reason, I would get a blank stare and then a response like “so SharePoint is inefficient and is hard-coded to look for MAXDOP=1?”
Knowing that I would be asked the same question again at the next SQL Saturday, in late July I sent out a tweet trying to get an answer to the question: “Will SharePoint Server 2016 require MAXDOP to be equal to 1?” The only response I received was from Dan Usher, who’s response you can see below – sarcasm included 🙂
@DanielGlenn Hmmm… now you're just being silly. @williambaer @mkashman @jthake
— Dan Usher (@binarybrewery) July 24, 2015
So, with the release of SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview, I was very interested in performing an install with MAXDOP set to something other 1.With SharePoint 2013, if MAXDOP did not equal 1, the install failed when creating the configuration database and would show an error (see information about permissions at the end of this post).
So with my first install of SharePoint 2016, I set MAXDOP equal to 5 in SQL Server and ran the install. The install completed successfully…to my surprise. I really thought I would see an error similar to the one above.
So, for a moment, I thought I might have a new story to tell my DBA friends: “SharePoint Server 2016 doesn’t require MAXDOP=1!” But, that moment quickly went away and I remembered why the error message appeared in a SharePoint 2013 install – the install user did not have sufficient rights within SQL Server to change the Maximum Degree Of Parallelism setting. SharePoint 2013 actually does attempt to change MAXDOP to 1, but if you have SQL and SharePoint configured properly, your SharePoint account will not have rights to make changes to SQL system settings.
For my first install test, I was using a service account that did have administrative rights on SQL as well. I looked at the setting in SQL and SharePoint 2016 did change the Maximum Degree Of Parallelism setting to 1. So, the story is, as of now anyway (we are dealing with Preview software), SharePoint Server 2016 requires MAXDOP=1.
