Sunday, December 28, 2014

Maintain multiple copies of same document effectively using “Manage Copies” feature

Sometimes we need to have copies of same document in multiple SharePoint sites. Let’s assume that each site should contain important documents as shown below.

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Above setup prompts us following questions

Q1. Is it a good practice to upload documents manually in each site?

Q2. What if we have thousands of sites?

Q3. What if those documents need to be updated regularly?

Above valid questions leads us to keep those documents centrally and publish copies to whatever locations they need to be.

We can achieve above task using SharePoint search, but with few limitations

  • Original location of documents are visible to end users
  • Difficult to check amount of copies (in published sites) from the original document location
  • Difficult to publish a particular version only to a selected sites
  • and many more…

How can we overcome above limitations?

Instead of using search, we can use out of the box and heavily underrated “Manage Copies” feature.

Following are the steps to publish and share documents using “Manage Copies” feature

1. Store documents in a document library

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2. Select the document and click on “Manage Copies” icon

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3. Click on “New Copy” link and provide the URL of the destination site

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3. I prefer to click on “Update Copies” link to copy documents instantly

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3. We can check destination libraries to see the success

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As shown above we can maintain multiple copies of the same documents, where we can store the original document centrally.

As we have now solved half of the problem, let’s focus on how to update copies of a particular document.

Let’s say that there is an amendment to the leave policy and we have thousands of project sites those having copies of that leave policy. How can we reflect the change to those sites? It’s very easy. Following are the steps

1. Check Out the document in the original document library

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2. Do the change to the document

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3. Save the document and Check In. Remember to select “Update copies of this document with the new version” option

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4. This will prompt another window showing all the copies of that document. If we don’t want the update to reflect on a particular site we can leave it by not checking the checkbox.

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5. We can check destination libraries to see the success

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In this article I explained the usage of “Manage Copies” feature to effectively manage copies of important documents.

Hope this helps someone Smile

Monday, December 15, 2014

Install SQL Server Reporting Services in multi server SharePoint 2013 farm with Windows 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014 hosted in Azure VMs

Recently I installed SQL Server Reporting Services in SharePoint integrated mode in following multi server environment. I used Windows Server 2012 R2 for the operating system and SQL Server 2014 as the database server. My server farm is hosted in Azure VMs.
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So following are the steps I used to install and configure SSRS

1. Installation of Reporting Services in SharePoint mode and Reporting Services add-in for SharePoint in Application server
  • Download SQL Server 2014 image in application server and start the setup
  • Select Reporting Services – SharePoint and Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint
  • Complete the installation
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2. Installation of Reporting Reporting Services add-in for SharePoint in WFE server
  • Download or copy SQL Server 2014 image in WFE server and start the setup
  • Select Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint
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  • Complete the installation
3. Register SQL Server Reporting Services service in SharePoint 2013
  • We have to execute following two commands in both servers
Install-SPRSService
Install-SPRSServiceProxy
4. Start SQL Server Reporting Services service in App server
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5. Create new SQL Server Reporting Services service application in Central Administration
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That’s all we need to do.

Caution !!

Prior to the above successful configuration, I tried the same using Reporting Services Add-in utility downloaded from Microsoft.

Unfortunately it got the SQL Server Reporting Services Service stuck in Starting
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Finally I was able to complete it after downloading the SQL Server image to my server to do the configuration as I mentioned above