SharePoint – Page 2 – SYNK Ventures

May 8, 2019May 8, 2019 KS Hub Sites, Office 365, SharePoint, SharePoint Online, Sub sites, Uncategorized

SharePoint Hub Sites and difference from sub sites

Hello world! A blog post was long due now!

I think I must have missed the Hub Sites in SharePoint buzz but a blog from my side anyhow.

What is a Hub Site?

Firstly, it is not a template like Communication or Team site, you can register an existing team site or communication site as a Hub Site so if you want to create a Hub site from scratch please create a site preferably a modern one and then register it as Hub Site which can only be done SharePoint Admin in Central Admin link.

Hub site is used to facilitate Intranet in organizations which can have other sites as “Association” or “Navigation” links. You can roll up information from associated and linked sites to the main Hub site by using Apps available.

You can think this of a container site but physically it does not contain any sites but can only be associated.

What makes it unique?

Something like this was not available before but I believe everyone wanted something like this as working with Site Collections and the Sub sites structure is rigid and difficult to change later on.

Hub sites introduce us a flat structure which can be moved easily as sites are just associated and not created under them.

So, uniqueness is in the flat structure which can be implemented easily.

Difference between the Hub site-based structure and the traditional structure is as below

Hub sites vs Sub sites

Hub site based	Traditional – Site collections – sub sites
Flat structure	Hierarchy based structure
Sites are associated and not created under it	Sites are created under a main site
Access permissions do not have any impact in	Access permissions are inherited by default or needs to be managed separately
Easy to move around sites and change structure or associations	No easy ways to change the structure

How to utilize or use Hub Sites?

Hub site should be used to bunch sites together, create an intranet or roll up information together. Bunching or associating sites together should be done based on departments, organizations, key features, team or based on keywords or location etc. or if you want to roll up specific information from different sources.

Hub site can only be really useful if you will be rolling up information and two most easy ways to use OOB of Apps called “Highlighted Content” and “Sites” which can fetch different information from associated sites and show them beautifully.

On modern pages just add a section layout and then select add App using “+” symbol and select Highlighted Content or Sites depending on your needs, I would recommend Highlighted Content as it is really powerful and can roll up almost all data. Refer to screenshots below

As you can view you have following options

Select a source: can select all hub sites or some or specific one
Type of source: can be document, news, lists etc.
Filter and sort to organize your content
Different options for a Layout to support your needs

Other things you should consider while creating and managing Hub sites:

Naming convention of Hub sites so that it can be easily recognized
Name information which needs to roll up also properly so that easy to roll up later
Consider the audience before you start creating hub sites
Consider search scopes while deciding on the association of Hub sites
Also note that you can put a link to non-associated site

How to create Hub sites?

As pointed out earlier there is no template like Hub Site, you have to create a site collection using template either team site or communication. Communication template is recommended one from Microsoft.

Create a site a then select option mark it is a Hub site, you need to SharePoint admin to do all this

CommSite HRCommSite

After the site is created you can register this as Hub site

Once this is done you can view extra navigation at the top

So that’s about Hub site, if you have any questions or remarks please contact us via our Contact Us page or via our Facebook page or via Twitter

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March 13, 2018March 14, 2018 KS Search, SharePoint, SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Search Crawler

SharePoint Crawler error – Warning in Index component, Cannot plan query for index system. Index fragment ‘0’ has no available cells #sharepoint #crawler #searchservice

Search can return this error due to various reasons “Search has encountered a problem that prevents results from being returned. If the issue persists, please contact your administrator” but this will be certainly come if there is an error in one of the search components.

If you check in ULS log you will see this error ” Cannot plan query for index system. Index fragment ‘0’ has no available cells.”

This error indicates that there is an error in index partition and you should see a yellow warning exclamation in Central Admin as shown below

If your error meets all these criteria then you have the same issue. If you look at other articles regarding then 90% of articles will mention to do an index reset and do a full crawl which will definitely fix the issue but this should be your last option and not the first one in a production environment.

To fix the issue we should look at clearing configuration cache on the server where index partition is being stored.

The steps to clear configuration cache is very well documented and can be found below

Steps to clear configuration cache

But doing these steps might not fix the issue so follow below instructions

Try first clearing configuration cache and check if error gets fixed
If not then again do the same steps but this time also restart SharePoint Search Service before you restart the SharePoint Timer Service
If this also does not work then try to restart the server after step 1, restarting server in Production environment is not advisable during office hours so do it in planned manner
If this also does not work then we are left with no other option but do an index reset and do a full crawl, use steps documented on Microsoft site Perform index reset

Also note that during these operations if any incremental or full crawl was going on you need to let it finish to make a call if above has fixed the issue. We observed that issue goes away only when crawl has finished.

Above strategy should work in most cases if not then reach out to us and we can help.

Please contact us via our Contact Us page or via our Facebook page or via Twitter

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July 25, 2017June 10, 2019 KS Active Directory, PowerShell, SharePoint, SharePoint 2013

Impact of Active Directory Migration or domain change on SharePoint – Part 1

Now a part 2 of this is available you can read here https://synkventures.com/2019/06/09/impact-of-active-directory-migration-or-domain-change-on-sharepoint-domain-migrate-sharepoint-servers-part-2/

There can be situations when your organizations decides to change name due to mergers, acquisitions or splits. In this case quite often users are migrated from one active directory to other. This will definetely have impact on SharePoint users, servers and configurations.

Generally active directory migrations are done in two steps

Migrate users and computers
Migrate servers and service accounts

This post will cover the first point, second one will be covered in second post.

Generally when users are migrated in active directory you would expect that Microsoft products will be handled automatically but strangely that is not the case with SharePoint due to the reason User Profile service works in SharePoint. Reason is that User Profile Service does not work with Secuirty Identifier (SID history).

Before you migrate the users another thing which needs to be taken care is that all the Web Applications needs to allow new domain to do that please refer to below TechNet article

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg602075.aspx

When users are migrated in Active Directory, SharePoint has provided a command to migrate the users in SharePoint as well.

To migrate user in the whole farm use below command

$farm = Get-SPFarm

$farm.MigrateUserAccount( $_.oldlogin, $_.newlogin, $false )

Note that old login and login should be read like below

olddoamain\user1

newdomain\user1

Reference article

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sowmyancs/2012/01/06/migrate-users-groups-powershell-script/

In case you need more help on this or other SharePoint issues please contact us via our Contact Us page or via our Facebook page or via Twitter

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March 25, 2017March 25, 2017 KS SharePoint, SharePoint 2013

SharePoint issue resolution – PortalSiteMapProvider was unable to fetch children for node or Unexpected System.Web.HttpException: Request timed out #SharePoint

Request time out is a very generic issue and can happen due to numerous reasons but error PortalSiteMapProvider was unable to fetch children for node can occur only if site navigation nodes cannot be fetched that is Top Navigation or Left Navigation.

Issue Symptoms: SharePoint sites does not load at all and give error after more than a minute. If you look for error message via correlation ID you will see Request time out message and below error messages

PortalSiteMapProvider was unable to fetch children for node
Caught a thread abort exception in TemplateRedirectionPage.ProcessRequest, the exception may be expected
Unexpected System.Web.HttpException: Request timed out

Issue Analysis: The first error is the key here as it mentions that it has experienced issue while fetching Navigation from site. This issue can be triggered if you duplicate nodes in site collection or between multiple site collections in the same content database. It’s important to understand that this can happen in the same content database site collections. You can consider this is as a kind of bug in SharePoint because this scenario is valid to have duplicate nodes. To identify and confirm that you have this issue you need to fire below SQL query on the content database you have the issue. I know I know we should fire any queries in SharePoint database but in this case you have to and got in confirmed from Microsoft, also they mention that it is prohibited to update data.

SELECT TOP(20) Count(nav.Eid) AS ‘DuplicateCount’, nav.DocId, ad.Dirname, ad.Leafname FROM NavNodes AS nav with(nolock) INNER JOIN AllDocs AS ad with(nolock) ON nav.Docid = ad.Id WHERE (nav.EidParent = 1025 OR nav.Eidparent = 1002) AND DocID IS NOT NULL GROUP BY nav.DocId, ad.DirName, ad.LeafName ORDER BY ‘DuplicateCount’ DESC

If it has data then it means you have duplicate nodes issue. A lot of users in some other articles have mentioned that they somehow were able to find numerous nodes and they fixed it by deleting the nodes which were basically junk nodes not added by them. But in our case we did not have any junk nodes but it occurred due to real nodes.

Once above is confirmed we need to find out which stored procedure failed as that it will re-confirm above and also what fix we need to do. To do that we need to change verbose level of logging and capture more detailed log. To change verbose use below commands to start and stop it. Between them you need to perform the issue that is load the page

set-sploglevel -traceseverity verboseex

Clear-SPLogLevel

Based on correlation ID you should see that this stored procedure “sp_recompile proc_getwebnavstruct” is the culprit. If this is also confirmed then we can go for the fix

Issue fix: To fix the issue you will have to do things, first is it to update statistics table and second free cache of stored procedure. Note that statistics update is only needed if it has not been updated to check that fire below query on content database

USE WSS_Content_name

SELECT name AS index_name,

STATS_DATE(OBJECT_ID, index_id) AS StatsUpdated FROM sys.indexes order by’index_name’ ASC

If the row Nav_Nodes does not have dates same as today then please update it using below command

EXEC sp_MSforeachtable ‘UPDATE STATISTICS ? WITH FULLSCAN’

Once done we should also run below command to update query plan cache

DBCC FREEPROCCACHE

Once done site should load normally now as it use to do before.

Note that the fix is all about running SQL queries on SharePoint content database, it has to be done carefully and also only if needed.

Refer to below support link for details

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3103194/outdated-database-statistics-decrease-sharepoint-server-performance,-cause-time-outs,-and-generate-run-time-errors

In case you need more help on this or other SharePoint issues please contact us via our Contact Us page or via our Facebook page or via Twitter

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February 27, 2017March 27, 2017 KS SharePoint, SharePoint SPFX, Visual Studio

SPFX SharePoint : Building your environment for client side webpart #spfx #spfxsharepoint

As of 22nd feb 2017 GA version of SPFX SharePoint Framework has been released. SharePoint Framework SPFX that is client side web part is a new framework introduced to provide one more option for client-side development other than Script Editor based and Add-in model.

The new framework is based on both of the existing solutions but in most of the scenarios SPFX is a preferred way to develop, two major plus points

Responsive controls
Can be deployed on modern pages and classic web part pages as well

More information can be read here Why SPFx

Building your environment for doing development using SPFX is very welll documented on this article but while doing the same for me I got few issues so I am just going to highlight few points which I thought was confusing or should be highlighted

There are four major things you need to do to set up your development environment

Set up your Office 365 tenant: You need at least Developer tenant which you can get from Office Developer Program, set an App catalog site and create a developer site. More details here . Once the site is ready please access SharePoint Workbench here https://replace-with-your-sharepoint-site/_layouts/workbench.aspx
SharePoint Workbench

Install Node JS : You need to install Node JS, make sure you do install LTS version from here https://nodejs.org/en/ . Unfortunately I installed it from here first time and it did not workout good https://nodejs.org/en/download/ . Refer more details here
Install Yeoman and gulp : Once Node JS installation is done you should run below commands to install Yeoman and gulp, make sure you run these commands in Windows PowerShell, I have assumed that you are using a Windows 10 machine. Also I tried using CMD prompt but it did not work out good. Also make sure you create a separated folder under C Drive and then perform all the steps
- npm install -g npm
- npm install -g yo gulp
- npm install -g @microsoft/generator-sharepoint
Install Visual studio code : Install Visual Studio code from here

If all steps are successful then your development environment is set up and you are ready to develop your first client side web part.

In case you need more help on this or other SharePoint issues please contact us via our Contact Us page or via our Facebook page or via Twitter

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February 20, 2017March 27, 2017 KS SharePoint, SharePoint 2013

Redirect SharePoint site from HTTP to HTTPS- Issues and Resolutions #SharePoint #SharePoint2013

When we start with SharePoint infrastructure lot of time SSL is not taken into consideration but at later point of time and surely in Production you should have SSL for encryption.

Since your users are used to HTTP URL you cannot ask every one of them to go to HTTPS from now on. The best is to redirect users automatically from HTTP to HTTPS. This article is not about how do this automatic redirection you can get to know the steps from here

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

We also did steps same as above but we faced some issues after which you might also get which depends on how your infrastructure has been set up

Issues with OneNote : If your end users have stored OneNote in document library all of them will have HTTP URL as their source so after redirecting to HTTPS you cannot save it to HTTP anymore. If one of users save it with new URL then it will be saved as new OneNote file. This is a tricky situation as you cannot get the old file and all will have local copies. Best strategy is to have the latest OneNote saved before you do redirection and upload it as new one after redirection.
Issues with embedded links in files : If you have embedded links of MS Office documents in other documents then you will still be able to open documents but all of them will open in read only mode but usually you will have option to edit directly from them. Solution to this to update the links after redirection, there is no alternative to this. Good part is still you can open the file.
Search issues : If you have HTTP URL as default URL in AAM or have used HTTP URL in search configuration then your search might break, you will not see any results but no error as well. To fix this you just use HTTPS URL at all places.

So these are things you need to consider if you plan for HTTP to HTTPS redirection.

Some other reference

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2818415

In case you need more help on this or other SharePoint issues please contact us via our Contact Us page or via our Facebook page or via Twitter

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February 4, 2017 KS Micrsoft Flow, SharePoint, SharePoint Online

2nd Microsoft Flow Template – Send Push Notification & Slack Message for a WordPress post #MicrsoftFlow #SharePoint #Office365

I was able to get my second Microsoft Template published in Microsoft Flow

Template can be used from here

Send Push Notification & Slack Message for a WordPress post

Functionality in this template is quite simple, when a WordPress post is made a push notification is made and also a Slack Message is posted in a particular group

To learn how to publish a template you can read my below blog about it

How to submit a Flow in template Gallery ?

To learn more about Microsoft Flow you can read below blogs

My tryst with Microsoft Flow!

Microsoft Flow – Create from blank

Microsoft Flow – Advanced mode options #SharePoint #MicrosoftFlow

February 2, 2017February 2, 2017 KS SharePoint, SharePoint Online, SharePoint WebHook, WebHook

What is SharePoint WebHooks ? #WebHooks #SharePoint #SharePointWebHooks

Before we describe SharePoint WebHook, first let’s understand what is a WebHook.

I believe you are familiar with concepts of API which has been popular for few years now, in API model / setup you request data from an application and in return you get data from the application.

So let’s consider a scenario that you want to know every time something changes in the application, to deal with that in API is cumbersome you will have to keep on asking for data and find out if there was any change from last time.

What if you can get a notification that something has been changed, means you get a response without asking that something has been changed. Now that is what WebHook is, you get a notification that something has changed.

Before I describe SharePoint WebHook you must know that WebHook is not something which has been created by Office 365 or Microsoft but it’s a concept already used in WordPress etc.

SharePoint WebHook can be created for Lists as of now, so basically any changes in a library or list will send a notification if you have subscribed to WebHook. Based on this notification you should a response and also process it further for implementing changes or activities.

Now if you know about Remote Event Receivers you might find it similar but it is different as you can prevent the action or change happening in SharePoint but only be notified about it. Also like traditional WCF based notifications you don’t have information of what has been changed, you just a get a response that something has been changed in library or list.

So as an Application you need to do certain things to make WebHook work

First of all subscribe to a WebHook
Once subscribed you will receive POST messages from SharePoint
Once you receive POST message you should response in 5 seconds with HTTTP/1.1 200 OK
After that your application should store the notification to process it further.

This is basic overview of SharePoint WebHook, in next post we will do more hands on and learn to set up WebHook and how to process it.

January 28, 2017March 27, 2017 KS SharePoint

SharePoint 2013 Search Error : object reference not set to an instance of an object – Fix #SharePoint #SharePointSearch

This a common error message which you can see if you have search issues “Object reference not to set an instance of an object”. This error message does not tell much and you will have to look SharePoint log and find the correlation ID.

If you search on the internet for this error you will hit numerous reasons and fix for it. Problem is that error message is very generic and can be seen for various kind of issues. I have encountered this in two scenarios which I am gonna list down.

First thing you need to check SharePoint health, if there is an error in that best resolution is to recreate the index

You must have some error message in SharePoint search status like below

Reset search index

If that is the not the case the other reason can be you have orphaned items in your farm / content database. Generally you will get error message in SharePoint Health Analyzer for this but in our case we did not get it strangely. So basically you cannot trust it so best is to look for correlation ID in SharePoint Log.

What I observed is that when you search in SharePoint it will enumerate all site collections and it might fail doing so if you have orphaned items. You should look carefully and find out which content database it was enumerating.

If you have find out you should use below command to Refresh Sites for the content database. This method synchronizes information between content and config databases.

$db = Get-SPDatabase | where {$_.Name -eq “DatabaseName”}

$db.RefreshSitesInConfigurationDatabase()

If this also does not work you can use below as well but this needs to be done out of office hours.

Dismount-SPContentDatabase “<ContentdBName>”

Mount-SPContentDatabase “” -DatabaseServer “” -WebApplication http://SiteName

Hopefully this well help someone and I just added one more solution in list of solution available.

In case you need more help on this or other SharePoint issues please contact us via our Contact Us page or via our Facebook page or via Twitter

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What is a Hub Site?

What makes it unique?

How to utilize or use Hub Sites?

How to create Hub sites?

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