I have always been a healthy guy, but recently I decided to make getting and staying in shape a priority. I travel a lot. During the month of October, I am going to be home 4 weekdays! Between now and Thanksgiving I’ll be out every week. That is a lot of travel for me. Don’t get me wrong here, I am excited to be busy, but a little worried that my health will suffer. So I am going to challenge myself like I did last year for the SharePoint Evolution Roadshow. During the 3 weeks on the road, we traveled to 13 cities and (with the generous help of friends like Bill Ayers, Ben Robb and Rob Pratt) I was able to run 100k in 3 weeks. For my American friends, that’s around 63 miles.

I am so excited to be speaking at Unity Connect Amsterdam 2015! BTW, you get a discount if you register with “McDer10”. I am getting my content together for my session Managing Office 365 with PowerShell and thought I’d share a tip that saves me TONS of times when working with a new demo tenant. With a little tweak I know this can be used in production too, more about that at the end.

Anybody who has spent any time troubleshooting SharePoint Server issues, particularly in organizations that are so segmented that the DNS, AD, Network and Database folks won’t work with the SharePoint folks, knows that you have to learn a few tricks to determine if the problems are actually SharePoint problems or the result of DNS, AD, or other misconfigured network appliance. Any time I hear network folks tell me they “optimized” the network for my SharePoint Farm I cringe, wondering what they broke in the name of optimization. Here’s a tip if this happens to you, ask them to prove it. Ask them to show you before and after metrics that prove the optimization actually made a difference. This strategy has worked well in organizations that have some level of change management because it usually results in a pause for the initial state testing, and may provide you with a heads-up that “change is a-comin’”. The thing about configuring your farm for Apps is that many different folks are involved to make it work, some know SharePoint and some don’t, so you have to be able to test “OPC” (Other Peoples Configurations) to be sure they got it right. Remember, Apps are not just for SharePoint Apps, but are also used for things like Access Services (if you choose to deploy it), so this configuration is something you want to get “right”.

A Brief Introduction

Before I start gushing (or venting) about what I like and don’t like, I think it’s important to understand what kind of user I am. I am a technology guy with a Windows Phone who travels. I run when I travel and have begun doing interval training in between runs (or when the weather outside is frightful). I don’t do CrossFit, I don’t swim, cycle or drag myself through the mud. (Not that I won’t someday, just not today, or tomorrow…) I am currently tracking my activity with Endomondo and really like the features, the sharing (Facebook and Twitter), and the tracking. (If you use RunKeeper, or some other App, great! It does not matter, as you will see…)

It is funny. We, meaning folks like you and me that spend our days reading, writing, learning and teaching about technology, often have a different reaction to technology based on who is going to use it or who we have to educate. For example, in one breath you may talk about how amazing it is that your 3 year old can use your tablet “without showing them how” and in the next roll your eyes at your spouses repeated failure to upload a photo to Facebook. Let’s face it, different audiences have different needs. The child is uninhibited, explores freely without concern or fear of judgment, there is no expectation of “doing it correctly”. The child is rewarded for curiosity. The adult, on the other hand, is judged (either by themselves or by you watching). They know there is probably a “right way” and get frustrated when trying to find the “one right way”. Why do we have this baggage? It just gets in the way of success, particularly when learning something new.

I love my Lumia 920. It has been the best phone I have ever owned. This has been a good week for my Lumia 920. I gave it a good cleaning to fix a fogged lens and this morning AT&T released the Cyan Update.

Cleaning House

About a year ago I began to notice that photos taken with the front lens on my Nokia 920 were not nearly as good as the rear lens. I mean I understand that the rear lens (the real lens) is a much better lens. This is one of my favorites taken in Kinsail, Ireland. (I still need to find an “I shot this with my phone” photo contest and enter this shot.)

Microsoft has announced that they will retire Tags and Notes in SharePoint Online. The article indicates that users should use Yammer or the Newsfeed instead. While I am not terribly surprised by this move. I am disappointed that the only viable replacement is Yammer or the Newsfeed. Neither of these solutions offer a true replacement for the Tags and Notes feature. Neither has a decent “consolidated view” of my tags and notes, offers a Public and Private view, or offers a simple in browser experience for the user to collect and manage links with tags and notes.

In SharePoint 2010 anytime a client asked for a query that user User Profile properties to drive the results we had to develop and deploy a custom search solution. In SharePoint 2013 we can now access User Profile properties through the much improved Keyword Query Language. I use one simple example of this in my Search Session demos. I call it “Your Documents”.

Your Documents Query Rule

1. Create a new Query Rule on Local SharePoint Results.
2. Give the new rule a name.
3. Remove the Query Condition, this rule will fire on all queries.
4. Click Add Result Block and formulate your query as follows:
   1. Block Title – Your Documents for “{subjectTerms}”
   2. Query - {subjectTerms} Author:{User.Name} IsDocument=1 This query says, give me only documents containing my subjectTerms where the Author property contains the current user’s name.
      • Click OK.
      • Click Save.
      • Return to your search center and try a query using a word contained in a document you authored. You should see something like this:

I have been busy this week creating a PowerShell script that recreates an organically grown SharePoint Site Collection with a dozen hierarchical sites based on site templates. The last time we created a site like this it took about 3 days. With a script I have it down to about 8 minutes on an Enterprise (E3) Tenant. One issue I ran into was when I tried to apply my site templates to the new site for my client I received the error:

I have been presenting how I provision SharePoint 2013 Search for quite a while and have finally gotten around to publishing my script for provisioning a SharePoint Search Service Application with PowerShell. This script can be used to initially provision SharePoint Search in a multi-server environment. With minor tweaks it can also be used to alter an existing topology. There are a couple things that this script demonstrates:

• How to use a configuration file
• How to provision multiple servers from a script
• How to specify where each search component is provisioned
• How to set initial configuration parameters like Crawl Account and Search Center

Feel free to download and try it out. No warranty is expressed or implied!