I was recently trying to replicate some functionality I’m used to with InfoPath, but this time using a PowerApp. I was looking for a way to get parameters from outside into a PowerApp, and surprisingly this is really not well documented, but actually really quite easy to do. I’ll walk you through the process below.

Note, this isn’t about passing parameters between screens in a PowerApp, that’s well covered in several blog posts, and forums.

First off, start by creating an app. Below I’ve created my “ColinTestApp” App. Next, go into the “Information” pane on the far right (highlighted by the arrow).

In there you’ll find the “Web link”. This is what you’ll use to pass variables into your app via a web URL. Note the App GUID is in in the URL – this is the unique identifier for your app.

Your Web link will look like something like this below (where the GUID of your APP replaces APP GUID).

https://web.powerapps.com/apps/[APP GUID]

To pass parameters to the App, you simply add URL parameters like this below.

https://web.powerapps.com/apps/[APP GUID]?ID=123&Ball=round&River=water

In this case, we’re passing 3 named parameters, “ID”, “Ball”, and “River” (remember, when passing URL’s over HTTP, you need to start with a question mark (?), followed by ampersands (&) for all additional parameters in a “name=value” pairing).

To use these in your PowerApp, you simply refer to them by their parameter name using the “Param” method, like below.

Param(“[PARAM NAME]”)

For example, in my case, I used it as a start variable on my initial screen. This allowed me to feed to the PowerApp a dynamic value (the ID) of the item I wanted to load at start up. In this scenario, the data was being fed from a SharePoint list, and at load time I was able to load the specific SharePoint list item I wanted into my start screen.

First(Filter(MySharePointListDataSource,ID=Param(“ID”)))

The above formula basically filters the ID parameter to the “ID” of the data source (a SharePoint list), and then from that set, I select the “first”, just for good measure (even though there should never be more than one matching ID for any given SharePoint list item).

In the above screen, just make sure you have the “DetailForm1” selected (which will allow you to set the DATA pane, and set your datasource for the form), and then be sure that 1 & 2 are the same value (i.e. if your data source (SharePoint list) is “Products”, be sure that Products is in both #1 and #2 above.

Note, I’d previously setup a DataSource that draws from my SharePoint List

So in my scenario “TestList” would be in both #1 and #2 above.

Hopefully this helps some of you out in PowerApp land!

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What We Did
I was recently involved in building a Project Registry solution to help a local registered charity with managing their multiple cross-department projects. The Craigdarroch Castle Historical Museum Society’s Executive Director, John Hughes, asked itgroove to help him prepare the organization to manage their project portfolio, which was growing significantly over the next five years. The end-goal was to find a way to bring a big picture overview to the Castle’s collaborative project management and communicate decisions to the team about where key project information (Files, Tasks, Notes, Conversations, etc.) would be stored.

How We Solved It
We built the Castle a low-code solution using a single SharePoint list with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for styling the look and feel. List view web parts using JSLink allow our design team to change how the rows, columns, and fields are rendered. It also allows icons to be included in the dashboard to visually signify information like the colour-coded Key Performance Indicators, and the logo of the technology tool used to store various types of project information. The simplicity of the solution ensures the content in the Registry can be entered and modified by an end-user with a basic understanding of lists as it only requires them to paste URLs into fields and select text choices from a drop-down menu.

Learn More…

• Read the Craigdarroch Castle’s Client Success Story: “Integrating Business Tools to Bring the Big Picture to Collaborative Project Planning”.
• Watch a Walk-through Video of the Project Registry in the itgroove Gallery.
• Check out the itgroove April 2017 video Newsletter to see Screenshots from the Project.

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I put together a presentation on the new Microsoft Stream App in Office 365, and presented it on Aug 8, 2017 at the Sydney Office 365 User Group in Sydney, Australia.  Feel free to check it out and let me know if you have any questions. 

The post Microsoft Stream – The Video Evolution appeared first on Archive.

I recently put together a presentation on the new Microsoft Forms solution that came out in Office 365 (in public preview).  I’ve presented the below presentation at the Sydney (Australia) SharePoint User Group on July 18th, 2017, and again on Aug 4th, 2017 in Adelaide, South Australia.  Please check it out below.

The post Microsoft Forms 101 appeared first on Archive.

I recently put together a presentation on my experience in New York / New Jersey over the course of a 9 (or maybe 10) month project trying to migrate SharePoint data from one company to another, and then into the cloud. I gave this presentation at the Office 365 Saturday event in Sydney, Australia on June 3rd, 2017. Please take a look at the slide deck I posted below.

The post 9 Months of Fun with SharePoint in Azure and Office 365 appeared first on Archive.

June 13th 2017 Outlook updates break search indexing

I have run into this with a few clients with large PST mailboxes and Outlook 2010 to be specific, but also on Win10 machines with Office 2010.

They get:

“search results may be incomplete because items are still being indexed. Click here for more details”

and indexing never seems to finish or seems stuck.

Microsoft has released security updates to supposedly fix the issue, link below for Windows 7 – 10.

Security Update

Hopefully this helps, people really get mad when they cant search their emails!

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Office documents not opening in Chrome in SharePoint Online

I tried all the normal repairing office, uninstalling/reinstalling, resetting to defaults.

First I went to set default programs and reset it to defaults.

In this case the protocol wasn’t set by default, this didn’t fix chrome, but it fixed IE.

I logged into the computer with a different profile and when I tried to open a word doc in Chrome I got the prompt I was missing.

Now to reset this option in chrome so it would work on her profile delete or rename the “local state” file in
Users -> (users profile name) -> AppData -> Local -> Google -> Chrome -> User Data

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I’ve always struggled with the “MECE” (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive) promises of taxonomies.

It can be easy to confuse a Department in the HR reporting structure called “Logistics” with the corporate Function for “Logistics”.  In my practical experience the Function of Logistics is useful where staff from other business or administrative groups may be the primary actors in the delivery of some specific activities in the overall process.

Despite the best efforts of IM Pros to follow traditional scientific notions of classification, in the business world there is rarely the time to ensure that (1) a domain/set of terms truly represents the whole picture and (2) each entity/term in the set is both unique and useful.  Therefore what we call “taxonomies” often actually contain terms that have some pragmatic messy degree of overlap.  Often this is good because it allows us to maintain an ROI in our metadata, and it’s good enough to reach a silver level of compliance.  We just need to expect to have to roll with the punches when new information is provided by the business that requires the addition of new functions, activities, terms, etc.

To that point I was pleased to discover this well written blog post by Dave Snowden (formerly of IBM) http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/typology-or-taxonomy/ In case that page disappears off the interwebs here is the summary to get you thinking:

“The message is very simple rigid boundaries have huge value in static situations so taxonomies work. But where things are subject to rapid change and the possibility of encountering novelty is high they are plain dangerous. However we do need constructs to make sense of the world and that is where conceptual frameworks, or typologies come into their own.”

Hope this helps you in your business communications!

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Very recently I had to change a bunch of accounts from one domain to another in SharePoint. Rather than doing this piecemeal for each individual account, I decided to write a simple script to do this for me. Since I couldn’t find this online, I figured I’d demonstrate how I did it.

Start by creating a 2 column Comma Separated Value (CSV) file. This is just a plain text file where the left side is the original domain of the user, and the right side is the *new* domain for that same user. In my case we were using SP2010 and moving the users from classic to claims, so I added a claims token in at the same time.

The CSV File

(Original domain user on left, updated domain user on right. I saved this file under c:\top\out.csv)

ABC-NA\enwqc,i:0#.w|COMPANY\enwqc

ABC-NA\eotib,i:0#.w|COMPANY\eotib

ABC-NA\ergyp,i:0#.w|COMPANY\ergyp

…

Next, I needed some PowerShell that would read the CSV file, and process each user (move them from the old domain to the new domain)

The PowerShell Code

(Note: You need to specify the SharePoint site (Web) that you want to apply this change to – yes, you have to do this site by site. Update the URL in the code below before proceeding)

$path = “c:\top\out.csv”

Import-Csv $path -Header Name,Value | Foreach-Object{

$old = $_.Name

$new = $_.Value

write-host “about to update user $old to $new.”

$user = get-SPUser -Identity “$old” -Web https://[DOMAIN]/sites/[SITE]

Move-SPUser -Identity $user -IgnoreSID -NewAlias “$new” -Confirm:$false

}

To run this script, simply copy the lines above and paste it into a SharePoint Administrator PowerShell. The output will look similar to what you see below.

The Script Running…

about to update user ABC-NA\ggdxb to i:0#.w|COMPANY\ggdxb.

about to update user ABC-NA\gcmuy to i:0#.w|COMPANY\gcmuy.

about to update user ABC-NA\evlgx to i:0#.w|COMPANY\evlgx.

…

There’s obviously an improvement that could be made to this script in that it could also be written to iterate over a collection of sites (webs), but I didn’t have a need to do that. To do this, you would simply wrap the code above in another foreach-object and provide a parameter for the “-Web” option.

Hopefully this helps someone else to save a bit of time in the future.

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A while back I was trying to install SharePoint 2010 and was receiving the following “Error 1935. An error occurred during the installation of assembly component”. I was also getting this issue when trying to install SharePoint Designer 2010.

Initially I tried the following link, https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/926804, but that did not resolve my problem. The suggestion in this post is to uninstall the .NET framework. I tried this, and unfortunately it didn’t work.

As this was essentially a new machine, I tried a few things that you wouldn’t likely do if this was a well seasoned machine. Firstly, I uninstalled EVERYTHING in the “Programs and Features” under the Control Panel – no dice, still had the same error message. Next I went into the Server Manager and uninstalled ALL the Roles and ALL the Features. This last step appears to have been the key.

Ultimately it appears to boil down to the fact that the .NET installer 3.5 was installed, and wasn’t being cleanly uninstalled (along with some of the other things that must have been installed). After uninstalling, I rebooted and then ran the .NET cleanup tool in the support link above. Finally, I rebooted once again.

After the last reboot, I installed JUST the .NET Framework 3.5 in the features section of the Server Manager, and then I was able to successfully install SharePoint Designer 2010. After adding in some of the other SP2010 pre-requisites, and then re-running the pre-requisites installer for SharePoint, I was then able to successfully install SharePoint 2010.

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