All posts in Configuration

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 Site Architecture – Flat, Deep or Something In The Middle

Hi recently had the privilege to do another presentation with Joanne Klein.  This time we built a presentation off of a post that she had written around whether we should use flat or deep structures with our site collections and sub sites or if we should have something in between when designing a SharePoint site architecture.  It was a lot of fun and we probably could have done entire presentation on just a portion of it.  Either way, I promised our attendees that I would post our slide deck.  You can find the slide deck here.  Thank you very much to everyone who attended.

 

Thanks for reading!

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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Leading Practices for Planning a SharePoint Environment

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!

How to Setup SharePoint Search to Crawl External Content With BCS

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:

BCS Search With No Profile Configured

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.

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