Master Page and Page Layouts not available in SharePoint Designer Left Navigation (Object's Panel)

If you could open the site in SharePoint Designer but "Master Pages" and "Page Layouts" option is not available in Left Navigation(also called Object's Panel), there could be multiple reasons for that.

Lets troubleshoot this :

First thing to check: Permissions:
You need at least Designer rights on the site to do this. Click here to learn how to to check permissions in SharePoint and learn more about SharePoint permissions.

Second Thing to check : Publishing Feature:
Page Layout specifically are available in Publishing sites only. Which means that publishing feature should be activated on the site.

How to check Feature

From site setting , go to Site Features. Look for Publishing feature and activate if not activated already.

Third Thing to check Designer setting in Site Collection Settings :
SharePoint designer options could be made available or unavailable at site collection level if enabled from web application. Click here to check options.


Forth thing to check Designer settings in Central Admin:
SharePoint Designer is enabled at Web application level through Central Admin and there are options to enable partial designer options only.

Please make sure that "Enable Customizing Master Page and Page Layouts" is enabled for your web application.

Click here to know about SharePoint Designer Settings in Central Admin.

How to check permissions for SharePoint or AD user

This article implies to SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2016. This option is not available in SharePoint 2007.

• To check permissions for a particular user, group (both SharePoint and AD group) click Site Permissions from Site Settings.
• Click Check Permissions from Ribbon.
• Enter name/ Email / ID and click Check permissions.

I will show all permissions user have. If a user is given access through multiple groups there will be multiple entries.

Same way We could check permissions for lists/libraries of even a single item 

Whats's New in SharePoint 2016

While we are still waiting MS SharePoint 2016, which will be released somewhere around May 2016, Microsoft has revealed some teasers. 

After watching the 1 and half hour video, below are the take homes:

• Microsoft is Building SharePoint 2016 and next releases considering SharePoint 2013 as baseline.
• Size of the database per site collection will be increased from 250 GB to TB's (exact figure will release late). This will surely going to help in Migrations.
• List threshold is going to be from 5000 to somewhere around 10000.
• Number of Site Collections per web applications would be increased to 1.5 lac.
• For Migration from 2010 or 2007, we will have migrate to 2013 first.
• Yammer will totally integrated in SharePoint 2016.
• Specific roles could be assigned to servers in code, while installing.
• Microsoft is moving from 999 up-time to 9999 up-time.

I will keep updating this when i will have more information.

Migration from MOSS 2007 to Sharepoint Azure

Although there is lots of documentation already available on this i want to list the steps to migrate from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint Azure in simple language.

Now before we start, lets list some points to consider:

• We can not directly Migrate from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint azure. We will have first migrate to SP 2010.
• We will have to convert AD users to ADFS as explained here.
• It is always a good practice to cleanup the SharePoint Database before we mount it on Azure Site.

Steps to Migrate

Step 1 : Make MOSS 2007 DB read only

• On the MOSS 2007’s database server, click Start, point to All Programs, Microsoft SQL Server, and then click SQL Server Management Studio.
• Traverse to Databases node by expanding the tree
• Right-click the name of the database that you want to set to read-only, and then click Properties.
• In the Properties dialog box, click the Options tab.
• Under State, select the Database Read-only to True, and then click OK

Step 2 : Take MOSS 2007 DB Backup

• Traverse to Databases node by expanding the tree.
• Right-click the database you want to back up, point to Tasks, and then click Backup Database
• In the SQL Server Backup dialog box, specify a name for the backup, select Back-up type – Full, select a destination, and then Click OK to start the backup process.

Step 3 : Restore this Backup on 2010 DB Sever.

Step 4 : Create a Web application on SharePoint 2010.

Step 5 : Remove the data base of new created web application and mount the restored DB.

• This could be done using UI or power-shell. This is listed by Microsoft here.

Step 6 : Now we will test DB for any missing features and if we need to install any custom components on the on Azure.

Test-SPContentDatabase -Name <DatabaseName> -WebApplication <URL>

This URL explains thoroughly the report generated by Test command .

Step 7 : Based on the report generated in above step we will have to take appropriate actions.

Majorly there would be following things:

• Missing features : Use the power-shell to remove the missing features(or orphaned features)
• Install any third party components.

Step 8 : Once cleanup is done take DB back up of 2010 site.

Step 9 : Restore backup on Azure DB sever.

Step 10 :  Create a Web application on SharePoint 2013.

Step 11 : Remove the data base of new created web application and mount the restored DB.

Step 12 : Now that our Site is ready we will have to convert the Users.

Follow this link to understand how to convert.

Step 13 : Deferred Site Collection Upgrade

This is a replacement of Visual upgrade feature available in 2010. Its pretty simple and can be done using below mentioned power-shell command.

Get-SPSite -ContentDatabase WSS_Content -Limit All | Upgrade-SPSite –VersionUpgrade

Migrating from AD to ADFS Sharepoint 2013 azure.

One of the problem we face when migrating to SharePoint 2013 azure is user migration as SP 2013 supports only Claim based authentication. So if your source SharePoint site is running on classic authentication, migrated users will not be able to login on 2013.
Another thing to consider would be that when we will migrate to Azure you domain will also change. On source it would be AD and on azure authentication provider would be ADFS.

But Microsoft has provided a solution to it. All you will have to do is to run Move-SPUser Command as mentioned here. Below mentioned power-shell script will convert all users of a site collection.

add-pssnapin microsoft.sharepoint.powershell
$url ="<Site Collection URL>"
#i:05.t|Domain-id-provider|username@domain.com
# get all users in the site, this includes iwindows users
$users = get-spuser -web $url -Limit ALL 
foreach($useriteration in $users)
{
     $a=@()
     $userlogin = $useriteration.UserLogin
    # get the user login name
    #Write-Host $userlogin
    if($userlogin.Contains("Domain\"))
                {
          $user = Get-SPUser -web $url -Identity $userlogin
          #Write-Host $user.Email
                  $userLoginInfo=$user.Email
                                if($userLoginInfo)
                                {
        #Write-Host $userlogin " = " $userLoginInfo
       Move-SPUser -IgnoreSID -Confirm:$false -Identity $user -NewAlias "i:05.t|domain-id-provider|$userLoginInfo"
                                                echo "User converted to claim with i:05.t|domain-id-provider|$userLoginInfo"
                        }
                                else
                                {
                                                echo "No email address map with user $userlogin"
                                }
                }
                else
                {
                                #echo "Non Domain user remains same $userlogin"
                }

}
Remove-pssnapin microsoft.sharepoint.powershell