SharePoint 2016

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.