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SharePoint 2013 PowerPivot Install – Error Deploying Farm Solutions

I ran into an issue recently that I thought would be good to pass along. I was installing the BI features for SharePoint 2013 on a new farm and ran into an issue when configuring PowerPivot. This environment is a 3 tier environment as depicted in the image below.

2015-07-15 13_24_45-Document1 - Word

These are the BI steps that I had already completed. (along with some helpful links)

Here is the download link for SQL Server 2014. The installer does not deploy or configure Power Pivot features in SharePoint. The following components install by default:

  • Power Pivot for SharePoint 2013. This component includes:
    1. PowerShell scripts (.ps1 files)
    2. SharePoint solution packages (.wsp)
    3. Power Pivot for SharePoint 2013 configuration tool to deploy Power Pivot in a SharePoint 2013 farm
  • Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Analysis Services (MSOLAP).
  • ADOMD.NET data provider.
  • SQL Server Analysis Management Objects.

A recommended best practice is to install spPowerPivot.msi on all servers in the SharePoint farm for configuration consistency, including application servers and web-front end servers. The installer package includes the Analysis Services data providers as well as the Power Pivot for SharePoint 2013 configuration tool. When you install spPowerPivot.msi you can customize the installation by excluding individual components.

The next step is to configure the PowerPivot for SharePoint Add-in

This is the area in which I ran into an issue.  Here is the technet article about the configuration.

  1. I launched the configuration toolimage<
  2. I set the default account information, DB Server and PowerPivot infoimage
  3. I set the parameters for the task “Create PowerPivot Service Application” to use my naming format.  (Remove the GUID from the DB)image
  4. I set the web application deployment location for the task “Deploy Web Application Solution”image
  5. I set the unattended account info for the task “Create Unattended Account for Data Refresh”image
  6. I then clicked Validate and Run

The configuration failed on the task “Deploy Farm Solution” with the error:

Running PS Script failed. Reason: Solution failed to deployed, reason: SPAPP01 :
Error: Cannot add the specified assembly to the global assembly cache: Microsoft.AnalysisServices.SPAddin.dll.

The solution DID deploy to SPWEB01 and SPAPP02.

These were the items I tried to debug first all of which failed:

  1. IIS Reset on all servers
  2. Reset Timer Service on all servers
  3. Ran Configuration tool as Administrator
  4. Set default account to different account names with different permissions (farm/install/service/etc…)

I then stumbled across this blog – Troubleshooting PowerPivot for SharePoint Solution Deployments – which lead me into the correct direction based on this statement:

“…the Timer service depends on the Administration service to carry out the deployment work because the Timer service usually runs under a low-privileged service account that might not have the required permissions to deploy assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache and so forth, while the Administration service uses the high-privileged Local System account with full access to all local resources.”

So I head out to SPAPP01 and check out what account is running the Administration service and sure enough it was set to the fully qualified farm domain account!

I reset the log on to be Local System and reran the configuration.

image

Success!

image

Hopefully this helps someone else moving forward!

Microsoft Ignite & SharePoint/O365 – Outcomes

MSIgnite

Well this blog post is coming in quite late as Microsoft Ignite was a little less than a month ago. But I believe in better late than never and there are some good topics that I wanted to follow up with. I was lucky enough to attend Ignite with a great group of folks from Concurrency and was also able to do some great networking to meet new folks in the SharePoint and O365 collaboration world. My initial reaction of Ignite was that it was a little overwhelming at times. Coming from the world of smaller SharePoint conferences having 20k+ people in a giant building with all different types of Microsoft technology led to some long walks and not many deep dive sessions. With the amount of announcements in the Office 365 and SharePoint Server 2016 space that were being discussed it was and still is a challenge to keep up with. Looking at the conference from a strictly SharePoint perspective it felt limited at times. Many of the primary SharePoint sessions were packed to the brim and had to be held in overflow areas. I think this directly spoke to the overwhelming usage that SharePoint has in the enterprise still. I am now very excited to attend the smaller SharePoint specific conferences such as SharePoint Fest and SPTechCon to dig deep into the new experiences. I have been trying to go through all of the videos on Channel 9 but there are so many good ones. If you want to download the videos and slides directly here is a link for instructions on how to do it.

In this post I will try to highlight what I believe to be the best sessions for collaboration around SharePoint and Office 365 and also review my pre-conference predictions.

My prediction outcomes

NextGen Portals

Ok we all knew they were already going to announce something but this still was an exciting topic. The new Knowledge Management portal currently called Codename “InfoPedia” was demonstrated. It was apparent that this portal was still in the early stages of development but their strategy to deploy a KM could be great. The new KM portal will consist of Boards, Articles and Microsites in which users are empowered to generate content quickly in a standardized and already styled way. This leads to a more organically and horizontal growing solution rather than a pre-determined hierarchical solution. Here a great post from Benjamin Niaulin about this topic.

Recommended sessions for this topic:

OneDrive for Business Sync Updates

Again we knew this coming but everything announced here was great news. I could write multiple blog posts on all of the new stuff they announced around this topic but here are the juicy highlights. The new OD4B sync client will use the current OneDrive protocol. There will be a unified sync client across OneDrive and OneDrive for Business platforms and the preview and RTM client will be available by end of year. Some other important things to note with the new client:

    • Selective sync (everyone have a round of applause for this one)
    • No more 20k file limit
    • Support for up to 10GB files
    • Blocking of unmanaged PCs
    • Includes PC and Mac

Recommended sessions for this topic:

Simplified Hybrid with SharePoint

I attended the SharePoint Hybrid pre-conference at Ignite and got to see first hand what is coming with hybrid in SharePoint and Office 365. Overall the strategy is clear to me that hybrid will be the new on-premises. There are features that will only be available in Office 365 and Microsoft’s strategy is not to bring you to the cloud but bring the cloud to you. This will allow enterprises to opt-in to hybrid on your own terms. This was very obvious in their hybrid strategy moving forward. Microsoft is trying to make they hybrid experience transparent. I won’t go deep into any of these strategies but if you want to discuss them just shoot me an email or a tweet. Their primary pillars are:

    • Hybrid Search
    • Hybrid OneDrive
    • Hybrid Extranet
    • Hybrid Team Sites
    • Cloud-drive Hybrid Picker
    • In the future with no further info yet…
      • Hybrid taxonomy story
      • Hybrid DLP
      • Hybrid eDiscovery

Recommended sessions for this topic:

What I hoped to see

Future of Forms

Isn’t this everyone’s favorite SharePoint topic? I came in hoping to hear something about forms, or at least anything. With the incredible amount of announcements there was still nothing new on forms. The current state still exists in which InfoPath 2013 will continue to work in Office 365 and SharePoint Server 2016. The only time I heard forms being discussed in a session was during the MVP panel that I linked to above. The panel confirmed the current state and provided similar input to what I am currently telling my clients. If it is a small list form customization go ahead with InfoPath. If you have a larger and more long term forms requirement it is time to look at a 3rd party or custom development.

Future of SharePoint Workflow

There were not architectural changes announced during Ignite. With a total of 0 sessions and 0 discussions about workflow during Ignite I would tend to lean towards the thought that there will be no architectural changes. Workflow will continue to run on Workflow Foundation 4 as an external resource as it does today on-premises and in Office 365. Now there was some news that will affect workflow creators.

There will not be a SharePoint Designer 2016 but SharePoint Designer 2013 will continue to be supported.

I think this is an important step in the evolution of productivity in SharePoint and Office 365. Obviously SharePoint Designer was built with on-premises as its base. That much control is unnecessary in a cloud solution like Office 365. So on that side it makes sense to start bringing in limits. And of course anyone who has used SharePoint Designer heavily in the past knows it was a very buggy product that loved to crash. It is important to remember that we are over a year away from the release of SharePoint Server 2016 so there will be more news around this topic.

As far as workflow creation, I do believe that this is a step in the right direction and hope to see a browser based workflow creation experience. I will also use this time to plug my session at SPBiz that is directly related to SharePoint Designer workflows. This should be a great free online conference.

Future of Yammer

I was very wrong with my prediction here. I was leaning towards the thought that brand for “Yammer” itself would be going away. It was stated pretty loud and clear that this was not the case. There were multiple sessions around this solution including the Yammer Roadmap. Yammer is here to stay and will have a place in the Office 365 ecosystem. Each experience that comes with Office 365 does have its appropriate use cases. The challenge that we currently are and will continue to face is the confusion around when and where to use an experience. There was even a session around this topic titled How to Decide When to Use SharePoint and Yammer and Office 365 Groups and Outlook and Skype. Obviously if we had to have a major session on this topic there is confusion on what to do. I hope this vision continues to clear moving forward.

One item of note around Yammer and Office 365 is that the UI for Yammer is changing to align better with the rest of Office 365. If you are a part of the Office 365 Network (and if you’re reading my blog and are not, go join it now) you are already seeing these changes happening.

The Site Actions Menu in SharePoint Server 2016 not changing locations from the top right

I can confirm that it is staying in the right from the demos performed. No need for any panic from the community.

Anything else interesting?

I think the winner of most interesting topic during Ignite and so far after Ignite has been Office 365 Groups. Microsoft is putting a ton of time and effort into this collaboration experience. I believe that Office 365 Groups still need some help around the governance and control but they will be a go to solution in the future. Here is a link to a great blog post from Nik Patel that will go into a little more detail. Overall groups will be an experience that encompasses nearly all aspects of Office 365.

yammer-post-image

Recommended sessions for this topic:

Here are some other interesting topics and some sessions about each.

SharePoint Server 2016

Office 365 Security

Office 365 Migration API

 

I look forward to the next Microsoft Ignite conference in 2016 coming back to Chicago on May 9-13. It will be interesting to look back on this post and see how different the landscape moves in just 1 year.

Interact with list fields based on SharePoint Group

A very common question that is asked around the SharePoint community is about the ability to interact with item forms. These forms are how users view and edit items in a list. Changes to these forms can accomplished in a few different ways.

  1. Use SharePoint Designer to create an editable New, Edit, or Display form
  2. Edit the default New, Edit, or Display form pages using web parts.  (The edit page link for these forms can be found in the site settings via the gear menu.)
  3. Using a customized Infopath form (for now…)

Using any of these options it is possible to edit the forms in both a basic and advanced way. If you are creating new forms with SP Designer you can edit the HTML of the form directly and have control over nearly everything that is displayed.  You can do some easy customizations that can be very helpful for the end user experience. One example involves the hiding of a column (such as status) on the default edit form. These are the steps to do this in SP designer:

1.  Create a new Edit Form using SP Designer on the corresponding list

Edit1 - 2014-09-08 11_16_41-

2.  Locate the row that contains the column you want to hide and use HTML comment tags (<!– & –>) to comment out the row.

Edit2 - 2014-09-08 11_19_16-.aspx

One big disadvantage of this approach is that as columns are added, removed, or renamed the form will not reflect these changes. You will need to manually go update the field changes on each custom form that you created. Also this scenario hides the field for everyone that goes to the list. 

What if we wanted to only hide the status column for users of a certain SharePoint group?

This can be accomplished using jQuery and one of the best libraries available, the jQuery SPServices library. The files that you need and the instructions to get started using this library can be found on codeplex. Some great examples of using these services can be found on the blog of the creator of this wonderful tool, Marc Anderson.

Continuing on the example above of hiding a status column, let’s work towards the requirement of hiding that column unless you are in the SharePoint group “Approvers”. 

Here is the script that you can put into a Script Editor web part on the default Edit Form:

<script language="javascript" src="https://sitecollection/SiteAssets/jquery-1.11.1.min.js">
    </script>

<script language="javascript" src="https://sitecollection/SiteAssets/jquery.SPServices-0.7.2.min.js">
</script>

<script>
$(document).ready(function () {

if(checkrole('Approvers')){
$("[id^=Status]").closest('tr').show();
}
else {
$("[id^=Status]").closest('tr').hide();
}

function checkrole(groupname) {
    var IsvalidRet = false;
    $().SPServices({
        operation: "GetGroupCollectionFromUser",
        userLoginName: $().SPServices.SPGetCurrentUser(),
        async: false,
        completefunc: function (xData, Status) {

            if ($(xData.responseXML).find("Group[Name='"+groupname+"']").length == 1) {
                IsvalidRet = true;
            }
        }
    });
    return IsvalidRet;
}

});
</script>

Script Breakdown

The first 3 javascript calls load the appropriate libraries on the page. These calls can also be placed at a higher level (such as the master page) so they do not need be called on every page. The download files for jQuery can be found here and the SPservices can be found in the link earlier in this post.

The next script section starts with the document.ready() which detects the state of readiness of the page for you. Code included inside of this will only run once the page Document Object Model (DOM) is ready for JavaScript code to execute.

if(checkrole('Approvers')){
$("[id^=Status]").closest('tr').show();
}
else {
$("[id^=Status]").closest('tr').hide();
}

The if statements calls the checkrole function and passes along the group name that you want to check to see if a user is a part of. If the statement returns true it shows the status column and if it returns false it hides the status column. The lookup checks the page for ID’s that contain the word Status. You can use a browser development tool to inspect elements on a page to get their generated IDs. You should not take the section of the ID that is the GUID.

Edit3 - 2014-09-08 20_33_57-Tasks - ..

The last section of the script is the checkrole function. This uses the SPServices library and the SPGetCurrentUser function to return the users data. It then scans through the responseXML to find the group name and sets the variable to true.

function checkrole(groupname) {
    var IsvalidRet = false;
    $().SPServices({
        operation: "GetGroupCollectionFromUser",
        userLoginName: $().SPServices.SPGetCurrentUser(),
        async: false,
        completefunc: function (xData, Status) {

            if ($(xData.responseXML).find("Group[Name='"+groupname+"']").length == 1) {
                IsvalidRet = true;
            }
        }
    });
    return IsvalidRet;
}

The big disadvantage of this option is that hiding a column does not actually secure the column from the user, it just hides it on the form. If this user has access to this column in quick edit or datasheet view directly in the list they would be able to change it.

These are some options to get started with interacting with list forms after the announcement of the death of InfoPath and a great tool in SPServices that can take the SharePoint user experience to a new level.

Not folders or metadata, why not folders & metadata?

SharePoint is built and ready for content management but it can be a challenge to take advantage of the tools it provides. The question of whether folders or metadata should be used is a question that is asked over and over in every SharePoint project and SharePoint community. The 2 primary methods for organizing content in a document library is with folders and metadata. This is a topic that is very important and can make or break a successful SharePoint project roll-out. Everyone always asks what is the best strategy? Most SharePointers will quickly jump to “Folders are bad! Metadata is good!”. As a consultant must say though, it depends.

Are folders evil?

Everyone knows what content management using folders looks like. Managing content in folders was happening well before computers. When I was in middle school I had my trapper keeper and then awesome folders for each of my classes. I had my primary folder which was my trapper keeper and my nested folders for my classes. That same premise was done in basic file shares in computers. That premise has since been migrated into content management solutions like SharePoint. Content is stored in a collection of nested folders in a document library and organized in a way that probably made sense to the person who set them up, but may or may not make sense to others.

There are multiple disadvantages to folders which are highly publicized. There are more that can be discussed but these are the major ones that come up the most.

  • URL length limitation   —   Overall URL length is limited to 256 characters
  • Forced grouping   —   Everything file HAS to belong to a folder and cannot fall into multiple categories
  • File URL   —   Moving a file from one folder to another means the URL of the file changes
  • Folder naming   —  Folder names cannot contain special characters
  • Workflows   —   They cannot be performed on folders
  • Lack of control of information architecture or taxonomy   —   A folder can be edited by anyone with contribute rights which could break a standard
  • Internal knowledge   —   When people turn over information is lost which can include the original rationale behind a folder structure

What about this metadata thing?

Metadata is one of the strongest factors that places SharePoint amongst the top collaboration platforms. Metadata allows for the tagging of content with attributes that classify the content. For example an mp3 loaded onto a computer has attributes like Artist, Album Title, Track length. These attributes help describe what song it is so you can quickly listen to what you want. Can you imagine going through a deep folder structure just to get to your songs? How about not being able to quickly sort by artist or doing a search by most plays? This metadata tagging has great advantages for content management. As with music tagging, once you apply metadata to documents it is then possible to provide better searching, filtering, categorization, grouping, and sorting. This allows you to look at data in different ways with the capability of enterprise metadata across multiple documents.

But metadata may not fit everyone’s needs. There is a large planning and discovery phase that has to occur prior to launching a metadata structure to ensure it covers all different kinds of content across teams. After the discovery this structure needs to be developed and implemented. And after it is developed it will require more advanced change management and training than if folders were just being used. This can be a very new philosophy to people that can be challenge to understand as it is being adopted.

So what about those folders again?

After knowing the disadvantages of folders and advantages of metadata there is another point that needs to be made which is the advantage of folders. Foremost with any SharePoint projects is end-user adoption and acceptance. It should be a goal to have sustained adoption of your project. This involves an extended adoption that does not drop off over time. People love folders and at times taking a strict stance against folders can just push people away from your sites. You could build the fastest, prettiest, most secure SharePoint farm in the world but it would be completely pointless unless people use it. And user-adoption is not the only advantage of folders.

  • Permissions   —   They can be set at the folder level and any documents residing in that folder inherit permissions
  • Default metadata tagging   —   Default values for metadata can be set based on the folder it is located in
  • Bulk upload   —   It is easy to drag and drop many files into a folder either via the browser or in explorer view

Can we use both?

YES!  It is completely possible and in some circumstances best to use both. Why not give an end user the comfort of putting a document into a folder and automatically adding metadata when they do it? Why not build an admin view where the content owners upload their documents in a folder structure but end users have a view which “shows items in all folders” with sorting and filtering?

Now using a hybrid approach you still fall under the same disadvantages stated earlier in this post. That means proper governance and maintenance of an approach like this is required for it to succeed. There cannot be deeply nested folders or many changes to the structure. There needs to be proper planning up front for the long term goals of the library, folders, and content to ensure a sustained solution.

One solution that we at Concurrency provide is the creation of an effective content management strategy. This strategy will help decide the best use cases for taking advantage of all of the tools that SharePoint has to offer while ensuring end-user adoption and a successful SharePoint project.