Value of SharePoint Add-Ins

I was privileged to conduct a session for ISVs in Sri Lanka which was organized by Microsoft. The whole purpose of the session was to promote the value of SharePoint Add-Ins (formerly Apps).

Value of share point add ins from Prabath Fonseka

Office 365 Planner

I’m a diehard fan of Trello. I’ve been using it since 2012. All my ideas to implementations are planned and managed in Trello. Not only me, my team uses the same for task allocation, collaboration and tracking. Going beyond the web tool, I uses the mobile app as well. But todays post is not about Trello, but probably a Trello killer.

Microsoft has come up with their own planning software (yet to be released in Q4) in Office 365, which is know as Office 365 Planner. According to Microsoft “Office 365 Planner, which offers people a simple and highly visual way to organize teamwork. Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress. Planner can be used to manage a marketing event, brainstorm new product ideas, track a school project, prepare for a customer visit, or just organize your team more effectively.”

Office 365 Planner will be available in preview to Office 365 First Release customers starting next quarter, so keep an eye on your Office 365 app switcher.

Happy Planning!

Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 Available for Download

Few minutes back Microsoft announced the release of Visual Studio 2015 and .Net 4.6.

Microsoft has added tremendous amount of new features in to the new version of VS. According to "Soma" Somasegar, Microsoft’s corporate VP of its Developer Division, “When you think about Visual Studio, the core theme is that VS 2015 is a cross-platform tool set". I'm so existed to test the product, specially the cross platform features.

Soma's blog on VS 2015.

You can see the Visual Studio release note from  here.

Deleting a Site Collection Forcefully

Before writing about the solution, let me brief the problem. I was working for one my clients, suddenly I got an error message inside the PowerShell window. I was trying to move a Site Collection using the Move-SPSite cmdlet to a new content database. "A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server" was the error. This is not what I'm going to talk about as I'm still trying to rectify the cause for the same.

Just after the above error, the existing site collection stopped working. Once I select the Site Collection in the "View All Site Collections" in central admin, on the right side of the screen, all I saw was a empty values about the site collection. Even it was without a Content Database. My plan was to delete the site collection and restore the backup. But deleting failed due to the unavailability of the database. Even the Remove-Spsite cmdlet couldn't help me as it can only delete a full provisioned Site Collection. But the below approach worked well.

$siteUrl = “http://mydomain/Site“
$site = get-spsite $siteUrl
$siteId = $site.Id
$siteDatabase = $site.ContentDatabase
$siteDatabase.ForceDeleteSite($siteId, $false, $false)

Thanks to Peter.

Windows Live Writer with Blogger and 2 factor Authentication

I’m a fan of Windows Live Writer and for me that’s the best blogging tool I’ve ever used. Recently I enabled 2-factor authentication in my email account. When I try to log in to my blogger account through Live Writer, it says either the username or the password is wrong.

This is an easy fix. Log in to your Gmail within the browser. Go to your account on top right hand corner and click “My Account’'. Next click “Sign-in & Security”. Once you are in, you will see “App passwords”, click on it.

You need to generate a App Password for your Live Writer and that will be your password for Live Writer from today onwards to log in to Blogger. Once the password is generated, use it in your Live Writer with your login name.

Blog happily and securely!