SharePoint 2016 RTM

Another great day for SharePoint lovers, a day to celebrate. SharePoint Server 2016 is Released to manufacturing (RTM). As a SharePoint user since year 2006, I’m very clear where Microsoft is heading with their billion dollar product. SharePoint 2016 is built for Cloud and full of rich Hybrid features. There were few releases prior to the RTM. There are a lot of new features for the IT Pros, Admins and the new set of API brings a tremendous opportunities for the developers as well.

Use the reviewer's guide to learn more about SharePoint Server 2016. Also you can download the RTM. With SharePoint 2016 comes Project Server 2016. From now on, Project Server is a part of SharePoint Server.

The Future of SharePoint
You can join the live online event on 4th of May to learn the vision of the product and the roadmap. “See Jeff Teper, CVP for OneDrive and SharePoint, outline our vision and future plans for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business—both on-premises and in the cloud with Office 365. Following the keynote will be a number of sessions detailing the new innovations along with sneak peek demos of what’s coming. Whether you are an executive, IT pro, developer or SharePoint user, we have a lot to share and hope you’ll be part of this historic moment and register today.”

Embed Office 365 Video

I still remember in year 2012, building our own Video portal in on-premises when Microsoft Media services was on beta, when Microsoft allowed it to be used to build your own video steaming service. Later Microsoft released Office 365 Video, but it had its own limitation at the release. User voice was helpful enough to make it a better product for an enterprise (still not a fully fledged product though).

Embedding video published to Office 365 video portal on other sites and pages was a limitation till today. With the release of new features, you can embed videos in your SharePoint Online and also in your SharePoint On-Premises environment.

Edit an existing (or new) page, go to the insert tab and click on Office 365 Video.

Select the video from the Office 365 Video portal.

Once added, you can still change the look & feel by amending the html. Select the Edit snippet and do the necessary changes.

Apart from the above method, if you want to add a video from Office 365 portal in to a page in your on-premises environment, you add the code to embed. Go to your video portal and below the video you can find the embed button to get the html.
 

Selecting the embed code will allow you to add the code.

Simple as that.

Deploy on-premises database to Azure SQL database

This is simple step by step guide to deploy your on-premises (or even cloud) Microsoft SQL database to Azure SQL database service with data.  Simply, this is a data migration to Azure SQL.

You have to make sure you have an Azure tenant with an active subscription to proceed with the next few steps. I have downloaded and installed AdventureWorks2014 database in my own machine for the demonstration.

One more prerequisite, you need to have a SQL database server in Azure. Your server name should look be similar to yourservername.database.windows.net.

Open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, right click on the database, select “Tasks” and select “Deploy Database to Microsoft Azure SQL Database…”

After the introduction screen, you will be asked to set the deployment settings. There you must set the server connection, the new database name and a temporary location for the bacpac file.

Once you click on the Connect, to connect to the Azure database server, you will be asked to enter the credentials.

You will then be asked to add a firewall rule where you have to sign in and provide access permissions to your ip address (or subnet) to access the azure database server.

Once the above steps are done, you will be allowed to set the pricing tier for the server. This is bit of a tricky thing as there are DTUs for each tier. The resources and power of each service tier and performance level for Microsoft's Azure SQL cloud databases are expressed in terms of Database Throughput Units (DTUs). The available resources will vary based on the DTUs. So till we complete the data migration, it’s better to stay within the standard tier.

Providing the necessary information, you can proceed with the data migration.

Once completed, we can see the DTU consumption and you can use your preferred tool to connect to Azure SQL Database.

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.