I was excited to get the RTM of Office 2016 but dismayed that the Excel preview function did not work in Outlook 2016. Other previews were fine, like PDF and Word. I figured there must be a problem with the way that Excel 2016 was registered and tried a “Repair” and reboot but that did not help. Firing up Process Monitor showed the problem pretty quickly. The registry key for the Excel Preview handler is not the same as the other working handlers. Read More →

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. Read More →

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. Read More →

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. Read More →

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. Read More →

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. Read More →

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. Read More →

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. Read More →

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 Create a new Query Rule on Local SharePoint Results. Read More →

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: Read More →