All posts in Configuration (SP 2016)

How to Auto-Generate SharePoint Audit Reports: The GUI

A question I get often, especially around solutions where security is a big concern is “how can we see who looked\opened\updated\deleted an item in our document library.  Updates, are easy if you have versioning enabled as it tracks each update in the version history, but what if you don’t want versioning enabled or you need to track the other items?  Enter SharePoint audit reports.  I previously blogged a detailed post on the audit logs within SharePoint.  Basically, once enabled they will record everything that occurs within the site depending on the settings you select.  You can find more information on it here.  However, the problem with audit reports is you need site collection admin access to see them.  This does not work in many instances as most end users don’t (and shouldn’t) have that level of access to your site collection.  So how do you get them the reports without manually running the report for them each time they require it?  This is what we are going to cover in this series.  This post specifically will assist you in preparing the data for your users from the SharePoint GUI.

Quick Note: this may be an old topic, in fact I know it is.  I started this blog two years ago and apparently forgot about it.  I was going to trash it when I came across it but remembered that I still see a number of requests for setting up audit reports to automatically run for others.  So I decided to complete it since it is still relevant for all versions of SharePoint including SharePoint Online

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SharePoint Best Practices – Lists and Libraries

These days it is really easy to create lists and libraries to store data and documents.  It is also very easy to build metadata to support the information you are trying to store.  However, as I have stated before it is also very easy to set things up incorrectly.  This next post in my Power User Best Practices is going to cover what you should and shouldn’t do with a SharePoint List and Library.

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MVP Days Alberta Slide Decks

This past week I had the extreme pleasure of speaking at two conferences with the MVP Days Road Show.  I spoke with Joanne Klein on SharePoint Search and solo on SharePoint Business Connectivity Services.  Unfortunately my environment didn’t play nice and had three, yup I am not kidding, three BSODs during my presentations.  Everyone was really forgiving about it and we just kept right on trucking through.  As promised I would like to include our slide decks for everyone to download and learn from.  All four slide decks for the presentations completed are listed in this post.

MVPDays – Finding a Needle in the Haystack_Search Concepts

MVPDays – Finding a Needle in the Haystack_Search Features

MVPDays – Playing Outside Your Sandbox. Interacting with other systems using SharePoint BCS

MVPDays – Playing Further Outside Your Sandbox

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

Pushing the Limits of SharePoint Storage: Getting Beyond 200GB

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.

SharePoint Database Size Limits

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.

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