How to add a CSS class into OpenText or RedDot CMS rich text editor

You can follow these steps to add a css class into your OpenText text editor so that your editors can add that class using text editor’s drop down menu.

• Go to your content class and under the Content Elements node find your text type placeholder
• From the Action Menu, click the Assign fixed style sheet link

• Inside the Edit Style Sheet dialog box enter your class name/s in one line as seen below:

• If you check your text editor, you should see the callout-note css class as one of the options ready to be used:

That is it 🙂

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Office 365 outlook groups features comparison

Office 365 is a way that helps us use Exchange and SharePoint online together to give your teams or group of people a way to work together using the best parts of what’s available in Office 365. Office 365 groups don’t exist in the on-premises space but in hybrid deployments, Office 365 Groups can be synchronized back to on-premises Active Directory via the AAD Connect tool, where they function as distribution groups. Microsoft has made it very clear that Office 365 Groups are a cloud entity that will not appear on-premises.

Below is a comparison of outlook group features for different platforms i.e. showing the availability of the different outlook group functionalities in each client platforms:

Bulk exporting of External contacts to Office 365 Exchange online

The non-profit organization that I support uses a Google group account to host its members email address. The organization has hundreds of email addresses in this group account. As soon as the organization started using Office 365 it soon become apparent that it needed to import those email addresses into Exchange Online in bulk so that we can add these emails into a distribution group (DG) account.

How do you go about importing these external emails into Office 365 Exchange online?

1. Go to Google Gmail account, export the email addresses and save as csv inside the c:\temp folder or wherever you like.
2. Make sure the following fields have values inside the above-mentioned csv file:
   • ExternalEmailAddress
   • Name
   • FirstName
   • LastName
   • OtherTelephone
   • Manage
3. Start windows PowerShell as admin and connect to your office 365 Exchange online tenant. You can connect to Office Exchange online using the below scripts. You will be asked to login and make sure you use your Office 365 admin account and password:

$UserCredential = Get-Credential

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

Import-PSSession $Session

4. Next run the following command:

Import-Csv c:\temp\ExternalContacts.csv|%{New-MailContact -Name $_.Name -DisplayName $_.Name -ExternalEmailAddress $_.ExternalEmailAddress -FirstName $_.FirstName -LastName $_.LastName}

The assumption is you saved your csv file under the folder c:\temp

As you ca see below now you should see each external users being exported to Office 365 Exchange online.

5. Go to your Office 365 Exchange online admin center to check exported contacts

6. Click recipients from left navigation and then contacts from top tab. Now you see all your external contacts populated inside Office 365.

Options for setting up dev environment to create SharePoint 2013 provider-hosted app

The two options that, I think, we have for creating provider-hosted apps are the following. Having said that you may have a 3rd option which is a hybrid scenario:

1. Using a locally installed SharePoint 2013 environment (Azure or a local SP box) and configuring for a high-trust apps for SharePoint. You can have a local Sharepoint farm either by spinning an Azure VM image which has all the nuts and bolts required to setup SharePoint, AD, etc.. (this can be cheaper if you have MSDN subscriotion) or having an expensive machine where SharePoint 2013 is installed.
2. Using Office 365 SharePoint tenant where all the configuration is setup for you via ACS – OAuth.

Here are relevant videos:

A TechEd 2014 video on setting up your on-premises environment for app development.

Using an existing Windows Azure AD Tenant with Windows Azure.

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In order to publish a SharePoint hosted app to a site collection the site must be based on the developer site template or have the “Developer” Feature enabled on it.  The “Developer” Feature is marked as hidden in its definition so you must use PowerShell to enable the Feature. This error is caused when you try to deploy in a non-developer template site collection.

To avoid this error, either for SharePoint online or On-premise development, try first to create a site collection based on the Developer template and deploy your SharePoint-hosted app to this site collection. If you are deploying to a non-developer template site collection, which is something you shouldn’t be doing then here are the live links to download the SharePoint Online Management Shell i.e. for SharePoint online scenario and associated PowerShell scripts as described in the screenshot below:

Hello world SharePoint-hosted app

As indicated in my last blog post, I am running the Apps for Office sample packs so that I can learn some their techniques. The following is what I had to do to run the “Hello world  SharePoint-hosted” app and the result I got.

1. I run the above app by using Visual Studio 2013 update 3
2. Below is how the file looks like under the solution explorer. Make the necessary changes as suggested below and run it.

 

3. You will immediately be asked for Office 365 user name/password and later you see the “Do you trust Basic SharePoint-hosted?” app page as follows

4. Click Trust It button and you will see this result page

There was some warning while I deploy the app because the CDN url for jquery as was set as http not https. Change it to https and that will take care off the error.

Another note, is that as you uninstall and install the same app the GUID for appweb  appears to remain the same except the last letter in the GUID part changing sequentially up. 

If you go to my Office 365 tenant home page, https://sharepointcan.sharepoint.com, you see a link for the new SharePoint-hosted app listed under the Recent left navigation menu as well as created within the Apps in Testing custom list. The latter custom list captures the list of apps under test as well as their appweb url.

If you want to refer as to how this app is created please check the how to create a basic SharePoint-hosted app.

Now, I would like to deploy the app so that my users can start using it. How do I go about it. First make sure you deploy the app from VS 2013. Next we need to find a place where we can store the app. Options are either to SharePoint public store or your own organizational app catalog. I will create an app catalog by going into my Office 365 SharePoint Admin center. Check this how to deploying and installing apps for SharePoint: methods and options.

Go to your App catalog site collection and upload the .app file into the Apps for SharePoint document library.

 How to add an app

Go to any site where you would like to add this app (and a copy of the same app is not yet avilable) by clicking the gear icon a.k.a. site actions -> Add an app -> Click From Your Organization, from the left nav -> click the app -> Click Trust It button.

This will add the app into your site. When you click this newly created app, it send you to a different domain, as explained above, but same SP chrome setting.

That is it.

My approach for mastering SharePoint 2013 apps development

SharePoint development in the 2013 version has drastically changed leaving us to scratch our head as there is a lot to learn to catch up with the best process/technique of developing SharePoint apps. To make matter worst, Microsoft is push enterprise SharePoint development from on-premise to Office 365. Meaning we need not to forget the old way of writing trusted, server-side code, solutions as well as the new/future way of writing client-side code or apps in short. Having said that this blog post only refers to the latter SharePoint development scenario, which is creating SharePoint apps. The following is how I mapped my learning process. If you have a different one please let me know.

1. Sign up for Office 365 environment and install Visual Studio 2013 update 3 in your local dev machine – done
2. Signup for Azure as the provider hosted app that you develop will require you to have a  website where you would deploy your custom code – done
3. Set up on-premise SharePoint 2013 development environment by forking at least a 16 GB memory laptop, which can be very expensive but effective – done
4. Install Apps for Office sample packs as well as Office Dev Github projects and start playing with the code. I preferred to run these codes in my Office 365 tenant so that it would be much faster to start the work – in progress
5. First plan is to master SharePoint-hosted apps development and later move into provider-hosted apps.
6. Learn JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery and Angular JS as they can be valuable tools in the SharePoint-hosted apps development life cycle.

In the next blog post I will share some of the experiences I got in my learning endeavor.

Important Online resources/links

These are links that I put together as a reference for myself. It includes links that have multitude of resources or individual blog post links that I would like to use in my future projects.

1. http://dev.office.com/training
2. http://juliepagano.com/blog/2014/05/18/javascript-debugging-for-beginners/
3. https://www.udemy.com/angularjs-jumpstart
4. http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/product-training/sharepoint
5. http://sharepointfieldnotes.blogspot.ca/2014/07/uploading-large-documents-into.html
6. http://eloquentjavascript.net/
7. Office 365 tip – Provide a contact both internal and external mail address
8. AngularJS JumpStart with Dan Wahlin
9. Introduction to Object-Oriented JavaScript
10. A Drip of JavaScript
11. .NET and JavaScript libraries for Office 365 APIs
12. JavaScript API for Office (v1.1)
13. John White, BI guy
14. The Data Queen

Re-blogging SharePoint 2013 and OpenSearch – Search twitter, Facebook, wikipedia etc all in one page

Anirudh Gupta has a nice blog post/screencast on how you can display Twitter, Facebook and other social media feeds on a SharePoint 2013 page using SharePoint 2013’s OpenSearch. I am re-blogging it here so that I know where to find it.

 

 

Exported SharePoint list templates not retaining lookup column data

This post is based on Gitolekha’s blog post with added explanations and tool-set especially for finding list GUIDs and how you can alternatively convert cab files to stp files.

I have a parent list called Tracking and a child list called Org i.e. in the source site. My parent list, Tracking has a lookup column called orgcode. A child list called Org has the column orgcode.

I have several data already populated in the parent list. I was asked to migrate the Tracking list with its data from its current location to a diffrent site/could be a different farm or web application. The client do not want any data loss.

You might think saving the Tracking list as template with data will do the trick. Unfortunately, saving the Tracking list as template with data and exporting it into your destination site will only have partial data. That means lookup column data gets lost in the process. This problem occurs because list template does look up on a table using GUID. In creating a list  template and exporting to a different site this GUID changes, hence it is no longer able to retain the values.

This is how I tackled this issue:

1. Save the child list, Org, as template i.e. with data.
2. Add this list template into your destination’s list template gallery library. Its url is http://your site/sites/[site collection name]/_catalogs/lt/Forms/AllItems.aspx.
3. Create a new list called Org, in your destination site, based on the Org list tempalte that you created in step #2.
4. Find the guid of the newly created, Org, list using this wonderful utility tool.(http://weblogs.asp.net/soever/sharepoint-development-handy-little-utility-to-get-guid-s-and-attribute-names).
5. Go to your source site and find the guid of the Org list from the Source site using the same utility tool.
6. Go to your source site and save the Tracking list with data as template. This will create a file with .stp extension. Have a copy of this file into your working folder.
7. Go to the folder where you saved the Tracking list template i.e. the .stp file and rename the file extension into .cab.
8. Double click this .cab file.
9. Right click the manifest.xml file and extract it by selecting your working folder.
10. Now open the extracted manifest.xml file and look for the child list’s source guid as captured in step #5
11. Replace source child list’s guid with destination child list’s guid as captured in step #4.
12. Now convert your edited manifest.xml cabinet file into stp file using makecab.exe as follows.
13. Run your command prompt tool -> go to the folder where the edited manifest.xml is located and run the next command line
14. … makecab.exe manifest.xml NewTrackingList.stp

Now import the edited stp file i.e. NewTrackingList.stp into your destinatiion site and create a new list instance. If you check your newly created parent list, you will see all column data intact with lookup column included.