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Office 365–MSFT Giveth and MSFT Taketh Away

OK, now that my “biblical” title has caught your attention I’ll explain myself … 2014 has seen big changes in Office 365.  Microsoft has been rolling out change after change after change.  Delve, Clutter, Sway, Office Mix as well as many backend changes and upgrades have made Office 365 a whole bunch better at the …

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PowerPivot Data Refresh Debugging Process

If you’re unable to refresh the data and you’re seeing the following issue (below) when trying to refresh content, follow the steps described below. Note this was written with SharePoint 2010 in mind, but it should apply equally to SP2013. The “PowerPivot Data” value will be whatever the name of your connection is (see below). …

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PowerPivot Gallery Thumbnail Debugging Procedure

I’ve had the odd occasion where the SharePoint PowerPivot thumbnails (in the gallery view) haven’t shown up properly for me, and a while ago I compiled a collection of debugging procedures. I figured I’d share this collection with the world. Some of these were meant more for SP2010, and SQL 2008 / R2, but many …

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Update to the DirSync Logon failure post

DirSync Logon failure I initially posted about re-installing DirSync to fix the login service issue for the Forefront Identity Manager Synchronization Service. While that fixed it initially I found further updates and reboots still caused the service to fail to start. I even installed the new Microsoft Azure Active Directory Sync Services tool and that …

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A quick followup on Veeam DR recoveries

We have been using Veeam with a number of our ESXi and Hyper-V customers with great success.  Frankly, backup is always a pain in the backside and Veeam makes backing up virtual environments just a little bit easier. One thing that I like about Veeam is the ability to easily manage remote backups – backups …

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Office 365– community.office365.com

Microsoft is putting a great deal of effort into improving and expanding the Office 365 Support Community site to make it the place to go to for help and support for Office 365.  The site is http://community.office365.com and it is brimming with all sorts of support information, including forums.  Fawad Khan is the Microsoft manager …

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Filtering a SharePoint List View by Hyperlink

I recently had a need to filter a SharePoint list view by a hyperlink column and found that unlike most column types in SharePoint, the edit view UI did not provide me with the ability to filter by this column type. It’s an odd choice, but… ok? As it turns out, you can actually create …

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Microsoft Virtual Academy — a great learning tool!

I have used Microsoft Virtual Academy for a lot of personal training.  There is a lot of good information and a number of great free courses available through MVA.  I even got to record two MVA sessions while I was at the MVP Global Summit in November, 2014, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience even …

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PS Config fails with “The exclusive inplace upgrader timer job failed”

I was working with a client recently and after running some OS updates on their SharePoint servers, I tried to run the Product Config wizard (PSconfig).   The command I was running was as follows. PSConfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures   Unfortunately, at one point (later in the sequence …

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Office 365 – App Switcher

The upgrades and add-on’s just keep appearing in Office 365. The Office 365 App Switcher has started to roll out to tenancies as of this week.  This is nothing earth-shattering but it is a welcome feature being added to Office 365’s feature set.  In a nutshell it replaces the “ribbon” of apps that was laid …

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