Setting a SharePoint Group's Description Using PowerShell

 

The SharePoint Group object has a property named "Description", but it appears to be ignored. When you edit a group in the browser there is no "Description" field, but there is one named "About Me" that is a rich text field. Turns out there's a few secrets you need to know to set this seemly simple little property.

Secret #1: Many of the group's properties are stored in another object, the SPWeb.SiteUserInfoList object.

Secret #2: The internal name of "About Me" is "Notes".

The PowerShell:

#create the group as usual and then retrieve it...
$web = $site.RootWeb;
$group = $web.SiteGroups["Test Group with HTML desc"];

#find the group's SiteUserInfoList info...
$groupInfo = $web.SiteUserInfoList.GetItemById($group.id);

#update the text...
$groupInfo["Notes"] = "<div>This is <strong>bold</strong> and this is <em>italics</em></div>";

#and save it...
$groupInfo.Update();

 

For a C# example see the answer in this discussion: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/968819/change-description-of-a-sharepoint-group

 

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PowerShell: Finding all SharePoint Lists with Lookup Columns

 

Did you ever want to find all of the columns of a certain type? All Lookups, all Calculated or all Managed Metadata columns? All you have to do is look at the Fields object "TypeDisplayName" property. While the example script below is looking for Lookup columns, you could modify it to look for any kind of column.

 

Find all Lookup Columns

This will find all Lookup columns in the entire farm!

Notes:

• Many of the out of the box lists are "custom" lists and will have fields that look like user added columns. Exclude those with the $TTNExcludeLists variable.
• Field that are Hidden or FromBaseType are not typically user created and are excluded in this example.

$TTNExcludeLists = "Solution Gallery", 
                "Workflow Tasks", 
                "Master Page Gallery"

Get-SPSite -Limit All | Get-SPWeb -Limit All | 
  Select -ExpandProperty Lists | 
  Where { -Not ($TTNExcludeLists -Contains $_.Title) } | 
  Select -ExpandProperty Fields | 
  Where { $_.TypeDisplayName -eq "Lookup" -and 
          $_.Hidden -eq $false -and 
          $_.FromBaseType -eq $false } | 
  Select {$_.ParentList.ParentWebUrl}, 
         {$_.ParentList}, 
         Title

 

TypeDisplayName

If you would like to see the list of all of the column types used in your site or farm you can run a script like this:

Get-SPWeb "http://yourServer/sites/YourSite" |
  Select -ExpandProperty Lists | 
  Select -ExpandProperty Fields |
  Select TypeDisplayName –Unique |

  Sort

It may take a long time to run (WARNING!) but this will list all of the columns in the farm:

Get-SPSite -Limit All | Get-SPWeb -Limit All | 
  Select -ExpandProperty Lists | 
  Select -ExpandProperty Fields |
  Select TypeDisplayName -Unique|
  Sort TypeDisplayName

 

Here's the list I got from my test farm:

TypeDisplayName
---------------
All Day Event
Attachments
Audience Targeting
Calculated
Channel Alias
Check Double Booking
Choice
Computed
Content Type Id
Content Type ID
Counter
Cross Project Link
Date and Time
Event Type
File
Free/Busy
Guid
Hold Status
Hyperlink or Picture
Integer
Lookup
Managed Metadata
Moderation Status
Multiple lines of text
Number
Number of Likes
Number of Ratings
Out of Policy
Outcome choice
Page Separator
Permission Level
Person or Group
Publishing HTML
Publishing Image
Publishing Schedule End Date
Publishing Schedule Start Date
Rating (0-5)
Recurrence
Related Items
Resources
Single line of text
Summary Links
ThreadIndex
User Agent Substrings
Variations
Yes/No

 

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Word Stemming in SharePoint 2013 Search

 

Word Stemming

Word stemming is when a search engine resolves a word to its root form and then returns variations of the word.

For example, search for one of these and return the rest:

• run, ran runner, running, runs
• fish, fishes, fisher, fishing

 

SharePoint 2013 Word Stemming

SharePoint 2013 only does "stemming" on singulars and plurals. So all we get for "run" is "runs" and for "fish" is "fishes". The exact stemming depends on the language.

SharePoint 2007 and 2010 did support an expanded form of word stemming, but you had to enable it in the search results web parts.

 

So what do we do?

Search using "OR".

   fish OR fishing OR fisher

   run OR ran OR running OR runs

Remember that the Boolean operators like "OR" must be typed in upper case and that mixtures of AND and OR usually will need parentheses.

   race AND (run OR ran OR running OR runs)

 

oh well…

 

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SharePoint 2013 Items Removed with Search Result Removal Return from the Dead!

 

In SharePoint 2010, Removed was Removed!

In SharePoint 2010 there's a search feature called "Search Result Removal" that made an item immediately disappear from user's search results. All you had to do was enter the URL to the problem item and click Remove Now. SharePoint then remove the item from the index and wrote a Crawl Rule to make sure the content was ignored by the crawler in all future searches.

The 2010 request to remove:

 

The auto-created Crawl Rule:

SharePoint 2010 had a interesting bug here. Uppercase letters in the URL would cause the the removal request to be ignored!

 

In SharePoint 2013 and Office 365, Removed is Just a Temporary Thing! Maybe only a few seconds!

We don't have Crawl Rules in SharePoint 2013 and Office 365. When you request the removal of an item or a URL from the search index, it just deletes it from the index. But… on the next crawl it adds it back! That next crawl could be an hour away, or only seconds, depending on your crawl schedules and the luck of your timing.

Nowhere can I find any documentation that says this!

The screen for removal requests is similar to what we had with 2010, but with no mention about Crawl Rules.

 

Removal Straight from the Crawl Logs

Both versions let you browse the crawl logs, find a problem item, click the dropdown on the item and click Remove the Item From The Index. In the Crawl Logs you can remove one item at a time while the Removal pages will let you exclude and entire path.

In 2013 we are just told that the item will be removed. In 2010 we are also told that a crawl rule will be created.

 

References:

Remove URLs from search results (SharePoint Server 2010
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff621095(v=office.14).aspx

Delete items from the search index or from search results in SharePoint Server 2013
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219587.aspx