More SharePoint 2013 Setup Tidbits

I have continued with my first SharePoint 2013 server setup and wanted to post some more items that worked for me to get some things configured for my environment. Check out my previous post for more tips.

Changing the Favicon

A little branding item that can prove to be useful in helping your SharePoint stand out in the multitude of open tabs is changing the Favicon. The blue SharePoint 2013 icon is unique but does not help your end users associate it with your company or organization. SharePoint’s favicon settings are a little different than setting them for a regular website. Mohitvash has a nice blog post pointing to the location of the favicon and how to make the setting changes in the SharePoint master pages. Fore more details on modern Favicon settings, check out this blog post on Big Favicons which includes some nice examples and links to a tool I used to create the Favicon for my site.

Using the User Profile Import Service to Create Phonebook Style Contact List

One of the items I hope to replace on our current Intranet is a manually updated contact list of employees. I want to centrally manage that through Active Directory and in turn SharePoint using the User Profile Service. You can use existing SharePoint imported profiles individually but it does not lend itself to a simple list of all employees very well. On SharePoint Use Cases, there is a nice PowerShell script to copy the user profile service entries into a Contacts list and also to update these list items as things change. I added some additional fields to the script which was easy to map. I place on scheduling this to run on a regular interval to keep things updated. I also wanted to remove old disabled users; however the current script does not do this. I may just delete the list before import each time. Here is another PowerShell script to delete all items in a list, be careful to select the correct list!

Remove Sync Option

The Sync option is another tool that appears by default in the upper right ribbon and may not be a good fit to leave as an option for end users depending on your organization. This allows users to download a local copy of files for offline work. I want users to work off live copies from SharePoint and avoid saving additional copies of files since that has been an issue in the past. Removing this option is very simple and Learning SharePoint has good step by step instructions for disabling Sync.

Bulk Convert .DOC files

Office Web Apps is an amazing feature; however, if you are migrating a lot of older documents to SharePoint 2013 and you start to open a .DOC file with Office Web Apps, it will prompt the user to convert the document to the newer Office file type. This is nice, but in reality it is creating an entirely new copy of the file so your document library could quickly be littered with two copies of files, confusing end users. So during content migration, I will be doing bulk conversions of older documents and removing the older copies. There are various methods including PowerShell and third party tools; however, Microsoft has a tool that is fairly easy to use and works very quickly. It will also convert a variety of Office file types, not just Word documents. Eric White’s MSDN article explains how to use the tool. One thing to note of course is that you will lose the version history; however, I intend on having a document archive repository and will just place the pre-conversion files there with their version history in case they are needed. Most of these files have not been touched in quite a while so hopefully it will not become a problem.

SharePoint Health Analyzer Rules Reference

I wanted to add this link to this Microsoft list since it has been invaluable in starting to track down any issues that appear in your SharePoint Health Analyzer.

I enjoy any feedback or thoughts on these tips. I will continue to post as I work through this migration from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2013.

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