Find if AD user or Group exists by using PowerShell

Quickpost

I just needed a fast and quick way to find out if a security group exists in Active Directory via PowerShell for some SharePointregarding business. I actually had to spend a little time searching for this, the simplest of solutions.

PowerShell prompt:

[ADSI]::Exists('WinNT://./usernameorgroup') <- Local users or groups
or
[ADSI]::Exists('WinNT://domainname/usernameorgroup') <- Domain users or groups

This will return true or false.

For my purposes this was exactly what I needed. What limitations this have in regards to security I don't know. But the user i ran this commands with is not a domain admin or has any elevated rights above admin on the said server.

SharePoint Color Palette Tool - SharePoint 2013

I might update this blog post later, but for now this is short and sweet.

I just discovered a great tool for quickly editing colors and generating *.spcolor files.
It is a small(1,1mb) Visual Studio-based program for editing color palettes for SharePoint 2013.
The program has a GUI with a site preview and generates an xml style file as one of the ingredients for SharePoint 2013 themes or looks as I believe they call it.

SharePoint Color Palette Tool is avaliable from Microsoft via technet.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=38182

I used this great "guide" for editing my own themes, placing the files in the correct folders directly in the hive OR in the site via SharePoint Designer 2013:

http://bniaulin.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/step-by-step-create-a-sharepoint-2013-composed-look/

Change URL on lists and libraries in SharePoint 2013

I have been told that this is impossible several times. Still I had a requirement to do this, and in SharePoint online its easy. I thought to myself that it should be as easy in the on-premise version so I decided to google it.

After reading through a couple of blogs I still somewhat in the dark. I found one that said it was as easy as to open SharePoint designer 2013 and rename the list(just as in 2010 they said). This however did not work.
I opened the list, changed the name, but the URL was still the same.

But after some searching I found the solution in the comment field of this blog post http://www.idubbs.com/blog/2012/sharepoint-2013-list-library-app-naming/.

SharePoint designer is the way to go. This is how to do it:

• Go to All files
• Find the list in the Lists folder or library in the root of All files
• Rename it 
• That's it

For those who don't have access to SharePoint Designer:

If you don't have option to open the site in SharePoint Designer then you must save the list as site template and create a new list with that template. But, make sure dependencies like lookup columns, workflows, event receivers etc.

(Source: http://praveenbattula.blogspot.no/2013/05/change-sharepoint-list-url.html)

I would say that I would not mind if the SharePoint team made this possible directly from the browser in on-premise SharePoint too, but I guess they have their reasons?