Sharepoint-2013 on When Software Attacks!

SharePoint 2013: Creating Managed Metadata Columns that allow Fill-In Choices

Thu, 17 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a relatively quick post. There’s a fair bunch of stuff written about creating columns in SharePoint 2013 that use Managed Metadata termsets. However, some of it is a pain to find and then some. I have had to deal with two frustrating issues lately, both of which boil down to poor sharepoint documentation.

Safely modify SharePoint 2013 Web.Config files using PowerShell

Tue, 01 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One of the things we learn early in our SharePoint careers was not to manually edit the web.config files of a web application. SharePoint involves multiple servers and has its own mechanisms for managing web.config updates.

Declaratively create Composed Looks in SharePoint 2013 with elements.xml

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is really a follow-up to my earlier post about tips with SharePoint publishing customisations. Composed looks have been a part of a couple of projects recently. In the first, a solution for on-premise, we used code in a feature receiver to add a number of items to the Composed Looks list. In the second, for Office 365, a bit of research offered an alternative approach with no code.

Speaking at NEBytes on February 19th

Sat, 08 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pleased to have been asked to speak at NEBytes again – a great user group that meets in Newcastle. I’ll be speaking about customising SharePoint 2013 using master pages, themes and search templates, along the same lines as my recent blog post.

Six tips when deploying SharePoint 2013 masterpages, page layouts and display templates

Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been hat-swapping again since just before christmas (which explains the lack of Azure IaaS posts I’m afraid). I’ve been working on a large SharePoint 2013 project, most lately on customising a number of elements around publishing. Getting those custom elements into SharePoint from my solution raised a number of little snags, most of which were solved by the great internet hive mind. It took me a long time to find some of those fixes, however, so I thought I’d collect them here and reference the original posts where appropriate.

User profile service failures caused by Distributed Cache on SharePoint 2013

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is a relatively quick post, largely because I was not able to record the details of the error messages we saw in the farm before we fixed them.

On a recent engagement we were investigating problems with a SharePoint 2013 farm that had been installed for our customer by a third party. There were a number of issues that we worked through but I wanted to record this one for the community.