SharePoint on Thomy Gölles

Adoption & Technik - ein neuer Podcast

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 22:39:48 +0000

Link zum Podcast: at365.de

Schon im Feber in Bremen, haben Antje Lamartine und ich gemeinsam beschlossen in 2020 das deutschsprachige Podcast-Universum zu erweitern. Zu Beginn war die Idee ein Interview oder ein Video zu machen rund um Collaboration. Genauer gesagt wollten wir uns den ROI, also den Return of Invest, von Collaboaration Projekten ansehen und versuchen eine Definition dafür zu finden.

Dann kam der März. Und in 2020 veränderte der März bekanntlich für alle alles. Für unsere Podcast-Idee bedeutete die neue globale Situation, dass auch wir in Sachen Bedeutungshoheit unseren Fokus auf das Thema Schule und Fernunterricht mit Microsoft Teams legten.

Adoption & Technik - ein neuer Podcast

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 22:39:48 +0000

Link zum Podcast: at365.de

List app usage in Microsoft Teams

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 09:51:29 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I saw a thread in the interwebs where someone asked about information on Teams app usage. The question was what apps are used in which teams. I knew from experience with the Office365 CLI and the Teams commands there, that this should be possible to accomplish with the existing commands. So here we go.

ListAllTeamsApps.ps1

The first tiny script just iterates through all your teams and lists all apps in each team. Remember: the command will list only those teams you have access to. You can start this with your personal account, but to get all teams you will need an admin account to run those lines.

SPFx Development in WSL 2.0 - Linux files integration in Explorer

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 22:50:16 +0000

Last week on Thursday my Windows PC got the latest Windows Preview Build. I was looking for a new version of the preview as the last one broke my webcams for Microsoft Teams. In times like these, not having a working video feed in Teams is not really a situation you want to end up with. There was a workaround to use OBS and a virtual camera to get it working but this was far from stable so I searched for a different way.

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 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 ;)

SelectedTech Webinar 6 - QnAMaker, SharePoint and Microsoft Flow

Thu, 08 Aug 2019 10:24:06 +0000

In episode 6 of our SelectedTech podcast/webinar series, Albert-Jan introduces his concept of updating the QnAMaker knowledge base with data from SharePoint. To make this as easy as possible he used Microsoft Flow already a couple of times at customer demonstrate the use case of bots updated that way. Talking about Flow at this particular time means we also spend some minutes on the latest license news for PowerApps and Flow.

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.

Friday Funday: Oculus Go & SharePoint

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 10:05:46 +0000

Since a few weeks, I’m playing with the new Oculus Go, a standalone VR headset. I wanted to test this kind of technology a few years ago, and this year at SharePoint Saturday Madrid we were invited to a virtual zombie hunt. This already was a fantastic experience joining a virtual reality with a group of fellow MVPs. The Oculus Go isn’t a powerhouse regarding performance. You can think of smartphone computing power with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 and a 5.5-inch, 2560x1440 WQHD LCD display. I never had a VR headset before. The main reason behind going with the Oculus Go is its independence. You don’t need a PC to power the experience, and you don’t need to use your phone in some kind of snap-in headset. Here you see Stephan trying out the Oculus Go with his own headphones. When you start playing with the headset, you get notifications from some apps to use headphones for a better immersive experience. Turns out that the audio makes a huge difference. But diving into VR on that level is somehow also a little scary or awkward. In some way, you lose the connection to your surroundings which can be disturbing. If you take your headset for a ride on the virtual roller coaster, you probably perceive motion sickness. It’s a wired feeling, your eyes tell the brain, “wow we are moving” but your inner ear is like “nope, we are standing still”. I saw this reaction on everyone testing the device for the first time. You get used to it, my advice is to sit down during the ride and grab the table in front of you. This already helps a lot. The platform is based on Android and an individual Oculus store. You can not run any Android app on the headset. I sideloaded some of the Office and SharePoint apps but wasn’t able to get them running or if brute forced the UI was entirely off. Would be cool to join a Teams meeting on the device. It’s built-in microphone and speakers should be good enough for an online meeting experience. For a real information worker use case the device lacks keyboard input. You can connect a keyboard via USB, but as you see nothing but the VR experience, I don’t think adoption will be high. This might change in the future by moving from virtual reality to augmented reality headset like the Hololense. Here some screens of the browser view of a modern SharePoint page, a Valo landing page or our own TeamBox. Overall it’s a device I would categorise as a gadget or nerdy. The VR is nice and the games more fun than expected, to be honest. But we are still a few steps away from using this kind of technology on a daily basis in a regular office. Maybe in the future but not now.

How to sideload an existing SPFx package in Microsoft Teams

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:45:45 +0000

Introduction

In preparation for a talk next week I spent the whole weekend on creating demos and slides. A couple of days ago the SharePoint team released version 1.7 of the SharePoint Framework. This release has a ton of features, but one specific for Microsoft Teams adding the capability to surface SPFx web parts inside a Microsoft Teams tab. As my talk will be about Microsoft Teams why not change the demo plans 72 hours before the talk and try something new?

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 = “”;

Chrome SP Editor v4.1.4

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 10:51:12 +0000

A couple of months ago I started playing with webhooks and SharePoint lists. After searching for the easiest way to configure a webhook I came across a feature in SP Editor by Tomi Tavela. By using the SP Editor you just need to open Chrome, navigate to your SharePoint site, press F12 and look for the Webhooks menu in the tool. Adding a webhook is done in two easy steps, selecting your list and provide the URL to your webhook, click save and that’s it. In my use case, I needed a small addition to that feature. A SharePoint webhook has an optional parameter called ClientState. This can be used to identify your webhook later on by just that variable. In the last week of July, I had the pleasure to be in Helsinki and meet with some local SharePoint guys including Tomi. If you already had the experience to feel that guys passion for his work and SharePoint development in general, it’s like a no-brainer to be motivated to give something back. It’s just a couple of lines of code added to the already awesome SP Editor and now starting with version 4.1.4 you are able to add a custom ClientState when adding a webhook to a SharePoint list. So, go check out the latest release of SP Editor as it only will get better.

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!

Wrapping up SPC18 and SharePoint Virtual Summit Announcements

Mon, 21 May 2018 18:05:30 +0000

This list of hyperlinks is just a reference for all the news from #SPC18 form the keynote today. Only the links, no opinion. At least not now. As I’m not in Vegas right now, I had to watch the keynote in the live stream. There is an option for a re-live of the keynote if you missed it: https://mediastream.microsoft.com/events/2018/1805/SharepointSummit/ And here the list of some of the things mentioned during the keynote. Especially the mixed reality features in the demo are definitely something new and probably something that only will be adopted with some use cases that are way above the gimmick factor. SharePoint innovations transform content collaboration with mixed reality and AI New Capabilities for OneDrive Announced Today at SharePoint Conference North America Stream innovations at the SharePoint Conference showcase AI in video What’s new for your intranet in Office 365 Enrich your SharePoint Content with Intelligence and Automation Introducing Microsoft Training Services Welcome to SharePoint Server 2019, a modern platform for choice and flexibility Security you can trust, control you can count on with SharePoint and OneDrive (SPC News) Updates from Build: New improvements for SharePoint Framework coming soon And this one makes us at SPS Vienna especially happy:

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.

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:

Microsoft Teams Automation - Create Team from Webhook

Fri, 03 Nov 2017 17:54:49 +0000

Today Microsoft released the Microsoft Teams Powershell Cmdlets module (https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/MicrosoftTeams/0.9.0). This allows you to use PowerShell as the first basic API for Teams. Bill Bliss (@bill_bliss) from the Teams Team (still awkward wording) told us this week on Monday in a session at Microsoft Vienna that they will push the PowerShell Cmdlets in the coming weeks and the Graph API will follow. To be honest didn’t believe that they would be that fast in releasing the bits but I’m more than happy now. To take this a little further I created an Azure Automation Runbook for the CreateTeams Cmdlet in my Azure Tenant. The Runbook itself can be triggered by a webhook. With that in hand, you basically can create a bot or a Teams app to create or update your Teams based on the cmdlets Microsoft released. The Runbook I created uses the basic steps for reading input from the webhook based on this blog post: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/stefan_stranger/2017/03/18/azure-automation-runbook-webhook-lesson-learned/``` [CmdletBinding()] Param ([object]$WebhookData) #this parameter name needs to be called WebHookData otherwise the webhook does not work as expected. $VerbosePreference = ‘continue’

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.

AzureFunctions, DateTime.Now and why CultureInfo matters

Sun, 24 Sep 2017 10:40:42 +0000

This post maybe is only for myself to finally remember the differences between on-premises and cloud in terms of environment variables. I’m currently working on some features for MoCaDeSyMo that are based on AzureFunctions and Visual Studio 2017. Since one of the previews, you are now allowed to build your own custom libraries and use them in an AzureFunctions project. Furthermore, you can now easily test and run your AzureFunction on your local computer. That’s a huge deal compared to publish the function every time or compared to the time you need to attach the remote debugger to your function running in the cloud. So for the last couple of days I only tested my function locally and of course, everything worked fine. After publishing it I got a 500 internal server error back. Ok, nothing new, something is different between local and cloud. So let’s find the difference. Turns out there is a new version of the AzureFunction tooling in VS so I updated this. After some hours I got to the point that something is messing around with my connection to the Azure storage table I use. Still, everything works fine when tested locally but now I get a 400 bad request back from the Azure storage table. Now only remote debugging can help and by the way that’s a damn cool thing if you think of it. Debugging your cloud function locally. Nevertheless, turns out that the bug is somewhere in those lines of code: Again, everything works perfectly on my local machine but crashes somewhere here when published to the cloud. The experienced guys maybe solve it within the blink of an eye, but it took several hours for me. The difference is the result you get back from DateTime.Now.Date.ToShortDateString(). My AzureFunctions run somewhere in the US, with an us-US CultureInfo as base culture for the current thread. On my local machine, the base CultureInfo is de-AT so in terms of date, the difference is obviously MM/dd/yyyy versus dd.MM.yyyy. That’s the “only” difference in terms of the code. At first, I was like, ok that’s not a big deal, I can handle that different date format in the database and I don’t care if my dev tables get mixed up with different formats. But turns out there is a list of characters you are not allowed to use in a RowKey column in an Azure storage table. And of course, “/” is one of them. So the code worked fine in a de-AT environment because of the dd.MM.yyyy but crashed in an us-US one where the format is MM/dd/yyyy. Sometimes the smallest things you already know come back and haunt you for hours …

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:

Slides from SharePoint Saturday Brno

Sat, 10 Jun 2017 15:05:47 +0000

Today I had the opportunity to talk about our understanding of a modern intranet based on SharePoint and Office 365 at the very first SharePoint Saturday in Brno. I’m still sad about missing the speaker’s dinner yesterday, but nevertheless, all the others had an awesome dinner with typical local food of course. If you interested in my slides, here your go:

SPSBrno The intranet of tomorrow based on SharePoint and O365 - Thomas Goelles—Thomas Goelles

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.

Slides from SPS Madrid 2017

Sat, 20 May 2017 15:10:38 +0000

Today I had the honour to speak at SharePoint Saturday Madrid about how use the samples, ideas and other parts of the SharePoint Pattern and Practices initiative. After not crashing at the special Segway tour for staff and speakers yesterday everything went fine during the session. If you interested in the talk feel free to check the slides here:

SPSMad2017 - How to use SharePoint PnP assets in real world use cases—Thomas Goelles

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.

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.

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.

Solvion WORKBOX Webcast and SharePoint Days Munich

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 22:42:51 +0000

Like every year December is super busy. To save you some time this blog post will only highlight the news of the coming days. Next week on the 14th and 15th of December we will deliver a one-hour webcast about our Modern Workplace Solution Solvion WORKBOX. For details and registration please visit http://workbox.solvion.net/workbox-en.html#kontakt Tomorrow on the 8th I will be presenting at the SharePoint Days 2016 in Munich. If you find the slides interesting, feel free to ping me.

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:

A Taste of Vienna - European SharePoint Conference 2016

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 12:18:56 +0000

A few months ago I got informed that I will be part of ESPC 2016 in Vienna. As I am from Austria this is a very special event for us and I’m looking forward to this exciting week. Our company will be there during the whole week and my session will be Thursday at 11:45. At first I was very happy with this slot, but after a closer look and realizing who else is speaking at this time, gosh, what an amazing line up again. For all of you first timers in Vienna take this three minute video about the captial of Austria. It will raise the bar in terms of what to expect, I know. But it will be a great week! Cu @Vienna!

Cross Site Publishing and Variations: hands-on experience

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 21:53:36 +0000

Over the last months we had the chance to get our hands dirty in the new 2013 way. In this post I want to share some of the decisions we made by using the content by search webpart and the variations feature heavily. Introduction Late last year a customer asked us to implement a partner portal. He thought about a different publisher area where he is able to manage the content in German and a portal for each language group available. He wanted the upload use case as simple as possible to allow his co-workers to update the information without any further assistance. Also he requested to “somehow” tag the content for all other languages (FR, EN, IT, RU, CN) in German because they are not able to support all languages in the upload team. They also wanted to display the files in a “nice” way and the standard SharePoint list wasn’t included in their definition of nice. All user data (username, passwords) already existed from the up and running partner portal in use so we had to build a solution integrating all of this users in SharePoint. Also we had to guarantee that people from a defined language group can only access content of their configured language. How we did it Actually we already thought about XSP (Cross Site Publishing) and variations in our very first meeting. At this time we also thought that managed metadata navigation will be a good way to handle all the navigation settings in the portal, but … yeah that was plain wrong. Remember: you are not able to configure security trimmed links via managed metadata navigation. Everybody with access to the selected web will see all configured navigation links. For me that was a huge surprise. I had in mind that SharePoint *always* handles the navigation in the security context for the current user. With managed navigation that is not the case. So if you want to put some security in your navigation, you can’t use this new set of features. The XSP on the other hand worked like charm. We set up a document library as a catalogue for the content by search webpart. We used a term store to tag all the documents with the right category. To allow a real fast upload and publish process we mixed the metadata with a folder structure and worked with the default column values for the different folders. This enables the publisher to open that special library with the explorer view and allows a very fast upload with integrated tagging. For the ease of use we just implemented one document library with root folders for each language. From there on every language has a different subset of all available elements. The German portal hast the most content and every other language has just a subset of the German folder structure. With this folder structure the author only has to copy the documents to the right folder without any further configuration. Furthermore the author never has to actually update something in the user’s area. The only reason to browse the documents is to see if search already picked up the changes. Next step was to configure the variation root and the needed languages. In a first phase we built the German portal, so the variations generated a sub web with /de-de as our start url. In this web we created different web part pages for every content category. On every webpart page we configured a content by search webpart filtering on the specific content category. By using a custom display template we were able to show some specific information and a thumbnail for each element. That was some kind of tricky because we had to display documents and images as well with the same display template. If you dig deep into a search results node you recognize that the url to your element is different for documents and images, so you can’t build your href the same way. SharePoint always gives you the link to the display form for images in a document library if you use the Path property. You have to use a special property (DefaultEncodingURL) to get the full href to the specific picture. Security In terms of security we used SharePoint groups heavily. Every language has about 10 types of different user groups with different access rights. Both, the authoring web and the variation webs are security aware. All users are stored in a SQL database that is configured as a FBA membership provider source in SharePoint. Within the FBA administration every user can be configured for a different role in the portal. Adding a new language The task of adding a new language to the portal is accomplished by a mix of hands on configuration and some powershell scripts. All content is uploaded to an instance of the defined folder structure and tagged properly. The variations feature creates the new subweb with the target language. The SharePoint standard user interface supports the language by installing the right language pack. All custom menu entries at the navigation configuration have to be updated with the translated terms. All webpart headings are set via a powershell script. We used some of Gary Lapointe’s powershell magic to update webpart properties. Conclusion The out of the box features of cross site publishing and variations are really a huge step forward for the product. Yes they are built with a little focus on web publishing and anonymous access where also managed metadata navigation integrates well. But I hope this post gives you an idea how this features can also be used in a security aware intranet solution. References: Without the help of this blogs and articles we never could have accomplished the given task! Thx!

Document Management in SharePoint 2010 Series Part 1

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 20:51:00 +0000

Introduction

This post will be the first in a series of posts focusing on document management in SharePoint. The series tries to cover the whole environment of the implementation. We will discuss the different phases we see in such a project. We will start with a analysis phase, we will cover the questions how to decide what content should be moved and which files better stay. We try to give you insights about which end user training approach fits our projects best. For sure we will discuss how to build all the structure, sites, content types, views, …., web parts and so on. We will show how search can be a key success element in such an environment. And we will have a look at all the 3rd party tools we use in terms of end user adoption. All this content will be targeted towards SharePoint 2010 although the last post in the series will give a hint how our approach adopts with the new bits from vNext out there.

First Posting

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:23:00 +0000

Hello on my new created SharePoint focused Blog! My name is Thomy Goelles, I’m currently working at a Microsoft Gold Partner in Graz, Austria. I’ve been working with the 2007 release of the product since January 2007. Our projects mainly target a SharePoint enablement at small to midsize customers. We didn’t had to update a single 2003 implementation till today. So the real SharePoint hype in our area came with the last version of the product. Our main focus is building intranet solutions. We’ve done only one internet facing site in the last 2,5 years. I think the license for the internet facing ECM solution is a way to big for our typical customer. We tend to guide our customers to the MOSS Standard version. We did a few projects on WSS, but it turns out that sooner or later you are going to develop a custom solution targeting a built in feature form the Standard product. All our custom solutions are 100% WSP packages. We are using the WSP Builder VS project as root of any project. We are faced with farm scenarios with multiple front end servers, so WSP solution packaging really pays out. All our solutions are developed locally, checked in to our team foundation server and are built there. It’s not a 100% CI process, but we are getting there. Currently my personal focus is set on the Content Query Web Part. I really start loving this web part. If your are working with the CQWP you probably came across the more flexible solution built by Imtech public available at codeplex. This is a real fantastic web part and there is a great blog by a guy called Waldek Mastykarz. If you are interested in the CQWP this blog is a must read! Inspired by the work done with the CQWP I’m currently working on a “NewsContentSlider” web part. I’m trying to built something like this with the content query web part. I’ve done the xslt part in Visual Studio 2008 with the help of a little reg hack to enable intellisense in VS. The solution is already running on my development machine but I still have to fix some minor bugs in the css. Last week a colleague and I discussed about the used jQuery library in the solution. At the moment I’ve included a reference to the Google based jQuery library but as we deploy this tool to a intranet site we tend to host the libraries somewhere in the style library of SharePoint as a internet connection is not a must on a intranet site. This week I came across a tweet saying something about SharePint and Slovenia. So I opened Google searching around for a conference in Slovenia and luckily I found the page. So SharePoint Conference Slovenia is held on 26th of November 2009 in Moravske Toplice. As this is probably a hour away from us we definitely looking forward to do this event and also the SharePint that is planed there.