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SharePoint developer who’s that?

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SharePoint developer it’s very popular job those days . I mean when you read LinkedIn posts or HR portals you will find a lot of open positions. And in one case I saw very interesting question. Person from HR written that she’s looking for SharePoint developer. And someone asked: but who are you looking for? Which version of SharePoint? What set of skills do you need? And answer to those questions is not so obvious… So let’s start from the begging.

 

SharePoint Developer

SharePoint Developer

 

SharePoint 2013

Someone could be surprised that I ever wrote about it. Well, believe me or not but this version is still used in many places, as also they used SharePoint 2007. Many companies, especially the big ones, still relays on this version, as they made a lot of investments and build many solution, so for them it could be real challenge to make an upgrade. In case of this version we can assume that core skills for SharePoint developer are:

  • perfect SharePoint server knowledge. Yes, yes! I think that if you want be good SharePoint developer you have to know it well. Sometime you can find very sophisticated solution, when out of the box already there
  • of course ASP.NET is must have skill
  • C# ; but please remember if you know it, you will still need some time to understand SharePoint itself
  • knowledge of  IIS could be usefull
  • HTML, JavaScript, XML, CSS
  • SOAP
  • CAML
  • STSADM/PowerShell
  • SQL Server knowledge is also useful
  • Patience. I know many developers who just hate SharePoint and they don’t work with it. That’s right, sometime SharePoint could be real pain and you have to have nerves of steel. Well, I like that 🙂

 

SharePoint 2016

For some simplicity let’s assume that set of skills will be similar to previous version. I am not going to write anything about JavaScript frameworks, as I am not sure if SharePoint framework goes to on premise version… If SharePoint framework will be available on premise, then skills from next point will be very important.

 

SharePoint developer – future

In my opinion future of SharePoint can be seen when we take a look on SharePoint online and the entire Office 365 platform. The best description in this case is JavaScript is the King! Microsoft since few months sends us updates about something called SharePoint Framework. This solution should allow use tu build advanced solution with JavaScript. Few months ago Microsoft disabled to us code behind with Sandbox Solution in the cloud, so now every SharePoint developer waiting  for this tool. With SharePoint framework and Office 365 API which is still updated our possibilities should greatly increase. So what do we need? Today JavaScript is a main skill! Other important are:

  • TypeScript
  • React. Did you now that Delve and new libraries has been build with React?
  • Node.js
  • Gulp
  • Yeoman
  • Webpack
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Angular JS
  • Office UI Fabric

As you can see above key skills are away from C# code. Of course in some cases it could be necessary to run Visual Studio, for example to write Web Job in azure, but the main code will run on the client side. If you are looking for more information about SharePoint future you can take a look on Office Dev Center. Especially you should check SharePoint PnP Webcast.

Now it’s time for my personal opinion… I hope… Really… That Microsoft will stick to the direction which has been chosen. We already saw so many ideas or technology skills. Each of them has been presented as “the Chosen One” 🙂 .  And after sometime nice guy from Microsoft comes to us and says: “Forget it about it!!! Now we want to present you something new and special…” . But we have created so many solution, we had so many plans. You can say many bad things about Apple, but they take about developers. Why Microsoft can’t walk the same road?

We don’t need revolution, we need evolution. Well maybe I saw too many thing and become old? I hope this time it will be different story.

Run SharePoint workflow from Console application

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SharePoint workflow is a essence to that platform and I many cases is a main reason to implement it.  Today I would like you to show you how to run SharePoint workflow from Console application. In case of SharePoint on premise is not something big, as we have a few options here like Timer Job. But when we work with SharePoint online is priceless. I know that from personal experience of last few weeks. Let’s imagine that we written SharePoint workflow, which resets statuses of some items on a list. Unfortunately when we work in cloud we don’t have a option to schedule the job. Option which comes up here for us is console application which will start the process. Then we can publish it as Azure WebJob, and Azure scheduler will run it every day in the morning. It’s really simple and efficient.

 

Configure application to work with SharePoint online

In first step we have to create token which will be used to authenticate our application. I have written a post how to do this here , so I will not write it again in details. In the next step we should create simple console application with Visual Studio and install with NuGet Package Manager AppForSharePointWebToolkit. We should configure it as described in the post, to grant access our application access to Office 365 tenant.

 

Method to start SharePoint workflow

First element is reference to „Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.WorkflowServices”. It contains necessary classes to work with our workflow.

WorkflowServices

WorkflowServices

Below you can find the code which make everything for us. In general we have four main blocks here.
style=”background-color: lightgrey;”

  1. We get ClientContext for our site where workflow is located
  2. We are searching for workflow instance
  3. We build a list of list items
  4. We run workflow for each list item

And that’s all. There are also two important thing from my point of view:

  • capse in CamlQuary  should be raplaced with  _x0020_  . In other case our query will not work
  • We have to provide workflow name in our site collection to start valid process
 
  private static void RunReminder(ClientContext clientContext)
 {
 Web web = clientContext.Web;
 WorkflowServicesManager wfServicesManager = new WorkflowServicesManager(clientContext, web);
 WorkflowDeploymentService wfDeploymentService = wfServicesManager.GetWorkflowDeploymentService();
 WorkflowDefinitionCollection wfDefinitionCollection = wfDeploymentService.EnumerateDefinitions(false);
 clientContext.Load(wfDefinitionCollection, wfDefs => wfDefs.Where(wfd => wfd.DisplayName == "Reminder"));
 clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
 WorkflowDefinition wfDefinition = wfDefinitionCollection.First();

 var workflowSubscriptionService = wfServicesManager.GetWorkflowSubscriptionService();
 var workflowAssociations = workflowSubscriptionService.EnumerateSubscriptionsByDefinition(wfDefinition.Id);
 clientContext.Load(workflowAssociations);
 clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
 
 var firstWorkflowAssociation = workflowAssociations.First();
 var workflowInstanceService = wfServicesManager.GetWorkflowInstanceService();
 var startParameters = new Dictionary<string, object>();
 
 
 List employeesList = clientContext.Web.Lists.GetByTitle("Employees");
 CamlQuery query = new CamlQuery();
 query.ViewXml = "<View><Query><Where>" +
 "<And>" +
 "<Contains>" +
 "<FieldRef Name='Lunch_x0020_Ordered'/><Value Type='Boolean'>0</Value>" +
 "</Contains>" +
 "<Contains>" +
 "<FieldRef Name='Out_x0020_of_x0020_office'/><Value Type='Boolean'>0</Value>" +
 "</Contains>" +
 "</And>" +
 "</Where></Query></View>";
 ListItemCollection collection = employeesList.GetItems(query);
 clientContext.Load(collection);

 try
 {
 clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
 }
 catch (Exception exception)
 {

 Console.WriteLine("There were exception on a list: " + exception.Message + "Application will be terminated!!!");
 Environment.Exit(1);
 }
 foreach (var item in collection)
 {
 Console.WriteLine("starting first workflow on " + item.Id);
 workflowInstanceService.StartWorkflowOnListItem(firstWorkflowAssociation, item.Id, startParameters);
 clientContext.ExecuteQuery();
 }

 clientContext.Dispose();
 }

Document management in SharePoint

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Document management in SharePoint is a huge topic and in general it’s most important feature of the platform. In previous post you could read about “SharePoint Information Architecture“. And now I would like to to continue in more practical way.

Of course you can find a lot of white papers or how to’s how to manage documents, for example at Technet  or Office pages. But still, decisions taken here are very important from project point of view. Also it’s important for end users as also for people who will make project implementation.

One of the most post popular approaches is to make SharePoint looks like file server, so we create a lot of folders inside folders. Well in this case, it’s difficult to manage and difficult to find out where our documents are…

folder

folder

 

 

But it’s super coll to someone who provide us a content, but for people who needs to find something or work on it it could be challenging. What are disadvantages in case of this approach?

  • There’s no metadata in general 
  • There’s no navigation based on metadata 
  • No filters 
  • Too many clicks to get interesting content 

On the other hand it’s important to highlight about some advantages related to permissions management at folder level. Also document library which has been synchronized to local computer with OneDrive looks much better than library with metadata only

Document management – metadata instead of folders

This very good approach from end user point of view. In this case he can have flexible navigation, sorting, filtering, etc. Unfortunately from people who upload the content this case it’s not easy to implement. They can’t just do drag and drop, they have to add metadata, so upload process takes much more time. And in this case sometime people just enter anything to make the process fast… So we can get bigger mess than we wanted…

Those two options are leading us to summary that both groups have different needs in case of document management. So how we can make happy both of them?

Group is better

It seems that the best option here is using both solution together in case of document management. I am using it by myself and it works perfect for me. What we can do? Let’s create a few columns which will contains important metadata. As you can see below I just have two columns: supplier (dostawca) oraz document type (typ dokumentu). And first column is metadata type. In the next step we have to design structure of our folders. We have think about for a while as it’s very important.

Folder structure

Document management

 

As you can see in my case it’t very simple. In each folder I have created a few sub folders. And that’s all. Now it’s time to use very powerful SharePoint feature called Change default column values. I don’t know why this option it’s not used to often.

 

Change default column values

Change default column values

 

With this feature we can automatically set tags/ properties for uploaded documents. So if you put something into “DELL” sub folder, SharePoint will set all predefined metadata for the document. With this approach we achieve a few goals which were not possible previously. We can use drag and drop, we can build navigation based on metadata, when we make a synchronization to local computer we have nice folder view. It’s very useful if we create two views: one with all folders and the other with metadata only.

I hope that this short post shows you how we can use different approaches to get better result in Document management. It will not require to much work from you and the result could be very good to your team. It’s one time job and your SharePoint will be looking much more better.

SharePoint Information Architecture

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SharePoint Information Architecture it’s a key term when you start thinking about SharePoint implementation. The first question in fact is what are we talking about? In many cases or system you will get different definition. For me SharePoint Information Architecture means focus on the content. Not technical stuff, but the content which are we going to store there. If you are interested more in the topic you read more at Microsoft Technet site. You can find there more information what SharePoint Information Architecture is.

Content which we are going to store we can divide to four main points:

  • Documents
  • List Content
  • Web Sites
  • Posts/Pages

In fact this is all what we can store in SharePoint. To fit this content exactly to our needs we can use following tools, which are provided to us by SharePoint:

SharePoint architecture

SharePoint architecture

 

Someone could ask what SharePoint is? We can get many answers here and everything could be true. But first of all it’s a platform which help us to store and manage content. In my opinion companies or users make general mistake when they try to use it to other things. Of course you can do it, but why? Then we will get complains from it people or developers that SharePoint is very challenging platform to manage or development. Of course if you build almost everything with it that could be a challenge , but for example if you develop CRM system base on SharePoint with code written from scratch why you don’t put it to different application?

SharePoint Information Architecture – four steps to success

In my opinion you need four steps to successfully implement SharePoint Information Architecture:

key steps

key steps

  1. Define. First and key element is a goal which we want to achieve. Without that every next step will fail and it will not have any sense. We have to know what kind of result we would like to get, what kind of problem we want to solve. Without that can’t properly design SharePoint Information Architecture. For example we want to provide to the end user fast search option of existing company information. If your goal is to make SharePoint implementation as other companies do, you can be in trouble…
  2. Design. When you make a design plan you have to decide which features will be needed to get expected result. For example do we need tags? Or maybe we need special search configuration?
  3. Implement. When we know what we would like to achieve we can go to implementation .
  4. Govern. When our SharePoint Information Architecture will be in place and all our  goals will be reached we should take care about govern our solution. And this is very important as previous three points. We have to train our users how our solution works, how they should use it. Of course we have also monitor how users works with our solution as it could happen that after few weeks we will get huge mess in our SharePoint

How to do in real world I will show you in next post.

App permission in SharePoint online

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Today I would like to write a few words how we can use App permission in SharePoint online. This topic is very interesting as also very useful. It allows us to make a lot of things with our tenant without direct login in Office 365 login page. Do you remember my post about geolocation? When you take a look on the code you will see that I used user name and password with clear text. Of course it could be fine in some situation, but in general we should avoid this. So the question is what we can do? How to remove user name and password from our application?


The best solution for this problem is to use App permission. With this approach our application will use tokens, which provide us much better security level. To do start we have to generate Client Id and Client Secret with following URL in our tenant:

URL: https://[tenant].sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/appregnew.aspx

app registration

app registration

 

Press Generate button. We will get two strings which will allow our application to authenticate with tokens. In Title field we enter name of our application.We should use something more than “my app” as in the future it could be difficult to remember purpose of the application. App domain should use localhost, and Redirect URI should have URL of our tenant. That’s the first step. After token generation we have to setup permission for our app. We can do this at following URL: /layouts/15/appinv.aspx. We enter following XML structure:

 

 
 <AppPermissionRequests AllowAppOnlyPolicy="true"> 
 <AppPermissionRequest Scope="http://sharepoint/content/tenant" Right="FullControl" /> 
 </AppPermissionRequests>

How to use it App permission in SharePoint online

So it’s time to use our knowledge in real world. Let’s create simple console application. Next in the NuGet Package Manager we should look for something called AppForSharePointWebToolkit. Install it.

AppForSharePointWebToolkit

AppForSharePointWebToolkit

 

After package installation we will get some references to Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.* and plik App.config, which is our next target. Let’s open it and add new section appSettings with our keys  ClientId and ClientSecret. We put there our keys which we generate before. In our case it looks like this:

 
<add key="ClientId" value="28921286-09f3-4bce-819a-4e53a12dabb6"/>
 <add key="ClientSecret" value="HOaS7LQbBi8QYU/1x67Bdae38qJh79qt+LY4IoLcQHM="/>
 <add key="ClientSettingsProvider.ServiceUri" value="" />

 

 

The last piece is new using statement in our code using Microsoft.SharePoint.Client; . And that’s all . In my cases I prefer to use additional class which has only one purpose – to return only clientContext for single URL, just like below:

 
public static ClientContext GetClientContext(string siteUrl)
{
         Uri siteUri = new Uri(siteUrl);
         string realm = TokenHelper.GetRealmFromTargetUrl(siteUri);
         string accessToken = TokenHelper.GetAppOnlyAccessToken(TokenHelper.SharePointPrincipal, siteUri.Authority,&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;nbsp;realm).AccessToken;
         var clientContext = TokenHelper.GetClientContextWithAccessToken(siteUri.ToString(), accessToken);
         return clientContext;
}

As a result we will get clientContext, so then do whatever we want in our tenant.

Microsoft Planner – how to start

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Just few days ago Microsoft announced that his latest application for Office 365 – Microsoft Planner is going live.  I was using it during preview time with my team and I have to say that it’s awesome! If you have Office 365 you will get solution which allow increase your team productivity. From my point of view Microsoft Planner is very simple team management software, which also allow us to make simple project management. It similar to other products on the market like Trello or Slack.

Short presentation how to use Microsoft Planner

If your Office 365 subscriptions which allow you to use it, you should see it in your office 365 app launcher. Let’s run it. That’s how start screen looks like:

Microsoft planner start

Microsoft planner start

Let see how to create our plan. It’s very simple, we just need to enter plan name and decide if our plan become public or no. After that just press “Create plan” and we are ready to go.

New Plan

New Plan

 

When you create new plan Office 365 create for your several things for you:

  • Notes – dedicated OneNote space,
  • Calendar – project calendar
  • Group email and Group people – group members working on the plan
  • OneDrive for the plan.

Also we get dedicated e-mails address to the plan – it’s not require any work from IT team… Let’s create our first task in our plan. Just press + icon, and enter task name. Also you can assign person to the task and setup due date. It can be set up later too. It’s up to you.

First Planner Task

First Planner Task

Now press the task tile, you will see grouped all stuff related to the task. We can do following things here:

  • Set up status
  • Start and end task date
  • Assign task to someone else
  • Add attachments
  • Create check list for the task
  • Add comments.
Planner Task details

Planner Task details

 

When we add documents for the task they will be saved to dedicated OneDrive space. Also we can make conversion with our plan members. Members will be notified if something new happen in our plan. When you go charts for specific plan you can see progress for all in the plan, it allows you to have quick view how things are going.

Planner charts

Be default when you go to planner hub  you will see all your plans. But there’s very nice feature. If you add any plan to favourites you will get also in planner hub those charts with progress.  As you can see colours on the charts are standardized,  you can very easy find out how all your plans works. You just take a look and you can see which plan require your attention.

Favorite plans

Favourite plans

And that’s all. As you can see application is very simple, but still give us a lot of things, in very simple way. It very important when you have to work with non it people. They don’t need huge project/task systems like Jira or Mantis. They need something simple and I think that Microsoft Planner is very good solution for this.

Let’s start with PowerApps

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A few months ago, Scott Hanselman announced, new solution which change mobile development for Microsoft world, and the others somehow too. That solution was called Microsft PowerApps. The solution wasn’t available for tests, it was just possible to register for preview waiting lists. Fortunately I work for the company which placed almost entire business in the cloud and Microsoft help us a lot with this. And thanks to my boss I was able to get early access to this coll tool. As far as I know right now PowerApps are available in preview for everyone, but I can see it in my App launcher.  Well let see how it works.

Let’s start with PowerApps

 

To start go to your Office 365 tenant, press the app tile and run it.  After that you will see the screen which looks like below:

PowerApps start screen

PowerApps start screen

As you can see it looks simple. We also get four applications which Microsoft prepared for us to discover how PowerApps works. Let’s try to building something by our own.

I have very simple list in our Office 365 SharePoint online. This list is used for presenting some basic sales data. I just have there: Cashier name, net sales, clerk id and report day.

Those information are updated on daily basis by simple CSOM console application, which sends data from our ERP to SharePoint online. Press “New app” button. You will see pop up message “To create and edit apps, you need to install PowerApps Studio for Windows.” I have already installed it, so I have to just press “Open it”, and press “New” to start. You will see possible sources for our application.

PowerApps Start

PowerApps Start

And in my case choice is obvious, I mean I will use SharePoint online as source for my App. You will get textbox for url of your SharePoint site, enter credential and your will get all list in the site. Now just press “Connect” and our application make their magic.  Please take a look at the print screen below:

PowerApps Screens

PowerApps Screens

Without any additional work I get  three screen, which has been created base on the data in my list:

  • Browse screen
  • Details screen
  • Edit screen

And in many cases it will absolutely enough for our needs, but if we want to build something more sophisticated you have a lot of options:

  • we can create additional screens
  • we can insert actions
  • we can create flow, really A LOT of flows, for example “Create Salesforce and Wunderlist Tasks” from the App
  • we can use icons, controls, forms, etc
  • we can add additional data sources
  • and much more

As you can see PowerApps were presented as simple solution for non developer people, but it’s looks very powerful. I think that in some cases mobile application can start worry about it… Let’s come back to our app. Now it’s time deploy our PowerApps to our organization. It’s very simple operation. You just need to “Save as” and then select option “the cloud”, and in next step you have just mark checkbox “Allow access to other users in my organization”. This option will save the app to your Office 365 tenant. After that when you open again PowerApps and login with your organization account you will see your app on the all available list apps. Also this one is available to you to edit.

Save PowerApps

Save PowerApps

Now let’s check if it works as expected. PowerApps solution can be used for example with iPhone, as well with Android devices. It’s time to login to App Store and install it. Now just login with your organization account and you can see on the all available apps in our organization tenant. As you can see my app is on the list… Awesome, isn’t it 🙂

Iphone PowerApps

Iphone PowerApps

Now you have just press the app icon and report is ready to go. As you can see entire solution is very simple, but it’s really powerful and it give to us a lot of options. I just find out that it has taken more time to me to write this post than create and deploy app itself.

Geolocation column in SharePoint

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Did you ever try to use Geolocation column in SharePoint? No? So today I would like to write about something new. I mean that today I am going to write about Geolocation column in SharePoint. This topic is not described to often, which is strange to me as it’s very interesting and also it could be very useful. For my tests and coding I will use SharePoint online. Geolocation column is a new feature, which has been introduced in SharePoint 2013. If you are not familiar with this topic you should read first article at MSDN pages. In general new column give us possibility to keep in SharePoint column (Geolocation column) geographical coordinates, which can be used to build nice looking Bing maps with our custom location. Let’s see how we can do this.

The first step is to get a key for Bing maps which can be generated at this Microsoft portal. For our needs we can use Basic key, which can be obtained for free. But if you plan to build something big probably you will need paid key. If you get your key you can now activate geolocation columns in your site. By default this option in not active. If you run SharePoint on premise you can use PowerShell script.

 

$WebUrl = "https://mojaWitryna.sharepoint.com/KRMBasicData"
$EmailAddress = “mojUser”
$Context = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientContext($WebUrl)
$Credentials = Get-Credential -UserName $EmailAddress -Message “Podaj hasło do Office 365”
$Context.Credentials = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.SharePointOnlineCredentials($EmailAddress,$Credentials.Password)
$List = $Context.Web.Lists.GetByTitle(“Moja lista“)
$FieldXml = “&lt;Field Type=’Geolocation’ DisplayName=’Location‘/&gt;”
$Option=[Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.AddFieldOptions]::AddFieldToDefaultView
$List.Fields.AddFieldAsXml($fieldxml,$true,$option)
$Context.Load($list)
$Context.ExecuteQuery()
$Context.Dispose()

Some people says that they were able to run this script against SharePointa online, with SharePoint online management shell. Well, I always get in this case errors. I don’t know. Maybe there’s a problem with a files version or something… Microsoft make a lot of changes to Office 365 stack. For my environment I used CSOM, as console application. Works perfect for me.

 
var webUrl = new Uri("https://mojawitryna.sharepoint.com/Site");
                using (ClientContext ctx = new ClientContext(webUrl))
                {
                    var login = "user";
                    var password = "password";
                    var secureStrPwd = new SecureString();
                    foreach (char c in password)
                    {
                        secureStrPwd.AppendChar(c);
                    }

                    var creds = new SharePointOnlineCredentials(login, secureStrPwd);
                    ctx.Credentials = creds;

                    var web = ctx.Web;
                web.AllProperties["BING_MAPS_KEY"] = "Bing key ";
                 web.Update();

                ctx.ExecuteQuery();
                
                List officeLocationList = ctx.Web.Lists.GetByTitle("Moja lista");
                officeLocationList.Fields.AddFieldAsXml("<Field Type='Geolocation' DisplayName='Column name'/>", true,AddFieldOptions.AddToAllContentTypes);
                try
                {
                    officeLocationList.Update();
                    ctx.ExecuteQuery();
                }
                catch (Exception)
                {

                    throw;
                }

And that’s all. Please note that our code adds column to existing list! You can’t just activate geolocation column and then add it later to the list with browser. You have to always use code to add such column to the specific list.

Bing Map

Bing Map

Above you can see a map which displays our location base on the data in SharePoint list. By default you can’t create such view in SharPoint list. But when you activate geolocation column you will get new view template called  “Map View”. There’s one more thing. Geolocation data is difficult to add to the list. In my next post I will show you how to make in easy way.

User Photo in Office 365 – how to solve problems?

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User Photo in Office 365 it’s a problem which was driving me crazy for last few weeks, event I wrote a lot of posts on official Microsoft forum. This one is based on personal experience of last few weeks when I was doing our local Active Directory integration with Office 365 and Azure AD. I am SharePoint guy and I just wanted to present my users photos in SharePoint. Unfortunately for some reasons user photos which were existing in my local active directory on premise installation didn’t appear in SharePoint online. Our local support says that everything is perfect. Unfortunately there was a problem.

This my account in our on premise AD

My AD Photo

My AD Photo

 

But when I displayed my user in Office 365 there was no my photo

my Office 365 Photo

my Office 365 Photo

So what’s the problem with User Photo in Office 365?

Well, in case of user photo synchronization between on premise Active Directory and Office 365 we have consider a few things:

  • user photos from local AD will not appear in all application of Office 365 in the same time!
  • first place where user photo appears is Exchange online
  • To present user photo from local AD photo size must be less than 10KB
  • If there’s no user photo in Exchange online it will not appear in SharePoint online too…
  • If we have photo in Exchane online we have to start sync process to SharePoint online

How to force sync process to SharePoint online

Everything seems to be simple but some time it doesn’t work as it should. Even as tenant administrator we can’t start synchronization in Office 365 interface of user photo to SharePoint online.

To start synchronization process each user should go to my sites or Delve. Also user can do following steps:

About me > press photo  > Change photos > we are changing photos in Edit Details >

Usually it works. If we have a problem we can try following steps to get User Photo in Office 365:

  1. Go to SharePoint Online Admin Center in Office 365 admin portal> User profiles
  2. In People we select ‘Manage User Profiles’
  3. We are looking for the user who has a problem
  4. Let’s edit user profile and search for Picture Exchange Sync State
  5. Picture Exchange Sync State – change to 0, delete photo and save
  6. Picture Exchange Sync State – change to 1, save and check the result

It’s worth to remember which has very important impact on our solution. According to Technet thumbnailPhoto property is synchronized between Azure AD and Exchange Online only one time! All later changes in our on premise AD will not be send to  Exchange Online.

Well, we still can use PowerShell

Connect to Exchange online:

$UserCredential = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session

 

We can change user photo with following command (base on Technet):

 
Set-UserPhoto "Paul Cannon" -PictureData ([System.IO.File]::ReadAllBytes("C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\PaulCannon.jpg"))

Unfortunately this option described on Technet site in not accurate. If you get an error just like below you have to update your script

Error on proxy command ‘Set-UserPhoto -PictureData: …
‘False’ to server DB5PR07MB1368.eurprd07.prod.outlook.com: Server version 15.01.0390.0000, Proxy method PSWS:
Request return error with following error message:
The remote server returned an error: (413) Request Entity Too Large…
+ CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [Set-UserPhoto], CmdletProxyException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Microsoft.Exchange.Configuration.CmdletProxyException,Microsoft.Exchange.Management.RecipientTasks.SetUserPhoto
+ PSComputerName        : outlook.office365.com

In our script we have to update parameter -ConnectionUri. As you can see I added option ?proxyMethod=RPS  . Also before we can use our photo we should encode it into variable.

 
$UserCredential = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/?proxyMethod=RPS -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session -AllowClobber -WarningAction SilentlyContinue -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$user1 = ([Byte[]] $(Get-Content -Path C:\1\Tomek1.jpg -Encoding Byte -ReadCount 0))
set-userphoto -identity user@domain.anme -picturedata $user1
Remove-PSSession $Session

 

And that’s all. I hope that this short post will help you to solve problems with user Photo in Office 365 during local Active Directory and Office 365

C​ollab365 Summit

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Collab365

Collab365

Collab365 is back and guys are going to do this AGAIN!





I just saw that new awesome event has been announced at SharePoint community site. And it looks very interesting. You can register here. Please find below some details:

What’s the conference about?

  • Over 100 hours of live and pre-recorded content delivered direct to your device.
  • Exclusive interviews, panels with Microsoft’s product teams and community experts.
  • 3 amazing Keynotes delivered by the living legends known as Bill Baer, Jeremy Thake, Mark Kashman and Sonya Koptyev.
  • Meet the stars of Microsoft (and more) and listen to what they think 2016 has in store for us all.

Need to know more?

  • The Collab365 Summit will take place on 10th-12th May 2016.
  • Online, using our Collab365 Virtual Event Platform.
  • You will see 3 consecutive days of IT Pro, IT Dev and Business sessions.
  • Be the first to watch exclusive interviews with top speakers.
  • If you miss it, you can catch up on demand right after each day.
  • Watch on your PC, Xbox, Mac, Chromecast or tablet.

Want to speak at Collab365 Summit?

For some of you, who want to some challenges… They are looking for speakers at Collab365 Summit across all of these technologies Office 365 products, SharePoint 2013/2016 and also Microsoft Azure. If you can present a business-oriented, “IT Pro” or developer session across these disciplines – we want to hear from you! Apply to speak here.

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