SPServices in the Office 365 Developer Podcast

Today Randy Drisgill (@drisgill) alerted me to the fact that Jeremy Thake (@jthake) and Steve Walker (@sharepointing) were talking about me in the Office 365 Developer Podcast: Episode 018 with Steve Walker on SharePoint UX developer guidance. While they do indeed say some very nice things about me (those payments to Redmond are working out),…

Microsoft Cloud Show Episode 016 – Interview with Marc Anderson on Recent Changes Impacting Customers on Office 365

A few weeks back, I sat down (virtually, of course) with Andrew Connell (@AndrewConnell) and Chris Johnson (@LoungeFlyZ) to record an episode of the Microsoft Cloud Show. Andrew was in Florida, I was in Boston, and Chris was way around the world in New Zealand. Ah, the wonders of modern technology. The only place to…

Getting Around SharePoint’s Threshold Limits for Large Reference Lists

In SharePoint 2007, we could build lists that contained as many items as we wanted and access them in any way we wanted. We may have done stupid things that were bad for server performance, but if we knew what we were doing there were few limits. We had the mythical “2000 item” rule of…

Office 365 Update Changes ‘Display Name’ on Required Fields

Observant SPServices user GregRT noticed something on Office365 today that I figured couldn’t be true. He posted the following in the discussions on the SPServices Codeplex site: FYI – I had left my debug on. Users were getting errors on there forms that a field could not be found by SPServices. MSFT has changed the…

InfoPath Forms with Master Page Applied or Script Enabled

Say what you will about InfoPath. It’s a dead technology, it’s not getting any Microsoft love, it’s only for the wealthy (Forms Services is only available only in Enterprise -level CALs of SharePoint), it has no future. I’ve heard all of these and more. That said, it’s a pretty solid technology and works. We can…

InfoPath 2013 Forms on Office365 with External REST DataSources

I’m building a reasonably complex form with InfoPath 2013 in which I need to look up data for some dropdowns from several external REST Web Services. The REST services are available publicly and anonymously, so authentication isn’t any issue. For example, say I have a field on the form which displays values for Category in a dropdown….

Thoughts on ‘In the New World Order, Microsoft’s Biggest Competition is IT’

There’s an excellent article on WindowsITPro, posted on September 5, 2013, by Rod Trent called In the New World Order, Microsoft’s Biggest Competition is IT. I encourage you to read the article in its entirety, but a few bits stand out for me. …for [Microsoft’s Cloud offerings] to actually work, Microsoft also has to alter…

Configuring Lync Public IM Connectivity on Office365: But Can I Really Use It?

I use Office365 on an E1 plan to run my massive business of one. With that plan, I get Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync. It’s a fantastic deal for about $10 a month and works great for me. I’ve sort of ignored the Lync component since there are so many other (somewhat better) options out there….