Side Loading of apps is not enabled on this site error while installing app

If you are trying to install an app to SharePoint 2013 RTM environment or to Office 365 then you might see the below error if you are trying to deploy the app to the site which is not developer site.

Error occurred in deployment step 'Install App for SharePoint': Side Loading of apps is not enabled on this site.

Solution: 
Always the app should be published/deployed to the developer site (A site collection with the Developer Site Template). And from this developer site you can add the App to your SharePoint site. 

SharePoint 2013 Cloud or no Cloud - What is your choice?

SharePoint 2013 come up with fantastic features with new UI, new architectures like App Model, Search Crawling and Shredded Storage etc. This new release is impressive and it's support very large and multi-server FARM support. Below are my views on whether to go for Cloud environment or to no go for it.

Why to go for Cloud (SharePoint Online)?

• Platform: As we already know SharePoint online for 2013 Preview build is available. RTM will be available soon.
• UI: The new UI is very easy to use, customize and add more functionality through CMS improvements compared to earlier versions.
• Tools: The Napa tools help us to quickly write the code (Client Side code) and publish them from browser in no time. Very quick development tools. 
• App Model: The new app model will give us the opportunity to extend our SharePoint system with custom coding. Earlier models supports Sandbox solutions and in 2013 we have both Sandbox and App models. 
• Design & Customization: It's as easy as uploading a background image and change colors to design a new theme for SharePoint site in 2013, until unless you want to change the master page for full extent. You can customize the master pages with tools like SharePoint Designer and deploy them to SharePoint Online. Themes are very easy to apply and customization is very simple. 
• Cost: If you like to maintain a FARM on-premises it will be more expensive to maintain the hardware and software. SharePoint online is too cheap compared to on-premises and will save thousands of $. 

Why to not go for Cloud (SharePoint Online)?

• There are no big new reasons why we need on-premises environment. :) If yours is big organization where many services are running like finance services, corporation intranet, file share and search crawling then we must need on-premises environment. SharePoint Online will not give control to run all these as there is  no authorization to Central Administration. 
• If an organization has big repository for the documents on file share and you like to crawl them to show results in Search then we must need on-premises.
• Multi-server FARM is only possible in On-premises and Farm level solutions are possible only in On-premises.

It's completely based on our requirements to decide whether to go for Cloud or not. Above mentioned are the possible reasons according to my view. SharePoint online (build in 2013) is a great product for CMS, small scale intranets. With new templates available in SharePoint 2013, you can build product catalog web sites etc. I believe SharePoint Online will grow fast in near future. 

Download SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 RTM

Just last week we discussed about 2013 versions are reaching RTM and thought they will be released in mid-November. But, you know what the RTM are available to download in MSDN. Mine is in progress why are you waiting? Download yours too!

Download SharePoint Server 2013

Geolocation field in SharePoint 2013

Today I have played with this field and really fantastic to have this feature in SharePoint. It's going to be very useful in our applications.

I have wasted around 30 minutes of time to find where is the Geolocation field to manually add from browser. I searched in the Site Columns list and didn't find it. Thought I have to activate any features and searched Site collection features and site features.... But no luck.

After did some research and found that we have to add the Geolocation field through programming. Is it? really? Why? So many questions and started doing research more time and everyone given the examples in C# (Server side coding) to add Geolocation field to a list. OK. now what? Below is what I have did to check the Geolocation functionality.

Sorry there was something wrong with the download. Try adding it again error in SharePoint 2013 Apps

**Update: The issues is resolved in RTM release. The issues was coming only in the preview version.

I know everyone should get this error when they try to add an app from the SharePoint Store. Yes, it is a bug and whatever App you want to add to the SharePoint 2013 site you will see the below error.

Sorry, there was something wrong with the download. Try adding it again

SharePoint and Office 2013 RTM announced

Wow. It's too early than expected. Great! The Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 RTM are announced and it will available from mid-November.
Office team says they provide Business customer with early access for testing, piloting and adopting office within their organizations and give feedback to improve their products.

• We will begin rolling out new capabilities to Office 365 Enterprise customers in our next service update, starting in November through general availability.
• Volume Licensing customers with Software Assurance will be able to download the Office 2013 applications as well as other Office products including SharePoint 2013, Lync 2013 and Exchange 2013 through the Volume Licensing Service Center by mid-November. These products will be available on the Volume Licensing price list on December 1.
• IT professionals and developers will be able to download the final version via their TechNet or MSDN subscriptions by mid-November.

You can stay tuned my blog for more information and news about the new products related to SharePoint and Office. Awaiting for RTM versions.

Limits and Boundaries of SharePoint 2013

As we all know boundaries are absolute limits that cannot be exceeded by design. When we are planning to design a farm we should keep all these limits to avoid future issues. Perfect example of boundary is document size limit: 2GB. It’s by design and the absolute limit and cannot be exceeded by design.
Thresholds are those have a default value that can be change in certain circumstances. Default the document size is 50MB and you can increase up to 2GB.

Main limitations:

How to create tiles for SharePoint

Syncfusion tool is excellent to create the tiles. They have plenty of icons to create our custom tiles to use them in the new windows platform. I am using this software to create tiles for my SharePoint 2013 site. Really cool and strongly suggest you to use it.

Download it here.

SharePoint Designer 2013 design view?

I know the designer fans are not happy when they hear the news about it. The design view is completely removed by Microsoft with no reason. The only mode available is Code view. For each change you are doing, you have to preview it by running the Preview in Browser option. Not good right?

But, the good news is that SharePoint 2013 sites can be opened through SharePoint Designer 2010. I know it's not recommended by Microsoft, but we can use it for now to get the design and code view for our implementations. If you need to implement pages, web parts requires design view then go for SharePoint designer 2010. Otherwise you can use improved designer 2013 for workflows, styles etc..

Event receivers for Users, Roles, Groups, Inheritance SharePoint 2013

Wow. This is excellent news for me, no for all of us. The question we have discussed almost 15-20 times since SharePoint 2007 was released is "Site Permissions, People and Groups are also SharePoint lists, are there any event receivers bound to them?". This is needed for us to track the security for specific sites. For example, when someone is trying to add/edit/delete a user we like to track all of them we don't have any way in 2007, 2010 versions. Now, with these new event receivers we can track the security and can have full control over the complete SharePoint security by implementing the custom solutions. Really it's a great thought to have event receivers on these. The new event receiver class is "SPSecurityEventReceiver".

Below is the list by category the new event receivers.

Download SharePoint 2013 tutorials and eBooks

SharePoint 2013 is now a hot product from Microsoft with new UI and completely new features, we should learn them to keep ourselves up to date. Below are the links for documents and eBooks to know more about them.

• All presentations
• IT Pro Video links
• eDiscovery Planning
• Deployment guide for SharePoint 2013
• Mobile Architecture for SharePoint 2013
• Upgrade Worksheet for SharePoint 2013 Preview

For all content on SharePoint 2013 in MSDN site found here.

You can see the complete details on all kind of downloads related to SharePoint 2013 here.

SharePoint 2013 preview all related downloads

I have good experience on SharePoint 2013 preview now. Leant much, gone through almost all new features and spending time on writing as much blog posts as I can.

Below is the complete list of all downloads available for the SharePoint 2013 and related environment downloads. Please remember,  while you are downloading (some software available in both 32 and 64-bit versions) verify the right version x86 or x64 and download.

Sign in as different user in SharePoint 2013 preview?

I know who started working on SharePoint 2013 preview edition should discuss about this at least once. Yes the link is missing. Very frustrated isn’t it? When I am trying to login to the site if I don’t have access it simply says "Sorry, the site is not shared with you." How crap is that? If it says that then it should give me option to change my authentication. OK. Now, what is the fix?

We know there is sign in as different user link in SharePoint 2010. Let’s try it out in our browser. http://sp15/_layouts/closeConnection.aspx?loginasanotheruser=true. Yes, it’s worked. OK, is there any other way to fix this to add back the link to navigation?

Memory leaks in SharePoint 2013?

I believe yes, there are. As this is the preview version there are possibilities for the memory leaks and other development issues. In the SharePoint 2013 server go to task manager and see what is taking more memory. You should see something like below.

SharePoint 2013 certifications

The certifications news on the new SharePoint product released from Microsoft. And below are the exam codes.

• 70-331 (Core Solutions of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013)
• 70-332 (Advanced Solutions of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013)

The exams will be available from February 5th, 2013.

Discontinued features in SharePoint 2013

Recently the MSDN article is published on discontinued and modified features in SharePoint 2013. This is very important to know as what all are discontinued compared to the previous version for future planning on upgrades or migrations. Below are the main features (according to me) among all the list Microsoft published.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM):

• Barcode: Inserting barcode command is no more available in ribbon. Which means you cannot add the SharePoint generated barcode to Word documents.
• Print labels: Ability to generate, embed a label containing the metadata about office files is no more supported.

Web content management improvements in SharePoint 2013

There are plenty of improvements in CMS compared to earlier versions of SharePoint. I have tried most of them and felt really easy to do things through browser.

Content Authoring Improvements:

• Content authors can copy the text directly from the Word and paste to the Rich text fields, HTML fields, content editor web parts etc.
• A new Video content type is added in SharePoint 2013. The uploading of a video and embed into the content is very easy. When you upload a video, the cms engine will automatically create the thumbnail for the video.
  Note: To generate automatic thumbnail generation for the video you uploaded the Desktop Experience Feature must be installed on the Front-end web server.
• Content author can insert iFrame into the html fields on the page. Site collection administrators can customize the filed security settings by changing the default trusted external domains. So that users will not add all external domains which are not approved to the SharePoint sites. To control this go to Site Settings –> HTML Field Security.
• Image Renditions: Now SharePoint 2013 supports Image Renditions. With this feature you can now enable the same image can render in different sizes in different places. You can set this through the Site Settings and Image Renditions option.
  Note: To use the image renditions you must enable the BLOB cache. To enable the BLOB cache please use this link “Enable BLOB Cache”.

Enable Continuous Crawl in SharePoint 2013

Enable continuous crawls is a crawl schedule option that is new in SharePoint 2013. It is available only for content sources that use the SharePoint sites content source type. A continuous crawl starts at set intervals. The default interval is 15 minutes, but you can set continuous crawls to occur at shorter intervals by using Windows PowerShell.

Prerequisites:

• Create a Search Service Application
• Create at least one content source of type "SharePoint Sites".

Site Policy in SharePoint 2013

SharePoint has lot of features and in any organization data grows day to day. At end of the day we see huge and huge data which is unusable or data grown beyond the estimation or something which is unmanageable. The sites will be created as we need but we don’t delete them when we don’t need it.

You can use site policies to help control site proliferation. In SharePoint 2013 we have couple of options to control the site policy. Below is the site policy with the available options.

The MSDN article has very detailed description of the options mentioned here. These policies will help us to resolve the site management issues we face in large organizations.

Managed navigation using term store in SharePoint 2013

In SharePoint 2013 another feature we must like is the Friendly URL's. This is main feature in terms of SEO as well. If your site has the custom navigation needs to be implemented then one way is to implement from the site settings –> Navigation and add/edit/remove the links whatever you want to show up on the site. Another way with SharePoint 2013 is to manage the navigation via Term Store. You can create a term set and terms [Links] in it to show these terms as links on SharePoint site. For example, if you want to map your /pages/default.aspx with /home then it is possible with this new feature.

State Service in SharePoint 2013

I found that the State Service is missing in the SharePoint 2013 central administration site. I am not sure it is the problem with my installation.

I need to create a simple Approval workflow in my SharePoint 2013 site and for that first I need to check all services required to run workflows are configured correctly or not. As we all know Workflows should require the State Service to be run in the environment and the service should be associated with the web application where we are creating the workflows.

As there is no UI to start the service in SharePoint 2013, I have used the Powershell script to do this job.

$serviceApp = New-SPStateServiceApplication -Name "State Service"
New-SPStateServiceDatabase -Name "StateServiceDatabase" -ServiceApplication $serviceApp
New-SPStateServiceApplicationProxy -Name "State Service" -ServiceApplication $serviceApp -DefaultProxyGroup

The above 3 lines will create the state service application, state service database and the proxy to run the service. Now, the final step will be associating the service with the current web application. For this, go to
Central Administration -> Application Management -> Service Application Associations. Associate the service with your web application.

Here you go, all is set and enjoy with workflows...