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SharePoint Saturday Chicago Suburbs Materials

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It was a great day at Devry University for SharePoint Saturday Chicago Suburbs 2016. There was a great speaker lineup and nearly 500 registered attendees.  There ended up being a strong turnout which included a good collection of sponsors both local and national.  Going to SP Saturday events I am always amazed the SP community and the dedication to the space.  Knowing that these events occur nearly every Saturday across the globe seems a little crazy.  I don’t know of any other tech community that has a following like this one.  I can say I have never been to an Excel Saturday yet.  That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or shouldn’t exist though! In Chicago I performed 2 sessions both with great attendance.

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My first session was with my coworker Matt Engibous around building Collaboration Roadmaps.  This is a session where we stay at a high level of discussion but go through real world scenarios and proven processes to putting together a plan for SharePoint or Office 365.  By the end of the session we hope that the attendees have some ammunition and actual files that they can use to initiate this process in their own company.  Included in this session are documents such as a content inventory, workshop template, and a UX/UI survey.  All of these files are located in the link at the bottom with the slides.

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The second session I performed was on SharePoint Designer workflows.  In this session I walk through users the differences between different versions of SharePoint designer all the way up through a detailed demo of building a subsite using REST services.  With this session I hope to be able to provide some tips and tricks to all skill levels of designer from the basic up to the advanced.  I have a detailed slide with super helpful links at the end of the presentation.  All of those slides can be viewed in the link below.

Thank you to all who joined!

Link to slides and materials!

Speaking at Collab365

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I was fortunate to be chosen to speak at this years Collab365 Summit occuring May 10th – 12th.  Collab365 is a FREE online conference that has been evolving for a few years and every year keeps getting bigger.  The sessions are built around SharePoint and Office 365 and have tracks that are set for IT Pros, IT Devs and Business Delegates.

If you haven’t registered make sure you sign up HERE

My session will be about….

Office 365 Video, learn it – love it – use it

What’s the easiest and safest way to share training videos, company updates, and messages from the CEO to all of the employees in your organization? Office 365 Video is a quickly evolving NextGen portal that can help bring your company to the modern workplace.

In this session I will go through what Office 365 Video is and some of the key scenarios where it can be utilized.  In more detail I will be going through:

  • Technical architecture
  • Management of videos and the video portal
  • End user experience & mobility
  • Where and when to use it
  • Extensibility

Office 365 Video is also changing quickly and this session will also bring everyone up to speed on the most recent updates that Microsoft has rolled out and anything that is identified in the upcoming roadmap.

Steps to hide content from Delve in Office 365

When Delve was released by Microsoft it was pretty groundbreaking in the content management world. There was finally a tool that would help people find content no matter where it was located. This is one of the primary struggles that I work with clients with all the time. People love to think that adding custom managed metadata and building a super complex information architecture will allow people to find content easier. In some use cases this works but as a daily business practice this can drive people away. And once you break down those ECM walls you end up with unorganized chaos. As an ECM guy my palms get sweaty just thinking about some of the setups I have worked on where millions of files are strewn across file shares with no good way to ever find anything. So when Delve came along and basically said; “I don’t care where your content is – here are the files that I think you should be using.” this lessened the need of an in-depth ECM process and at the same time opened up people’s eyes around content security. I don’t want to go too much into Delve as a whole but here is some quick info and handy links before I break down how to hide content.

What is Office Delve?

  • Delve helps you discover the information that’s likely to be most interesting to you right now – across Office 365. Find information about people – and through people – and help others find you.
  • You don’t have to remember the title of a document or where it’s stored. Delve shows you documents no matter where they’re stored in OneDrive for Business or in Sites in Office 365.
  • Delve never changes any permissions, so you’ll only see documents that you already have access to. Other people will not see your private documents.
  • Office Delve for Office 365 admins

Hiding content from Delve

You may have a scenario in which you don’t want content to appear in Delve no matter what. Some examples could be high volume transactional processing files or payroll tracking information. Thankfully Microsoft has given us a simple way to hide content from Delve by using a site column called HideFromDelve. This can be done at the library level as well but I wanted to provide instructions so end users can have the power to add this column after it has been created once.

Important note: This will only hide content from the Delve app itself. The document will still be viewable via search and the Office Graph.

  1. Navigate to the site that has a library of files in which you want to be able to hide them from Delve
  2. Use the gear in the top right to go to Site Settings

  3. Under Web Designer Galleries, click on Site columns

  4. Click Create


  5. Enter the column information and click Ok, the name and type have to be EXACT for this to work.
    1. Name: HideFromDelve
    2. Type: Yes/No (checkbox)
    3. Default value: No


  6. Navigate to the library that you want to hide content and go to Library Settings via the ribbon


  7. Under the list of columns, click the link Add from existing site columns

  8. Scrolls down in the Available site columns list and select the newly created HideFromDelve column and click the add button to move it across. Then click Ok

  9. Navigate back to your library and you can begin marking documents to be hidden from Delve. The quickest way to do this is through the Quick Edit view.

  10. After the next scheduled crawl, the document will no longer appear in Delve!

Don’t create a SharePoint site with the URL “con”

This might not be news to everyone but this issue was a new one for me. I went to go create a site for a client around the state of Connecticut. I had created multiple other sites using the first 3 characters of the state name; ARI, WIS, etc. So I then went to go create a site with the URL of “con” ……

And then……

Server Error in ‘/ Application with a 404 cannot be found error! At first glance this makes no sense. Your site exists, you can see it in site contents:

I found out that this was due to a reserved words list. This list is not directly within SharePoint, but within the fundamental rules of naming files in Microsoft, regardless of file system. Here are the words that you cannot use as the name of a site, library or list.

CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9

If you have created one of these sites you can still delete them through Site Settings -> Content and Structure.

Select your sub site and click Delete.