Latest SharePoint topics

After several years of building SharePoint Framework solutions on an almost daily basis you get to the point where you’ve managed to find some things that work pretty well. I recently started a new project and after sharing them with the team realized that maybe these tips would be useful to others and so thought to consolidate them into a list. Change the default view for the tenant app catalog Probably not the oddest, but certainly in a top 10 oddest OOB settings in SharePoint, is the list view settings for the default view in the tenant app catalog for SharePoint apps which groups by Product ID. [Read More]

This content has also been posted on Microsoft 365 Platform Community Blog. When someone says to you, they are using their “dev tenant” what they’re probably referring to is their personal development “sandbox” they received as part of joining the Microsoft 365 developer program. By visiting Developer Program - Microsoft 365 and selecting “Join Now” you’ll be walked through a wizard that will help you provision your very own Microsoft 365 tenant. [Read More]

Curate the News Social Following Sites on behalf of a user The impetus for this post was the desire to follow a site for a batch of users. Why? Well, the news that shows up on the SharePoint home page stems from news posted to sites you follow. So as an organization, especially a large one, if you want to somewhat curate what news gets pushed to your users you need to make sure they’re following the sites that have the news you want them to see. [Read More]

Introduction Azure Active Directory (AAD) Unified Groups, or better known as Office365 Groups, the security principal that underlies modern SharePoint team sites, Teams, Outlook Groups, Planner, etc. is a very powerful management construct that is the glue that holds the Office 365 security pyramid together. Basically, a Unified Group has both an Owners group and a Members group and by adding users (either users in your tenant or external users – with a Microsoft based work and school account or a personal account) you can create a construct that allows you to work across many of the vast product offerings in Office 365. [Read More]

One of the things I’ve been working on lately is harvesting a complete listing of all the site collections in a tenant, including as much metadata as possible. Some of the metadata I’m looking for revolves around adding governance to managing your catalog of sites, especially in a large tenant. For sure I think the SharePoint product group has visibility into the needs here but to get full fidelity might take significantly longer than you can wait. [Read More]

For this last post I want to take what we’ve learned and add the final pieces that have you creating web parts in the same way you would modern SPFx web parts and solutions. We’re going to start by discussing TypeScript and then briefly touch on Sass and how to include these languages into your new Webpack/Gulp environment. TypeScript is becoming almost ubiquitous in modern web development. The pros are numerous, my favorites are the ability to write code to target older browser with modern capabilities, and the ability to use a version of intellisense to validate your objects properties and methods. [Read More]

In our last post I went through the gulp process we were implementing to watch our files and upload them into an appropriate SharePoint library so that we can test our work inside SharePoint regardless of if SharePoint was version 2007 or SharePoint Online. Now we’re going to take things further and formalize our process. One of the tools the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) uses is Webpack. Webpack’s main goal is to take the many files that you create as a developer and bundle them all together into one JavaScript file. [Read More]

In the first post in this series I discussed some of the benefits of formalizing your client-side development process and then a bit about starting the process of tooling up. A common scenario to develop our own client-side solutions in SharePoint is to point a Content Editor (CEWP) or Script Editor (SEWP) web part at our custom html, css, and js files that are sitting in a document library somewhere in our environment. [Read More]

Last year, around this time, Marc and I agreed we should write a blog series on our development process. As often happens good intentions get buried in other commitments, but I’ve finally managed to circle back on this topic which I’m finding has become more important than ever. Over the last year the SharePoint Framework has taken off. Although it still doesn’t support the paradigm that I most often am developing for - the full-page app hosted in SharePoint - I still think it’s a great model for development. [Read More]

A recent comment on my blog post “SharePoint time, is not your time, is not their time.” has prompted me to create a short addendum post that specifically references updates and how your thinking might differ from displaying SharePoint date/time values. To recap our example, I was discussing how to manipulate the date values to have your client-side code mimic (or not) the regional settings of your SharePoint site. The question was raised about how to deal with dates when doing POST to a SharePoint list or library from your client-side code. [Read More]