Showing Search Results in a grid using DataTables.js

This might be one of the coolest JavaScript libraries out there for SharePoint, DataTables.js. DataTables.js allows you render a set of search results in data table format allowing you to Sort, Filter and Page automatically. Because SharePoint search allows you to search and return items from the entire farm you lost the ability to dynamically sort and quickly filter. DataTables give you this back in a very quick and easy to use format. To get data tables working we need the following:

• jQuery library reference
• DataTables library reference
• DataTables base or custom css style sheet
• Custom Control Template
• Custom Item Template

Let’ s get started. First we need to created out custom control and item templates. These templates are created and stored at the site collection level. They are saved in the Master Page Gallery > Display Templates > Content Web Parts To create these two files you need to create two HTML files. This can be done by either copying an existing item and control template and replacing the code with the code below OR you can copy and paste this code directly into a new HTML file(s). Control Template Copy and paste the following code into a new Control_Grid.html file

Connecting to On Premises via PowerBI in the cloud

There has been a lot of buzz and questions around connecting your Office 365 tenant to data located on Premises. This is a common requirement and is now made possible with PowerBI.

Connecting to your data source is made possible with the Data Management Gateway(DMG) The awesome part of the DMG is that is makes the connection outside the firewall. That means, no reverse proxies, custom web services or firewalls to deal with!

Overall, there are few requirements and caveats that I encountered while setting up my demo environment. FYI, I set this up in under and hour, including the time is took to spin up a PowerBI trial.

• The DMG must be installed on a non-SQL server in your on premises environment. I could not get anything to work on my SQL server so I am thinking this has to be done on a member server,
• A new Gateway must be created via your bi admin center.
• You must register the gateway with the on premises DMG client.
• You can then store your credentials for the data sources on premises OR in the cloud. The benefit to storing the creds in the cloud is you can recover quicker from a system failure.
• Let’s get started

Service Pack 1 allows for Yammer/OneDrive integration On-Premises

With the release of Service Pack 1, you get two new features in Central Admin (among other preceding CUs as outlined here).

The first one is OneDrive for business integration. This allows for you to redirect users to the cloud for their ‘personal’ storage. This can be done for everyone OR you can select specific audiences. This allows for a dynamic approach for moving certain users to the cloud. For instance, I can make all of my support services staff use the default On-Premises storage and I can redirect my Sales users to the cloud to allow them to have easy access and Office Web Apps integration built in. This of course will include the new Yammer social integration features when they are released near the end of this year or early next year. OneDrive for business requires an additional license and early indicators seem to be anywhere from $2.50-$5.00 per user(?).

You can also redirect the Sites suite link. This will show users sites they follow for SPO only. They will no longer see any On-Premises sites that they are following. This is an all or nothing option as well.

 

Calendar Single Line CQWP Item Style

The content query web part allows your to apply a custom item style using XSL to view the information in a custom way. This item style shows a Calendar Event with a nice visual icon. Everything renders on a single line.

 

Installation

1. Open SharePoint Designer.
2. Open your site collection where you want to use this style.
3. Click on All Files > Style Library > XSL Style Sheets.
4. Check out the ItemStyle.xsl file
5. At the end of the file, before the </xsl:stylesheet> tag copy and paste the item style below.
6. You can now access this item style in you CWQP presentation style drop down

Note: You must enter the following field mappings in the template in for it to render properly.

.Clone() or –Clone, that is the question

When you are working with Search in SharePoint 2013 you no longer have the luxury of using the GUI to modify search topology. Now we have to directly modify a topology using a clone in PowerShell.
At a high level we have the:

• Search Service Application
• Search Topology
• Search Instance on each Server in the search topology

We also have the following components:

• Admin
• Crawler
• Content Processing
• Analytics Processing
• Query Processing
• Index

When we want to change the topology of a search service application such as:

• Change the index location on the index component
• Add a index replica on another server in the farm
• Add additional components to other servers in the farm
• Remove components