10 Sep 2019
The Microsoft Teams client is coming to Linux! This is great news and will allow Microsoft to have the widest operating system coverage on desktop and mobile. As most people who follow Microsoft closely are likely aware, Windows is no longer one of the top performing products in Microsoft’s portfolio and Microsoft’s focus has shifted to services such as Azure and Office 365. This shows in revenue as well as behavior – we’re seeing Linux releases for a variety of software, from SQL Server to VSCode and soon… Teams.
Teams has been usable on Linux for some time now through the browser, but there are limitations. A fully featured Teams client will be welcome to provide full media features. While the Teams client is available on Microsoft’s official repository as a deb package, don’t get too excited – you have to be invited to use the Linux client :-(
While I still use Windows 10 as a daily driver, primarily due to gaming and .NET Framework development, Linux has been attractive as a desktop option for quite some time now. Client applications like this enable people to choose their operating system of choice.
I’ll be looking forward to the day Chromium Edge and Office come to Linux!
10 Sep 2019
The SharePoint 2019 September 2019 Updates have been released.
For all SharePoint updates, visit SharePoint Updates.
10 Sep 2019
The SharePoint 2016 September 2019 Updates have been released.
For all SharePoint updates, visit SharePoint Updates.
09 Sep 2019
In SharePoint Server 2016, I saw a reference to a class named SPFarmInitialization. That piqued my interest and I have previously blogged about it. I decided to take that project one step further and build a PoC on what could be done with this. Turns out, it would be a neat way to build a farm, if you could build a complete farm.
This method uses an unattended.txt file to build a farm. However, there was more to the creation of the farm than simply dropping in a file and running the Config Wizard. Instead, using a NamedDataSlot one could run an application to initialize the build of the farm. Presumably this is done to pull secrets from a centralized location that itself is secure.
Farm Launch is a project I created to execute this process. You’ll note that it uses hardcoded usernames, passwords, and other values in both the code as well as the supplied unattended.txt file that you will need to adjust should you want to try this on a test server. Because of this, I’m not providing a binary – you will have to edit and compile it yourself.
This solution does not support adding additional farm members and the SPFarmInitialization class does not support provisioning most services, making it’s current implementation only useful in scenarios where a new farm would be consuming services from another farm for Managed Metadata, Search, and the User Profile Service.
Ultimately, this is a thought experiment, but something I can only hope that the product group investigates for future versions of SharePoint Server.
13 Aug 2019
The SharePoint 2019 August 2019 Updates have been released.
For all SharePoint updates, visit SharePoint Updates.