Issues with August 2015 CU for SharePoint 2013

We happened to patch our Q&A environment with August 2015 CU and we noticed few issues while installing the CU and also while testing the farm after the successful installation of the August 2015 CU for SharePoint 2013 . It’s a know fact that starting from SharePoint Server 2013 , it is no longer necessary to install the Foundation CU before the Server CU .The server CU already has the fixes for the foundation version and hence you can directly install the SharePoint Server 2013 CU .Now, lets talk about the issues which we noticed while installing the CU …..

Link for the CU :_ https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3055009

  1. The August 2015 CU for SharePoint 2013 doesn’t get installed properly when you attempt to do so .It fails for the first time giving no clue of what caused the failure to happen and once again it fails in the second attempt .Finally, if you try to run it for the third time it installs smoothly without any error .This is weird but at this point Microsoft has accepted this as an issue and hasn’t announced any fix for this yet .

It’s good to see that Microsoft has already documented this issue :_ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tehnoonr/archive/2015/08/28/sharepoint-2013-august-2015-cumulative-update-package-fails-to-install.aspx

2. Now the second issue is with the “Search” .As you must be already aware that the August 2015 CU is mainly focused on hybrid search. The August 2015 CU seems to cause some trouble to the search centre after its installed .

Steps to repro the issue which I’m talking about related to search:
1. Go to search and type a user’s name in the search box .
2. When the results are presented , retype or change the query and run a search again , this time you will get an error which says “Field or property “TimeZoneId” does not exist and also a correlation ID related to that error . You can repro this if you try to toggle between the “Result sources” i.e. “Everything” and “ Associates “ in the search page.
3. You won’t get this error when you do the search query for the first time , just try to repeat it again and toggle between the “result sources” and then you will notice this error. Also if you switch between different user names in the search box you will notice this error .

Looks like many users have noticed this issue and this issue was supposed to be fixed with the July 2015 CU and it hasn’t been fixed yet.  Please check the “comments” area in the below mentioned blog to know more about this :  http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_gossner/archive/2015/08/11/august-2015-cu-for-sharepoint-2013-is-available-for-download.aspx

3. I carried on my testing once again and found another issue as well . Looks like Microsoft has reported this as a Bug and no fix has been announced yet . Please check the link below to know about this issue :

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/5dc44e6e-b5bd-47f8-a75d-71c9841f9ace/august-2015-cu-list-attachments-give-file-names-cant-contain-the-following-characters-message?forum=sharepointadmin

Hope Microsoft comes up with a fix for this bugs ASAP .

New and improved features in SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview

Visit the post for more.

Source: New and improved features in SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview

New and improved features in SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt346121(v=office.16).aspx

Deprecated or removed features in SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview

This  technet link gives a detailed explanation of the deprecated or removed features in SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt346112(v=office.16).aspx

Note: Since this is only the preview version I think this list is subjected to change in the mere future . Also please be mindful that the “Tags” and “Notes” feature is removed in SharePoint Online too.

SharePoint 2013 Permission Report: Check Access Rights for a Specific User

I’m pretty sure that by now many of the SharePoint SME’s out there would have tried the “Check access rights script for a specific user” . Now if you’re new to this , please take a look at the link below to understand what this script is all about .It’s a very powerful tool with some limitations.  I happened to work with this script recently and listed below is my experience with this script .

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/SharePoint-Permission-2840f327

  1. It doesn’t get really granular and looks for all the bits and pieces and retrieve the complete information we are looking for .For instance it can’t get the permission assigned on a list item and its just stops at the list level .In addition to that it doesn’t look for the security groups too. 
  2. The script takes atleast not less than 30 mins to 1 hour to run depending upon the size of the FARM and the contents it has as it has to go through all the contents in the FARM . So its better you run this script on a server which is properly scaled out .
  3. Another annoying fact about this script is , the final report displays the list of all the sites where the “NTAuthority\Authenticates users” group and the “Everyone” group is added . For sure every user in the domain would be a part of this group and its really annoying to see the  report displaying  all those results which we don’t really need . Moreover it would be  great if the result just displays the list of the sites where the user was explicitly added . 

Powershell command to manually create a user’s “My site” in SharePoint

Powershell command to manually create a “My site” in SharePoint:

The “My site” in SharePoint normally gets created by the instantiation process when a user tries to access his/her “My site” for the first time .Now this process depends on how you have configured this functionality to work in your environment. It could either be configured in a way such that the “My site” is already created for the users in the FARM or may be the users need to access their “My site” for the first time and then the instantiation process would run which will then create a “My site” for the user.

This can also be done manually using Powershell .

Mentioned below is the Powershell command which is used to manually create a user’s “My site” …

$site=Get-SPSite “https://my.sharepoint.com”
$serviceContext = Get-SPServiceContext -Site $site
$userProfileConfigManager = New-Object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager($serviceContext)
$testuser = $userProfileConfigManager.GetUserProfile(“domain\username”)
$testuser.PersonalSiteInstantiationState
$testuser.CreatePersonalSite()

Note: Please make sure that you’re logged into the SharePoint server using the FARM account while running this command .Also make sure that the account running this command has enough permissions in the user profile service application too. 

SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview

SharePoint2016

SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview:

Ever since Microsoft announced the next on-premises of SharePoint ( i.e. SharePoint Server 2016) on Ignite this May , the term ” SharePoint 2016″ has caught the attention of many SharePoint geeks and everyone is keenly looking for its release date ….Now its quite obvious and a well known fact that Microsoft has added many advanced features to this release version which can add more value to the business and also offer a lot to IT Pros and Developers .

Today Microsoft has announced the availability of both SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview and the new cloud hybrid search preview for SharePoint Server 2013 and 2016. Please check the Blog below for complete info:

https://blogs.office.com/2015/08/24/announcing-availability-of-sharepoint-server-2016-it-preview-and-cloud-hybrid-search/

Download link for SharePoint Server 2016 Preview : 

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48712

Some useful documentation on SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview :

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303422(v=office.16).aspx