Office365 on Thomy Gölles

SharePoint Saturday Helsinki 2019

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 12:27:28 +0000

Last weekend Stephan and I had the pleasure to be part of this years SPS Helsinki. Another perfect run event by the local community represented by the two Jussis everyone doing SharePoint knows.

Here are our slides and a couple of pictures we took during our days in Finnland! A big thank you to all the helping hands organizing this event and to all the friends we had the opportunity to share time with. Yes, this also includes Jasper & Bunny ;)

10 things you should do with your Office365 demo or dev tenant

Tue, 30 Jul 2019 21:57:12 +0000

In the last couple of months, I needed to create a few demo or development tenants in Office365. As I don’t want to reinvent the wheel all the time, I created a list that steers me through the process and makes sure I don’t forget an important step. As you probably know, ticking things off a todo list can be a very satisfying activity. So the next time you need to create a development or demo tenant think of this list, copy it to your todo app and enjoy the good vibes while ticking off the boxes of your own 10 things.

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:

North American Collaboration Summit March 2-3, 2018

Sun, 18 Feb 2018 15:34:56 +0000

The North American Collaboration Summit (NACS), also known by its hashtag #collabsummit, and formerly known as SharePointalooza, is a premium community-driven conference in Branson, Missouri in 2018 with a focus on Microsoft’s products Office 365 and SharePoint. Its aim is to bring together business and technology in order to help delegates make sound decisions in the rapidly changing world of digital transformation. NACS is a two-day community event, based on the traditions of SharePoint Saturday Ozarks, SharePoint and our sister conference the European Collaboration Summit. World-leading experts and speakers will deliver a range of “what is new” and “best practices” sessions for these technologies. NACS 2018 will focus on all topics based on Microsoft’s collaboration products stack, such as Office 365 cloud platforms, SharePoint, Exchange, Skype for Business and Project (both in the cloud and on-premises), and cloud-only services such as Microsoft Teams, PowerApps, Logic Apps, Flow, Planner, and Yammer. These products and services will be approached from all sides: business, organizational, and technical. We will see a range of planning, adoption and strategy sessions focused on deciders and business users, as well as deep-dive technology sessions focused on administrators and developers. Please take a look at the list of focus topics. As part of a journey combining a business trip to Canada and attending the MVP Summit later in March in Seattle, I’m honoured to be part of the amazing speaker line up von NACS. My session is called “OFFICE 365, AZURE AND A RASPBERRY PI: A 21ST CENTURY LUNCH BELL” and combines the work I’ve done over the last 10 months in the fields of custom vision API, Microsoft Teams and some minor IoT related work and is based on the project posted here: http://www.modernworkplacesolutions.rocks/raspberry-pi-cognitive-services-microsoft-teams-how-a-pi-informs-us-about-lunch/ The hardest part this time is the demo part. Based on the time difference a live view of the system isn’t possible. It’s already dark back home by the time my session starts. This means we had to come up with some ideas for a travel setup. As my colleague Stephan Bisser and myself are very happy about being picked at other conferences as well, we decided it’s time to create a mobile-ready demo environment. Here a sneak preview of what to expect: And a short video:

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 Zurich 2017

Sat, 13 May 2017 11:00:15 +0000

Today I had the chance to present at SharePoint Saturday Zurich about how to manipulate data in Office365 and SharePoint by using Angular and AzureFunctions. The event took place at Microsoft Switzerland and was organised by the Swiss SharePoint and CRM community. Many thanks, guys! The Demo gods were happy today so everything worked out fine. If you are interested also in the code of the first example check out this.

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.