Every thing SharePoint 2016: Server roles based configuration wizard

SharePoint 2016 introduces new server role based farm configuration like you see in the image below.

I would think the role is actually based on the services that will be running on the server however, the rules are yet not been suggested by Microsoft.

One thing to ponder, Is this the beginning of the end of "3-tier architecture" deployment of SharePoint?

SharePoint 2016, InfoPath and its alternatives

SharePoint community has been given a peak by Microsoft at its plans for the on-prem version on its most popular collaboration platform.

Get more info by clicking on this link

On form solutions, Microsoft is researching a web-based solution for the design and creation of forms, (says Microsoft MVP, Asif Rehmani) while InfoPath will be phased out with ease. Microsoft has not made anything official yet and nobody knows any timelines of a production release.

Meanwhile, a few alternatives to InfoPath forms are Nintex, K2, AgilePoint, he suggests.

Get current Year and store in SharePoint List Column

Create a List Column in SharePoint.

Select the type as Single line of text

In Default value select Calculated Value and enter this command

=TEXT(Today, "YYYY")

Requesting site access in SharePoint 2013

Let me introduce you to the Access Request and Invitations feature that allows you to manage access requests to your sites in SharePoint 2013. All users without access to a particular site on SharePoint will be prompted with this message

"Sorry, this site hasn't been shared with you".

Now, how do you share the site then? Or how does a user request for access to the site?

By Enabling Access Requests!

Firstly, enable Access Requests, and to do that you need to enable Outgoing e-mail settings. Navigate to the Central Administration, under System Settings / Configure outgoing e-mail settings.

Once this is enabled your users will instead see something else instead of a "Sorry, ......" message, which is:

Let us know why you need access to this site

The user requesting access needs to provide a reason and click Send Request. The site admin will be notified via e-mail and the user's request is saved in the site.

To provide site Access

The site administrator can click on Site Settings (the cog wheel) / Shared With... to see the current Sharing status. If there are pending access requests, the admin will see a notification. You can click on View Requests.

The administrations will see all pending access requests in a list where they can see who wants access to which site and by clicking the ellipsis (the … ) they can see status of a specific request.

The admin can approve or decline the request or initiate a communication with the user requesting. If you type a message to the requester, it will show up in the same page which the user requested in the first place.

Site admins can also go to Site Settings / Access requests and invitations.

You can also access the Access Request hidden SharePoint List using the below URLs:

Guest user invitations - Access Requests/pendinginv.aspx
History - Access Requests/oldreq.aspx
Pending Requests - Access Requests/pendingreq.aspx

How to: Embed YouTube channel videos on SharePoint 2013

Suppose you have a channel on YouTube and you would like to embed all the videos from your channel on your SharePoint portal.

This will not only make the newly uploaded videos on YouTube available on SharePoint automatically but also save you time and your storage in your datacenter ;)

# First, we need to get the playlist URL of your channel. You can get this by clicking on Play All button on YouTube. For demo purposes, I'm using the TEDx NewYork playlist.

https://www.youtube.com/embed?list=PLsRNoUx8w3rPrI5Bd1btJam4kfOCZtcxT

# Get the iFrame embedded code from YouTube by clicking the share button under the video and selecting embed.

# Change the src value in this code with the playlist URL you got above. 

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed?list=PLsRNoUx8w3rPrI5Bd1btJam4kfOCZtcxT" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

# Now open SharePoint and navigate to the page where you want to embed your playlist.
# Click on the gear icon on the right top corner and select Edit Page.
# Click on Add a Web Part and select the Content Editor web part under the Media section.

# From the ribbon select Embed Code and insert the iFrame code we created above.

# You can now see that the iFrame displays the video and you also have the whole play list available on the left top corner of the video.

Let me know if you have tried something different to achieve the same?

How to: Configure People Search Directory on SharePoint 2013

People search can be important to an organization when you need to find someone with a specific skill. One thing is to display the search box and you can find for someone but, that doesn't offer a great user experience. The other way is to display a people directory and provide option to filter them and narrow the results such as department, job title, location etc. based on some criteria which is called Refinement in SharePoint terms.

Here I'm going to show you how to configure the latter. This can be setup using the SharePoint 2013 search web part.

What you are looking at at the end of this configuration is this.

Here are the steps that you will follow:

• Assuming that you already have the Search Service and User Profile Service setup. Navigate to Site Settings > Under Look and Feel select Page Layouts and Site Templates
• Select (Welcome Page) Search People and (Welcome Page) Search Results under Page Layouts section.

• Now Navigate to Pages Library and select New Document > Page
• On the Create Page screen select Search People page layout, write an appropriate name for the page and select Create.
• This web part will not show any results until we specify a query. To show all the people by default, we need to modify the query for People Search Core Results Web Part. Select Change Query button in the web part properties. Under Basics select Property contentclass under Property Filter and enter spspeople as the manual value as shown below.

• Now, we will have the list of people displayed. To configure refinement filters, to show other metadata properties that are defined in our search center, select the Choose refiners option on the refinement web part. Select Department and Job Title. Note that the managed property must have the ‘Refinable’ option selected in the search schema for it to be available in this list.

For further configurations like sorting and table based layouts, I found this very helpful.

Enhance the search experience!

How to fix: SharePoint 2013 Search not working and EPM / PWA is slow

Where do you start debugging the issue? I first checked the Search Service Application

• Navigate to Central Admin
• Under System Settings select Manage services on server
• Select SharePoint Server Search and check Search Service Application

Sure enough, it pointed out what's wrong.

Issue

The Search Service Application Topology was throwing an error:

Unable to retrieve topology component health states. This may be because the admin component is not up and running.

Resolution Steps

I referred to the SharePoint ULS logs and noticed that the Query Processing Component was throwing the following error:

There was no endpoint listening at [URL] that could access the message.

Tried IMS endpoints for operation execution: operation sent to IMS failed: Resource saturation, Try again later

This pointed out that the search service was trying to use a resource but something was limiting the usage.

Solution

The issue was resolved by configuring the noderunner.exe.config file by changing the value of the node <memoryLimitMegaBytes> to 0 (zero).

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Search\Runtime\1.0\noderunner.exe.config

Further References

http://blogs.technet.com/b/mpriem/archive/2012/09/05/sharepoint-2013-preview-hungry-search-service.aspx

To identify which noderunner.exe is taking up all the memory, please follow this URL:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kristopherloranger/archive/2014/03/24/sharepoint-2013-noderunner-exe-process-information.aspx

OS X Yosemite 10.10.2 released by Apple

This update brings a lot of improvements to OS X. I personally feel the Wi-Fi disconnection and slow web page load issue will make a significant change to the user experience.

Here is what you get with the latest update.

• Resolves an issue that may cause Wi-Fi to disconnect
• Resolves an issue that may cause web pages to load slowly
• Fixes an issue that caused Spotlight to load remote email content when the preference was disabled in Mail
• Improves audio and video sync when using Bluetooth headphones
• Adds the ability to browse iCloud Drive in Time Machine
• Improves VoiceOver speech performance
• Resolves an issue that causes VoiceOver to echo characters when entering text on a web page
• Addresses an issue that may cause the input method to switch languages unexpectedly
• Improves stability and security in Safari

Download the update from Mac App Store. Apple also released iOS 8.1.3

Has anyone updated their Mac yet? Give me your feedback in the comments section.

Apple released iOS 8.1.3 / Reduces space required to update / Also releases OS X Yosemite 10.10.2

The second part of the title is catchy. iOS 8 user adoption has been  noticeably slower than iOS 7 and one of the major reasons was to clear up space on your iPhone before the upgrade.

iOS 8.1.3 is comparatively a small upgrade. Apple apparently is testing iOS 8.2 currently to be released inline with their Apple Watch ahead this year.

Are you expecting a feature or fix that you did not find with iOS 8.1.3? Make them hear in the comments section!