Archive for November, 2016

Finding a Needle in a Haystack: SharePoint Style

This past week a friend of mine, Joanne Klein (@JoanneCKleinhttps://joannecklein.com/) and I travelled nearly 2000km to take part in what we fondly called our Alberta Tour.  We travelled to Edmonton and spoke to the Edmonton Microsoft User Group and the next evening to the Calgary SharePoint Office365 User Group.

Joanne and I spoke on different ways to make SharePoint Search better:

Finding a Needle in the Haystack: SharePoint Style

So you have this shiny new SharePoint environment built inside your enterprise. You have added tons of content and have lots of users adding, modifying and deleting content all the time. You’ve got your system purring like a kitten and everyone loves it except for one minor detail. Your users can’t find any of the content they are looking for. Search is just not working for them. If they don’t know exactly where to find a file they need to reference or work on, they are spending their precious time looking for it. Join us in this session where we will show you the great search tools SharePoint gives you OOTB.

Along the way we’ll show you some tips, tricks and techniques to make a user’s experience better. From search refiners to display templates, from managed properties to OOTB Web Parts we will show you how to customize your search to make it easier to use and to truly make your search so powerful your users won’t have any trouble finding their “needles in the haystack” – their content.

 

As promised to the attendees, here is the slide deck for our presentation.

finding-a-needle-in-the-haystack

Accessing SharePoint Site: “The context has expired and can no longer be used”

Just a quick little note of a quick solution I came up for a weird problem that occurred on my dev server.  I was preparing for a presentation and when accessing the site that contained all settings, data and code for the presentation was immediately receiving the error message: “The context has expired and can no longer be used”.

The context has expired and can no longer be used - Error Message

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Microsoft Teams – First Look and Thoughts

Announcing Microsoft Teams

On November 2, 2016 Microsoft announced what people have already started calling the “slack killer”.  This being Microsoft Teams.  Putting it briefly Teams is a tool that allows you to create small groups of users (usually your team mates or at least others within your organization) to collaborate on projects, common themes or whatever you need to easily work together with others on.  Sounds an awful lot like SharePoint Groups doesn’t it?  Well I will get to that in a bit.  The biggest difference however is that Teams has a chat component, and it’s really slick.  I have already started using it to collaborate on a presentation that my friend Joanne Klein and I are working on.  It allowed us to easily discuss our thoughts on where we wanted our presentation to go and how we wanted to configure it.  We could have even done it via a video meeting if we felt the need.

This is the first post in a four part series I am completing on Microsoft Teams.  You can go directly to the section you are interested by clicking on a link below:

 

 

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