SharePoint Online on Thomy Gölles

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 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.

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.

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.

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.