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Extending Active Directory & Integrating into SharePoint 2013 (Part 1)

If you’ve managed, administered, or developed on SharePoint, chances are at some point you’ve already encountered or resisted working with the User Profile Service (UPS) Application. There is no secret that UPS is one of the more complicated service applications available in SharePoint to configure, but is the effort worth the reward? I’m here to say yes. UPS has a lot to offer (beyond required for My Sites) and this blog will hopefully give you some insight into one use case for UPS that you can relate to. This blog will be a 3-part blog series broken down into the following sections:

  1. Extending Active Directory with Custom Attributes (the current post)
  2. Configuring ADFS 3.0 with SharePoint 2013
  3. Configuring User Profile Services to support Custom Attributes

Let’s dive into the business scenario I was recently faced with and how we used UPS to address the challenge.

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Your cacheHostInfo is Null: How to Fix It

The Distributed Cache service is one that gets relatively little attention because it’s installed by default on every server in your SharePoint farm and you would probably not know if it were having a problem (unless you paid very close attention). Recently, I had some time on my hands and went looking for trouble so to speak. My SharePoint 2013 farm was serving pages and life was good, but still I decided it was time to take stock of what was running where and if I could make some improvements. Among other things, I noticed my Distributed Cache service was only running on one of my 11 SharePoint servers in the farm. A closer inspection of the Event Viewer on servers not running Distributed Cache revealed a relatively common problem: cacheHostInfo is Null.

I say this is a common problem because it seems like a well-covered topic on the Internet, but I never came across a single page that ran this issue to group. I found many helpful hints, but decided this topic needed an end-to-end solution. Today, I cover how I approached the problem and the solution I found. 

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How Marketers Use Agile to Create Effective Content

As a first-time conference goer, September 7-11, 2015 was a whirlwind! I met marketing professionals ranging from Australia, Florida, Montana, and even my native Washington, DC. I attended spotlight sessions from famous authors (cheers to you Jon Ronson) and even cracked up at a stand-up session by the ultra-hot comedian from Trainwreck (that’s right, be jealous – Amy Schumer).

Easy Dynamics Consultant Lauren Strayhorn listens to Jon Ronson's spotlight speech at Inbound 2015 Easy Dynamics Consultant Lauren Strayhorn listens to Amy Schumer's stand-up show at Inbound 2015

So what conference did I attend, you ask? Well, Hubspot’s annual Inbound in Boston, MA, of course! So as you can guess, and probably correctly, all thousands (yeah… 14,000 of us)  who attended are writing blog posts about their experience and what they learned. While that’s great, I want to be unique and write about how I can take my newfound Inbound knowledge and apply it to something from the fantastic software developers I work with here at Easy Dynamics… and that’s Agile. 

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AWS S3 Storage Concepts for Windows Admins

linux and windows language barriers in aws storage concepts

If you happen to be a Windows Admin (you know who you are) and are beginning to work in the Amazon Web Services Environment, there are some things you need to know! Unless you are at least a little familiar with Linux, you are in for an adventure in confusion. As with any product there is a learning curve when you first begin to explore it. The first challenge is learning to “speak the same language.” Even though I have experience using Linux, I still stumbled until I digested the explanations. Be careful! The language/concept barrier can lead to a great deal of confusion and difficulty. There are many AWS terms that have special meaning. In fact, it is almost a different way of thinking.This blog will cover how I went about breaking the barrier and how you can too!

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Correspondence Management with SharePoint and EasyBox

SharePoint provides a powerful document management system and integrates easily with SharePoint Designer, or in more complex instances, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), to create highly configurable business process automation systems. With SharePoint’s ubiquitious presense in medium to large businesses and the federal government, SharePoint has become a common and attractive option for automating full-blown corrospondence management solutions. The problem lies in the leap from automating document driven processes to auditing those proccesses. 

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Event Handling in ArcGIS for JavaScript

ArcGIS for JavaScript is a mature and powerful framework for creating interactive maps and layers. Your map can respond to users easily by leveraging the robust collection of ArcGIS events. Just about every widget or module comes with a set of events that are easy to hook up.

Since the ArcGIS for JavaScript API is asynchronous, an event-driven approach is encouraged. Operations do not finish immediately or in sequence, so you must listen for information to determine when an object is ready. The event model is flexible and intuitive—events are very simple to register and you may keep track of multiple handlers for the same event.  Continue reading “Event Handling in ArcGIS for JavaScript”

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Improved Email Tracking with EasyBox

Why Delivery Reports?

One of the main advantages of EasyBox over email is its ability to accurately track views and changes to attached documents. It does this by keeping attachments within a company’s SharePoint stored in an SQL database. In the traditional email setting, administrators can set read receipts so when users read the email, they are notified. However, the user can easily mark ‘read’ without actually reading its contents. This setting provides a loophole for users to appear responsible for reading their emails. And even if the email was read, you still had no insight into who actually viewed the attachments.

With EasyBox, you get reports of exactly who opened the messages and attachments. This enables administrators, and other users, to better understand who did what and when. Because the attachments themselves stay in SharePoint and all views and edits are tracked. That way, administrators are able to visualize and audit the full document lifecycle.

That’s why the Delivery Report feature of EasyBox is so powerful! Follow the simple steps below to learn how to use this feature to its full benefit:

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Easy Dynamics Demos EasyBox at SharePoint Saturday DC

Easy Dynamics Demos EasyBox at SharePoint Saturday DCThis past Saturday, June 13, 2015, Easy Dynamics Corp was proud to sponsor and attend 2015 SharePoint Saturday DC at the Microsoft office building in Chevy Chase, Maryland. We enjoyed meeting and speaking with conference attendees about our first commercial product EasyBox, the only secure messenger for SharePoint. Use cases as correspondence management systems and as SharePoint adoption aides seemed to get the most user interest. We had a laugh with Adam Levithan, Product Manager at Metalogix Software, about interesting ways to spark conversations at our booth, as he suggested asking “What is your favorite soda?” Mine is Orange Fanta!

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Continuous Everything in a DevOps World

The word “continuous” seems to be the root of many agile concepts in today’s world. As agile adapts and takes on more and more evolving practices, the glossary for this lean-structured methodology gets thicker and thicker. Every day, organizations are trying and succeeding at impleEasy Dynamics Continuous Everything in DevOps and Agile Worldmenting agile process methodolgies which is often why technology runs faster than we can keep up. In this blog, I discuss a few methods that organizations can use to streamline their processes. 

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How AngularJS Helps Validate Forms

With AngularJS, you can apply a wide variety of checks and effects to form elements. This blog will go over some of the basics. Not only does Angular allow you to validate user input using built-in and custom directives, but it also automatically furnishes your elements with helpful CSS classes. 

Angular will help you take advantage of the many basic validation options included in HTML5, such as the required attribute and additional input types like email and URL. Angular extends the available options with their own directives like ng-maxlength and ng-minlength. 

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