Corey Roth [MVP] : PowerShell

Installing SharePoint 2013 apps with PowerShell

CoreyRoth — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 17:00:00 GMT

My PowerShell posts always prove to be the most popular. I showed all sorts of cool PowerShell tricks in my talk back at SPC12. One of the things I covered was how to install and manage apps using PowerShell. Since there is a corporate catalog and SharePoint store, you might not think you need to install apps with PowerShell, but your developers may choose to the app model for a future internal project, so as an IT Pro you need to know how to install the thing. There are a lot of similarities to working with solution packages but there are several differences to be aware of. The documentation on TechNet is pretty good, but putting it all together can be tricky.

Specific to PowerShell, there is some terminology to familiarize yourself with. You’ll see these for parameter names so you need to know what they are otherwise you’ll find yourself confused.

App Package – physical file containing the app (.app file)
App – an instance of an app installed on a particular subsite

Along with the App, you’ll find an Id property that refers to a GUID of that particular app instance. We’ll talk about that more when it comes to updates.

To begin installing app, we first install the .app file into a site collection and then we deploy the app to an individual subsite. To install the app package, we use Import-SPAppPackage. Specify the path to your app package (.app file) with the –Path parameter. You’ll also need to specify which Site Collection will contain the app using the –Site parameter. Finally, the Source parameter tells SharePoint where the app came from (SharePoint Store, Corporate Catalog, or Object Model). I always specify a value of ObjectModel for my custom apps. Here’s what the command looks like. Assign the results of the command to variable so that you can use it in the next step.

$spapp = Import-SPAppPackage -Path .\spcdemoapp.app -Site http://server/sitecollection –Source ObjectModel

You can always add –confirm:$false to avoid getting prompted.

Now you have the AppPackage installed, you can deploy an instance of it to a subsite using Install-SPApp. You’ll need to provide a URL to the subsite using the –Web parameter and a reference to the imported app package. That’s why we saved the results of the last command into $spapp. Use the following command.

$instance = Install-SPApp -Web http://server/sitecollection/site -Identity $spapp

Like always with PowerShell, no news is good news. At this point, you should find the app installed on the Site Contents pages.

Here’s what it looks like it is running. This is mainly for reference when we start talking about updates.

To determine what apps are installed on a particular subsite use Get-SPAppInstance. This cmdlet can be executed three different ways. You need the id of the App Instance to update, export, or remove it. So often you combine it with a Where-Object command to get a reference to an app instance by name instead of by id.

$instance = Get-SPAppInstance -web http://server/sitecollection/site | Where-Object { $_.Title -eq "MyApp" }

Once you have a reference to the App Instance, removing the app from a subsite is easy with Uninstall-SPAppInstance.

Uninstall-SPAppInstance -Identity $instance

One nice feature of PowerShell is that you have the ability to export an installed app to a .app file using Export-SPAppPackage. It takes a parameter named -App. It expects the value from an instance called .App (so use Get-SPAppInstance as shown above). You also want to specify where to save the file using the –Path parameter.

Export-SPAppPackage –App $instance.App –Path .\ExportApp.app

When it comes to updating apps, that’s where things get a bit tricky. Here is what you need to do:

Get a reference to the existing installed instance using Get-SPAppInstance shown earlier
Import the new app package with Import-SPAppPackage
Use Update-SPAppInstance with a reference to the imported app package and the existing instance

Here are the commands

$instance = Get-SPAppInstance -web http://server/sitecollection/site | Where-Object { $_.Title -eq "MyApp" }

$spappv2 = Import-SPAppPackage -Path .\myapp.app -Site http://server/sitecollection/site -Source ObjectModel

Update-SPAppInstance – Identity $instance –App $spappv2

One thing you might have noticed by now is that there is no way to retrieve which app packages are installed nor is there any way to remove them using PowerShell. This is a bit different than the way we deal with solution packages. I suspect it cleans itself up, but I’m really not sure. I hope these PowerShell commands prove to be useful to you. Let me know if you run into any issues.

How to: Perform a SharePoint 2013 site collection upgrade with PowerShell

CoreyRoth — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 23:11:30 GMT

At SPC12, I gave a talk about PowerShell in SharePoint 2013. In that talk I upgraded a SharePoint 2010 site collection to SharePoint 2013. I wanted to follow-up with a blog post showing the steps involved. To begin the process, I have restored a copy of my content database from my SharePoint 2010 environment on the SQL Server for my SharePoint 2013 environment. The first thing we need to do is mount the content database with Mount-SPContentDatabase. In SharePoint 2010, this process would actually update the database and perform the upgrade. Now, it actually just attaches the database but leaves the site running in SharePoint 2010 mode. Effectively you are running a full copy of SharePoint 2010 inside SharePoint 2013. You can do this and upgrade each site collection one at a time to make the transition process a bit easier.

Typically, when you are doing this, you’ll execute Test-SPContentDatabase first and resolve any reported issues. Just like in SharePoint 2010, you need to install all of your customizations via solution package prior to mounting. Test-SPContentDatabase can help you find some of these customizations if they are missing. For simplicity, I am going to leave that out of my example today. Mount-SPContentDatabase typically takes two parameters: the name of the database and the URL of the Web Application to bind it to. Here is what the command looks like.

Mount-SPContentDatabase –Name DatabaseName –WebApplication http://server

When it runs, you’ll see a progress indicator.

When it finishes, you’ll likely have errors. You can track them down and re-mount. More than likely you’ll always have some kind of error regardless of how hard you try.

Now you can go to the site in your web browser. You’ll see your existing site running in SharePoint 2010 mode along with a banner prompting to start the site collection upgrade process.

You can start the upgrade process right there in the browser, but we want to use PowerShell. We can see the upgrade status of our site collections using Get-SPSite. This cmdlet has been updated to show you the current version (ComaptibilityLevel) of the site collection. A value of 14 represents SharePoint 2010 while a value of 15 represents SharePoint 2013.

Get-SPSite

To upgrade a site collection, test it out first using Test-SPSite. Like Test-SPContentDatabase, this command can help you identify any particular issues. In my case, I am going to upgrade my root site collection.

Test-SPSite http://server/sitecollection

SharePoint 2013 has a new concept for the upgrade evaluation site collection. Effectively this process schedules a job to copy your site collection, upgrade it, and then optionally notify you (if you add the –email parameter). You don’t have to use this, but it’s a good way to test things out if you have a tricky site with a lot of customizations.

Request-SPUpgradeEvaluationSite http://server/sitecollection

Executing the command simply returns you to a command prompt. Later a job will fire off and create the upgrade evaluation site collection. This appears to be controlled by the Create Upgrade Evaluation Site Collections job. It only executes once a day so if you want to get your upgrade evaluation site faster, you can go manually run it. After it completes, you can visit your site by appending –eval to your site collection name (i.e.: http://server/sitecollection-eval). When you visit the site you’ll notice the warning bar at the top telling users that this is only temporary. After 30 days or so the site will get deleted automatically.

As you see I have an error in a web part that I need to correct. This is why upgrade site collections can be useful in finding issues before cutting over.

Let’s upgrade out site collection directly now. I only received warnings from Test-SPSite so I am going to proceed with the upgrade and assume everything is going to work fine. :) We use Upgrade-SPSite to make this happen. Pass the URL to the site collection and be sure and include –VersionUpgrade. It won’t upgrade to the new version if you leave off that parameter.

Upgrade-SPSite http://server/sitecollection –VersionUpgrade

Depending on the size of your site collection, it may take some time. When it finishes, you’ll see something similar to the screen below.

Now, we can visit our upgraded site in the browser.

Site Collections Upgrades are a powerful new feature in SharePoint 2013 which I believe will really make the process smoother. Keep in mind, you can also use the new Copy-SPSite cmdlet to make a copy of your site collection and perform some tests there.

How to: Use PowerShell with SharePoint Online Preview

CoreyRoth — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 13:59:00 GMT

I recently spoke about PowerShell at SharePoint Conference 2012 (SPC195). It turns out PowerShell support slipped into SharePoint Online Preview without a lot of people noticing. In my session at SPC12, I walked users through a lot of common scenarios of using PowerShell with SPO that I wanted to share with you. This post will show you how to get connected to your SharePoint Online tenant and how to do work with sites. In a follow-up post, I’ll show you how to work with users and groups. Keep in mind this only work with SharePoint Online Preview right now. When your existing V14 tenants get upgraded to V15, you will be able to use it then.

To get started, you need to install the SharePoint Online Management Shell. Since this is based on PowerShell 3.0, you need to have that installed. If you have Windows 8 or you are running this on a machine with SharePoint 2013 already, you’re ready to go. However, if you are running Windows 7, you’ll need to install Windows Management Framework 3.0. After you have installed it, simply launch SharePoint Online Management Shell from the start menu. You shouldn’t need to run it as Administrator.

Connecting to SharePoint Online

Before you connect to SharePoint Online, you’ll need to have the username and password for an account with global administrator permissions. You’ll also need to know your tenant admin URL (i.e.: https://mytenant-admin.sharepoint.com). When connecting to SharePoint Online, don’t forget to reference all URLs securely using https. If you try and use http, you will get an error.

To connect to SharePoint Online, use the Connect-SPOService command. It takes the URL to your tenant admin and a username. When you connect, you’ll be prompted for your password.

Connect-SPOService –Url https://mytenant-admin.sharepoint.com –Credential admin@mytenant.onmicrosoft.com

If you connect successfully, you will be returned to the command prompt without error. To see what commands are available, we can use Get-Command and pass it the module Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell.dll. You can get the full list on TechNet.

Get-Command –Module Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell

Getting Site Collections

To work with Site Collections, use Get-SPOSite (TechNet). It can return a single site with the –Identity parameter or it can filter a list of them with the –Filter parameter. The Filter parameter does server side filtering and can be used with the case sensitive operators (-like, –notlike, –eq, and –ne). You can also run it without any parameters to return all site collections.

Get-SPOSite

This doesn’t return the data in the greatest format though. It would be nice to see the full URL and when thinking about upgrades it would nice to see the CompatibilityLevel (either 14 or 15). We can do this by piping the output to Format-Table (ft) and specifying the desired fields.

Get-SPOSite | ft Url, CompatibilityLevel

You’ll notice that the CompatibilityLevel came back as 0 here. This is because, Get-SPOSite uses CSOM under the hood and it does not request all values by default. To get this data, you need to add the –Detailed parameter.

Get-SPOSite –Detailed | ft Url, CompatibilityLevel

The syntax of the server side filtering can be a bit tricky. The key thing to remember is that the operators are case sensitive so they must be lower-case. In the example, below I do a server-side filter looking for any site with the word “Contoso” in the URL. Put the expression you are searching for in braces.

Get-SPOSite –Filter {Url -like “*term*} | Ft Url

One thing you may have noticed is that there are not any commands to create subsites. Currently only site collections are supported.

Creating Site Collections

Site Collections can be created using the New-SPOSite (TechNet) cmdlet. This cmdlet takes a heap of parameters. Note that you still have to use the preset managed paths available to you in SharePoint Online.

-Url – full URL of the site collection (don’t forget to use https)
-Owner – full user name of site owner (i.e.: admin@mytenant.onmicrosoft.com)
-StorageQuota – in MB
-ResourceQuota – number of resources to allocate
-Template (Optional) – i.e.: STS#0 – Use Get-SPOWebTemplate to view a list of available templates
-Title (Optional) – name of site collection
-NoWait – instructs PowerShell not to wait until the cmdlet is finished

New-SPOSite -Url https://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename -Owner "admin@mytenant.onmicrosoft.com" -StorageQuota "500" -NoWait -ResourceQuota "500" -Template "STS#0" -Title "Site Title"

As mentioned above, you can run Get-SPOWebTemplate to return a list of available site templates.

Get-SPOWebTemplate

Deleting Site Collections

To delete a site collection simply, use Remove-SPOSite (TechNet) and pass it the URL in the Identity parameter. It can also optionally take the –NoWait parameter was well.

Remove-SPOSite –Identity https://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename –NoWait

Restoring Site Collections

Deleted site collections get moved to the site collection recycle bin. To restore a site collection that you have deleted, use Restore-SPODeletedSite (TechNet). It takes the same parameters as Remove-SPOSite.

Restore-SPODeletedSite –Identity https://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename –NoWait

Upgrading Site Collections

SharePoint Online also has the concept of deferred site collection upgrades. This means you can upgrade the site collections one-by-one or in batch using PowerShell. To run the Site Collection health check first, use Test-SPOSite (TechNet) and pass it the URL in the identity parameter. Once you are ready to upgrade use Upgrade-SPOSite (TechNet). Be sure and pass the –V2VUpgrade parameter or it won’t upgrade it.

Test-SPOSite -Identity http://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename

Upgrade-SPOSite -Identity http://mytenant.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename -V2VUpgrade

Unfortunately, I don’t have a tenant that can be upgraded yet, so I can’t provide a screenshot of this procedure.

Hopefully, you found these PowerShell cmdlets useful. I think they will help a lot when it comes to working with SharePoint Online. In the next post, we’ll cover how to work with users and groups.

Copying Site Collections with PowerShell in SharePoint 2013 Preview

CoreyRoth — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 03:44:06 GMT

I’m working on my PowerShell for SharePoint 2013 (SPC195) talk for SPC12 and I find this new cmdlet so useful I thought I would share it immediately. The cmdlet is Copy-SPSite and it’s easy to use. Just run it and before you know it, you’ll have a duplicate of a site collection on a fresh new URL. You can even optionally specify a new content database. Here is what it looks like:

Copy-SPSite http://server/sitecollection –DestinationDatabase MyContentDb –TargetUrl http://server/sitecollection2

A successful execution will return nothing at the command prompt. This is a great cmdlet for developers and IT pros that often need to quickly clone site collections and tear them down. It will take longer for bigger site collections of course. Try it out today.

How to: Seed Search Suggestions in SharePoint 2013 Preview

CoreyRoth — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 20:17:53 GMT

I was digging through some new PowerShell cmdlets for one of my talks coming up at SharePoint Conference 2012 (SPC12), and I stumbled upon the new cmdlet Import-SPEnterpriseSearchPopularQueries. I found this cmdlet to be interesting since it can be used to easily seed what shows up in the search suggestions on a given site. I took the example there and did some tweaking and thought I would share my results.

We first, need to get a reference to the Search Service Application Proxy using Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplicationProxy. Sorry, the cmdlets for search a bit wordy so that is what the Tab key is for. :)

$ssap = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplicationProxy

Search suggestions are actually specific to the result source and site that hosts the search box. This means you could have different suggestions depending on which part of the site you are on. To achieve that, we need to get a reference to the web hosting the search center and ultimately a result source object. Let’s get the web first. Change the URL to match your server’s search center.

$searchWeb = Get-SPWeb -Identity http://myserver/search

Now, we will use the Federation Manager to get a result source. However, we need a Search Object Owner first. The example on TechNet requires a lot more typing. I luckily found the cmdlet Get-SPSearchObjectOwner. It takes a scope (Level) and an SPWeb object.

$owner = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchOwner -Level SPWeb -SPWeb $searchWeb

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a command to directly get a result source so that means we actually have to go through the API to get a Federation Manager first.

$mgr = new-object Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.Query.FederationManager -ArgumentList $ssap

Once we have the manager object, we use the GetSourceByName method passing it the name of the result source and $owner. In this case, we use “Local SharePoint Results" as the result source name.

$source = $mgr.GetSourceByName("Local SharePoint Results", $owner)

As far as the query suggestions themselves, we will need to create a CSV file with the data. The format is simple: Query Text,Query Count,Click Count,LCID. For example:

SharePoint Conference,500,300,1033

Setting these values allows you to control the order in which items appear in the query suggestions. For suggestions to appear in the search box, the click count must be at least 5. 1033 is the LCID value for English. Here is what my file looks like:

Now, we run the Import-SPEnterpriseSearchPopularQueries cmdlet. It needs the SearchApplicationProxy, Filename, and ResultSource parameters which we retrieved with the previous lines of script.

Import-SPEnterpriseSearchPopularQueries -SearchApplicationProxy $ssap -Filename .\suggestions.csv -ResultSource $source -Web $searchWeb

If all commands execute successfully, you should not see anything returned at the command prompt. Now, you can begin using your suggestions right away. You do not need to recrawl. Go to the search center that you specified in your $searchWeb object. Start typing some of the values from your suggestions and you will see them beneath the search box.

This new PowerShell cmdlet makes it so easy to seed your search suggestions. I think I will start recommending this on new deployments to really improve the immediate value of search. Try it out today.

Adding and Deploying Sandboxed Solutions Using PowerShell

CoreyRoth — Tue, 22 May 2012 02:09:27 GMT

One of my most popular posts on DotNetMafia.com is my post on using PowerShell to add and deploy SharePoint solution packages (.wsp files). However, in that post, I never went in detail in deploying sandboxed solutions. Today, I want to talk about that and show you what you need to know. I started by using Visual Studio 11 to build a sandboxed solution using the new Visual Web Part.

To get started with PowerShell, run the SharePoint 2010 Management Console located in your Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products folder on your start menu. This automatically loads the Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell snappin so that we can execute SharePoint commands. To install a solution we will use the Add-SPUserSolution command. It takes two parameters. Specify –literalpath, which is the path to the solution file. One thing that is different is that you must specify the full path to the file for some reason. You then need to specify the URL to the site collection with the –site parameter. Here is an example.

Add-SPUserSolution –LiteralPath c:\code\SandboxedSolutionProject.wsp –Site http://sp2010/sites/sandbox

It looks like this in PowerShell. If it executes successfully, you’ll just be returned to the command prompt.

We can now see our .wsp file in the solution gallery.

We can see the solution package but note that it is not activated. For that, we need Install-SPUserSolution. It’s parameters are similar. We use –Identity with the name of the solution package (minus the path) and the –Site parameter with the URL of the site collection again.

Install-SPUserSolution –Identity SandboxedSolutionProject.wsp –Site http://sp2010/sites/sandbox

Once activated you can confirm it in the solutions gallery. You can now activate features as desired (using PowerShell if you want).

At some point, you might want to remove your solution. We can do that with PowerShell as well. First, we need to deactivate the solution using Uninstall-SPUserSolution. It takes the exact same parameter as Install-SPUserSolution.

Uninstall-SPUserSolution –Identity SandboxedSolutionProject.wsp –Site http://sp2010/sites/sandbox

Many of these commands may prompt you with an “Are you sure?” type prompt. You can skip this prompt by adding a –confirm parameter. Now, the last step is to remove the .wsp file from the solution store. For that, we’ll use Remove-SPUserSolution. It uses the –Identity and –Url parameters like the other commands. Just pass the name of the solution package along with the URL of the site collection.

Remove-SPUserSolution –Identity SandboxedSolutionProject.wsp –Site http://sp2010/sites/sandbox

Now the solution is gone from the Solutions gallery. I like to automate everything that I can so these simple PowerShell commands should help if you are working with sandboxed solutions.

How to: Make Windows 7 PowerShell look like the SharePoint Management Shell

CoreyRoth — Mon, 21 May 2012 20:54:03 GMT

I love me some PowerShell. I use it a lot in the context of SharePoint 2010, but I use it just as much on my own laptop. If you have been administering and configuring SharePoint enough, you have become accustomed to the shape and size of the PowerShell window that you get when you run the SharePoint Management Shell. That’s just the way I prefer things to look when I am in the command prompt now. However, by default, when you run PowerShell in Windows 7, you get this huge window that is just cumbersome.

That’s why I thought I would share these quick configuration settings to make your PowerShell experience in Windows 7 just like in SharePoint. Start by finding PowerShell in the start menu, right click and go to Properties. Jump over the Layout tab and you will find the first settings we need to change.

Let’s compare it to the settings on the SharePoint Management Shell.

From the screenshots, you can tell there are a few differences in the Screen buffer size and the Window Size. Let’s talk about Window size first. Start by reducing the Window size width from 120 to 80. You then want to change the Window size height from 50 to 25. You then want to adjust the Screen buffer size. I set the Width to match with a new value of 80. However, I leave the height at 3000, because having a bigger screen buffer is nice when you want to scroll back and look at something. Here are what my modified settings look like.

Once you’ve changed the layout, you may want to also change the color back to black instead of the Windows 7 default color. That’s easy to do by going to the Colors tab. Just click on the black box with Screen background selected.

That’s all there is to it. Click OK and then open a new PowerShell window. Your new command prompt will look just like the one in SharePoint 2010.

So it’s kind of weird tip for today but I find it useful because I like it when PowerShell looks this way. :) Try it out and see for yourself. You can customize other value as well.

Error: Update-SPProfilePhotoStore : Object reference not set to an instance of an object

CoreyRoth — Wed, 02 May 2012 22:48:01 GMT

I like blogging about errors and their resolutions. Sometimes the answer is simple, but I think there is a lot of value in posting the details of an error so that users can find answers in the search engines. After doing a My Sites upgrade from SharePoint 2007, you will have a whole heap of user photos that you need to beat into submission. This command goes through all of the existing user photos and creates thumbnails. This is often useful when a user has uploaded a giant image of themselves and you need to fix it. To do this, you may be familiar with the PowerShell command Update-SPProfilePhotoStore. You call it by passing the URL to your My Sites host.

Update-SPProfilePhotoStore http://mysitehosturl

If you don’t have the right permissions, you will find yourself with the following error:

Update-SPProfilePhotoStore : Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
At line:1 char:27
+ Update-SPProfilePhotoStore <<<< -MySiteHostLocation http://mysites
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidData: (Microsoft.Offic...ofilePhotoStore:
   SPCmdletUserProfilePhotoStore) [Update-SPProfilePhotoStore], NullReference
Exception
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.PowerShell.
   SPCmdletUserProfilePhotoStore

Now clearly to you that means you don’t have the right permissions, correct? Of course not. To run this command, you need the permissions as defined in this post on MSDN blogs. Now, you could take the easy way out and just run PowerShell as the farm account. However, I know you know better. Just go set up the right permissions and you’ll be set. The post on MSDN summarizes them as follows:

Go to Service Applications, select your User Profile Service Application, and then click Permissions. Add your account and check the Full Control checkbox.
Select the User Profile Service Application, and then click the Administrators button. Add your account there and check the Manage Profiles checkbox and nothing else.

Note that you can add groups on the Administrators section but you can’t on the Permissions section. Once you do that, run PowerShell with the Run as Administrator option and run Update-SPProfile again. It should execute without an object reference error.

How to: Activate a feature on multiple site collections using PowerShell

CoreyRoth — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 02:40:37 GMT

A lot of times we have a need to activate a feature on multiple site collections. This could be a custom feature to do branding or you may simply be activating publishing on multiple site collections. PowerShell makes tasks like these easy. We’ll take what we learned from my original Activating Features with PowerShell post and use some common techniques to iterate through the site collections and activate the desired feature.

For this example, we’ll activate the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure. The internal name of that feature is actually PublishingSite so we’ll start by using PowerShell to get a reference to that feature. We’ll assign the result of that value to a variable.

$feature = Get-SPFeature PublishingSite

If this is your first time working with this feature, be sure and test it by typing it into PowerShell to ensure that you are getting the reference to the feature correctly. Once you have the feature we can get a list of site collections. Retrieving site collections is simple.

$siteCollections = Get-SPSite

However, this will return every site collection from every web application. You probably want to limit it to a single web application using the –WebApplication parameter like this:

$siteCollections = Get-SPSite –WebApplication http://sp2010

We can then just use ForEach-Object to iterate through each site collection and then activate the feature. I use a pipe bind with the $siteCollections variable. Then I just use the Enable-SPFeature command passing it $feature for the feature and the Url to the site collection which we can get from the Url property of the $_ object. I also wrote some output to the screen so we could see which site collection was activating. Here is what the whole script looks like.

$feature = Get-SPFeature PublishingSite
$siteCollections = Get-SPSite –WebApplication http://sp2010
$siteCollections | foreach-object {
Write-Host "Activating" $feature.DisplayName "on" $_.Url
Enable-SPFeature $feature -Url $_.Url
}

Of course this works with deactivation as well too. I just updated the script to use Disable-SPFeature instead.

$feature = Get-SPFeature PublishingSite
$siteCollections = Get-SPSite –WebApplication http://sp2010
$siteCollections | foreach-object {
Write-Host "Deactivating" $feature.DisplayName "on" $_.Url
Disable-SPFeature $feature -Url $_.Url -confirm:$false
}

Note that I added –confrim:$false to the Disable-SPFeature line to prevent being prompted by the script.

This is a simple script that makes it easy to activate and deactivate features in bulk. This same logic could be applied to site scoped features as well if you had the need.

Configuring Site Collection Search Settings with PowerShell

CoreyRoth — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:28:11 GMT

I’m always looking for a way to automate things and configuring the search settings of a site collection is no exception. I’ve talked about the Search Settings page before and how important it is for configuring contextual search and the scope drop down on your master page. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to automate these changes instead of having to manually set it on every site collection?

To configure these settings, we first must understand where they are. It turns out that they can be found in the AllProperties collection of the root SPWeb object in a site collection. On a new site collection or on one where you have never configured the search settings, no values will exist in the property bag for search. However, one you go to the search settings page and click save, it will write the values into the property bag. As you may know, the search settings page has three configurable fields. These values on the search settings page map to the values below in the property bag.

Setting	Property Bag Name
Site Collection Search Center	SRCH_ENH_FTR_URL
Site Collection Search Dropdown Mode	SRCH_SITE_DROPDOWN_MODE
Site Collection Search Results Page	SRCH_TRAGET_RESULTS_PAGE

Now what goes in each value? SRCH_ENH_FTR_URL typically takes a relative URL (i.e. /search/pages). However, it can take full URL as well. SRCH_SITE_DROPDOWN_MODE requires you pass a special string based upon what you want the drop down to display (i.e.: Show Scopes, Don’t Show Scopes, Default to s parameter, etc.) How do you know what string to pass? Well the easiest way to determine this is to go to the Search Settings page of the site collection and view source. Search for the drop down mode you want and you will find the string in the value parameter of an option element. Here is what it looks like.

<option selected="selected" value="HideScopeDD_DefaultContextual">Do not show scopes      
    dropdown, and default to contextual scope</option>      
<option value="HideScopeDD">Do not show scopes dropdown, and default to target results      
    page</option>      
<option value="ShowDD">Show scopes dropdown</option>      
<option value="ShowDD_DefaultURL">Show, and default to 's' URL parameter</option>      
<option value="ShowDD_DefaultContextual">Show and default to contextual scope</option>      
<option value="ShowDD_NoContextual">Show, do not include contextual scopes</option>      
<option value="ShowDD_NoContextual_DefaultURL">Show, do not include contextual scopes,      
    and default to 's' URL parameter</option>

For example, I typically use the option Show and default to contextual scope, so I would choose ShowDD_DefaultContextual.

The last value, SRCH_TRAGET_RESULTS_PAGE cracks me up. Note how the word target is misspelled. It looks like something slipped past QA there. This value specifies the URL to the contextual search page. Typically, I change this to use the URL to my search center as I have mentioned before. Anyhow, if you want to set this value be sure and misspell it.

Now that we know what values we need to set, how do we put it all together with PowerShell? It’s pretty simple. First we need access to the SPWeb object of the root web of the site collection we want to change. You can use Get-SPSite first to do this, but if you know the URL, then you can just use Get-SPWeb. Either way you do it, get yourself an SPWeb object. Here is an example:

$web = Get-SPWeb http://server/sitecollection

If you have the right permissions, you should get a blank prompt back without error. If you get an access denied error, then you need to go make use of Add-SPShellAdmin.

Now that you have the SPWeb object, you can see if any values have been set for search by using the AllProperties collection.

$web.AllProperties

In my case, no properties have been set yet. Now I can set my values. You can set one or more of these in your script.

$web.AllProperties["SRCH_ENH_FTR_URL"] = "/search/pages";
$web.AllProperties["SRCH_SITE_DROPDOWN_MODE"] = "ShowDD_DefaultContextual";
$web.AllProperties["SRCH_TRAGET_RESULTS_PAGE"] = "http://server/search/pages/results.aspx";

After you set your values, don’t forget to call .Update() just like you would when working directly with the object model.

$web.Update();

Executing the script should just return you to the PowerShell prompt if everything worked. You can verify your settings, by looking in the AllProperties collection. For example. Just make sure you get a new instance of the SPWeb object first or you won’t see the changes.

$web = Get-SPWeb http://server/sitecollection
$web.AllProperties["SRCH_ENH_FTR_URL"]

As you can see it’s really simple. Now what if you wanted to set these settings on all site collections?

$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication http://server;
$siteCollections = $webApp | Get-SPSite –limit all;
$siteCollections | ForEach-Object {
$web = $_.RootWeb
$web.AllProperties["SRCH_ENH_FTR_URL"] = "/search/pages";
$web.AllProperties["SRCH_SITE_DROPDOWN_MODE"] = "ShowDD_DefaultContextual";
$web.AllProperties["SRCH_TRAGET_RESULTS_PAGE"] = "http://server/search/pages/results.aspx";
$web.Update();
}

Try that out and see if that works for you.

How to: Enable Clip Art with PowerPoint Web App SP1

CoreyRoth — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:38:32 GMT

When SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 came out, I noticed the following line in the release notes regarding Office Web Apps.

“Lets you insert clip art in PowerPoint Web App. (By default clip art support is disabled. An administrator can decide to enable it.)”

However, it didn’t say how to enable it. I looked all over the Internet multiple times and never found a solution. I knew it had to be some property I could set with PowerShell but guessing the right one and how to set it was the question. On a recent search, I came across this support article on Symantec web site where someone was having an issue and it was then I discovered the property name, EnableClipArt. On a whim, I decided to give it a try.

Here is what your ribbon bar looks like before you enable clip art:

To enable it, we can build a simple PowerShell script. You will need to determine the name to your PowerPoint Service Application’s proxy. In my case, mine is PowerPoint Service Application Proxy.

Now for the script. Remember to change the name of your proxy to match your environment.

$proxy = Get-SPServiceApplicationProxy | Where-Object { $_.DisplayName -eq "PowerPoint Service Application Proxy" }
$proxy.EnableClipart=1
$proxy.Update()

When it completes successfully, PowerShell will just return you a new prompt without an error. Now, edit your PowerPoint document again in the browser and you should see the Clip Art ribbon button enabled.

Select a valid region in a slide to do an Insert and click the Clip Art button. It will then let you search the online library of clip art for use in your slides.

Select the image you like and you will see it in your slide deck.

It’s simple to enable this support. I wish I could have found this documented sooner. I hope you enjoy this functionality. I was curious to see if this functionality was present in SharePoint Online (Office 365), but unfortunately it doesn’t look like it is there yet.

That’s not a deal breaker though for Office 365. Maybe we will see it in the future.

SharePoint PowerShell Error: The local farm is not accessible. Cmdlets with FeatureDependencyId are not registered.

CoreyRoth — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 14:05:59 GMT

Sometimes when you try to run a SharePoint 2010 Management Shell (PowerShell), you might encounter the error below.

The local farm is not accessible. Cmdlets with FeatureDependencyId are not registered.

Although, the answer is not obvious given the error message, the answer is quite simple. You tried to run PowerShell with a user account that is not an administrator in SharePoint. In this case, I had ran it with my personal account which is not an admin and does not have access to the underlying SharePoint databases. Hopefully, you used a “setup” account when you created SharePoint. Execute PowerShell with that account instead. You can do this either by logging in as that user. You can also hold down the Shift key and right click on the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell icon and choose the Run as different user menu item.

If you don’t have a setup account, things might be a bit trickier. You can also resolve this by running it as the farm account, but you really want to try and avoid this.

FAST Search for SharePoint PowerShell Error: Failed to communicate with the WCF service

CoreyRoth — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 20:22:31 GMT

One day when I wasn’t thinking, I encountered the following error when trying to execute a FAST Search for SharePoint PowerShell command such as Get-FASTSearchContentCollection.

Get-FASTSearchContentCollection : Failed to communicate with the WCF service.
At line:1 char:32
+ Get-FASTSearchContentCollection <<<<
    + CategoryInfo          : OperationStopped: (:) [Get-FASTSearchContentCollection], AdminException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : e107: Failed to communicate with the WCF service
   .,Microsoft.SharePoint.Search.Extended.Administration.Commandlets.GetCollectionCommand

Searching on the Internet yields the following KB article. However, this article did not resolve my issue. In fact, the cause was actually a much simpler solution. I realized I was running the PowerShell window with my personal account. Obviously, this account does not have the required permissions needed inside FAST. To correct the issue, I just did Run as Different User (hold down shift while right clicking on the icon), to run PowerShell with my fastuser account. Once I did that, I could execute the commands I needed.

An easier way to enable Managed Metadata site columns when using the Blank Site template

CoreyRoth — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 21:24:30 GMT

Whenever you use the Blank Site template for a site collection, a lot of supporting features that you may want are not activated. One of these is the feature for Managed Metadata site columns. When you pick one, you might see the following error.

The required feature is not enabled for this column type.

That’s nice, but why don’t you actually tell me the feature name that I need to activate? I’ve seen a lot of posts on this, and they state to activate the required feature using PowerShell using the GUID of the feature. Some even, dare I say it, recommend you use stsadm. Tsk. Tsk. I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember the GUID off the top of my head. I got tired of having to look up a post every time I need to activate this feature on a new site collection so I decided to figure out what the name was.

If you’ve read my previous PowerShell posts, you know that we can figure this out with Get-SPFeature. This told me that the feature name was actually TaxonomyFieldAdded. Now all we have to do to activate is use the Enable-SPFeature command as you see below. In my case, I am activating it at the site collection located at http://sp2010/sites/deployment.

Enable-SPFeature -Id TaxonomyFieldAdded –Url http://sp2010/sites/deployment

If all goes well, you’ll get a blank prompt back indicating success. Now when you try to create your managed metadata site column, it should work successfully.

Even if you’re not great with PowerShell, I find that this command is pretty easy to remember. Try it out.

Activating and Deactivating Features with PowerShell in SharePoint 2010

CoreyRoth — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 21:53:08 GMT

I was looking at the analytics of the site the other day and I noticed that my post, Adding and Deploying Solutions with PowerShell, currently has the most traffic on the site. I had always intended to write a follow up post on this, so here it is. Today I’m going to talk about how to enable and disable features using PowerShell. It’s great that you know how to deploy solutions now with PowerShell, but now you want to activate your features.

In SharePoint 2007 to activate a feature from the command line you might have used a statement like the one below. I’ll use the Reporting feature on my server named sp2010 as an example. The value specified in the name parameter refers to the actual folder name of the feature that is in your SharePoint Root folder (14 hive).

stsadm.exe –o activatefeature –name Reporting –url http://sp2010

To get started with PowerShell, run the SharePoint 2010 Management Console located in your Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products folder on your start menu. This automatically loads the Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell snapin so that we can execute SharePoint commands. You might have noticed earlier that I said we will talk about enabling and disabling features. The words enable and disable are key here because PowerShell uses those verbs to activate and deactivate features. To issue the same command above but with PowerShell, we use the Enable-SPFeature command. The rest of the syntax is pretty similar as you can see below. Just use –Identity to specify the name of the feature. You can even pass the –Force command like you could with stsadm.exe.

Enable-SPFeature –Identity Reporting –url http://sp2010

If your command worked successfully, you will see nothing and just get a blank prompt back.

If you would like to get some feedback from the command, you can have it return the SPFeature object back to you by specifying the –PassThru parameter.

We can confirm that the feature did in fact activate successfully using the SharePoint UI.

Can we confirm that the feature is enabled with PowerShell? Yes, we can by using Get-SPFeature. Now this cmdlet behaves differently depending upon the parameters passed through it. For example, if you type the following, it lists every feature on the SharePoint farm along with its Id and Scope.

Get-SPFeature

However, if you want to know which features are enabled, you can pass it a URL for a given scope (i.e.: –Web, –Site, –WebApplication, and –Farm). So to get a list of all Site Collection scoped features, we would use the –Site parameter.

Get-SPFeature –Site http://sp2010

You can still specify a specific feature or even use Where-Object to query the list as well.

Get-SPFeature –Identity Reporting –Site http://sp2010

If you get something like you see in the screenshot above, you know the feature has been activated. When the feature hasn’t been activated, you will get a lovely red error message.

The Enable-SPFeature command can also take a Pipe Bind from Get-SPFeature. This means that you could even activate multiple features at once this way. I’ll include an example of this in the future.

At some point, you will want to disable that feature you activated. As you probably guessed, the cmdlet you want is Disable-SPFeature. You use the same parameters that you use with Enable-SPFeature. When you execute the command, it prompts for confirmation as you can see in the screenshot.

Disable-SPFeature –Identity Reporting –url http://sp2010

If you want to disable confirmation, you can pass the –confirm:$false parameter.

Disable-SPFeature –Identity Reporting –url http://sp2010 –Confirm:$false

Setting the confirm parameter eliminates the confirmation prompt and you can use it with other PowerShell cmdlets as well. That is all that is involved in activating and deactivating features with PowerShell. It’s pretty easy. Hopefully, you can incorporate these commands in your deployment scripts.