Sunday 31 May 2015

Provisioing Site Collections using CSOM - Tenant Admin API

Overview:  This post looks at provisioning site collections using CSOM.  You can also provision site collections for SharePoint using PowerShell or any Server side object model. 
Points to Note:
Programmatically you can provisioning new site collections using CSOM using 2 approached namely:
  1. Tenant Admin API
  2. Http Post method (mimic the SharePoint UI for creating a site collection)
Note: Neither approach allows you to specify the Content Database to connect to, you shall need to manage the CDB you site collection goes into using the round robin site collection OOTB method for on-prem SP. 
Note: Tenant Admin API does not allow the Quota template to be specified.  See the FAQ section in this post.
Note: Tenant Admin API requires the April 2014 SP CU or later
Note: the Search Service Application needs to be configured to handle multi-tenancy to work correctly.  As do other the Service Applications using partitions to support multi-tenancy.  If you already have existing running farm, the change is a considerable effort.  The SA need to be created in partition mode and cannot be amended after creation (you will need to re-create the service Application).
Note: Using the Tenant Admin API for SC creation - you don't get the usual SP groups such as owner, contributor and visitor - you need to manually create them.
Note: I don't believe you can use the Publishing Site Template using the Tenant Admin API.
The Tenant Admin Site Collection can reside on the same or another Web Application where the site collections shall be provisioned.  Each Tenant Admin Site Collection (has it's own site template 'tenantadmin#0') has a SubscriptionId (Subscription Group) and when using the Tenant Site collection to create a new site collection, the new site collection is given the SubscriptionId for the group i.e. you can't specify the SubscriptionId declaratively).

Outline of steps to setup the Tenant Admin API:
  1. Service Application need to be configured in partition mode (important SSA are: search, UPA, MMS, BCS, SSS, there are more).
  2. Enabling remote site collection creation using CSOM on the Web Application
  3. Enable AdministrationSiteType property from a site collection to "TenantAdministration"
  4. Enable SelfServiceSiteCreationEnabled on the Web Application
  5. Set Up Tenant Admin for Multi Tenancy/setup subscription
More Information:
Multi-tenancy/Site subscriber explained by Bill Baer
Spencer Harbar's Rational Guide to Multi-tenancy is a useful resource
General guidance for hosters in SharePoint Server 2013 provides insight into Multi-Tenancy
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn659286.aspx
Scenarios where multi-tenancy potentially shall be used:
  1. O365/SharePoint Online
  2. SPO-D
  3. Hosting companies
  4. Government implementations such as G-Cloud
  5. Large Enterprise (only with extreme requirements)
Notes on HNSC using Tenant Admin API:
  • When creating a host name site collection with managed paths e.g. http://acme.com/sites/daffy, you need to create the corresponding root hnsc for the routing to work i.e. http://acme.com.
  • Creating a hnsc with a path is consider creating a hnsc not a path based site collection or a combination of the naming.
  • The manage path /sites/ which is already created works as it is already setup.  If you want another managed path you need to configure this separately.
Quota Limits:
Quota max storage size and code points are parameters in the CSOM Tenant Admin API, they don't set these values and you cannot set the quota templates using CSOM.  You only 2 options at this point in time is to use the UI and apply a template, not really an option for customers with hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of site collections or you use PowerShell/ the Server side object model.

Permissions:
To be able to provision a new site collection, the account used to provision shall need to have contribute rights (it feels low and simple to me but that is the min) or higher on the Tenant Admin Site Collection.

Troubleshooting Tenant Admin Site Collection Provisioning:  Update 2017-06-28
I had tremendous problems with site collections not being completely created using CSOM and the tenant admin API on a new server that was provisioned by our engineering department.  There are a couple of IIS and farm setting you will want to review should you get this issue and our amazing team figured this out so it is not my credit.  Gonzalo, Uzzey and Anthony with thanks!


Change IIS timeouts on the WFE's and SP farm configs, this made the site collections provision completely correctly.

Monday 18 May 2015

Remote Event Receivers Basics

Overview:  Historically we use Full Trust Code (FTC) within SharePoint 2010 and MOSS to have the ability to handle events in SharePoint such as an item being added to a list.  Since SP 2013 and going forward, full trust code is not the preferred approach and Microsoft of Remote Event Receivers (RER).

Notes:

  1. RER are web services that implement the iRemoteEventReceiver interface and a remote web server (WS). RER's WS can be hosted on an IIS application server (including Azure).
  2. Asynchronous events supported with different code approaches: 1. Synchronously call on the before and after events i.e. ItemUpdating, ItemUpdated 2. Asynchronous on past event/-ed events i.e. ItemUpdating only.
  3. RER's can be fired on SP events such as list item changes, BCS events, 

Complete and publish!!


Thursday 7 May 2015

SharePoint 2016 Points from the Ignite Conference

6 May 2015


SharePoint 2016 new features (from the Ignite conference 06 May 2015)
http://www.learningsharepoint.com/2015/05/07/sharepoint-2016-new-features-and-enhancements/

 
Notes:
  1. Office Graph and Delve are important in SP2016.
  2. MS are releasing a search add-on for SP2013 later in 2016, this will be part of SP2016 (vNext). The add-on stores the index on o365. allows seemless indexing of on-prem and O365 using AD to AAD sync.

Download all the Ignite Videos and Slides:
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/all-the-Ignite-Videos-and-b952f5ac