European Sharepoint 2013 Hosting Blog
Articles about European Sharepoint Hosting Service
European HostForLIFE.eu Proudly Launches Entity Framework 6 with FREE Trial Hosting
Dec 11th
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Entity Framework 6 (EF6) is an object-relational mapper that enables .NET developers to work with relational data using domain-specific objects. It eliminates the need for most of the data-access code that developers usually need to write.
Entity Framework is now available and there are top features to consider in this minor release:
Features that come for free. These are capabilities that are part of the core. You don’t even have to know they’re there to benefit from them, much less learn any new coding.
Level-setting features. A major enhancement is that Code First now supports mapping to Stored Procedures, something that has been supported by models created in the designer.
Another change is more interesting. With EF6, the EF APIs have been extracted from the .NET Framework; they’re now completely encapsulated in the NuGet package.
EF Designer in this category. It has been moved out of Visual Studio as of the 2013 edition, and instead provided as an extension to Visual Studio.
Ninja features. Support for asynchronous queries and saves, the return of custom Code First conventions, more extensibility using the new DbConfiguration type, support for mocking in unit tests, configurable retries on spotty connections, and even more.
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European SharePoint 2013 Hosting :: How to Configure Current Navigation in SharePoint 2013
Dec 10th
Configuring current navigation settings for each SharePoint site is similar to global navigation. You have the same options to automatically show pages and subsites in SharePoint.
You have these options to determine what items appear in the site’s current navigation:
- Display the Same Navigation Items as the Parent Site: This option displays the current navigation items using the settings of the parent site.
- Managed Navigation: This option enables you to manage navigation using a set of terms you define called Managed Metadata. When you select this option, your site will show sites and subsites based on the terms you have defined and not the subsites and pages in the site. When you select the Managed Navigation option, the option to show subsites and pages disappears.
- Structural Navigation: This option gives you the choice to display subsites and pages below the current site.
Remember : Choosing the Show Pages and Show Subsites options in the Global Navigation section makes navigation items show for pages and subsites in the top navigation. Choosing the Show Pages and Show Subsites option in the Current Navigation section shows the navigational links in the left navigation.
European SharePoint 2013 Hosting :: Find Performance Issue on SharePoint 2013
Nov 25th
Background
SharePoint 2013 has now as designed the architecture of FAST Search. This is one of the important reasons why more and more corporates are now switching to SharePoint 2013 and not to other collaboration platform’s.
It sound perfect to have a SharePoint Server 2013 with fast; but if you’re on a development environment with limited hardware resources, the chance exists that you’re Virtual Machine became too slow or even worst it will not respond anymore and the only way is reboot your server.
I have a SharePoint Farm installed on my laptop and only 2 Service Applications has been configured:
- Search Service Application
- Managed Metadata Service Application
Nobody is using or connected to the SharePoint Farm but the RAM has almost reached the Maximum
As you can see “Noderunner.exe” (Microsoft SharePoint Search Component) is itself consuming a lot of memory and the same Process is running multiple times. Noderunner.exe is the new executable of search service on SharePoint 2013. This process can’t turn it off because Search is one of essential service application in SharePoint 2013, and it is integrated in many features.
Find Problem
Let’s kill manually these services and see if my SharePoint site is still answering. Select your process and hit “End Process Tree”. This will kill the Process and all children that are attached to him.
As I’m on my Development machine I’m doing the same operation on all the Processes.
And Strike! Everything related to the Search (Content Search, Web Part …) is broken. I can browse to my Website but can’t execute anything related to the Search Service Application. As you can see this isn’t the best approach to gain performance.
Test
It’s really annoying because the Search Service Application shouldn’t not cause so much damage on our SharePoint Farm.
On SharePoint 2010 I knew we could configure the Search Service Performance Level with powerhsell.
Powershell Cmdlet:
Get-SPEnterpriseSearchService | Set-SPEnterpriseSearchService –PerformanceLevel “PartlyReduced”
Performance Level Explained:
- Reduced: Total number of threads = number of processors, Max Threads/host = number of processors
- PartlyReduced: Total number of threads = 4 times the number of processors , Max Threads/host = 16 times the number of processors
- Maximum: Total number of threads = 4 times the number of processors , Max Threads/host = 16 times the number of processors (threads are created at HIGH priority)
And in fact on SharePoint 2013 it’s the same scenario. After searching a while I found on TechNet this article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff608126.aspx who actually confirms my theory.
Open Powershell with a Domain Account who has Farm Administrator Rights and hit Get-SPEnterpriseSearchService and as imagined the PerformanceLevel is set up to Maximum.
To change this to reduced or partly reduced hit Set-SPEnterpriseSearchService -PerformanceLevel Reduced and restart the SharePoint Search if your Virtual machine is still answering. After this manipulation your SharePoint Server will be able to breathe and you can continue to work.
Test: Not tested way
You can also say that you want to have the Maximum Performance Level and refuse to change it to reduced.
There is a Config file for NodeRunner.exe’s configuration file that can limit RAM usage of a single process to specific value in megabytes.
You can find it under :
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Search\Runtime\1.0\noderunner.exe.config.
The configuration setting is called memoryLimitMegabytes and the default value is 0 (I guess unlimited). You can hit the value you want, save the file and restart your Search Service.
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Oct 8th
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Europe SharePoint 2013 Hosting :: Call WebService in SharePoint 2013, How to Use it?
Aug 21st
In SharePoint2013, you can use call web service action and loop. In this post, I will show you how to achieve this.
1. Create a List workflow called CallWebService
2. Create a variable called listurl
3. Create a dictionary variable called RequestHeaders and add the following key value pairs.
4. Call the web service with the HttpHeaders you just build in the previous step and store the response in the variable ResponseContent.
5. The ResponseContent variable is the Dynamic values (in SharePoint designer it will be called dictionary type) and it is new feature for SharePoint2013 workflow. We can use the following actions to count the number items in the variable.
6. You can use loop in SharePoint 2013 workflow and out each list title as shown below.
2. Create a variable called listurl 2. Create a variable called listurl
European SharePoint 2013 Hosting :: SharePoint 2013 Content Databases and the AllUserData Table
Jul 19th
I believe that some of you never realize that something’s changed of the content database in SharePoint 2013. Is that correct? As you know, AllUserData table has changed. See this:
First of all, what’s happened to columns [nvarchar1], [nvarchar2] (skip a few) [nvarchar64]? How about [int1] to [int16]?
They’ve all been combined into a fragment of Xml, and stored in a single column [tp_ColumnSet].
Let’s zoom in and have a look at one of those Column Sets:
That’s interesting.
Wide List Issues
Firstly, this means “wide lists” are going to be potentially faster than under 2010. A “wide list” in SharePoint 2010 was one that had so many columns that it would cause an INSERT or UPDATE statement to affect more than 8000 bytes of row data.
To work around the problem, when SP2010 works out the column you’re about to add to a list could cause more than 8000 bytes to be written, it would instead create an additional row to hold the new columns. SharePoint used the [tp_RowOrdinal] column to number each of the rows accordingly for a wide list.
We expect SQL Server to start table locking the AllUserData table as the number of row locks approaches 5000. Wide list behaviour would potentially cause SQL Server to have locky behaviour at one-half as many rows (or one-third, or one-quarter – depending upon how many list columns and therefore SQL rows).
Now it’s all stored in one big column, that particular problem is going to go away.
However, the [tp_RowOrdinal] column still exists in the SharePoint 2013 content database, and I’m not sure why.
SharePoint 2013 Content Databases and Sparse Columns
SQL 2008, 2008R2 and SQL 2012 all support “sparse columns” and “column sets“. These are SQL technologies that allows a row to grow beyond the usual 8K-per-row limit (up to 2GB of data when expressed as Xml). Under the hood, the AllUserData table still has [nvarchar1] through to [nvarchar64] and beyond! In fact there are 262 nvarchars, 1000 bits, 550 datetimes, 550 floats, 750 ints, 262 ntexts, 262 sql_variants, 350 uniqueidentifiers and 2 geographies (in a pear tree). (Thank you to Lior Gal for pointing me in the right direction!)
See the MSDN reference article on SharePoint 2013 AllUserData table design here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh625524.aspx.
But why didn’t these show up in SQL Management Studio? This is behaviour by designer to prevent poor performance when selecting form wide tables.
AllUserData Performance Issues in SharePoint 2013
Three general observations:
- For list sizes below 5000 SQL rows, lists that don’t use SharePoint indexed columns will probably be slower.
- For lists greater than 5000 SQL rows, unless we’re using SharePoint column indices in our query, SharePoint list throttling should kick in, and terminate the query before it gets started.
- For most list use cases, it is still massively important to use SharePoint column indices. But if you do decide to switch off throttling for a list, performance should be faster than under SharePoint 2007.
So, in summary: even in SharePoint 2013, make sure you have suitable indexed columns.
European SharePoint 2013 Hosting :: Resolving The Business Data Connectivity Metadata Store is currently unavailable
Jun 18th
Trying to create a external content type by using the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Designer I got the error “The Business Data Connectivity Metadata Store is currently unavailable”
Cause
This was caused by the fact that I had installed a “PowerPivot” SharePoint 2010 installation and during the installation you do not run the SharePoint 2010 Configuration Wizard.
Solution
First ensure all update are installed, by using Microsoft Windows Update, then go to the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Central Administration page and click on Configuration Wizards:
Run the wizard, make sure the Business Data Connectivity Service is checked.
After running this wizard I still got the same exception, this was caused by some services where not running, check if all services are running: Central Administration > Manage services on server:
After starting some services, see screendump the error was resolved
Europe SharePoint Server 2013 Hosting :: How to Setup Managed Metadata Service Application on SharePoint Server 2013
May 13th
In this post I will tell you how to configure Managed Metadata Service Application on SharePoint Farm. The Managed Metadata’s primary purpose is to provide you with a central location to store metadata (commonly defined as data about data) that can be utilised throughout any site within your SharePoint farm.
Here we start configuration of metadata server.
1) Open Central Administration, Go to Application Management >> Manage Service Application >> Click on New >> Select Managed Metadata Service.
You can give name to service whatever you want, I’ve given “Managed Metadata Service” for more clarity.
and Database name as Managed_Metadata.
Give AppPool name “SharePoint – Managed Metadata Service”
I’ve used svcMetadata service account for Application Pool Identity.
Click on OK.
Once the service is created you can see it listed on Managed Service Application Page.
Now we need to start Metadata Service from SharePoint Services on Server page.
for that go to Central Panel >> Under System Settings >> Manage Services on the server.
Start “Managed Metadata Web Service”
Go back to Manage Application Service and Open Metadata Service Application
This will launch the below screen which is referred to as the Term Management Tool.
Please try it. ^^
European SharePoint 2013 Hosting :: SharePoint 2013 Office Web Apps
Apr 15th
Office Web Apps is the online companion to Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote applications. It enables users, regardless of location, to view and edit documents. Office Web Apps gives users a browser-based viewing and editing experience by providing a representation of an Office document in the browser. When a user selects an Office document that is stored in a SharePoint document library or on SkyDrive, the document opens directly in the browser. The document appears in the browser similar to how it appears in the Office client application and provides many of the same editing features. When an Office Web App user selects the Edit in Word, Edit in Excel, Edit in PowerPoint, or Edit in OneNote button on the toolbar, the document opens in the associated Office client application if it is installed on the client computer.
Office Web Apps Server is an Office server product that provides browser-based file viewing and editing services for Office files. Office Web Apps Server works with products and services that support WOPI, the Web app Open Platform Interface protocol. These products, known as hosts, include SharePoint 2013, Lync Server 2013, and Exchange Server 2013. An Office Web Apps Server farm can provide Office services to multiple on-premises hosts, and you can scale out the farm from one server to multiple servers as your organization’s needs grow. Although Office Web Apps Server requires dedicated servers that run no other server applications, you can install Office Web Apps Server on virtual machine instances instead.
It is easier to deploy and manage Office Web Apps within your organization now that it is a stand-alone product. If you deploy SharePoint 2013, for example, you no longer must optimize the SharePoint infrastructure to support Office Web Apps, which in earlier versions was tightly integrated with SharePoint Server 2010. You can also apply updates to the Office Web Apps Server farm separately and at a different frequency than you update SharePoint, Exchange, or Lync Server. Having a stand-alone Office Web Apps Server farm also means that users can view or edit Office files that are stored outside SharePoint Server, such as those in shared folders or other websites. This functionality is provided by a feature known as Online Viewers.
SharePoint 2013 uses Office Web Apps Server for viewing and editing Office documents
When used with SharePoint Server 2013, Office Web Apps Server provides updated versions of Word Web App, Excel Web App, PowerPoint Web App, and OneNote Web App. Users can view and, in some cases, edit Office documents in SharePoint libraries by using a supported web browser on computers and on many mobile devices, such as Windows Phones, iPhones, iPads, and Windows 8 tablets. Among the many new features in Office Web Apps, improved touch support and editing capabilities enable users of iPads and Windows 8 tablets to enjoy editing and viewing Office documents directly from their devices. The following illustration summarizes the viewing and editing capabilities of Office Web Apps on SharePoint 2013.
What is new in Office Web Apps?
| Addition/change | Description |
| Change tracking | Enables users to open Word files that contain revision marks in a Word Web App. |
| Comments | Users can view, add, and reply to comments in a Word Web App and PowerPoint Web App. |
| Co-authoring | Co-authoring support is new in Word Web App and PowerPoint Web App. It continues to be supported in Excel Web App and OneNote Web App. |
| Embedding | Support for embedding Web Apps in websites is new in Word Web App, Excel Web App, and PowerPoint Web App. |
| Ink support | Enables users to view Word Web App and OneNote Web App files that contain ink. |
| Installation | Office Web Apps is not installed on the same servers that run SharePoint 2013. Instead, you deploy one or more physical or virtual servers that run Office Web Apps Server. Then you configure the SharePoint 2013 farm to use the Office Web Apps Server farm to provide Office Web Apps functionality to users who create or open Office files from SharePoint libraries.. |
| Licensing | SharePoint 2013 provides new license enforcement that works with Office Web Apps. If you enable SharePoint licensing and then enable Office Web Apps editing, only the users who have the appropriate license can actually edit Office files in a browser. If no Office Web Apps editing licenses are applied for users, only viewing is supported. |
| Quick Preview | Displays a preview of item content when a user rests over a search result in SharePoint. |
| Share by link | Allows users to send a link to a document to another user and allow the recipient to use Office Web Apps to view the document. |
Differences between Excel Web App and Excel Services
Excel Services is technology that enables you to view and interact with a workbook in a browser window similar to how you would use Excel on your computer. Excel uses a built-in calculation engine to connect to external data and render the results of formulas and queries. Excel Services uses server technology to provide similar functionality in a browser window. Excel Services was introduced in Office SharePoint Server 2007. In SharePoint Server 2013, Excel Services is available only in the Enterprise edition.
Excel Services technology is available in Office Web Apps Server as Excel Web App, and in SharePoint as Excel Services. Excel Web App and Excel Services in SharePoint have a lot in common, but they are not the same. Both applications enable you to view workbooks in a browser window, and both enable you to interact with and explore data. However, there are certain differences between Excel Web App and Excel Services in SharePoint. Excel Services supports external data connections, data models, and the ability to interact with items that use data models (such as PivotChart reports, PivotTable reports and timeline controls). Excel Web App enables users to view and interact with workbooks, but Excel Web App does not support external data connections or the ability to interact with reports and timeline controls that use data models. Excel Services provides more business intelligence functionality than Excel Web App, but Excel Services does not enable users to create or edit workbooks in a browser window. Excel Services is available only in the Enterprise edition of SharePoint Server 2013. Excel Web App is available in SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Foundation 2013.
European SharePoint 2013 Hosting :: Add DataView WebPart SharePoint 2013
Mar 25th
As in previous versions of SharePoint In SharePoint 2013, you can still add Dataview webparts to your pages using SharePoint designer 2013 but with a an exception that you no longer see a Design View in SharePoint Designer 2013.
Adding DataView with Source is still not very clear. I saw a bug when I tried to add a Dataview but it would only show empty data view and not the List\Library list. However, I found a workaround that and was finally able to add a XSLTListView WebPart on a page.
In this post we will see the Step-by-Step Tutorial on how to add a DataView in a SharePoint 2013 site page which will be viewed in Browser.
1. Open your site in SharePoint designer 2013.
2. Next, Create a WebPart Page.
Give your Webpart Page a name and click ok.
3. Next Edit file to Open.
4. Click on “CODE VIEW TOOLS” tab and then click on Parse HTML
5. Next click in of WebPartZone and then click on Insert Tab and then DataView.
If you don’t see this and just sees the “Empty Data View” Option select that and then again click in the WebPartZone and then Data View again. Then you will see the datassource Options. The earlier (empty data view) will add a DataFormWebPart that you can delete that if you want.
This might be a Bug in SharePoint 2013 beta Designer.
Once you add a DataView for a List\Library you will see a new XsltListViewWebPart added.
6. Click on XsltListViewWebPart and you will see the DataView’s tab appear.
Here you can Add\Columns,Set Paging,View Data Source details and rules and can do pretty much everything you use to do with your OLD dataview.
If you want to edit the XSLT of this webpart you can navigate to “DESIGN” tab and click on “Customize Entire View”.
7. Preview Changes – Even though the Design View is missing you can still preview the changes with “Preview in Browser”.
8. Once done Save the Page and Check in.
