SharePoint Online

Microsoft Ignite is just around the corner and the sheer number of new announcements for SharePoint and SharePoint Online has been almost overwhelming. The team is making such a tremendous job right now! One of my favorite features, that I have requested both privately and openly with Microsoft, is the ability to have custom themes for SharePoint. Yes, we had the old “look and feel” thing, custom CSS thing, Office 365 suite bar branding, but there has never been a good way of using this in Modern sites or even the possibility to turn of the default themes. And now, last week, Microsoft announced a new set of features that can do all of this for us – create custom themes, a nice theme designer and the ability to hide the default themes.

Today, Mr Vesa, announced the availability of the (long awaited) CDN features for SharePoint Online. The SharePoint Online CDN features allows you to turn one or more libraries in your SharePoint tenant into a repository for assets that you want to store in a CDN for performance reasons and geo-distribution reasons. How to set things up I’m not going to rehash everything that is outlined in the announcement post, but rather highlight a few important things.

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.

I have to admit it I have succumbed to Visual Studio Code and now also Gulp tasks, well almost at least. I was working the other day with some display templates and page layouts and needed a more efficient way than uploading the files to SharePoint Online. Open with Explorer could have worked, but since I used a customers Office 365 tenant I did not want to store credentials and do all the required voodoo to get that to work. Instead I decided to explore Gulp and see if I could automate this, and the result is a Gulp plugin called gulp-spsync.

It has been a while since Office 365 introduced the suite wide themes. These themes are applied on all services within the Office 365 suite, or at least the ones using the Suite Bar navigation. Up until the very last few weeks the suite wide theme has been something you can set but your SharePoint site owners and all end-users has been able to override them. Finally these things has been resolved and fixed (no info about this on the Office Roadmap, hence this blog post)!

SharePoint Team Sites are dead, there you have it! The era when SharePoint Team Sites was the king of SharePoint and web based collaboration are over. SharePoint Team Sites are dead, I said it again. Ok, you might think this is a link bait, a scam or something else - it’s not. This is how I foresee the future of online collaboration in SharePoint Online/Office 365. Team Sites are based on a decade old construct in SharePoint. They allow a great flexibility and extensibility for the end users, but… …it requires a lot of training …it drives a lot of support …it drives a lot of consultancy hours (yes, I am/was one of those) …historically upgrades are extremely expensive …[fill in your own here] …do the end-users really need that much power?

One very common requirement in SharePoint, and other portal solutions for that matter, is to have the possibility to target content to a dynamic audience of users and even secure information based on dynamic rules. Traditionally this has been done with Audiences in SharePoint. Audience is a dynamic set of users that is compiled, usually once a day, and at compile time the rules of the Audience is evaluated. A SharePoint Audience is used to target information, but cannot be used to protect content - ie as a security group.

It’s not easy to keep up on what is happening in the Office and Office 365 world. Everything is changing so fast. Fortunate for us Microsoft and the Office product group has created the Office Roadmap site (http://office.com/roadmap) with all (almost at least) the details on what is in development and rolling out etc. It became quite famous the other week when the new forms solution went from In Development to Cancelled.

It’s not easy to keep up on what is happening in the Office and Office 365 world. Everything is changing so fast. Fortunate for us Microsoft and the Office product group has created the Office Roadmap site (http://office.com/roadmap) with all (almost at least) the details on what is in development and rolling out etc. It became quite famous the other week when the new forms solution went from In Development to Cancelled.