i:0#.w|Ali.Mazaheri

Azure Logic Apps, Azure SQL and OpenAPS Better Together!

Ali Mazaheri — Sun, 23 Aug 2015 21:41:00 GMT

For the past couple of months I’ve had the pleasure to work and collaborate with OpenAPS.org founders (Dana Lewis and Scott Leibrand) and genius behind OpenAPS toolset Ben West and other folks involved to develop and implement our own artificial pancreas for my son Sam based on Scott’s reference architecture and their years of experience building DIYPS and becoming the third person in the world using openAPS [(n=1)*3] as his artificial pancreas. While the original goal was to implement a closed loop system running on Raspberry Pi, Linux, Python and node JS (Yes Scott forced me to code in node to help with openaps-js toolkit implementation as a pre condition to support me with Linux stuff and reminding me of [TAB] :) ) the need of reporting and notification were imminent and much needed.

To extend the implementation for above needs I also developed a simple ASP.NET Web API running on Azure so that after each successful temp basal command to pump I can capture data such as bg (Blood Glucose), IOB (Insulin On-board), Duration, Temp Basal amount and push it to an Azure SQL instance and leveraging Power BI for some reporting and visualization.

As for notification I then decided to use Azure Logic App, Azure SQL API App and Twilio App to capture new entries and send them via text to my mobile phone. While this was a temporarily and simple solution for alerting I wanted to use the existing Azure Notification Hub used by Nightscout Windows App and push alerts for both Nightscout and OpenAPS.

While I could leverage my existing Mobile Services implementation and programmatically add OpenAPS alerts I was desperately waiting for availability of a Notification API App on Azure!

After a tweet to Logic App team couple of days ago, within minutes got a response to try the exact thing I was looking for from GitHub! and a couple of minutes later I was receiving push notification without writing a single line of code! The following images show the high level solution architecture and also examples of notifications I receive on my phone and my Microsoft Band! Big kudos to Josh Twist and the team for bringing this magical thing called Azure Logic App and this is how we #upgradeyourworld

What’s next?

I am currently working on wrapping up an OpenAPS implementation for Windows 10 and to run a closed loop on Intel Compute Stick! and continue working with OpenAPS team to further extend and make it available for broader reach!

#WEARENOTWAITING

Leveraging Azure Mobile Services and Twilio for NightScout real time push notification and SMS messages

Ali Mazaheri — Mon, 09 Mar 2015 20:29:42 GMT

In this blog post I am going through steps to configure and enable real time push notification for NightScout Windows Phone 10 app and also sending SMS messages to other subscribers on other smartphone platforms like iOS.

First, I created an Azure Mobile Services project in Visual Studio 2015 preview and added required packages including MongoDB (v2.0.50727) and Twilio (v4.0.30319) using Nuget.

Second, I added a custom Mobile Services ScheduledJob class called “NightScoutJob” and added the required references as following:

Next, Under ExecuteAsync method, by leveraging MongoDB’s MongoClient we now have direct access to MongoDB’s database/collection and using Linq queries we can get the last reading from Dexcom. With a simple check if glucose reading is below or above a limit (Configurable using App Settings) the custom job sends a notification push and a SMS message to verified numbers.

Snippet for Push Notification:

As a prerequisite I also configured Push setting for the Notification Hub on Azure portal and modified the code for the Windows Phone app to subscribe to this channel using Windows.Networking.PushNotifications class library, more info here.

Snippet for SMS messages using Twilio:

Note:
Twilio SID, Token and phone number was provided by Twilio after creating a trial account, also note that you need to verify recipient numbers to be able to send SMS messages via service, more info here.

After adding the App Settings and Connection strings to my custom mobile service I published the code via Visual Studio, added a custom job through Azure Portal and set it to run every five minutes:

As a result now I am able to receive notifications through Azure notification hub or an SMS message via Twilio when glucose numbers are low or high and be able to avoid Hyperglycemia and Hypoglycemia with the power of Azure and the cloud.

Update:

Recently I also got a chance to try the Band SDK and although background task is still not supported (Coming for Beta) now by using Mobile Services Push Notification Channel Message Received event handlers I should be able to send notification to Microsoft Band as well. More to come …

Magic of Cloud, Azure and Open Source, Introducing Nightscout Project!

Ali Mazaheri — Sun, 26 Oct 2014 20:01:00 GMT

Ever since our son was diagnosed with #T1D back in August our lives have changed forever, but despite the challenges a lot of positive support from family, friends (New and old) and of course Technology has blessed each of us specially Sam! This blog post is our token of appreciation to all involved to make this solution accessible and making a huge impact on families with Type One Diabetes specially the Nighscout team (You guys ROCK!).

What is the Nightscout project?

Nightscout (CGM in the Cloud) is an open source, DIY project that allows real time access to a Dexcom G4 CGM from web browsers via smartphones, computers, tablets, and the Pebble smartwatch. The goal of the project is to allow remote monitoring of the T1D’s glucose level using existing monitoring devices.Yesterday I attended Nightscout Install Party in Anahiem and seeing families configuring the solution on Azure using open source components like MongoLab and github was mind blowing to say the least, It was also fun to help the families trouble shoot Azure while they were setting up their solution.

Being an Azure addict, although still waiting for our dexcom I decided to do the deployment myself and in less than 10 minutes I had my Azure Website getting the Nightscout code from github connected to my instance of MongoDB on AZURE!

Nightscout has done a great job to provide an awesome documentation so everyone can follow the instruction and have everything setup including, MongoDB, github repository and Android setup here.

Here is quick walkthrough on how I did the setup myself:

I started by setting up an account on MangoLAB site and selecting Azure as Cloud host:
Next, I created a new database, DB user and a collection:
Configuring a fork was a breeze, you gotta love github:
Courtesy of MSDN subscription I provisioned the website on Azure:
Next I added connection strings to Mongo DB and the collection I created earlier:
Getting the source code from github and getting it deployed was super fast:

View Full Album
And in couple of minutes the website was up and running:

What's Next?

As soon as we are approved for Dexcom G4, I need to setup the android phone, getting our pebble watches and we are good to go!

I am looking forward to working with team to make this further accessible for other families and available on other platforms like Windows Phone :)

Thank you Nightscout, Thank you Microsoft Azure , Thank you MongoLab, Thank you github and countless other folks who made this happen!

Update:
I also found out that Scott Hanselman from Azure team been directly involved with the NighScout team in past couple of months as well which by itself is huge and cant wait to see what’s coming next and glad to be part of v-team!

Update (11/8/2014): Great post by Scott Hanselman on enabling Websockets and forcing SSL.

Make sure to join or support NightScout team here: http://www.nightscout.info/ and also join us for the upcoming JDRF Walk on November 9th http://www2.jdrf.org/goto/mazaheri

Connecting to OneDrive For Business on-premises using iPad ODFB app!

Ali Mazaheri — Mon, 22 Sep 2014 18:50:00 GMT

As announced earlier on Office Blog we do now support connecting to on-premises ODFB using iPad app (starting with v 1.2.1 and above), per above blog post as this point we support FBA or NTLM to authenticate and authorize users to get access to their files and resources hosted on on-premises SharePoint 2013. As any extranet solution one of the core requirements is to configure the DMZ and firewall to allow HTTPS/443 communication and publishing the endpoint (in this case our MySite web application) from outside as depicted (Courtesy of Bill Baer ):

Assuming the above is configured and working, we should be able to now try connecting the ODFB app using users credential and the MySite FQDN, while this works via Windows Phone but not on iPAD (at least for now). Reading the support article titled “Use the OneDrive for Business app on an iPhone or iPad” you should pay attention to the following paragraph:

“If you’re an Office 365 multi-tenant user you can connect from the OneDrive for Business app in any network environment including Wi-Fi and cellular data. If you’re not using multi-tenant Office 365, you can connect only when using your organization’s on-site Wi-Fi network. Contact your SharePoint administrator if you’re unsure which user you are.”

Solution:

Connecting your iPad using a VPN connection! In order to make this working my colleague Tom Fuchs configured VPN server on one of our Windows 2012 R2 instance and following easy steps got me going and a happy camper!

From iPad main screen, go to Settings and select VPN connections, and select Add VPN Configuration.
Make sure to select PPTP and add server IP address, username and password and click Save.
After successfully creating the VPN connection, on main page toggle the VPN and after providing the credentials you should be connected to corpnet.
Next, launch the ODFB app from your iPad and add the user’s credentials.

Make sure to add the URL of your MySite web application under Advanced Options.
Now you should be all setup and have access to the content of your ODFB on-premises.

Note.: While this workaround enables remote users to connect to ODFB on-premises a better option would be to leverage the online offering and a hybrid model with your on-premises deployment.

Connect SharePoint Online to an on-premises SQL Server from an Azure provider hosted app using Hybrid Connections

Ali Mazaheri — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 23:06:09 GMT

Recently I was asked by a customer if there is a way to allow SharePoint Online users to connect to an on-premises SQL database without using BCS and avoid the overhead configuring that. As a fan of SharePoint Apps and Azure the recommendation was to implement and leverage a provider hosted app on Azure, as for data access three options could be considered:

Port the required databases to Azure SQL and sync that with On-premises SQL
Configure Site to Site VNET to connect the app directly to on-premises SQL instance
Leverage the new Azure Hybrid Connection

The rest of this post covers the required configuration and steps to implement the solution using Azure Hybrid Connection.

First I used Visual Studio 2013 to create a sample SharePoint provider hosted app called AlimazMVC using OOB project template, next I added a new MVC Model connecting to my on-premises SQL using Entity Framework along with required controller class and view elements:

Pretty straightforward! As expected VS did all the plumbing behind the scene and our sample SharePoint app was successfully launched from my localhost giving access to SQL database (Fabrics):

Next step was to publish the ASP.NET MVC app onto Azure website (I provisioned earlier) and also to add the SharePoint app into my Office 365 app catalog, as you can see I didn't change the connection string to any Azure SQL:

After deploying the solutions, I added the app to my team site and was able to navigate to provider hosted app:

As expected, selecting the product view gave me an error as web site could not establish a connection from Azure to my on-premises SQL instance:

The next couple of steps shows how to easily configure a Hybrid Connection via Azure portal to give our provider hosted app access to backend on-premises data:

From Azure Portal, I selected the website (AlimazMVC). As you can see there was an option for Hybrid Connections:
Following the wizard, I created a new connection pointing to local SQL server IP and port. We also need to create or use an existing Azure BizTalk service to create a connection:
Next, I installed the connector using the zero touch client:

|
After couple of seconds my hybrid connection was alive and connected!
After a quick browser refresh my provider hosted app was all connected to back end and workings expected:

There you have it, give it a try! Go Azure, Go O365, Go Hybrid!

MEDIA ENCODING with Microsoft Azure Media Services and K2

Ali Mazaheri — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 02:00:00 GMT

By Melissa Layupan and Ali Mazaheri

INTRODUCTION

Media file encoding (and transcoding) is one of the predominant use-cases within the Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry, and one which many M&E companies struggle with.

Reason being is that M&E organizations invest in a multitude of expensive digital and media asset management systems to handle media files and their manipulation. Having numerous media asset/digital systems oftentimes leads to disjointed and fragile business processes around media file encoding, transcoding, and delivery.

Moreover, since the management of media files is fragmented across different non-integrated systems determining actual progress within the media file process remains a huge challenge. For example, knowing what stage the processing failed in real-time versus hours/days or even weeks later.

As a joint effort between Microsoft Technology Center in Irvine and K2 Southwest team the goal of this project is to show how K2 solutions along with Microsoft cloud offerings can be used together to overcome many of today’s M&E challenges through the implementation of a seamless hybrid environment for collaborating w/customers while also providing transparency and visibility into the media delivery process to discover status and uncover issues.

Some of the key goals of this work are to include the following:

Cutting-edge technology from Microsoft such as:

Azure (IaaS)

Underlying infrastructure for K2 and SharePoint 2013 (on-premises)

Azure Media Services

Responsible for encoding, storing, and live-streaming of media files

Office 365

Used to store customer information

SharePoint

Used to surface high-level status information for the encoding process

Yammer

Used for near-time and real-time collaboration between internal and external constituents

Leverage the 4 components of the K2 platform:

Forms:

Interact with end users regardless of where they are accessing the forms – ie. O365, SharePoint (on-premises or in the cloud), mobile, etc.

Workflow:

Model out the business process and drive workflow through the different technologies (ie. Azure Media Services, Office 365, SharePoint 2013, CRM 365, and Yammer)
Handle errors and send notification emails for responsive issue resolution

Data:

Utilize K2’s patented data technology to demonstrate a no-code integration approach for connecting to different line of business systems

Reports:

Apply K2’s data layer to build self-service dashboards through Microsoft Excel and Power View.

Hybrid

Microsoft has both cloud-based and on-premises offerings, you can use K2 to create hybrid business applications

Mobility

Both K2 and Microsoft offer mobile functionality so that users can be productive while on-the-go.

HIGH-LEVEL ARCHITECTURE

At a high-level the supporting infrastructure is entirely cloud-based, using a mix of both Azure and O365.

AZURE - Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS)

The Azure environment is modeled after a small-scale SharePoint 2013 environment where there are 2 WFE servers, 2 App servers and two SQL Server 2012 instances.

K2 was then installed into this environment. Note: In this example, K2 is installed on one of App servers, but in a typical production implementation, K2 usually recommends installing the software on its own server and as part of a high-availability cluster:

OFFICE 365

From the Office 365 stack, the solution leverages CRM, SharePoint, as well as Yammer Enterprise.

SOLUTION SCENARIO

The company is a video production company which uses Azure Media Services. In this hybrid scenario, customers use an Office 365 portal to request video production. Employees of the company receive the requests through K2 surfaced through Yammer, SharePoint 2013 (on-premises), and their mobile devices. After the employee reviews the request, K2 posts updates to Yammer, SharePoint 365, CRM 365 and calls Azure Media Services to encode the file into a live-stream (viewable in both Yammer and SharePoint).

Screenshots:

1. Media Requests: K2 smartform embedded in an Office 365 SharePoint site:

2. Collaborate w/external constituents through Yammer. In this hybrid example, the Yammer group feed is displayed in a K2 smartform. The K2 smartform is exposed on both the Office 365 SharePoint site (used by customers) and the SharePoint 2013 on-premises site (used by the company’s employees). NOTE: The Yammer group feed is part of a larger K2 smartform that enables Yammer and O365 SharePoint searches (this allows users to remain within SharePoint).

3. Use Yammer to receive K2 task notifications

4. Enable users to participate in Yammer discussions through K2 smartforms

5. Perform parallel processing of the media files through K2 and Azure Media Services

Below is a screenshot of K2’s View Flow which provides real-time, visual process instance information so that end users can know exactly what has occurred in their process instance. For example, green represents the steps that have been taken, and blue represents the current step.

And smooth streaming at the end straight from WAMS:

SUMMARY

In this project, we used K2, Azure, Azure Media Services, Office365, Yammer and Power View to create an integrated solution that thoughtfully engages an organization and its customers. Even though this solution was around Media & Entertainment, keep in mind that these technologies could be applied to virtually any use-case, and that the possibilities are endless in terms of what you can build and how you can engage with end-users…

If you are attending SharePoint Conference make sure to visit K2 Booth for a demo and to further discuss the solution with us!

Big thank you to Melissa Layupan (melissa@k2.com) for all the hard work building the solution.

Enabling Office 365 Hybrid Search with BIG-IP

Ali Mazaheri — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 23:15:00 GMT

Recently MTC Irvine team had the pleasure of collaborating with Steve Peschka and F5 engineers to validate leveraging F5 appliance as a reverse proxy for O365 Hybrid Search scenarios. I am super glad to announce that the technical article is now available publicly for anyone planning to implement this scenario using F5 solutions here.

Configuring SQL Server AlwaysOn on Azure IaaS for SharePoint 2013

Ali Mazaheri — Thu, 15 Aug 2013 21:34:46 GMT

With recent announcement of support for SQL Server AlwaysOn on Azure IaaS, in this post I am going over the steps to configure a Listener for automatic failover of a SharePoint 2013 content database from a primary replica to a secondary.

The environment I used to complete the steps is running on Azure IaaS and consists of a domain controller, two WFE/Query servers, two App servers and two SQL servers.

As a prerequisite I configured Windows Clustering Service on both SQL machines (SQL1 & SQL2) and also created an AG called “MTC” with MTC-SQL1 as Primary and MTC-SQL2 as Secondary. I also added a sample content DB (called wss_contnet) to “MTC” AG:

Next I installed KB2854082 on both SQL servers and used the latest Azure PowerShell July 2013 on my client machine to successfully complete the steps.

Note:
Both SQL servers should be part of the same Cloud Service which should be different from other cloud services assigned to other client machines (i.e. all SharePoint servers).

To allow access through a listener I created a load-balanced endpoint with direct server return option for both MTC-SQL1 and MTC-SQL2 by running the following PS snippet:

        1: $AGServers = "MTC-SQL1","MTC-SQL2" 

       2: $ServiceName = "mtcsp" 

       3: $EndpointName = "Listener" 

       4: $EndpointPort = "9090" 

       5: ForEach ($node in $AGNodes) 

       6: { 

       7: Get-AzureVM -ServiceName $ServiceName -Name $node | Add-AzureEndpoint -Name $EndpointName -Protocol "TCP" -PublicPort $EndpointPort -LocalPort 1433 -LBSetName "$EndpointName-LB" -ProbePort 59999 -ProbeProtocol "TCP" -DirectServerReturn $true | Update-AzureVM 

       8: }

After successfully running the cmdlet the endpoints should look like this for both SQL servers:

I also added firewall rules to both SQL servers to allow inbound access through TCP port 59999 and 9090 for the listeners.

Next on the primary SQL (MTC-SQL1) I added a new Listener (SQLListener) by using the SSMS, accepting default settings and set the port to 9090. At this point you need to document “Cluster Network Name” and “IP Resource Name” by opening Failover Cluster Manager:

We also need to get the public IP address of cloud service assigned to both SQL servers by going to Azure Portal, after gathering all the required parameters as last step I ran the following PS to assign the public IP address, the Probe Port, etc. to failover cluster:

       1: $ClusterNetworkName = "cluster network 2" 

       2: $IPResourceName = "MTC_10.5.160.101" 

       3:  $CloudServiceIP = "Your Public IP Address" 

       4:  Get-ClusterNetwork Get-ClusterResource $IPResourceName | Set-ClusterParameter -Multiple @{"Address"="$CloudServiceIP";"ProbePort"="59999";SubnetMask="255.255.255.255";"Network"="$ClusterNetworkName";"OverrideAddressMatch"=1;"EnableDhcp"=0}

To test and validate I reconfigured CLICONFG on all SharePoint servers to point to Public IP address and selected port (i.e. 9090), detached and re-attached the content db using the new SQL Alias and successfully did a failover from MTC-SQL1 to MTC-SQL2 using SSMS:

Troubleshooting e-Discovery with SharePoint and Exchange 2013

Ali Mazaheri — Fri, 17 May 2013 20:09:00 GMT

Working on implementing a POC to demonstrate the new e-Discovery capabilities in SharePoint and Exchange 2013 I hit an interesting issue which I could not find any resources online to troubleshoot. To setup the e-Discovery I successfully:

Installed the EWS components on SP2013 servers
Established S2S auth between Exchange and SharePoint 2013 by following the TechNet article
Configured permissions on the Exchange side
Added and validated a Search Result Source for Exchange

After provisioning an e-Discovery site ,I managed to successfully add a mailbox but then notice the following error on the page:

"This source may be invalid, you do not have permission to access this location, or the location is not indexed by Search."

Looking at the ULS log I noticed the following exception:

"ExecuteDiscoveryQuery: Query to Mailbox with Id [/o=ALIMAZ/ou=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)/cn=Recipients/cn=12f2304707574b4c88a645db9e7c09e2-Administrator], IsArchive [True] failed with error code [0] and error message [Search AdminRpc call failed on Mailbox database instance 1b061d06-19a9-4fcd-b61b-9dcac1a1c97b with return code 2802.]"

After searching online and not finding anything related to the above error I suspected that our friend Exchange should be the cause of this error :), wearing my Exchange admin hat (Kinda scary) I saw the same error in the event log on Exchange server and running Test-ExchangeSearch cmdlet noticed that Content Index State for the mailbox database is in "FailedandSuspended" mode.

Following TechNet article Reseed the search catalog and manually resetting the index on Exchange resolved the issue and I managed to conduct queries against Exchange from e-Discovery site and wrap up the POC:

Building a SharePoint 2013 App to embed Yammer feed on an Office 365 SharePoint site using Yammer Connect

Ali Mazaheri — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 23:11:45 GMT

Here is quick step by step post on how to build a sample App to embed a Yammer feed on an O365 SharePoint site by leveraging Yammer Connect API.

In Visual Studio 2012 create a new project using SharePoint 2013 App template:
Open the App.js file an add the following JavaScript snippet:

Network, FeedType and FeedID are three parameters we need to connect to our Yammer specific feed via Yammer Connect API.
Open the ClientWebPart.aspx and add the following JavaScript snippet:
Next, we need to define the properties for the App Part and add the required querystring parameters to ClientWebPart element:

You can get the value for the Network and FeedID by going to your Yammer group page and clicking on Embed This Feed link:
After compiling and publishing the project from Visual Studio 2012 you should be able to add the App to your O365 Corporate Catalog and add it to a site collection of your choice and set the properties of App Part to render feed from a specific Yammer Group in your network:

Site Mailboxes in the new Office

Ali Mazaheri — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 18:56:49 GMT

Cross posting from Exchange Team Blog:

Site mailboxes allow users to work together naturally – while compliance is applied behind the scenes.

A site mailbox brings Exchange emails and SharePoint documents together. For users, a site mailbox serves as a central filing cabinet, providing a place to file project emails and documents that can be only accessed and edited by site members.

More.

Service Application Federation between SharePoint 2013 (Public Preview) and SharePoint 2010

Ali Mazaheri — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 19:58:00 GMT

One of the common challenges upgrading a multi-farm MOSS 2007 (Parent/Child) deployment to SharePoint 2010 was the introduction of new service application architecture and planning for downtime upgrading MOSS 2007 parent farm to a new SharePoint 2010 provider. With the release of SharePoint 2013 the good news is that SharePoint 2010 consuming farms are now able to leverage SharePoint 2013 service apps through federation (Note. This only works one way and a SharePoint 2013 farm can not consume services from a SharePoint 2010 provider).

In this post I provide a step by step guide on how to upgrade a SharePoint 2010 MMS to SharePoint 2013 and then federating the service to an existing SharePoint 2010 farm.

To upgrade the MMS service application simply backup and restore the database to your SharePoint 2013 SQL instance.
Provision a new instance of MMS in SharePoint 2013 using the 2010 MMS database (Consider providing other attributes such as HUBUri, etc.)
Provision a Proxy for the new MMS service application.
Ensure that the new MMS service application is accessible via SharePoint 2013 Central Admin site and included as part of service application association setting.
Next we need to establish a trust between SharePoint 2010 consumer farm and SharePoint 2013 as new provider farm, steps are similar to SharePoint 2010 and as outlined on my previous blog post .
After successfully running the cmdlets on both farms you should have a trust established and the SharePoint 2010 farm should have access to SharePoint 2013 Topology service.
Now we need to publish the MMS in SharePoint 2013 provider farm via CA site or PowerShell.
In SharePoint 2010 consumer farm connect to the remote SharePoint 2013 MMS service application using CA site or PowerShell.
In SharePoint 2010 consumer farm ensure that you have access to SharePoint 2013 MMS service application.

In next blog post I will cover upgrading SharePoint 2010 User Profile service application to SharePoint 2013.

Content Deployment Source feature in SharePoint 2013 (Preview)

Ali Mazaheri — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 18:20:28 GMT

SharePoint 2013 brings a lot of new capabilities and enhanced functionalities such as new XSP (Cross Site Publishing), Image and Video rendition, Friendly URLs, Content Search Web part and tight integration with Search and Managed Metadata service applications outline in this TechNet article.

Anyone involved with Content Deployment planning and deployment in MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010 should also find this new CD enhancement very handy :)

Content Deployment Source is a new feature in SharePoint 2013 which enables content deployment specific checks on source site collection and enables setting up content deployment from the site collection to a target site collection.

To enable this capability all you need to do is to:

Activate the feature:
After activating the feature a new “Content Deployment Source Status” link should be available under Site Collection Administration section:
After selecting the link you should be able to see a list of potential errors along with workaround to ensure a successful deployment:

Translating Office documents using Office Web Apps Preview and Microsoft Translator Service

Ali Mazaheri — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 17:17:27 GMT

As you’ve already heard lots of new and enhanced capabilities are coming through the latest version of Office Web Apps (Preview), my colleague Steve Peschka did a great job on his post going over steps required to deploy a new OWA farm for your SharePoint 2013 deployment. In this post I will go over steps to configure OWA to allow users translate Office documents by using Microsoft Translator Service:

On your WAC server enable Translation by running Set-OfficeWebAppsFarm cmdlet and set the TranslationServiceAddress parameter to Microsoft Translator endpoint.
Restart WAC servers in your farm.
From SharePoint 2013 site open a Word document via browser.
Go to backstage by selecting File link and select Translate.
Select the language from the drop down (e.g. Dutch).
You should have access to translated document momentarily.

Upgrading from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 Step by Step

Ali Mazaheri — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 00:32:00 GMT

This post provides a high-level step by step guide on upgrading a SharePoint 2010 site to a SharePoint 2013 (Customer Preview) and as with any Beta release is subject to change. For further information on planning and upgrading content and services to SharePoint 2013 you can visit the recently published TechNet site here.

Also make sure to check out Bill Baer's great post on Upgrade, and special thanks to Bill for sharing his custom solution used for this post J.

Add and deploy any required O14 custom solutions in your SharePoint 2013 farm, notice that all O14 solutions being deployed under 14 hive but eventually it's recommended to migrate the custom code to O15.
Backup and restore the SharePoint 2010 content database to your SQL Server hosting SharePoint 2013 farm.
Run Test-SPContentDatabase cmdlet to identify missing components along with potential errors and related warnings. Check the upgrade log and deploy any missing components and re run the cmdlet to verify.
Attach the content database to the desired web application using Mount-SPContentDatabase cmdlet.
After successfully mounting the content database to web application, the site should be accessible in 14 mode.
To upgrade the site simply click on "Start now" link on the toolbar, you can also go to SiteUpgrade page from Site Setting page as well.
Click on "TRY A DEMO UPGRADE" link to verify the site collection upgrade (This step can be performed by Site Collection Administrators, farm admins can run
Request-SPUpgradeEvaluationSiteCollection cmdlet as well).
Provision a temporary site collection to validate the site post-upgrade.
An email should be sent out to Site Collection admin when the temporary site is provisioned.
After validating the temporary site we upgrade the site by going to SiteUpgrade.aspx page and clicking on "Upgrade the Site Collection" button (Farm admins can run Upgrade-SPSite cmdlet as well).
During the upgrade The SiteUpgrade.aspx page shows the progress and provides a link to an upgrade log for troubleshooting purposes.
Your site collection should now be accessible in 15 mode along with all new capabilities enabled in the farm and for the hosting web application such as Social and Office Web Apps.

SharePoint 2013 (Customer Preview) is finally here!

Ali Mazaheri — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 19:30:57 GMT

As you all know we publicly announced the availability of public beta (Customer Preview) release of next version of Office yesterday including SharePoint 2013, like previous release of SharePoint I've had the pleasure to work with Product Team and elite team of experts led by Vesa to work on labs and environment for our SharePoint Ignite IT Pro program and super happy to be able share the experience and lessons learned working on early builds moving forward.

As for now I recommend checking out the great post from Vesa on resources available for both IT Pro and Developer tracks, also reading the following great blog posts from Jeff Teper to begin!

SharePoint Server 2010 April 2012 cumulative update package is available now!

Ali Mazaheri — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 18:26:00 GMT

FYI, from Microsoft support site:

A recent, isolated issue was discovered in the SharePoint 2010 Products April 2012 Cumulative Update that could result in an HTTP 500 error when users delete objects to include documents, lists, and Webs and a new object is created using the same path where the original object remains in the Recycle Bin. This issue has been resolved in the revised packages. The revised packages include support for resolving issues related to the originally published updates.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2598151

Document Preview and Thumbnail issue post SharePoint 2010 December CU 2011installation

Ali Mazaheri — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:58:00 GMT

After updating one of my SharePoint 2010 labs with SharePoint 2010 December 2011 CU, I noticed that I could not see the document preview and thumbnails as part of my search results. After some digging with Fiddler I noticed that the call to wacproxy.ashx was returning a weired error as follows:

('ERROR:600:required parameters either missing or invalid')

This issue should be resolved in next CU, but for now if you are using Fast and Office Web Apps and you need to have the document preview and thumbnail in your search results, DO NOT INSTALL December 2011 CU.

SharePoint Design Time Session at SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim

Ali Mazaheri — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 04:15:07 GMT

As you might know, the Microsoft SharePoint documentation team is offering a series of dedicated design sessions through out the week of October 3rd during the SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim, CA. I am very privileged to drive this sessions along with other well-known folks in community such as Spence Harbar and rest of the usual suspects covering various workloads. Doing similar engagements at Microsoft Technology Center I am certain that selected customers will gain and benefit from these sessions.

Looking forward to meeting you at the conference and happy SharePointing …

Crawling Host-Named Site Collections in SharePoint 2010

Ali Mazaheri — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 05:03:21 GMT

As I was working with a customer on designing their SharePoint 2010 farm using HNSC approach customer was curious on why they are not being able to return results for those site collections.

After reviewing the search service application in their POC environment and checking crawl log I noticed the following warning:

“This URL is part of a host header SharePoint deployment and the search application is not configured to crawl individual host header sites. This will be crawled as a part of the host header Web application if configured as a start address.”

After adding the URL for HNSC web application host and a crawl results started showing up and hence a happy customer …

Configuring SharePoint Content Organizer to route documents to a separate site collection

Ali Mazaheri — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 04:54:13 GMT

Recently I was asked by one of my customers on how the Content Organizer feature can be leveraged to design a large archival solution using SharePoint 2010. Initially this feature was enabled and configured for their Record Center (e.g. http://records.contoso.com) and they wanted to scale out the RM by routing records and documents to more than one site collection based on specific criteria.

Here are the steps I shared with them and thought it might be useful for other folks:

Provision required site collection in a dedicated content database (e.g. http://records.ontoso.com/sites/arch1) .
If the new site collection is not based on “Record Center” ensure to enable Content Organizer feature.
From Central Administrations go to “General Application Settings” and add a new “Send To Connection” for the new site collection provisioned on step 1.
For http://records.contoso.com site collection ensure that “Content Organizer Settings” allows routing documents to other sites” by checking “Allow rules to specify another site as a target location”.
Now go to “Content Organizer Rules” and create a new rule, notice that now you have the option to select a target destination by selecting an option from the combo box, select the new destination and click OK to continue.

Office 365 Jump Start for IT Pros series are now online!

Ali Mazaheri — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 20:12:37 GMT

Big thank you to Mark Kashman and the team for all the hard work on releasing these great content.

“The Microsoft Office 365 Overview provides an excellent perspective of the overall value Office 365 provides to modern organizations in terms of productivity, access, familiarity, security, control and reliability. This section will help IT Pros better understand the options and advantages organizations have by taking this approach.”

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/office-365-jump-start-01-microsoft-office-365-overview-for-it-pros

Office 365 Public Beta and Office 365 Training Course Released Today!

Ali Mazaheri — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:56:02 GMT

The Office 365 Beta is now open to the public. Office 365 provides a cloud-based subscription service that includes Office 2010 Professional Plus, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online. Office 365 also provides developers and ISVs a platform for building cloud-based collaboration and communication solutions for the cloud. To help developers make the transition to building solutions for the cloud with Office 365, I’m pleased to announce the release of the Office 365 Training Course for Public Beta. The kit includes 7 sessions, over 10 hours of video, and 16 labs as both an offline training kit as well as an online training course on MSDN.

For more details on the Office 365 Public Beta and the new training kit, please see this blog post.

Importing SharePoint user profile multi-value properties using BCS

Ali Mazaheri — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 02:44:00 GMT

I was asked by one of my customers to help troubleshooting why they could not import multi-value values for user profiles using BCS in SharePoint 2010, first of all this TechNet article and Spence Harbar’s blog have a lot of good information on planning augmenting user profiles using BCS in SharePoint 2010 which is highly recommended if you have not looked at yet. In this case customer had a BCS model which had “Read Item” and “Read List” methods implemented and simply returning data as “UserID” (Same value as Windows account name map to identifier) and “Skill” (one or more), the issue was when trying to create the sync the option to for “1:many mapping” was disabled:

and they were only allowed to do a 1 –> 1 mapping and hence only importing the first skill into “Skills” user profile property!

As I was reviewing the BDCM file I noticed that the comparison filter for “UserID” was missing, after adding the “FilterDescriptor” :

<FilterDescriptors>

                <FilterDescriptor Type="Comparison" FilterField="UserID" Name="UserID">

                  <Properties>

                    <Property Name="UsedForDisambiguation" Type="System.Boolean">false</Property>

                    <Property Name="IsDefault" Type="System.Boolean">false</Property>

                    <Property Name="CaseSensitive" Type="System.Boolean">false</Property>

                    <Property Name="Comparator" Type="System.String">Equals</Property>

                    <Property Name="UseValueAsDontCare" Type="System.Boolean">true</Property>

                    <Property Name="DontCareValue" Type="System.String"></Property>

                  </Properties>

                </FilterDescriptor>

</FilterDescriptors>

and configuring the sync connection along with setting the “Filter items by” for “1:many” setting:

All values were imported to “Skills” property as a multi-value data after starting the sync:

SharePoint 2010 People Picker and Claims

Ali Mazaheri — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 01:09:00 GMT

Recently I received questions from our customers on SharePoint 2010 People Picker behavior when provisioning web applications in Claims mode using trusted identity provider such as AD FS 2.0, complaining the control not behaving as it does in Classic mode or in Windows Claims. I definitly recommend folks to review following newly published TechNet article when deploying SharePoint 2010 in Claims mode and consider if they need to plan for a custom claims provider before rolling out. Here is the snippet of the article pertaining to this topic:

"By default, when you use SAML token-based authentication, all queries entered in the text box are automatically displayed as if they had been resolved, regardless of whether they are valid users or groups. If your SharePoint Server 2010 solution will use SAML token-based authentication, you should plan to create a custom claims provider that will implement custom search, name resolution, and list features. For more information about custom claims providers, see Custom claims providers for People Picker (SharePoint Server 2010)."