SharePoint Online – it was weird when it came out, it’s been unstable for years, but it’s the portal solution by Microsoft we all love and cherish. It’s taken the whole ecosystem a few years to mature to a point where it finally became the number one choice for enterprise collaboration, and with its buddies like Microsoft Teams, the prime option for all kinds of communication & internal publishing needs as well.
My experience with SharePoint Online started around the end of 2013, when I started modernizing the full-trust farm solutions my employer had back in the day. The app, or add-in model, was just a bit frustrating to work with, but with updates it become usable as well. And nowadays, it’s definitely the go-to solution instead of self-hosted on-premises.
But what does Microsoft say about this?
What is SharePoint Online – according to Microsoft?
SharePoint Online is a cloud-based service that helps organizations share and collaborate with colleagues, partners, and customers. With SharePoint, you can access internal sites, documents, and other information from anywhere—at the office, at home, or from a mobile device.
-Microsoft
SharePoint itself is almost 2 decades old, and SharePoint Online has seen over half a decade of usage as well. That means that SharePoint Online, at this point, is a battle-hardened tool for collaboration and communication.
These posts handle the cloud installations, development, configurations and all kinds of weird issues.
This post describes a couple of ways to fix the issue “For security reasons DTD is prohibited in this XML document”. At least for me, it appeared when trying to access SharePoint Online using Powershell or a console program using OfficeDev.PnP (which in turn uses CSOM). Error When running any piece…Continue reading Fixing the “For security reasons DTD is prohibited in this XML document.” issue
If you’re working on SharePoint deployments, and aren’t familiar with the SharePoint Search Query Tool, you’re probably doing something wrong. Or you’ve got a really troublefree tenant and simple requirements.. :) At least for technical issues, it’s the #1 tool for debugging what’s in the index and what isn’t. This…Continue reading Using SharePoint Search Query Tool
Microsoft is deprecating, or even removing one of the most widely used features in SharePoint sites – Site Mailboxes. For the end-user, this might not mean much but still requires some additional work from the administration side. In this post, I’m trying to give a rough outline, of what you…Continue reading Site Mailboxes deprecated on SharePoint Online – use Office Groups instead
This post describes the actual, working, and the fast process of removing a site collection in SharePoint Online using the Remove-SPODeletedSite commandlet in SharePoint Online Management Shell (a flavor of PowerShell). Description Sometimes you need to get rid of a site collection you’ve created in SharePoint Online. The most typical example perhaps…Continue reading Remove-SPODeletedSite – Actually removing a SharePoint Online Site Collection
In this post, I outline a simple way to stop SharePoint (either on-premises installation or SharePoint Online) from redirecting to Delve or MySites (respectively). The normal behavior is, that this happens when users click any name of a user anywhere in SharePoint. This is often not desired, and sometimes just…Continue reading Disabling Delve/MySite redirection from SharePoint Site Collections
Luckily, SharePoint Add-ins (or App Parts, like they were called earlier) are slowly getting killed and rooted out of all the sites they once were deployed to – and I don’t think anyone’s going to miss them. However, as so often happens with legacy implementations, there will still be thousands of sites,…Continue reading Updating files in an App Part (SharePoint Add-in)
This post describes a peculiar problem that a customer had. In their intranet, all of their employees had a managed metadata -typed managed property in SharePoint User Profile Service and a mapping from that property to RefinableString31. RefinableString31, in turn, was used on Search DisplayTemplates to show the textual value…Continue reading RefinableString -managed property in SharePoint Online not populating for all items