Hide the "Follow" link on the hover panel for people search results

I had a request recently to hide the "Follow" link shown on the hover panel for people search results. Upon trying a number of different ideas, I found the easiest way to accomplish this task is to modify the display template associated with this functionality. See steps below.

1. At your search center site, go to Site Settings, and click on Master pages and page layouts under the Web Designer Galleries section.

2. Click on Display Templates > Search, and find the Item_Person_HoverPanel.html file. Download a copy of this file to your desktop.

3. Edit the file in notepad, and comment out the following line.

<div class="ms-calloutLink ms-uppercase" id="_#= followId =#_"></div>

My blog posts have been few and far between lately as I have been super busy pursuing an MBA at my dream school - Notre Dame. After finishing, I will post more!

Content Search Web Part: Subsites not sorting correctly

If you are one of many using the Content Search web part to display all subsites of a parent site, and the sorting by Site title is not working as expected, use the following tips to get it working correctly.

1) Use one of the refinable string managed properties and map it to the 'ows_SiteName' crawled property. I used the RefinableString00 managed property.

2) Create a new Result Source on the parent site. Site Settings > Results Sources (under Search). Create a New Result Source. Give it an appropriate name, scroll down, and click the 'Launch Query Builder' button. In the Query text box, add your query as needed. I used "path:"https://company.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename" contentclass:STS_Web  UrlDepth=3" to show the first level of subsites on my parent site. Next, click the SORTING tab, and select your refinable string managed property. Select the OK button.

3) In the Content Search web part query, click the link to 'Switch to Advanced Mode'. Select your newly created Results Source in the drop-down, and clear the Query text box. Select the OK button.

4) If your subsites are still not sorting correctly in the web part, try re-indexing them. On each subsite, go to Site Settings > Search and offline availability (under Search). Click the 'Reindex Site' button.

SharePoint Online: Some CSS Tidbits

For this post, I just wanted to pass along some CSS tidbits I have been using lately on SharePoint Online sites. See below. I have also included a brief explanation in parenthesis next to each comment. Hope you find these helpful.

/* Hide Global Navigation */ (Hide the global, or top level, navigation bar)
#zz11_TopNavigationMenu {
display: none !important;
}
#zz12_TopNavigationMenu {
display: none !important;
}
/* Hide Page Title */ (Hide the page title next to the site logo)
#pageTitle {
display:none;
}
/* Header Banner */ (Use an image to act as the site header banner, and size it as needed)
#s4-titlerow {
background-image: url('/sites/sitename/PublishingImages/image.jpg') !important;
    width: 100% !important;
    height: 53px !important;
    background-repeat: repeat !important;
    }
/* Site Logo Size */ (Increase the size of the logo on the site)
.ms-siteicon-img {
max-width: 281px;
max-height: 60px;
}
/* Search Bar */ (Change the background color of the search bar on the site)
.ms-srch-sb {
background-color: white;
}
/* Web Part Headers */ (Change the background color of the web part headers, and the font size, color, and weight (bold) of the web part titles)
.ms-webpart-titleText.ms-webpart-titleText, .ms-webpart-titleText > a {  
background-color: #BEBEBE;
font-size: 18px;        
font-weight: bold;      
color: #0072c6;        
padding: 5px 5px;    
}

Note: I recommend you use these styles in an external style sheet on your site and reference it in your master page.

The Future of SharePoint: Brighter than Ever!

The SharePoint team at Microsoft has announced some of the new capabilities coming very soon to SharePoint, particularly around OneDrive, Mobile, and Office 365. So far, it looks amazing! Really excited about the future of SharePoint. See link below for article.

The Future of SharePoint

SharePoint 2013 Workflow: Open task form in edit mode when using 'Start a task process' action

When using the 'Start a task process' action in a SharePoint Designer 2013 Workflow, you can create a hyperlink within the email notification body to allow each task to be opened in edit mode by default. Just follow these steps:

1) Implement each step outlined in the "2013 Workflow Task Links Redirect to Edit Form" blog post, by Robyn Courchane.

2) In SharePoint Designer 2013, under the Email Options for your 'Start a task process' action, click the button to open the email editor. By default, the task item hyperlink points to the [%Task: Title%] address, which opens the task item form in display mode. All you have to do is change [%Task: Title%] to [%Task: URL%], as shown in the screenshot below.

3) Select the OK button twice. The hyperlink configuration should now look like the following screenshot.

Save and publish your SharePoint 2013 Workflow. Now, when users receive an email notification issued by the 'Start a task process" action, the task item hyperlink will take them directly to edit mode.

SharePoint 2013: PowerShell to change site logo for all site collections/sites within a particular Web Application

Quick Post: You can use PowerShell in SharePoint 2013 to change the site logo for all site collections and sites within a particular web application. Copy/paste the following into a text file and rename it with a .ps1 extension.

$sitecollections = Get-SPSite -WebApplication http://webappurl ($sitecollections).AllWebs | foreach {$_.SiteLogoUrl = "/PublishingImages/logo.jpg"; $_.Update()}

SharePoint 2013: "The e-mail message cannot be sent. Make sure the e-mail has a valid recipient."

Recently, I ran into an issue in SharePoint 2013 in which a SharePoint workflow would not send email notifications to a few users selected via an InfoPath people picker control. The only thing that fixed it for me was the following.

1) Go directly to the All People list of the root site collection by using the following URL format.
http://[SiteCollectionURL]/_layouts/people.aspx?MembershipGroupId=0

2) Find the users experiencing the issue and remove them.

3) Add permissions to the site for each user again, as needed.

If this issue is occurring to many users throughout your entire SharePoint site collection hierarchy, you can apply the following farm wide fix:

1) stsadm.exe -o sync -deleteolddatabases 0

2) Manually run the User Profile to SharePoint Full Synchronization timer job. This job will take some time to run, but should fix the issue throughout the entire farm.

InfoPath 2013: Open web browser form directly with link in SharePoint workflow email

This may have already been blogged on hundred other sites, but I wanted to make sure it was on my blog as well, for future reference.

While building a SharePoint Designer 2013 workflow, you can create a link within the body of an email alert to open a web browser form directly. Simply follow these steps:

1) In the email body of the workflow, place your cursor where you want to create the link, and click the hyperlink icon to add a new hyperlink (see screenshot below). For the Text to display field, I usually select the Name from the source. For the Address field, click the ellipses button. Complete the next steps in this blog post to get the URL you need for your string build.

2) Open a new instance of the web browser form published to your form library. Copy the URL in the address bar, and paste it to notepad.

3) In notepad, change XsnLocation to XmlLocation, and remove the entire XmlLocation up to where "&DefaultItemOpen=1" begins. You will replace this path in your string build with the Encoded Absolute URL field from the source.

4) Copy/paste your new URL in the String Builder area for the Address field in Step 1. Be sure to add the Encoded Absolute URL field from source for the XmlLocation removed in Step 3.

See screenshot below for an example of a string build for the Address field.