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 51 Comments

Customize SharePoint from Mac OS

Create and edit SharePoint files form Windows is simple with SharePoint Designer but if you are a Mac user, you are in though spot!

You can do pretty much everything from the browser but upload a file every time you want to change CSS is a tedious process.

In this article, I’ll explain how you can save time and how you can get access to all the files and folders needed to customize SharePoint sites from your Mac.

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By João Ferreira Feb 22, 2017 Branding, SharePoint 5 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 55 Comments

How to solve the most common issues on SharePoint Designer

If you work with SharePoint at this point you’ve probably realized that SharePoint Designer is one of your best allies but still is a bit temperamental and sometimes it just refuses to work properly.

In this article, I’ll cover the most common issues and how to fix them.

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By João Ferreira Feb 1, 2017 Development, SharePoint 0 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

How to fix 401 error after applying a custom master page to SharePoint

This is a short article but it can save you precious time when you apply a custom banding to your SharePoint site.

After applying a custom master page to the site some pages or all of them may start displaying a 401 error, this happens on collaboration sites and system pages namely Team Sites where you have minimal download strategy feature activated.

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By João Ferreira Jan 24, 2017 Branding, SharePoint 0 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

Enable Sandbox solutions on SharePoint 2016

Sandbox solutions and web parts are deprecated for a long time but due all the restrictions of the SharePoint app model caused the iframes this is still the best way to deliver rich web parts that fully integrate with the site and other solutions like custom themes.

Microsoft is pushing user’s way from this model by creating limitations to Sandbox solutions like removing sandbox solutions with managed code from Office 365 and deactivating the execution service by default on SharePoint 2016.

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By João Ferreira Aug 14, 2016 SharePoint 6 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