For the last 2-3 years I’ve been working with customers on migrating to Defender for Endpoint from other AV/FW/EDR solutions. One of the big issues I’ve seen is there are a lot of checks to see what could prevent Defender from successfully onboarding. In order to make these checks more consistent and faster I decided to create a script to help identify and flag potential migration issues.

In the previous post about ASR adoption, I recommended you enable ALL ASR rules in AUDIT mode. Now we will use the Security Baseline to build an ASR policy that should be minimally impactful to your systems and end users.

This post is intended as a starting point for organizations looking to adopt Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) rules. ASR rules can help improve an organization’s security, but they can potentially disrupt normal user and application behaviors in certain environments. My recommendation to anyone looking to implement ASR rules is to always start with Auditing.

This is the second post on switching to Defender Anti-Virus and using the Security Baselines published in Endpoint Manager to create a good starting point for your Defender AV settings. This post will focus on the settings in the Security Baseline for Windows 10 and later and how to create an AV only policy based on these settings.

When switching from one AV to another organizations want to know if they can keep their current AV settings, or if their AV Vendor has recommendations for better adoption, detection, and performance. For these types of conversations with Microsoft Defender AV I often recommend customers look at the Security Baseline rules as a good starting point.

MDI alerts have a number of different learning periods, and each is well documented. However, there is not a single list of all the alerts that have learning periods for easy reference, so I have created and will update this list.

I recently had a request for a more detailed example of how to use the Azure Mobile Angular Services so I went ahead and created a single page application that has very little capability but is a good example for those getting started with AngularJS and Azure Mobile Angular Services and have pushed it to the GitHub site. The example is built using Visual Studio but is just a single HTML page and a Scripts folder with the necessary .js files inside.Once you have pulled the project you will find it does actually read from my Azure Mobile Services, although write is disabled,so you can follow along.

If you’ve started using SharePoint 2013 you probably noticed that Microsoft changed the way they present the Modified value. In SharePoint 2010 the Modified field showed a Date/Time stamp, but in SharePoint 2013 the Date/Time is replaced with something like “3 minutes ago”. Personally I like this, but some users may not and the Date/Time stamp may be really important especially for Legal Departments or other Audited applications.

Fortunately there is a very simple fix, using the Client Side Rendering to override SharePoint’s default rendering of the Modified field.

I’ve been working on a site migration from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 and a lot of what we did in 2010 was to customize forms the user interacts with. One of the requirements we had was to ensure a Project Name and Project Alias field did not contain the same information. In SharePoint 2010 this had been done by adding some JavaScript to the page, grabbing each control by HTML Element ID, and then comparing their values. When we migrated these fields all got new HTML Element IDs so our validation logic was broken.

I was working on a project today where I need to dynamically create a MS Word Document, save it to a SharePoint library, and then present the document to the user for editing. My first attempt was to create an IFrame that would redirect to the document once it was created, but this would only open the document in ‘Read Only’ Mode.

I recently had more fun with setting Managed Metadata values in SharePoint 2010. This time as part of an event receiver during the Item Adding, Item Updating, and Item Updated events. (There are interesting event ordering challenges which lead to using all of these events, but that is not the focus of this blog.) The challenge I faced was copying values from a Document Set down to documents that were being created/uploaded to the list. Normally, using Shared Properties would negate this but because we wanted use to edit the Managed Metadata Values in the Document Information Panel we could not use shared values because the Document Set would immediately overwrite any changes made to the document. Instead we created an Event Receiver to manually handle the updates from the Document to the Document Set, and from the Document Set to the child documents.

I recently had an issue trying to set the Managed Metadata field value on a new list item I was creating in C# code. In the control where the user could select the managed metadata value I was using the OTB Taxonomy Control which was properly bound to my Managed Metadata Field.

I was recently working for a client who began having issues with the Windows 8.1 baseline and their search center. If you are familiar with Windows 8.1 then you are aware that it comes with IE 11 which has a new User Agent string that can cause some issues with SharePoint (ref: IE11 Broke SharePoint 2010). My task was to figure out why when a user entered a search term/key word and hit enter the page simply refreshed.

Recently I posted about how you can use Client Side Rendering (CSR)to display contacts on a map. After posting about how to display the entire list data, I decided I wanted to see how CSRcould be used to change the user experience while adding, updating, and viewinglist items, updating items, and viewing items. This post will provide a high level overview of how I was able to change the display during New, Display, and Edit of an individual item and then later I will actually put this together with the Contact Map idea.

The Microsoft Office announcedon Friday that InfoPath 2013 will be the final version released.This is a significant announcement because itmeans any customer with customSharePoint workflows, Office Document Information Panels, and any other Data Entry Applications will have to move those to a new technology, but Microsoft hasn’t said which one.

Several years ago, back in the dark days of SharePoint (MOSS) 2007, Tom Resing and I worked together on a demo displaying contacts from a SharePoint contact list on a Bing/Google Map. He and I presented this at several SharePoint Saturday events (Boston, Virginia Beach, Richmond, Tampa) and found highly positive response. It has been a while since Tom and I worked together, and a lot has changed in SharePoint so I wanted to revisit our old demo and take a newly available approach.

I’ve been noticing recently my SharePoint site was behaving oddly, especially when I wanted to edit a web part. Yesterday the odd behavior hit a critical point as I was unable to connect web parts on a page. The problem was every time I clicked the drop down arrow on the web part heading the page would refresh and some of the menu content would appear in a side panel, where the web part properties are usually displayed.

I’ve been working on a project recently that has a large number of sub-agencies and the parent organization was attempting to push a standardization of Content Types. Since no one really wanted to duplicate work the organization decided they did not want to migrate content into SharePoint (from file shares) until all the content types and metadata had been identified and created. However, as with all large agencies some groups wanted to move forward with limited or partial capabilities because after all some limited capability is better than what they currently have. The concern that arose from this was: What if they created a Content Type in one of their Site Collections that had the same name as one that would be published later on?

I have done a lot of development with SharePoint workflows, especially those developed in Visual Studio. Unless I have been working with a standard list type, I generally create a Content Type that my workflow can be associated with and to ensure the columns and values needed in the workflow will be present. However, creating Content Types is always a painful process, because as you develop the content types and test them you need to delete the original content type, and any list depended up in before you deploy the updated version. This is even worse when you upgrade a solution that is in use in productionbecause you can’t easily delete the content type just to add additional fields.

Recently, I was working with a coworker who had created a javascript dashboard using jQuery and KnockoutJS in SharePoint. The dashboard had worked perfectly for him, but when I viewed the site none of the data would render. While we were testing the site we noticed that my browser was running inBrowser ModeIE10 with Document Standard IE 7 Standard,but his was running Browser Mode IE 10 with Document Mode: Standards. Having battled with SharePoint 2010using anHTML5 Masterpage I began looking for the Meta tag on the page which should define the appropriate browser mode and noticed he had removed it. I had him add the tag back to the masterpage (from my experience removing the browser mode tag in SP2010 causes all kinds of issues when editing pages, list items, etc) but still found the dashboard was not functioning properly.

Recently my company performed a migration for our old production environment to a new production environment so we had a more stable and robust platform to support the company, including providing leadership with better business intelligence about our operations. As part of the migration one of my goals was to launch My Sites for our internal users so they had somewhere to store information they were working on.

Last month I was working on a demo for a charitable organization that has lots of volunteers around the country. The charity didn’t want to have to create new active directory accounts for each of these volunteers so as part of the demo we integrated SharePoint 2010 site with Windows Azure App Fabric Access Control (ACS), this way we could use Google, Windows Live, and Yahoo! as authentication providers. (Yes I know we could hook directly to each of these providers, but using ACS allowed me to use all the providers with one SharePoint Trusted Provider instead of using three different trust providers). We demoed the site to the charity and they were very excited and happy with the solution.

I was attempting to create a custom FAST Search Center that would have a custom master page, and some web parts added to the search and result pages. My starting point was to grab the FAST Search Center site definition from the site templates in the SharePoint 14 Hive.

Recently I have been working on a SharePoint 2010 solution that leverages External Content Types for storing information associated with Microsoft Dynamics Great Planes Timesheets. Part of the information captures when an task is expected to be completed, which the UI allows the user to select a date from a calendar. Since the only significant information for this field was the date when I designed the database I chose to only capture the date value. Testing on my local Windows 7 VM worked perfectly and we rolled the solution out to the customer for testing.

Recently I was contacted by PACKT Publishing because they have recently published a book Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration and wanted me to review the book. I’m actually quite excited about this opportunity because it is my first invitation to review a book, and the book is talking about two of my favorite technologies!

Many SharePoint developers have come from a background with ASP.NET and so most are familiar with the Membership Provider concept. SharePoint uses ASP.NET at its core the membership providers you have build for custom web applications can be used in your SharePoint web application. The advantage of this is that you can abstract your web parts, application pages, etc in SharePoint so they use the Membership Provider to get user information rather than coding your own Active Directory calls into a library or the web part/application page itself.

During a recent project I was leveraging the SharePoint Lists Web Service to retrieve information from a list and push it to a Silverlight display. The list I was using was a heavily customized list with about 35 different views and at least as may fields. My Silverlight display would provide information like the “status” of the list item based on a number of other criteria. This status field was stored as a simple “Single line of text” field in the SharePoint list.

I’ve been working with WCF and SharePoint 2007 and ran across an issue. The scenario is an Account Registration process which allows the user to request access to “protected” sites within a portal. This solution blends some jQuery and WCF using the JSON format for request and response messages. The issue I ran into was when a user requested access to a/several sites I needed to pass the Site ID to the WCF service as part of the user request object.