Hi everyone,
On October 20, 2016 I had the honour of taking part in the Collab365 Global Conference. At this conference I presented my session on Advanced Concepts in SharePoint BCS. I forgot to provide the slide deck to the Collab365 team prior to the conference. I have posted the slide deck here.
Playing Further Outside Your Sandbox: Advanced Concepts in SharePoint BCS slide deck.
Recently at my client site (I have a lot of posts that start this way) we have been getting more and more requests for groups that want to bring higher amounts of data into SharePoint. These requests are really pushing the limits of SharePoint Storage thresholds. So I started looking into the ways that we can get around that. Our thought was that since Microsoft recently announced being able to handle 25TB of data for SharePoint Online Site Collections. We should be able to easily handle the 4TB ceiling in our on-prem environment.
Update: I wrote another blog post concerning this where I go into greater detail on how to test if your environment can go beyond the 200GB threshold and the results of a test I did. You can view that information here.
The limitations of SharePoint’s content databases are pretty well documented here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-CA/library/cc262787.aspx#ContentDB. But in a nutshell you want to keep your content databases below 200GB. The same document actually suggests splitting out your site collections if the content DB reached more than 100GB. This would be to allow for growth within the sites.
But what if it’s a single site collection within that database? This now means you should consider branching off the site collection into multiple site collections. For example, create an archive site collection to house data that is no longer actively updated or used. Likely this will cut down on your data usage a great deal. You will have to migrate the data in order to do it, but it is a necessary evil to save on space.
I was recently hosted by CIPS Saskatchewan to give my Leading Practices for Planning and Implementing a SharePoint Environment presentation. It was a great time and I really enjoyed giving it. I will also be presenting the session in October at the Victoria SharePoint User Group and at SharePoint Saturday Redmond. I have updated the slide deck somewhat so wanted to provide it to everyone for them to download.
Thank you to all the organizations for allowing me to present this session and thank you to everyone who came out and attended. I hope you gained something from the presentation.
Click this link to download the slide deck.
Thanks for reading!
So the other day I wrote about an error received when your security is not setup properly when configuring search for external data using Business Connectivity Services. I thought today would be a good day to show you how to setup SharePoint search to crawl external content with BCS. Setting up search isn’t actually too hard once the ECT is there. What people initially forget though is setting up the profile page. This is what tells SharePoint how to display the data to you. If you don’t setup profiles here is what things look like:
We can see from the link details that it is coming from the BDC (Business Data Connectivity). That’s the service in SharePoint that houses BCS. Clicking on the link just takes us back to the search center. This is because SharePoint doesn’t know how to display the data to us.
Recently I was configuring search to access my SQL Server data via an external content type for a demo I was presenting. Once the content source was configured I ran the full crawl to populate the index with the data from my external source. After about a minute the crawl was marked complete. So naturally I am going to want to test it and make sure my data is pulling through. The external data is a basic asset database so I did a search for one of the manufacturers I knew was in there. Received the dreaded “Nothing here matches your search” message.
Well I know there is data in there so obviously something went wrong. I know what is wrong as I have done this before, but I want to go through some of the troubleshooting steps you can do to help determine the problem.
