Wictor Wilen

At the Future of SharePoint event in San Francisco on May the 4th Microsoft announced the new and improved customization option and/or development model called the SharePoint Framework. This is a development model that solely focused on client-side development. There’s been some confusion going on on Twitter and other social medias and podcasts and I thought I should put together an Q&A post for this.

Today is the day many of us have been waiting for since the big SharePoint event at May the 4th. The highly anticipated SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is here and announced in at the SharePointFest, in this blog post, as well as in the new Github repo for SharePoint. Personally I’ve been waiting for this even longer after being involved by the product team to give early feedback and also attending the first top secret DevKitchen “hackathons” where we could try out very early bits.

Here’s one of these real life stories that caused some headache for quite some time but was in the end very easy to resolve. I’ll write it down and hopefully some of the search engines pick it up and help some other poor soul out there. Background We have a solution that uses publishing pages to manage news articles and information pages in SharePoint Online. These articles and pages have a custom page layout with a custom content type, so they look decent and have proper metadata. They are all deployed using the PnP PowerShell cmdlets.

I have long thought that GUIDS are unique, well GUID actually stands for Globally Unique Identifier. And SharePoint is one unique product using GUIDS everywhere. There are 2^128 possible GUIDs to choose from, so there should be no need to reuse GUIDs as long as I’m alive methinks. SharePoint uses GUIDs to uniquely identify Site Collections and Sites, and more, and this is for instance exposed through the ID property of the SPSite and SPWeb objects. If you take a look at the documentation for SPWeb.ID it actually says: “The globally unique identifier for the website” - which I interpret as this ID is unique, globally! Period.

This is by no means an official support statement from Microsoft, rather an unofficial compilation of official statements. Last week the SharePoint Online team rolled out the preview of the Modern SharePoint lists. Modern Lists are the new incarnation of ye ole Classic SharePoint lists that we all loved and hated over the last decade or so. The Classic SharePoint lists and libraries has been one amazing and powerful tool and I would say that they have been a big part of the success SharePoint has had. Customizations using XSLT, SharePoint Designer and JSLink has all contributed to its success.

As many of you have noticed I have not been posting my What’s new on the Office Roadmap updates. Well, I’ve been on a vacation not trying to think of Office 365 to start with, and then also, I’m ending my series of these posts. Sorry. I have to start with saying that I love the amount of changes we see now in the Office 365 service. The team(s) is/are doing an amazing job with kicking out new features and updates in some areas. Our favorite SharePoint is killing it with features at the moment, and more is to come. And do believe this will continue for the foreseeable future.

Happy Friday and welcome back to another Office Roadmap update. This time the day before the big SharePoint Saturday, here in beautiful Stockholm, where we all are going to indulge on the goodness that was announced a couple of weeks back at the SharePoint Futures event. Lot of new stuff in the mobile space this time around. Changes 2016-05-20 Launched Windows Universal App: OneDrive UWP (Universal Windows App) are now launched and live (new) User Activity Reports: Compliance center improvements for OneDrive/SharePoint on document views/edits/downloads etc (from in development) Intelligent Discover for Android: Discover (Office Graph) view in the Android OneDrive app (new) Mobile Access to SharePoint Online for iOS: Access your SharePoint files from the OneDrive app (new) Office 365 Groups: easily add users from a distribution list to a group: this is cool, now you can add all members from a DL to an O365 Group instead of one user at a time (new) Self-service NGSC setup and goove.exe takeover: Simplified setup for NGSC (Next Gen Sync Client). Finally. Goove.exe (giggles) (new) Rolling out Office 365 Groups: scripts to migrate Distribution Lists (DLs) to Groups: Some sweet scripts for migrating DL’s to O365 Groups (new). Funny it’s listed as rolling out, the script is there! What’s missing. Project Online - Developer Samples: Project Online goes Github: http://aka.ms/pppmapisamples (new) Project Online - OData performance improvements: and when they have some sample code, they of course want it to perform (new) SharePoint home in Office 365: the new SharePoint Home tile is being rolled out. Check /_layouts/SharePoint.aspx in your tenant. (from in development). Office integration added back to NGSC: improved office integration in the NGSC (Next Gen Sync Client) (new) Improved image attachment viewing in Outlook on the web: Always nice to see improvements to the web client, it’s now way ahead of the desktop one, this time big thumbnails and side by side view (new) In Development Annotating and inking for Mac: Draw using your mouse on you Mac - cause you suck and don’t have touch on that shiny thing (new) Copy and move to SharePoint: Intelligent Discovery for iOS: Discover (Office Graph) for the iOS OneDrive app (new) Intelligent Discovery for Windows Phone: Discover (Office Graph) for the Windows Phone OneDrive app (new). Anybody want to buy a couple of Lumias, I have several as paper weights. Mobile Access to SharePoint Online for Android: Access SharePoint files and not only OneDrive on your Android OD4B app. (new) Mobile Access to SharePoint Online for Windows Phone: Access SharePoint files and not only OneDrive on your WP OD4B app (new) Office 365 Groups: Exchange Admin Center (EAC) UI for migrating Distribution Lists (DLs) to Groups: Evolution of the migration scripts mentioned above. You will soon be able to migrate from DL’s to Groups using a single button in the Exchange Admin Center. Nice! (new) OneDrive for Business Shared folder Sync: this is a nice new feature. If someone shares a folder with you from their OneDrive you will be able to sync them (new)

Hey, happy Friday the 13th! Here’s a small Office Roadmap update for all of you Jason fans! Not that many changes this time around, but still interesting, and a lot of Outlook 2016 for Mac releases. Changes 2016-05-13 Now Launched eDiscovery Case Management, Hold & Permissions: the new eDiscovery features are now fully rolled out (from in development) Enter full screen view in Outlook 2016 for Mac: the full screen view for Mac Outlook as announced in January are now out. (new) Find a meeting room in Outlook 2016 for Mac: and so is the possibility to find a meeting room on your Mac (new) Office 365 Groups: ability to update privacy type: you can now as a Group owner change the privacy type of your Groups (public or private) (from rolling out) One-click Archive: The on-click archive feature in Outlook on Mac are now also fully rolled out (from rolling out) Outlook 2016 for Mac two step authentication: And you can also log in using two factor authentication on your Mac (new) Rolling out New editor for Outlook 2016 for Mac: And if you’re lucky you might even be getting the new editor in Mac so you can use “more fonts and colors”. (new) Project Online - Removing the upper limit on number of PWA instances per tenant: after this update you will be able to have unlimited number of PWA instances, was previously only 7. (new) Right to Left language support in Outlook 2016 for Mac: and if you write your stuff from right to left you can now use Outlook 2016 on your Mac, without writing backwards (new) In Development FastTrack | Dropbox to OneDrive for Business Migration: If you are using Dropbox you can soon get help from the FastTrack center to get yer files out of there (new) New usage reports for SharePoint, OneDrive and Mailbox Storage: the new admin UI will get better and improved reports for storage usage in SharePoint and Exchange. (new) Office 365 Usage Reporting APIs: and not only that, you can suck that data into your own apps as well (new) SharePoint mobile app for iOS: Nothing new here, it’s just a rename from “The new SharePoint mobile app” to “SharePoint mobile app”

The Office Roadmap updates with the new announcements from the Future of SharePoint event has arrived (they arrived May the 4th to be precise). I’m back from the event and San Francisco and I’m full of the energy that the SharePoint team transmitted. You should specifically take a look at the In Development part here. That’s where we got the new and fresh stuff from the Future of SharePoint event. Changes 2016-06-06 Now Launched Delve Analytics: Do you want all the details on how and when you work Delve Details and an E5 subscription is all you need (from in development) Drive Shipping and Network Based Data Import for Office 365: Fast Track is getting more and more mature with import options (from in development) FastTrack | Box to OneDrive for Business Migration: Still using Box? Get your files over to OneDrive with Fast Track (from in development) FastTrack | Expanded language support: More languages available in the FastTrack (new) FastTrack | Power BI onboarding support: And Fast Track Power BI is now live (from in development) Multiple timeline bars in Project Online: This must be one of the features that’s been jumping back and forth the most on the roadmap (from rolling out) Office 365 Groups: multi-domain support: This is one of the most important feature releases of Groups. Read this article for full details and configuration options. (from in development) Office 365 Reporting Dashboard: Better reporting in the admin center (from rolling gout) OneDrive for Business Recent Files to Sway: Easier access to your OneDrive docs in Sway (from in development) Skype for Business App SDK: Get your coding skills on and build some Skype Apps (from in development) Skype for Business Mac Preview 1: The long awaited Skype Mac client is not out. Feedback on it has been moderate at best though (from in development) Updated people profile experience in Office 365: The Delve profile page is now fully rolled out. I wonder if Delve will stay as the document discovery feature or if it just will be renamed to “My Profile” or “People” or something, which would make total sense(new) Yammer user profile update from Azure AD: The one-time sync from Azure AD is now launched. Wonder if we ever will see a proper sync? (from in development) Rolling out Basic Chat: Basic Skype chat from the Skype icon in mail - it doesn’t say that it’s web based, but I guess it is(new) Office 365 Groups: usage guidelines: A very important update, this allows you to modify the usage guidelines for Groups (another feature copied from Yammer) (from in development) SharePoint Online - modern document library experience: The new doc lib experience, mayhaps rolled out a bit early and without any guidance (new) In Development eDiscovery Case Management, Hold & Permissions: more permissions control for eDiscovery and compliance stuff (from rolling out) New AutoCAD file format support in Visio: AutoCAD file support in Visio… (from rolling out) Office 365 Groups: search Groups files using Office Delve: Searching should now show documents from Groups (new) SharePoint home in Office 365: Finally Office 365 and SharePoint will get a proper home page. The Sites tile will be renamed and now point to this page. You can read more about this feature here. (New) SharePoint Online – Client-side Web Part for Existing SharePoint Pages: The new customization features announced at the Future of SharePoint Event. Client-side Web Parts created using the new SharePoint Framework on existing SharePoint pages. Read my post about it here (new) SharePoint Online - modern lists experience: A new lists experience, very similar to the new doc lib experience. A great and modern looking UX. (new) SharePoint Online - SharePoint Framework: The new client-side framework that will be used to make the future customizations and development of SharePoint. This is the Framework that Microsoft will build the new “NextGen” portals and the one we will use. There’s much more to read about this here. (new) SharePoint Online - Site activity and insights on the Site Contents page: Each site will get its own set of statistics that shows you how the site is used and what activities are going on (new) SharePoint Online – Webhooks on SharePoint Document Libraries: One of the first new extensions to the SharePoint APIs. I’m glad they are using standardized Webhooks, instead of some weird remote event receivers. Hopefully we’ll get the same for lists (new) The new SharePoint mobile app for iOS: Announced as the “Intranet in your Pocket”. The new SharePoint App will first come for iOS (actually I’m already using it) and then later for Android, and if Windows Phone is still alive by the end of this year those two users might get it as well (new) Cancelled Class Notebook: limit sharing and deletion of section groups: This is just weird, this was rolled out the other week and is now all of a sudden cancelled (from rolling out)