In my last vacation, I built a Lync Box for me and my team at work with a Raspberry Pi Model 2 and 15 LEDs.

The idea came from Jon Gallant who already built the same thing for a single user. He called it beakn, the Lync Status Light and tried not only a Raspi but also some other hardware. I took the idea and made a thing for the whole team (5 people)

Hardware

First of all: How does it look like?

It is very simple and the inside and the box is not very nice. Maybe I should build one with a 3D printer. However, it is working and we will install it in front of our space. To connect the LEDs I have used an old IDE cable which perfectly fits on the IO ports of the Raspi (after cutting one of the sides).

Software

I’m not using Windows 10 on the Raspi because as I started the project, Windows 10 IoT had no Wifi. It is using the default Raspian Linux Image with Mono. I’m running a .NET console app on it which actually checks an Azure queue every few seconds for new messages. On the clients I’m using a plain old WinForms app without a window and the Lync SDK. It checks for Lync status changes and then sends a message to the Azure queue.

You can find the software on Github here.

We have configured AD Import in SharePoint 2013 with an LDAP filter set. After some time we discovered, that accounts deleted from AD are not automatically deleted from SharePoint.

After a lot of debugging and testing I found the solution:

The LDAP filter is an “Include” filter so you have to define which accounts should be imported. The filter looked like:

(&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user)(!(title=*Service Account*))(|(company=MyCompany1)(company=MyCompany2)))

(Import all accounts which are not service accounts and belong to MyCompany1 or MyCompany2)

You see the issue? Deleted accounts are not included in the filter, so I had to change the filter to include “isDeleted”:

(|(isDeleted=TRUE)(&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user)(!(title=*Service Account*))(|(company=MyCompany1)(company=MyCompany2))))

Now also deleted accounts are included and SharePoint will delete the profiles correctly.

Maybe Microsoft should mention this in the documentation. Currently there is only one sentence regarding the LDAP filter:

If you want to filter the objects that you import from the directory service, in the Filter in LDAP syntax for Active Directory Import box, type a standard LDAP query expression to define the filter.Source: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219646.aspx

Ok, here we go. The sync engine got a major refactoring. It is now a lot faster to get the changes from SharePoint and to iterate over the local files. That means it is now just a matter of seconds to “analyze” the changes even for more than 1000 files and 1 GB. It should therefore also be able to sync your libraries with thousands of files in a reasonable time.

The other big news is the complete new setup experience. Just click here to download and execute the setup. It takes just a few seconds and SPSync should start. That’s it. No “Next”, “Next”, “Finish”, nearly no time and no local admin rights required. Even better: Updates gets automatically installed in the background and on next restart of the app you are up-to-date.

Please report all bugs to support@spsync.net

SPSync is approaching version 1.0. Today I’m happy to announce that SPSync now works more stable and also includes a new command-line interface.

It should work now with all SharePoint 2013 on-prem and Office 365 sites without any issues during connecting or displaying the “select folder” dialog. As the “SharePoint Url” you can now use more formats and SPSync will try to figure out the site, the library and the authentication method automatically. For example, these formats are all fine:

• https://YourOnPremisesSharePointOrYourOnlineTenant.com/sites/teamsite1/_layouts/15/start.aspx#/Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx
• https://YourOnPremisesSharePointOrYourOnlineTenant.com/sites/teamsite1/Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx

The most requested new feature is the command-line interface. You can find SPSyncCli.exe in the install folder.
It accepts two parameters. The local folder and a “preview” mode parameter.

You have to configure a sync connection like before with the GUI. After that, you can sync a folder with the following command:

SPSyncCli.exe “C:\Your\Sync\Folder”

If you just want to see, which files will be modified (but don’t want to do it now) you can sync in a “what if” or “preview” mode:

SPSyncCli.exe “C:\Your\Sync\Folder” true

The result looks like this:

SPSync now uses a different location for the metadata. It is now directly within the local folder under “.spsync”. Therefore you might get a conflict message the first time you sync with the new version.

Download the new version here: http://spsync.net

I’m happy to announce that the top requested feature on UserVoice is now available for testing.

Now you can select which folders in your document library you want to sync. Just click “Edit” on your configuration and then “Save & Select Folders”:

Download version 0.9.6 here: http://spsync.net