O365 on Thomy Gölles

Microsoft365DSC remote name could not be resolved lyncdiscover

Mon, 11 May 2020 15:29:37 +0000

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon a LinkedIn post/article by Nik Charlebois about the Microsoft365DSC project. The first sentence on Github already sold the idea to me “This module allows organizations to automate the deployment, configuration, and monitoring of Microsoft 365 Tenants via PowerShell Desired State Configuration.”

After starting to playing with it a little I came across a nasty error that took me some time to resolve. To prevent others from also losing valuable time I thought it might be a good idea to document the steps.

SharePoint look book: how to provision templates to non-English tenants

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 23:08:19 +0000

Introduction

Over the last weeks since Ignite 2019, the SharePoint look book got more and more attention. Microsoft showcases beautiful designs on the look book page, and with the help of the SharePoint provisioning service, you can deploy those designs within a few clicks from an admin user.

This is an excellent feature and allows you to deploy lovely demo site collections within minutes. That would be all great unless someone made a significant mistake during the creation of your tenant. In my case, that was me.

SharePoint Saturday Barcelona 2018 + "El Clasico" Demo

Sun, 28 Oct 2018 16:52:59 +0000

Yesterday I had the pleasure to present at SharePoint Saturday Barcelona. The whole of 2018 we were kind of touring with our “lunch bell” session. It all began at SPS Barcelona 2017 where a part of the session on PnP was a demo of the lunch bell. The feedback was really great and the idea of creating a session around this topic alone was borne. But all good ends at some point in time in our case this was one of the last times we actually present this topic. We have a full backlog of ideas for 2019 and after ESPC we won’t present this anymore. There is also a real-world reason behind the decision. We as Solvion move to a new office by the 1st of January, so there isn’t a need for this kind of lunch bell anymore. But let’s see what the new office provides and what ideas will be there after moving. Here the slides from yesterday: Back to SharePoint Saturday Barcelona. There is also another big event currently in Barcelona, El Clasico. The football match between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid. Last week in Brussels Edin asked me to use this match for one of my demos. It took me a few hours yesterday, but then I was able to showcase a SharePoint Framework ListView Command Set extension that takes the selected image in a document library and askes Azure Computer Vision for a description of the image. We tried the Command Set with a few images from footballers and got back a friendly message when the Command Set detected a local player from Barcelona. On the other hand, if it detects a certain player from Real Madrid, we just update the image with a logo from Barcelona just to make sure the audience in Barcelona isn’t starting throwing tomatoes at me presenting ;) I will put the complete project code on Github next week, but here the important part with the actual “logic” behind:``` @override public onExecute(event: IListViewCommandSetExecuteEventParameters): void { switch (event.itemId) { case ‘COMMAND_1’: { console.log(“COMMAND_1 clicked”); const itemId: number = event.selectedRows[0].getValueByName(‘ID’); var serverRelativeUrl = “”;

SharePoint Saturday Warsaw 2018

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 07:50:04 +0000

Last weekend Stephan (cloudguy.pro) and I had the pleasure to present at SharePoint Saturday Warsaw. The local crew around Edyta managed to get one of the best locations ever. The whole event took place in the local football stadium of Legia Warsaw. Our session was in their press conference room where on a regular day the coach or the players answer questions from the press. [ngg_images source=“galleries” container_ids=“2” display_type=“photocrati-nextgen_basic_thumbnails” override_thumbnail_settings=“0” thumbnail_width=“240” thumbnail_height=“160” thumbnail_crop=“1” images_per_page=“6” number_of_columns=“3” ajax_pagination=“1” show_all_in_lightbox=“0” use_imagebrowser_effect=“0” show_slideshow_link=“1” slideshow_link_text="[Show slideshow]" order_by=“sortorder” order_direction=“ASC” returns=“included” maximum_entity_count=“500”] In our session, we once again showcased how AI in the modern workplace can help in creating an engaging environment for users. In addition to the end user value, we also focus on how a creative idea can be used to learn new things in the fields of Office365 or Azure in a natural way. Our use case of the food truck monitor probably will never be sold to a customer, but you can imagine how much we learned about the technology included during the setup of the demo. Since a few weeks, we try to record all our sessions on video (Go check out our Youtube channel). If you are interested, start watching, for those with a smaller time budget the slides are also available here.

SharePoint Saturday Madrid 2018

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 08:54:19 +0000

Next weekend, next SharePoint Saturday. This time we had the pleasure to enjoy some days in Madrid. On Friday before the official SPS start, Stephan (cloudguy.pro) and I visited the home of Real Madrid and the tour inside the stadium. You may or may not like the club, but you must respect them for their success over decades. For us football nerds an impressive tour with lots of small details in such a professional environment. In Spain, there is always a speaker activity on Friday before the event. Last year I learned how to handle a Segway in the crowded city centre of Madrid or enjoyed a couple of laps at a cart race in Barcelona. But what Juan Carlos and the crew pulled off for this year was just mind-blowing. Maybe influenced by the recent announcement of SharePoint Spheres and its virtual reality they booked us a slot at Zero Latency. They offer a virtual zombie hunt for a group of people. Can you imagine? A group of SharePoint nerds with guns in their hands out in the VR to defend the base against attacking zombies. We had a lot of fun and once again a certain Finn proofed resourceful with his broad skill set. [ngg_images source=“galleries” container_ids=“3” display_type=“photocrati-nextgen_basic_thumbnails” override_thumbnail_settings=“0” thumbnail_width=“240” thumbnail_height=“160” thumbnail_crop=“1” images_per_page=“20” number_of_columns=“0” ajax_pagination=“0” show_all_in_lightbox=“0” use_imagebrowser_effect=“0” show_slideshow_link=“1” slideshow_link_text="[Show slideshow]" order_by=“sortorder” order_direction=“ASC” returns=“included” maximum_entity_count=“500”] The sessions were recorded and are available on Youtube -> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWdwEW5bKLhrfBdYbS_0C-w/videos Here our talk: And our slides:

SharePoint Saturday Zurich 2018

Sun, 03 Jun 2018 16:52:05 +0000

Last Saturday we (Stephan Bisser and myself) had the pleasure to be part of SharePoint Saturday Zurich. Jussi Mori, Samuel Zürcher and Stefano Tempesta did a great job in organizing once more an epic event packed with the latest and greatest on SharePoint, Office365 and the relating Azure areas. In his keynote, Vesa Juvonen from Microsoft took us on a brief journey through the history of SharePoint. The screenshots from the portal landing pages of version 2007 and 2010 took some of us in the audience way back in time. Somehow later in the day or to be more precise in the evening, some of the speakers realized how long they have been around SharePoint and what conclusion can be drawn out from this fact. Sorry Maarten & Vesa ;) Stephan and I showed our 21st-century lunch bell with a live demo in Zurich. The lunch bell recognizes a special food truck daily at our driveway and notifies our users in Microsoft Teams or Skype for Business. As we use Cognitive Services for our system with pictures of our office back home it’s actually not that easy to demo the system on the go. To still be able to show the features of Azure we decided to make a mobile version. This means during the session we are trying to detect this little food truck: In terms of preparing the demo, we need to take sample pictures in the actual room of the session to train the model. That means instead of lunch break Stephan and I took the opportunity to take around 60 images of the table on the main stage to later on demo the system within the environment. This type of demo is always special and time intensive to prepare, but when the deadline gets closer and closer the fun starts, right? Thanks again to the super hero organizer of the event, you did an awesome job and we are already looking forward to next year!

New Connector web part in modern sites

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:36:06 +0000

A few hours ago Jeff Teper announced a blog post by Mark Kashman titled “Use SharePoint web parts to showcase data from inside and outside Office 365”.

Exciting new webparts for the modern #SharePoint experience https://t.co/T5dSWhHDc1

— Jeff Teper (@jeffteper) February 20, 2018

This post [Link] contains a list of new SharePoint framework web parts that started to roll out to Targeted Release tenants today. I got lucky, my tenant already has some of the new web parts. The new ones are:

Kopieren und Verschieben von Dateien in Office365

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:07:47 +0000

Vor einigen Wochen hat Microsoft damit begonnen das Feature “File Move in SharePoint and OneDrive” in den Targeted Release Tenants auszurollen. Damit zieht man gleich mit dem schon länger verfügbaren Kopieren von Dateien in OneDrive und SharePoint.Das vollständige Rollout ist in der Roadmap für das 1.Quartal des Kalenderjahres 2018 vorgesehen.

Das spannende an diesem Feature ist die Möglichkeit Dateien nicht nur zwischen verschiedenen Dokumentbibliotheken sondern auch von OneDrive nach SharePoint zu verschieben. Genauer gesagt von OneDrive in Richtung SharePoint Dokumentbibliotheken. Wobei mit Hilfe von Microsoft Graph gleich eine Liste an Vorschlägen angezeigt wird, wenn man auf Verschieben klickt. Dieses Feature ist in vielerlei Hinsicht interessant, den größten Vorteil jedoch, so denke ich, wird es hinsichtlich User Adoption bringen. Nicht selten kämpfen IT Verantwortliche in Office365 Rollout Projekten mit OneDrive als Tool.

SharePoint Saturday Barcelona 2017

Sat, 28 Oct 2017 12:05:57 +0000

Today I had the pleasure to be part of another great event in Spain this year. Edin Kapic and his crew called and the community listened. Again I had the opportunity to talk about how we at Solvion use the Office Dev PnP assets in our projects. As I already did this kind of session a few times you normally think, Ok, just take the deck, move it over to this event’s design and off you go. Yeah, not if you build your tools on Office 365 or any other cloud vendor. The speed of change also hits speakers and consultants. ;) That means, of course, the session message stays the same: USE PNP!, but everything around got some polish and some updates. Feel free to browse through the deck, download it or modify it. Sharing is caring.

Speaking at Collab365 Conference: Raspberry Pi, Azure & Office365

Fri, 20 Oct 2017 13:38:03 +0000

Have you heard about the virtual Collab365 Global Conference 2017 that’s streaming online November 1st – 2nd? Join me and 120 other speakers from around the world who will be bringing you the very latest content around SharePoint, Office 365, Flow, PowerApps, Azure, OneDrive for Business and of course the increasingly popular Microsoft Teams. The event is produced by the Collab365 Community and is entirely free to attend. Places are limited to 5000 so be quick and register now. During the conference I’d love you to watch my session which is called : ‘Raspberry Pi, Azure & Office365 - How MoCaDeSyMo informs us about lunch’ The session covers the story of MoCaDeSyMo, a Raspberry Pi taking pictures and uploading them to Azure. With the power of the Azure Custom Visions Service, based on a trained image recognition model we are able to tell if the local food truck is already here or not. MoCaDeSyMo than uses Microsoft Teams to inform the different subscribers. For further reference, all the information is also assessable through a SharePoint Online site. If you join me, you will learn:

1#SPS Vienna, Office365 Meetups Graz & Wien

Fri, 29 Sep 2017 13:23:28 +0000

On the 11.11.2017 the first SharePoint Saturday will happen at the Microsoft Headquarters in Vienna. I’m pretty excited to announce that the registration is now open. To see the lineup and program, you will find a complete listing of the sessions on our home page. To keep up-to-date you can follow our twitter account (@spsvie) or join our Facebook Page. Join our first SharePoint Saturday in Vienna and I hope to see you in November! Also on this day at the SharePoint Saturday Vienna we will kick off the Office365 Meetup Wien: https://www.meetup.com/Office365-Wien-Meetup/ Office365 Meetup Wien will join forces with Office365 Meetup Graz. With that, the two biggest cities in Austria have their very own Office365 User Group The next meetup in Graz will take place on Octobesr 19th and will be around all news from Ignite and Homie, the language understanding bot by Stephan Bisser.

Wie weiß man wann der Jausenwagen da ist?

Tue, 08 Aug 2017 20:56:33 +0000

Hallo MoCaDeSyMo!

Wie vermutlich in jedem Unternehmen in Österreich gibt es auch bei Solvion unterschiedliche Möglichkeiten zur Gestaltung der Mittagspause. Vom schnellen Weg zur Cafeteria bis zum bestellen bei unterschiedlichen Lieferservices spannt sich ein breiter Bogen verschiedener lukulischer Genüsse. Wir sind dann noch zusätzlich in der glücklichen Lage das täglich ein Jausenwagen vom Imbiss Rainer bei uns in der Einfahrt seine Waren anbietet.

In den letzten Jahren war die letzte Option fast ein täglicher Weg. Ich hab direkt von meinem Arbeitsplatz direkt auf die Einfahrt gesehen und wurde quasi täglich vom Jausenwagen an die Mittagspause erinnert. Letzten Oktober aber haben wir intern Büro gewechselt und seit dem sitze ich am anderen Ende des Gebäudes ohne Sicht auf die Einfahrt. In der modernen Arbeitswelt kein Problem, einfach gegen 11:00 den Kollegen in Skype for Business pingen und fragen „Is da Rainer schon da?“ und die Sache ist erledigt.

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday New York City 2017

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 15:24:05 +0000

Next week I will be part of SharePoint Saturday New York City. I’m really happy to be on the agenda together with around 60 speakers from the global SharePoint community. My talk will be about how we use the Office PnP as a resource for learning and for general guidance in terms of architecture or specific development scenarios. There is still some time left to polish the slides and double and triple check all the demos, but I’m already looking forward to a fun weekend in New York. And of course, I’ll be taking notes to get some great ideas in organising such an event and maybe reuse some of them at SPS Vienna later this year. Here my slides from today:

Raspberry Pi + Azure Functions + Cognitive Services + Microsoft Teams -> How a Pi informs us about lunch

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 21:08:34 +0000

Introducing MoCaDeSyMo

Like every other office, ours also has different opportunities for lunch. You can take your break and visit the cafeteria, you can order food from some local restaurants or you can just step outside and buy something from the food truck. I’m a regular food truck buyer, but this option has some downsides. My office is on the other side from the front door, so I don’t see the guy arriving. This means I end up “pinging” colleagues with a direct line of sight regularly in Skype for Business in order to get some information about when I should go for lunch. Right now there are only a few people in our team with a window facing the front door so they end up getting pinged a lot. To end their misery we came up with the idea of some type of push notification. The first idea was about writing a mobile app that the driver of the food truck installs on his phone. This app should recognise our GPS coordinates and push a simple message to Azure upon arrival at our front door. This could have worked but had a dependency on the driver’s phone and his free will to join the idea. After some further thinking, we came up with the idea of using a Raspberry Pi that takes pictures of the scene and uploads them and uses cognitive services to check whether the food truck is present or not. So without further ado, here is MoCaDeSyMo: MoCaDeSyMo(mobile carbohydrate delivery system monitor) is the red fellow on the left of the picture. Insides his red body is a Raspberry Pi 3 and the default Pi camera module. On weekdays between 10:45 and 11:30 MoCaDeSyMo takes a picture every minute and tries to detect the food truck of a local snack bar called “Imbiss Rainer”. His main target is to recognise something like this: To make sure everyone on the team knows about the arrival of the truck MoCaDeSyMo uses Azure Cognitive Services to predict the presence of the food truck and if the probability is above a given threshold a Microsoft Teams connector gets triggered and we get notified with a message like this: This post discusses how we created the system based on this high-level architecture:

European Collaboration Summit 2017

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 15:20:05 +0000

The last couple of days a group of eleven Solvion team members had the chance to attend this year European Collaboration Summit in Zagreb. Like in the last years the speaker line up was superb. We even got a chance of a full day pre-conference workshop with awesome speakers. Of course, out of over 60 speakers, it is really hard and sort of unfair to pick and choose, but just based on the discussions we had on our way back home, that would be our list of speakers with the sessions that mattered the most. So shout out to: Paolo Pialorsi, Dan Holme, Bill Ayers, Eric Schupps, Sahil Malik, Waldek Mastykarz, Vesa Juvonen, Spencer Harbar, Mark Rackley, Benjamin Niaulin, Sebastian Levert, Marc D Anderson, Jussi Mori. This list does not reflect any scoring, just out of memory and some notes I took. Thanks again to the ECS team for organising such a great event and see you all again next year in Mainz! [ngg_images source=“galleries” container_ids=“1” display_type=“photocrati-nextgen_basic_thumbnails” override_thumbnail_settings=“0” thumbnail_width=“240” thumbnail_height=“160” thumbnail_crop=“1” images_per_page=“20” number_of_columns=“0” ajax_pagination=“0” show_all_in_lightbox=“0” use_imagebrowser_effect=“0” show_slideshow_link=“1” slideshow_link_text="[Show slideshow]" order_by=“sortorder” order_direction=“ASC” returns=“included” maximum_entity_count=“500”]

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Brno 10/6/2017

Tue, 23 May 2017 20:27:58 +0000

To be honest, I’m quite stunned about the turn out of my speaking submissions so far this year. After Munich, Zurich and Madrid I’m proud to announce to be part of SharePoint Saturday Brno 2017. My session about SharePoint and Office365 as the intranet of tomorrow got selected and I’m looking forward connecting with the local community and all the other speakers in Brno.

SharePoint Saturday Madrid 2017

Tue, 16 May 2017 07:34:10 +0000

SharePoint administrators, end users, architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft SharePoint Technologies will meet for the 2 nd SharePoint Saturday Madrid event on May 20th 201 7 at Microsoft Ibérica headquarters and I’m more than happy to join them. I’m looking forward meeting the Spanish community and I’m pretty sure SharePoint and Office365 will give us something to talk about. In my session, I will talk about what the PnP, the SharePoint Patterns and Practices initiative, has done to make all our lives easier. Of course, one hour just covers the basics, but we all need to start somewhere. If you interested in what is going on next Saturday make sure to follow @sps_mad and#spsmad.

Slides from SharePoint Konferenz 2017 in München/Erding

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 08:05:07 +0000

Feel free and a special and huge THX to Mark Kashman and Kanwal Khipple for their inspiring work in Austin and Toronto!

Thomas Goelles - The intranet of the future with SharePoint on O365 - reality check—Thomas Goelles

Thomas Goelles - Introducing Microsoft StaffHub - the new app for desk less workers—Thomas Goelles

Event News: SharePoint Konferenz München, SPS Zürich, SPS Vienna

Sat, 08 Apr 2017 09:54:50 +0000

Today I’m very proud to announce some event news for the upcoming weeks and also for later this year. In around two weeks I will be part of the SharePoint Konferenz 2017 in Munich. My two sessions are about the current state of the intranet with Office365 and the second about Staffhub. I’m looking forward to spent some time with all the local SharePoint peeps and also plan to connect at the Global Azure Bootcamp that is held on the weekend right before the event. Second, in terms of news, I’m proud to be part of SharePoint Saturday Zürich 2017. The conference takes place on May 13 and I will talk about how to connect SharePoint to public forms with Angular and AzureFunctions. Last but not least I’m super excited about our first SharePoint Saturday Vienna 2017 that got announced earlier this week. On November 11 we will open the doors at the Microsoft office in Vienna and welcome the local crowd of SharePoint and Office365 people. In terms of the team behind the event, I’m more than happy to join the creative and vibrant group that Melanie Culver, Stefan Bauer and Florian Lutz are. We have thought of this for some time now and decided that 2017 is the right year to put Vienna on the map of the SharePoint Saturday event series. This is also part of a greater plan to re-engage the local Austrian SharePoint and Office365 user group scene. There will be additional Meetups through the year in Vienna and Graz organised by the same team. So stay tuned, more to come!

SharePoint Wiki Bot - How to automate the Azure QnAMaker bot knowledgebase

Sun, 12 Mar 2017 19:04:46 +0000

<TL;DR>

This post shows a proof of concept implementation of an Azure QnAMaker bot that gets its knowledgebase updated by changes in a SharePoint wiki. The main idea is, that you use a wiki as some sort of knowledge management system and that changes to the content automatically get pushed to the bot’s knowledge base. By adding a SharePoint Webhook to the wiki pages library you can trigger an Azure web job that manages the bot’s knowledge base. By using the Azure QnAMaker API the web job publishes changes to the knowledge base so that a connected Azure bot can use it as it’s backend data. This way you can add a heading and some text to the SharePoint wiki page and about two minutes later you can ask the bot in Skype or Microsoft Teams about it. Kudos to: Wictor Wilén, Bert Jansen and Paul Schaeflein.

UPDATED: Yammer: new private messaging experience

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 11:01:16 +0000

In the last couple of days, Microsoft pushed a new UI to our Office365 Yammer tenant. Looks like we are one of those they test the new private messaging experience on. Let’s have a look what it’s like: There is a new section called Private Messages on the bottom left of the navigation bar. You see the names of those you messaged in private mode lately. Also if you have a close look the gear, the entry point to the settings or for switching networks moved. It is now on the top right of the navigation bar and not on the bottom as it used to be. Just a heads-up if you need to change networks like I do, you will be slightly distracted by looking for it down there. More details to that feature can be found at: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Yammer-Blog/Improvements-to-the-Private-Messaging-Experience-in-Yammer/ba-p/33161 In terms of roadmap this feature is still under “in devlopment” not under “rolling out” but it’s cool to see that there are things coming, nevertheless we are all still waiting for things like edit posts. Update After shooting out my blog post the Yammer twitter handle reached back and provided some insights. If you are familiar with the way tech companies “pre-communicate” things on their roadmap, I think we can agree on the fact, that this is just around the corner.

SharePoint PnP Partner Story - How we use the PnP in the Solvion WorkBox

Sun, 19 Feb 2017 16:25:11 +0000

A couple of weeks ago we had the opportunity to sit down with Vesa Juvonen and record a webcast about the Solvion WorkBox. Vesa is one of the masterminds behind The SharePoint / Office 365 Dev Patterns & Practices (PnP) initiative at Microsoft. If you are not familiar with their great work, it’s never too late to learn something new. -> https://dev.office.com/patterns-and-practices The webcast puts a focus on the architecture and the user interface of our WorkBox. You will hear and see what we did in terms of going hybrid and how we ended up creating a seamless Office365 look and feel in the solution. You find the full article at the Office Dev Center here. Here the youtube video: And also the slides:

Access denied. When uploading a file to the masterpage gallery fails

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 22:09:12 +0000

A few weeks ago we hit a blocker in one of our projects. We were trying to configure the root site collection of a tenant in terms of uploading a custom page layout. Every time we tried we got “Sorry, you don’t have access to this page” When you see something like this as a site collection admin, at least it’s odd. After playing around with setting the permissions again and double check die administrator rights we started searching the net for help. We came around some blogs that told us to delete the site collection and start all over again. We hadn’t done much yet so no problem, but it was the root site collection and this one indeed is special. After discussing the topic we decided to play it safe and ask support for help because recreating the root site of a tenant sounds not right. Today the ticket got finally back to me and I had the chance to work with the support person on this topic. It took him literally two seconds to point me in the right direction. We had to change the following setting: This allows users to run a custom script in the site collections. We also set it for the given site collection with a special powershell command (Set-SPOsite -DenyAddAndCustomizePages 0) and boom it worked. I was kind in a hurry, so just wrapped the call up with the support agent and off he was and I was a happy customer. Later today I had a few minutes to reflect upon this case and something felt wrong. It’s just, why wasn’t this a problem at any other site? Why only the root site? What has a custom script permission to do with preventing a site collection admin from uploading a file to the master page gallery? So I started reading the help link next to the “custom script” setting in the O365 admin centre. Turns out that this feature is activated by default on the root site collection for security reasons. Basically, it only allows a site owner to upload artefacts to the master page gallery. Every other site collection we tried was indeed created by our user, so this setting didn’t apply. To quote the page: “The ability to add custom script to sites and pages is controlled by the Add and Customize Pages permission. While the global admin, can specify which users and groups are granted this permission, anyone who creates personal sites and team sites is by default, a site owner. A site owner can add any script they want to the pages on that site." https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Turn-scripting-capabilities-on-or-off-1f2c515f-5d7e-448a-9fd7-835da935584f I like the reason, don’t get me wrong, I really do. But in terms of a permission concept and also in terms of proper error messages this just feels like unfinished work. I have some issues with this approach: 1.) I’m connected as a global admin with site collection admin rights, I can do much worse than uploading some bad code to the master page gallery. I have trillion other ways to break the thing, why blocking me here? 2.) If the code block that stops my upload would be designed to also check if the current user is a site collection admin, it could point me directly to this setting, because it’s the only other reason why I shouldn’t be allowed to do this. 3.) I have to activate a setting that says “Allow users to run custom script on personal sites” and “Allow users to run run custom script on self-service sites” to be able to upload a file to the master page gallery as a site collection admin. I know the link next to the settings describes that the root site collection is special, but in no way you can guess this from the description and wording here. You have to know this stuff or in other words you probably need to hit this at least once in your SharePoint life… To wrap it up, I hope this article helps anyone hitting the same issue and yes I do think there is some room left for improvement.

The O365 app launcher - your digital workplace/intranet start menu

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 22:00:51 +0000

The last couple of months Microsoft added some major updates to the top left navigation menu in Office 365, the app launcher. You are now able to add custom tiles with a title and a custom image to the app launcher. Furthermore, if you are already on SharePoint 2016 and use it in a hybrid configuration connected to Office 365 your app launchers can be combined. That allows you to serve the same tiles in the cloud and on premises. So far so good, but that’s only the introduction part. If you plan to use SharePoint Online for different workloads you may end up designing an information architecture that uses more than just one site collection. If you create a portal with this architecture a consistent navigation is helpful to guide your users, just to make sure they are not lost on the different site collection pages. As the majority of people started their SharePoint endeavour before they went to the cloud, some of them already have some experience in customising SharePoint and especially the navigation part. Their users also have at least some experience in just browsing different web pages and that’s why you end up discussing how you can integrate a “global navigation” somewhere in the red area of the screenshot below. If you knew the trick you even could create such navigation elements in SharePoint 2013 just by using a special PowerShell command. Of course, we used this approach in our projects what in some cases looked like this: You can build such navigations by customising your masterpage or injecting some JavaScript into the right places. As a data source, you can use a simple XML or JSON file or if you want your SharePoint admins to edit it in an easy way you use the managed metadata service as a source. Office 365 on the other hand, has some other plans with this first part of your page, to be accurate we are talking now about the red part of the screenshot below: If you just look at it and remember the tools you built for on premises, your first clue is probably to put your global navigation here. Again you can achieve this by changing the masterpage or some JavaScript. But in O365 the trouble has started just now … First of all this top bar was changed, I think at least three times in 2015. So your custom navigation maybe had to be changed multiple times and guess what, nobody warned you about that. Second of all, if you start with let’s say SharePoint online as the first workload in O365 chances are your users will also use different other services provided by their license. How’s the top bar gonna look like in OneDrive or Delve if you customised only the SharePoint masterpage? Plain simple you are unable to provide a true global navigation across all the different O365 services by just changing the SharePoint masterpage. That’s why Microsoft provides the app launcher. To be fair, even the app launcher isn’t working in exact same terms across all the different parts of O365, but for sure sooner or later it will be. So to enable a true integration of your services in O365 you should think of an approach like this: With this approach, you have to think of your different portals like any other service in O365. Your end users will love the consistent integration of custom services in the native Microsoft environment. If a new important service is ready just add a tile to the app launcher. Best part, if Microsoft adds new services they will also end up in the app launcher.

Our Yammer statistics and how to use it for comments on intranet pages

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 22:16:31 +0000

Yammer is something special. In all my years in the “Microsoft ecosystem bubble” it feels like it is the one piece of software that rather divides then units the community. It all started when Microsoft bought Yammer in June 2012. On this day I was at a SharePoint conference in Vienna and I have a good memory of the talking that started there. If believing in coincidences is the way you think the world works, no problem, but if you have a basic understanding of economics and the idea of tax paying, one might see a system in Microsoft buying other companies in June as it is the last month in their given fiscal year. That day in June 2012 I did exactly what Yammer wanted you to do. Create a network without asking someone in IT. Of course our company back then was only about 25 people in size, but nevertheless the journey started here. To get you up to speed have a look at the statistics of our last 28 days. 86,519 messages in four and a half years with our limited user count isn’t that bad. On the other side have a look on how we use groups in Yammer: We ended up creating a group for every customer, project and internal topic of interest. Basically we got rid of internal emails years ago. We don’t stick to a “you are not allowed to” policy, because of course there are use cases where it’s better to shoot somebody a mail. But if you ask anyone around roughly 90% of the internal stuff is communicated in Yammer. Yammer is far from perfect, don’t get me wrong. We would love to have a better search experience for example. Moving Yammer into O365 was a massive step, something it looks like Microsoft under estimated in 2012, but still integration of AD groups for example is something we would look forward to. Another missing feature is editing your posts, I know it’s coming, but you have the feeling that four and a half years is a very long time range for such basic features. A couple of weeks ago Microsoft announced Teams. As soon as I saw it I already imagined the “is yammer dead” questions. My point of view is different here. I can think of moving some of our groups to Teams. Maybe even most of them, but definitely not all. So today I think we will still use Yammer even after starting with teams, but this could be a total different story in your environment. As Microsoft still lacks some basic features in terms of integrating Yammer in SharePoint we ended up adding our own way. We started some ground work in terms of how to comment on a SharePoint news page within yammer. Let’s start with a basic page layout for an article page. That’s just a test page in your dev tenant, but you can see a grey Yammer logo on the bottom right of the page. It’s greyed out because I opened the page in Firefox and I’m not logged in yet. If I open Yammer in other browser tab, I’m authorized and the page changes to this: Of course you can already think of what this is about. We ended up using the graph API to create a graph object for this aspx page in Yammer. This enables us to load comments the same way Microsoft does on the delve board for example. As a user you have three options to add a comment here. First you can just start replying on a given comment right where it says “write a reply”. To start a new comment just start typing in the top box next to your user image. But what if you want to post your comment to a different group? Or what about using an announcement to notify a bunch a people even on their mobile? The third option is right behind the now blue Yammer logo and after clicking on it your screen looks like this: Sorry for the German here, but I think you get the idea anyway. The first dropdown allows you to choose the group you want to post to. The dropdown also has the information if a given group is a private group or if you as a user are in an admin role and can post an announcement to it. After the group selection you just add a teaser and some text and click on publish. The fly out will post your comment to the given group as a graph object by using a defined yammer app for the API access. The post in yammer will include the link to your page and uses the url of it as the main key to the entry. Here the result of the entry on our article page: And the yammer part: As a news author you can use this feature for pushing out a notification of your intranet article to all users of a given yammer app even on their mobile. A feature we think a modern intranet should be capable of. In terms of implementing this feature full credit goes to Stephan Schreiber who spent some days and nights with the graph API and the way Yammer uses authentication to make this possible.

Copy and Move to SharePoint - Copy rolling out already?

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 21:21:06 +0000

A few minutes ago I checked my OneDrive for Business and uploaded some files. As I managed to upload them to the wrong folder I wanted to move them with the built in feature. When I clicked on the command bar in our first release tenant the following menu caught my eye: Sorry for the German language at the user interface, but it looks like I’m able to copy my file to not only a different folder but also to different locations! The sidebar suggests groups and team sites I’m following. I’m not able to browse to any other locations, but I was able to load more destinations that are all in my following list. I just checked roadmap.office.com: Seems like it’s rolling out already … To add some rumors, maybe that’s something Jeff Tepper tweeted about today: