In SharePoint 2010, the Search Center does not provide a link back to the top-level site in the breadcrumb. This is a hindrance for users to find their way back to the top-level site.

Having a link back to the home page of the top-level site would be especially useful in scenarios like Intranet sites. A link could be provided in the breadcrumb back to the Intranet home page. Here is a quick example to add a link to an Intranet home page on a Search Center:

• Open the root site in the site collection in SharePoint Designer.
• Click Master Pages in the Site Objects left-navigation.
• Create a copy of the minimal.master Master Page, and give it an appropriate file name (ie, Intranet_minimal.master). This will be used to create a customized version of the Master Page for the Search Center.
• Open the new Master Page in SharePoint Designer.
• Find the following line:

<SharePoint:SPLinkButton runat="server" NavigateUrl="~site/" id="onetidProjectPropertyTitle" CssClass="s4-mini-h1-a">

• Before that line, add the following to the page:

<!-- Custom Link to Portal -->
<SharePoint:SPLinkButton runat="server" NavigateUrl="~sitecollection/" id="rootSiteBreadcrumbLink" CssClass="s4-mini-h1-a">
    Intranet Home
</SharePoint:SPLinkButton>

<SharePoint:ClusteredDirectionalImage
    runat="server"
    ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/fgimg.png"
    LTROffsetX=0
    RTLOffsetX=0
    LTROffsetY=607
    RTLOffsetY=618
    LTRWidth=11
    LTRHeight=11
    RTLWidth=11
    RTLHeight=11
    AlternateText=":"
    ClassName="s4-mini-titlesep"/>
<!-- End Custom Link to Portal –>

• The specific section of the Master Page should now look like the following:

• Save the custom Master Page.
• Apply the custom Master Page as the default for the Search Center site.
• If you refresh your Search Center site, you should now see a link to the Intranet Home.

Caveat:

While the link to the top-level site is dynamic (~sitecollection/), this example hard-codes “Intranet Home” in the Search Center Master Page. If the Intranet is renamed, the Master Page would need to be updated to reflect the new name.

One of the cool features of using Lync Online with your Office 365 account, is the ability to have photos of your contacts in your IM client. This lets you easily scan to see who is online, and if the person you are looking for is available. You can help your team out by adding your own photo to your account. To do this, you can first assign your photo to your Office 365 account, and then to your Lync Online settings.

Assign Your Photo to Office 365

Once you have a photo you would like to use, log in to your Office 365 Portal.

In the upper right, underneath your name, click My profile.

On the My Profile page, under Information, click Change photo.

Browse to the photo on your computer, and then click Upload.

You should now see your photo assigned to your Office 365 account.

Assign Your Photo to Lync Online

Now that you have added a photo to your Office 365 account, you can assign that as your photo in Lync Online,

Log in to your Lync Online Client.

Click the icon to open up the Menu, then click Tools, and then click Options.

In the left-hand menu, click My Picture.

In the options screen for My Picture, you will see three options. Choose the middle option: Default corporate picture. This is the photo you just uploaded and assigned to your Office 365 account.

Click OK.

You should now see your own photo on your Lync Online client, and your colleagues will see your photos next to your name in their Lync Online client.

In this example, our pretend company has decided it would be beneficial for the culture if employees knew how to better work with and relate to each other as they take on and complete projects. To do this, the company decided to focus on a strengths-based culture, to better allow each person's passions drive them to success. One of the methods used to help employees know their own strengths and the strengths of others was having each individual take the Clifton StrengthFinders assessment, to discover their top five strengths. Knowing employees were going to be taking and completing the assessments, the leaders at the company would like each individual to be able to populate their user profile on SharePoint 2010 with these strengths.

Within SharePoint 2010, the list of strengths were added to a Managed Metadata Term Store, so that the spelling and usage of the strengths would be consistent across all of the user profiles:

The following are the steps that would be used to add a property to each person's user profile so that they could assign terms from the Strengths Term Store, and show them on their individual profile.

Create the User Profile Property

Open SharePoint Central Administration, and access the User Profile Service Application by following these steps:

1. Under Application Management, click Manage service applications
2. Find the desired User Profile Service Application in the list, and click to highlight it
3. Click Manage in the Ribbon

On the following page, under People, click Manage User Properties:

On the Manage User Properties page, click New Property:

In the first section, provide the desired Property Settings. In this example, we will choose the name of "CliftonStrengths", and the Display Name of "Strengths". We will choose a multi-value string, with up to 150 characters. The last field maps the property to the managed terms that were previously created in the Term Store.

For the Sub-type of Profile, make sure the profiles are selected that you would like to display the property on. In this case, we only have the Default Profile:

Under User Description, we will provide a description that will help people understand what the intended purpose of the property is for as they are editing their profile:

For the Policy Settings, we will choose Required for the Policy Setting, and default the visibility to Everyone.

For the Edit Settings section, we need to make sure we allow employees to edit the property's values:

On the Display Settings section, we need to show the property on the user profile page. We also need to allow the property to show up to 5 values before being shortened with an ellipsis. To be able to edit the field, we need to allow the property to be shown on the Edit Details page. We also will allow updates to the property to show in the newsfeed.

After these values are set, click OK to create the new user profile property.

Move to the Desired User Properties Section

As shown in the last step, the new Strengths property will be displayed under a section called "Custom Properties". We want to change this so the property shows in the "Details" section. To do this, click the blue "up" arrow next to the name of the property until it is in the desired section.

Edit the User Profile

The property is now ready to be used on the SharePoint user profiles. Navigate to your profile, and click "Edit My Profile":

Scroll down to the "Details" section, and either type or select the five strengths to be listed on the profile:

Click Save and Close.

Then, on the user profile click the link titled "More Information":

The user profile should then show the "Strengths" property, with the selected strengths for the individual.

Microsoft recently released a very handy troubleshooting tool for Office 365. The wizard walks both administrators and end-users through common troubleshooting scenarios, like:

• Active Sync issues for mobile devices
• Problems joining meetings with Lync
• Using Office Web Apps
• Issues with AD synchronization and hybrid environments
• Working with SharePoint User profiles

The troubleshooting wizard does a good job of going through a couple of short steps to get an end-user or an administrator to the recommended resolutions for a particular service area.

For one of my SharePoint 2010 VMs, I wanted to upgrade one of the SQL Server Express Edition instances to SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition. Since my VM already had SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition installed, I only needed to go through the following steps to upgrade the specific instance.

When reviewing the properties of the instance with SQL Server Management Studio, it showed the Product version as SQL Server Express Edition.

Start the Upgrade Process

• In the Start menu, under Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, open the SQL Server Installation Center in the Configuration Tools folder.

• Then, under Installation, click Upgrade from SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008.

Install the Setup Support Files

• You may be prompted to browse for the SQL Server 2008 R2 installation media to install the Setup Support files. In my case, I mounted the ISO.

• Make sure the Setup Support Rules pass before continuing on.

• Run the install.

Upgrade the Express Instance

• After the install is complete, you can now continue with the process to upgrade the Express instance.
• Again, make sure the Setup Support Rules all pass before continuing on.

• The setup should find your existing product key. If not, enter it now.

• Accept the License Terms.

• Next, select the SQL instance to upgrade. In my case, the name of the Express instance was "SHAREPOINT".

• The installer will preselect the features to be upgraded in the instance.

• Verify the Instance ID and root directory, and continue on.

• Verify you have enough drive space, and click Next.

• Decide if you want to turn on error reporting, and click Next.

• Verify the Upgrade Rules all pass before continuing on.

• The installer will provide a summary of the upgrade actions. Click Upgrade.

• After the installer finishing the upgrade, it will provide a confirmation page that the instance was successfully upgraded.

• When reviewing the properties of the SQL instance in the SQL Server Management Studio, it will now show that it has been upgraded to SQL Server Enterprise Edition.

• This provided the opportunity to upgrade SQL Server to the latest SP and Cumulative Update level. These can be downloaded from the Update Center for Microsoft SQL Server.
• After running the updates, you can also see the instance's build version through the SQL Server Management Studio.

• In my case, I upgraded to build 10.50.2806, which is Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition with Service Pack 1 and Cumulative Update 5.

After these steps, I ran the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard to bring everything up to date.

A common business process scenario for onboarding a new employee within a company is for Human Resources to notify the IT department of the new employee joining the organization, and then for the IT department to create the Active Directory (AD) account and either notify HR, or wait to provide the information to the new employees themselves.

This type of business process might look like the following:

However, given the option, most businesses would like to see this process streamlined to enable HR to create the Active Directory account themselves, in an easy, pre-defined manner.

The streamlined business process could look like the following:

This can be accomplished without any custom development using Nintex Workflow and Microsoft SharePoint.

Using Nintex Workflow to Enable HR to Create AD Accounts

Using a simple SharePoint list, and a couple of the provided Nintex Workflow actions, you could create a simple form for HR that looks like this that enables HR to create Active Directory accounts for new employees:

Using just these simple pieces of information about the new employee, the “Create AD User” Nintex Workflow action can be configured to do the following:

• Create the Active Directory account
• Assign the account name (SAMAccountName)
• Assign the first name and last name
• Assign the manager
• If provided, assign the work phone #
• Create a generated password
• Force the employee to change their password at the first logon

Many other pieces of information could be easily assigned as well with a few changes to the form and the workflow. The basic configuration screen for the “Create AD User” action essentially looks like the following:

Each of these properties could be preconfigured or populated by fields on the initiating form.

Additional Low-Hanging Fruit to Enhance the Business Process

Additional enhancements that could easily be made using out-of-the-box Nintex Workflow actions include enabling the workflow to:

• Create the new user account “Like” another account (using another employee as a model for assignments)
• Assign the user account as a member of Security Groups
• Creating an Exchange mailbox to provision e-mail for the new employee
• Notify IT and the hiring manager
• Enable Lync / Office Communicator for the employee
• Assign the user account to specific AD Organization Units (OUs) based on Department
• And of course, extend the workflow to include more of the onboarding process…

Learn more about Nintex Workflow 2010.

The Office 365 Transition Guide for Administrators includes steps for making DNS updates for your company’s domain. However, the instructions aren’t very clear on the exact format of the values that you may need to provide to your DNS provider.

After a bit of investigation, we were able to take the values in the Transition Guide, and find the correct format for our DNS provider. The table below shows the DNS entries used by Deliveron to prepare for our Office 365 transition. The values may be used as a template, replacing “deliveron.com” for your company’s domain.

* Make sure to include the period at the end of the line in the SRV entry

For instances where there is need to update a specific list of user accounts in Active Directory, it may be ideal to use PowerShell to loop through the list and make the changes for each of the users using the Active Directory Administration Module for PowerShell. For the sake of this example, assume there is a CSV file with a column titled sAMAccountName:

If we wanted to update the Company attribute in AD for each of these users, we could use the following PowerShell script to read in the list of users, and use Get-ADUser to get the specific AD account object, and then pass to Set-ADUser to make the actual change:

1 Import-module ActiveDirectory
2 
3 $userList = Import-Csv '.\List of Users.csv'
4 
5 foreach ($user in $userList){
6     Get-ADUser -Filter "SamAccountName -eq '$($user.sAMAccountName)'" -SearchBase "DC=subdomain,DC=company,DC=com" -Properties Company | % { Set-ADUser $_ -Replace @{Company = 'Deliveron'} }
7 }

If you then wanted to query AD for those users to make sure they updated correctly, you could use the following query using Get-ADUser:

1 foreach ($user in $userList){
2     Get-ADUser -Filter "SamAccountName -eq '$($user.sAMAccountName)'" -SearchBase "DC=subdomain,DC=company,DC=com" -Properties Company | Select SamAccountName, Name, Company
3 }

Occasionally there is a need to quickly query Active Directory for all user accounts or user accounts with only certain values in particular properties. This can be done by installing and loading the Microsoft Active Directory Administration module for PowerShell. This is an add-on module, named ActiveDirectory, that provides cmdlets that let you manage your Active Directory domains.

After you install the ActiveDirectory module, there is now a new PowerShell option in Administrative Tools, called “Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell”:

This brings up the bland, DOS-like command prompt with the ActiveDirectory module automatically loaded. But what if you like to work in the Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE)? Start up ISE and then run the following command:

Import-module ActiveDirectory

That will load the ActiveDirectory module into your ISE session, so that you can use the desired cmdlets.

Querying for User Accounts

To query for user accounts, use the Get-ADUser cmdlet. For example, here is how you would query against your domain for all user accounts:

Get-ADUser -Filter * -SearchBase "DC=ad,DC=company,DC=com"

If you wanted to query for all of the user accounts with the last name “Collicott”, you would run the following:

Get-ADUser -Filter {Surname -eq "Collicott"} -SearchBase "DC=ad,DC=company,DC=com"

To export the e-mail addresses for all user accounts to a CSV file, you could run the following:

You can also find additional examples by viewing the help on the cmdlet:

Get-Help Get-ADUser -examples

The amount of time the “New” icon is shown in SharePoint 2010 can be changed at the Web Application level using PowerShell. Below are examples to get or change settings for the icon:

Get the Current Duration to Display the “New” Icon

$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication "http://webAppURL/"
$webApp.DaysToShowNewIndicator

Change the Duration to Display the “New” Icon

# Set to 1 Day
$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication "http://webAppURL/"
$webApp.DaysToShowNewIndicator = 1
$webApp.Update()

Prevent the “New” Icon from Displaying

# Essentially, just set the display duration to 0 days.
$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication "http://webAppURL/"
$webApp.DaysToShowNewIndicator = 0
$webApp.Update()