How to add Google Analytics to SharePoint without modifying the master page

Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics service in the internet, it provides a concise analysis with reports of everything that happens in your site as well as real time reports, mostly targeted for public sites it also works on intranets.

Intranet portals are the central hub of companies; important information is communicated to employees through these portals and you need to make sure that everyone can access to it no matter the device or technologies used.

Analyzing your intranet portal will help you to understand how users interact with it, what are the most viewed sites and what sites do you need to improve.

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By João Ferreira Feb 26, 2017 Development, Office 365, SharePoint 53 Comments

Can you still use sandbox solutions in 2017?

The answer to this question is yes, but… not for all situations and not all types of sandbox solutions.

SharePoint sandbox solutions were introduced with SharePoint 2010 and provided a mechanism to execute code outside of the ISS worker process. The sandbox solutions do not affect the entire farm; they are installed per site collection and they can be installed by the site collection administrator.

Every day I deal with SharePoint users that are extremely afraid of using sandbox solutions mainly because the message about this type of solutions being deprecated was not properly communicated by Microsoft.

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By João Ferreira Feb 19, 2017 Development, Office 365, SharePoint 6 Comments

Create a modern breadcrumb navigation on SharePoint

Breadcrumb navigation was available by default on SharePoint 2007 and 2010 but with the introduction of SharePoint 2013 it was removed and until today it wasn’t reintroduced.

Today I’m revisiting one my most read articles, back in 2013 I wrote an article to explain how this functionality can be added again to SharePoint and judging by the number of views this article still has there’s a lot of people trying to get the breadcrumb back.

The method from the previous article is still valid but it requires you to manually modify the master page, if you are not going to customize the layout of your site there’s no need to mess with it.

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By João Ferreira Feb 12, 2017 Development, Office 365, SharePoint 61 Comments

Fix publishing pages with custom page layouts created from template

This article is a continuation of my previous article that explains how to save publishing sites as templates.

Per the feedback received some people was not able to access the sites created with the template, this happens with sites that include pages with custom page layouts.

Before getting into details about how to fix this please notice that the previous article is a hack to save the site as a template, save site as a template is disabled in all Publishing sites and other type of sites with publishing features active, this means that the hack may not work in all SharePoint scenarios.

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By João Ferreira Jan 29, 2017 Branding, Office 365, SharePoint 3 Comments

Save publishing site as a template

Save your newly created SharePoint site as a template can save you a lot of time if you want to replicate it again in your environment.

Unfortunately if you used a Publishing Site or if you had to activate the Publishing Features in a Collaboration Site, save site as a template will not be available.

In this article I explain all the steps to bring back this feature to the publishing sites and also the extra steps you may need to activate all site features.

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By João Ferreira Oct 5, 2016 Branding, Office 365, SharePoint 16 Comments

Remove Faulty Web Parts from page

If you are a SharePoint developer and the Web Part you are working on is causing so many errors that you can’t even edit the page this tip is for you.

Removing malfunction webparts is very easy all you have to do is access the Maintenance Web Part Page, in this article I’ll show you three different ways to open this page.

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By João Ferreira May 29, 2016 Development, Office 365, SharePoint 0 Comments

Be prepared to the SharePoint framework

The SharePoint Framework was announced on 4th of May and it introduced a new model to develop SharePoint webparts that is radically different from its predecessors.

Over the years SharePoint development required a specific environment, with SandBox and Farm webparts is required at least one server with SharePoint and Visual Studio to develop and debug, with the App model introduced in 2013 the SharePoint server is no longer needed but it requires Visual Studio and a Developer site collection hosted on Office 365.

With the new framework you are absolutely free to choose your environment, the only requirement is a computer able to run the latest web technologies, you can even use Mac OS or a Linux distro.

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By João Ferreira May 22, 2016 Development, Office 365, SharePoint 5 Comments

SharePoint WSP Repackage

A few years ago I wrote an article explaining how to manually modify a SharePoint WSP solution using a specific software, over the years I got feedback about adware being added to the computers during the installation process of the software.

I recently tried to install this particular software and my antivirus automatically pop up saying that the file was not safe, to get rid of all this issues I decided to build a specific application to repackage all the files inside of the WSP solution.

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By João Ferreira May 19, 2016 Development, Office 365, SharePoint 2 Comments

Metadata navigation is not visible to users with read permissions

This is a common issue when you start using the metadata navigation in your SharePoint 2013 site, let’s check how easily you can make it available to all the users.

By default, when you create a term in the navigation term set, SharePoint selects Term-Driven Page with Friendly URL, if you leave this option selected the term will be visible only to the users with write permissions.

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By João Ferreira May 12, 2016 Office 365, SharePoint 13 Comments

Connect external services to SharePoint using Microsoft Flow

Connecting external services to SharePoint specially the ones that are not part of Microsoft ecosystem was incredibly hard but this is about to change with Microsoft Flow.

Microsoft Flow is an event-automation service developed to create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to get notifications, synchronize files, collect data, and more.

SharePoint 2016 was officially announced last week and it will include a full integration of Microsoft Flow but you don’t need to wait to put your hands in the new version, if you have SharePoint online you can start using it today.

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By João Ferreira May 10, 2016 Office 365, SharePoint 3 Comments