SharePoint Online

Provisioning the M365 learning pathways solution

AnthonyLeave a comment

This post details my experience of trying to provision the 365 learning pathways solution from the SharePoint look book and what I found that differs from the documentation.

Contents

Overview

The first thing to say about this is it’s quite literally a click of a button to actually provision the M365 learning pathways solution from the SharePoint look book, but please make sure you do read the prerequisites as that may well catch you out.

My one big takeaway from writing this post is that the initializing of the CustomConfig list is a crucial step.

Official Microsoft resources

Tenant admin or global admin?

The prereq’s makes mention of being a tenant administrator, the account I used was an O365 global administrator. A quick google search here shows that a tenant administrator is now the global admin role.

Google search of an O365 tenant administrator.

You can also use these steps in the troubleshooting guide to check if you have the relevant permissions.

Create an app catalog site

The solution requires an app catalog site to be created in order to work, to do this you’ll need to navigate back to the old SharePoint admin center, or the classic site collection page to be more in-line with the official verbiage!

To get there, press More features > under Apps, Open.

How to access the classic site collection pages from the modern SharePoint admin center.

From here it’s easy to create a new app catalog site, I’ve documented this before as part of the SharePoint start kit deployment, but to summarize:

  • Select app catalog
  • Press OK to create a new app catalog site
Select app catalog from the apps menu option
  • Enter the following details
    • Title: app catalog
    • Web Site Address suffix: enter your preferred suffix for the app catalog; for example: apps
    • Administrator: enter your username, and then select the resolve button to resolve the username
  • Press OK

Check global admin is app catalog site collection admin

You also need to make sure the provisioning account is also a site collection administrator for the app catalog site. To do this just select your app catalog site, press Owners > Manage Administrators and make sure its the either listed in the primary or one of the other site collection administrators.

Manage the administrators of the app catalog site in classic SharePoint admin.

Initialize the CustomConfig List & assign owners

Once the learning pathways site has been provisioned, the account used will receive an email to confirm. In the email there will be a link to the custom config list that needs to be run to set up the site for first use.

Once you load the CustomLearningAdmin.aspx page this page will be displayed.

If you don’t receive an email from the PnP provisioning service, then just navigate to your learning pathways site, then just add /SitePages/CustomLearningAdmin.aspx to the end of the url:

<YOUR-SITE-COLLECTION-URL>sites/<YOUR-SITE-NAME>/SitePages/CustomLearningAdmin.aspx

Next, you will need to add owners to the learning pathways site. Owners will have admin privileges on the site, but also be able to hide and show content delivered through the learning pathways web part. In addition, they’ll have the ability to build custom playlist and assign them to custom subcategories.

  • From the SharePoint Settings menu, click Site Permissions.
  • Click Advanced Permission Settings.
  • Click Microsoft 365 learning pathways Owners.
  • Click New > Add Users to this group, and then add the people you want to be Owners.
  • Add a link to Explore the Site in the Share message, and then click Share.

Issues & troubleshooting the learning pathways solution

1. Configuration issues within learning pathways site

Once the learning pathways solution had provisioned and I received a success message, I went in and started poking around in the site to see if content loaded etc.

Once I then started shared the site with a few colleagues I got feedback that they were seeing this message within each page:

“Microsoft 365 learning pathways has a configuration issue. Please see the browser console for detailed logs. For assistance check out the issues list at https://github.com/pnp/custom-learning-office-365/issues.”

What I found was if you don’t click the link to initialize the CustomConfig List, all of the learning pathways content that’s delivered from the web part won’t work. I also then tried to go back and open the link to see if the problem would correct itself. It didn’t and the CustomLearningAdmin.aspx page just hung and wouldn’t respond.

What worked for me in the end was to permanently delete the learning pathways site, delete the learning pathways solution from the app catalog site, wait 24 hours then provision again (this was I could use the same URL).

Naturally this time around I initialized the CustomConfig List from the URL before sharing it!

2. Delete sites from recycle bin in order to provision again

So stemming from issue number 1 above, I also noticed that unless you permanently delete your learning pathways site, you cannot create one with the same name. You will get a message similar to the below:

“Unfortunately your site provisioning at least partially failed!”

To permanently delete a site, all you need to do is delete it from Active sites (if not connected to an O365 group), then under Delete sites select the site and press Permanently delete.

How to permanently delete sites in modern SharePoint.

3. Multi factor authentication enabled for the provisioning account

I had an issue where I kept receiving a generic message from the provisioning service page saying:

“Unfortunately your site provisioning at least partially failed!”

The global admin account I used to run the provisioning service had multi factor authentication enabled, more specifically using the authentication app. What I found was when I changed by 2-step verification from using the authentication app to text, the provisioning service completed successfully.

4. app catalog site takes longer than 30 minutes to allow provisioning to complete

If you don’t already have an app catalog created, you will receive an error from the provisioning service similar to this:

“In order to provision the template you need to have an App Catalog in your tenant. Please, create one (for instructions you can read this document: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2087251), wait up to 30 minutes, and try again.“

When you then create an app catalog site, I found it took well over 2 hours before the provisioning service recognized as such.

How to create a custom ID for lists and libraries

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In this example I demonstrate how to create a simple solution that allows users to submit a request to a list, then a workflow fires that updates the request ID field with our custom ID number.

Classic SharePoint
Modern SharePoint

ID numbers, reference numbers, ticket numbers…this is something that regularly gets asked to be a part of any SharePoint solution or request based system. My first thought when this is required is “easy, we can just use the SharePoint item ID column and use that”. However, creating a simple calculated column that leverages the in-built ID column is not as easy as it seems.

My first attempt at creating a custom ID column involved creating a new calculated column, and appending some text before the ID and then inserting the ID column into the formula, like this:

="REQ-00"&[ID]

The problem with this approach is that when new items are added, the ID appears to “slip” resulting in the custom ID column having no ID number being pulled from the SharePoint ID.

Custom ID column – modern SharePoint

1. Pre-requisites

Before you begin you will naturally need to create either a list or library in SharePoint, and the relevant apps checked as part of your O365 license.

2. The setup

  • Create a new column, with the type Number – I called this ‘solIncrementNum‘
  • Create a new column, with the type Calculated – I called this ‘solReqNum‘, later renamed ‘Request Number’
    • In the formula field, add the following: ="SOL-00"&[SolIncrementNum]
    • For the Data Type, select Single line of text
Setting the formula for the solReqNum column in list settings

NOTE: for the Request Number formula if you want to prefix your custom ID with something else just replace what’s between the ” “ in the formula field above.

3. Build the Flow

Flow action: when a new item is created

  • Create a new flow from the template “when a new item is created, complete a custom action”
  • Give your Flow a name, I called mine “Populate Solution Request Number”
  • In the “when a new item is added” step, make sure the site address and list name are the same as the list you built the custom ID column for earlier
Step 1 of the Populate Solution Request Flow

Flow: update item

  • Press + New step, start typing “update item”, select the update item action from the selection
  • Select the site in question, then copy and paste the List Name from the previous action
  • Make sure this action has the following fields set:
    • Id: ID
    • Title: Title
    • solIncrementNum: ID

NOTE: make sure that when you set these fields, that the values you use are coming from the “when a new item is created” action.

Step 2 of the Populate Solution Request Flow

Now when new items are created within the list or library, the flow will fire and create a new request number.

Modern SharePoint list with Flow that populates Request Number
Pages: 1 2

Finding the task properties pane in SharePoint 2013 workflows

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(this post was written using a SharePoint online environment and SharePoint Designer 2013)

So here’s the scenario, there is a central list where users add items and once submitted a workflow runs that assigns tasks to separate task lists. No big deal right?

The scenario

Task actions in SharePoint 2013 workflows are a pretty standard thing, the example above just assigns tasks to different lists (think HR, IT, Pensions) for work to be completed. The additional requirement I had was for these tasks to not send any system generated assignment emails when the tasks are assigned.

Example of creating & assigning a task in a SharePoint 2013 workflow.

The problem

This one really had me pulling my hair, but in a nutshell there is no obvious way to turn on/ off the emails that are system generated at the point which a task is assigned.

When you double-click on a task, an “Assign a Task” window opens. Within this window there is an “Email options” drop down, but this only has the email editor for the task creation email and the ability to turn on/ off the task overdue email(s). It doesn’t have any settings for switching on/ off the initial emails themselves.

The Assign a Task window doesn’t contain the properties to switch off system generated emails.

The hidden task properties pane

So at this point I began thinking there is no way to do this and the design for this process is now fundamentally flawed…until I right-clicked!

If you right-click on the list within the assign task action (the ICT Task List Members bit underlined in the example below) a menu will appear. Normally this menu contains some simple options like moving an action up or down. However, with task actions there is an additional option called “properties”.

Hidden properties button within the “assign a task” action.

After clicking on the “Properties” button, you’ll find an additional “Assign a Task Properties” window which contains the following, hidden properties:

Hidden assign a task properties window.
  • PreserveIncompleteTasks: set to true if you want non-completed tasks to be deleted when the task process is complete.
  • WaiveAssignmentEmail: set to false if you want to have an email sent out to the assignee when a task is created
  • WaiveCancelationEmail: set to false if you want to have an email sent out to the assignee when a task is canceled.

By default, all of these properties that are set to “no” or “false”, so will send emails based on the above parameters. To change, just click on the drop down next to each option and update to “yes” or “true” and the emails will stop sending!

Tales of a SharePoint migration – part one

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The path to a trial migration

I’ve been suitably inspired by Andrew Warland’s fantastic two-part series documenting his approach and migration to SharePoint Online, so much so that I thought it would be a fun series to write about my own experiences.

Take a look at Andrew’s blog series here.

It is’nt my intention to necessarily document Microsoft best practice in this series, rather just to explore some of the challenges, sucesses and experiences I notice along the way.

The current situation

My organisation has recently made the decision to move to to the cloud, with O365 being the naturally preferred destination. SharePoint has been well embedded, and heavily used within the business for several years, with on-premises SharePoint 2010 currently in production.

Finally, in terms of the SharePoint architecture and data volume, there are only three web applications to merge together as part of the migration effort. However, there are several site collections within our main intranet web app, plus many sub-sites nested within them, meaning the huge database sizes behind these site collections could prove difficult come migration time.

A note on the new, flat structure

Our current environment has a well established top-down structure in place that is generally consitent across the environment.

Having already made the investment in ShareGate, this will be the tool of choice for the migration. In the version 11.0 release of ShareGate, a new restructure option now allows you to promote sub-sites to top-level sites post inital migration from the source SharePoint environment.

The new restructure option in ShareGate 11.0

Considerations for a successful migration plan

One of the biggest issues to be resolved before we can start any sort of migration activity, is the fact that we have several content databases well over the 200GB recommended general use size limit.

Microsoft best practice suggests that any environment that has site collections, sites, content databases, libraries or lists that exceed the software boundaries and limits should be remediated prior to any migration activity. In this case, the main idea is to split each content database that exceeds 200GB into seperate content db’s, and where neccessary, move or promote sub-sites to site collections and attach new db’s.

Armed with the knowledge of the recent restrcuture functionality coming to ShareGate, plus my own personal feeling that any remediation activities to our current environment may in of itself carry adverse risk to the estate we proposed a different approach.

Trial migration begins

With all the reporting capabilities at our disposal via ShareGate, I was able to get a firm grasp of what resides within each site collection in our environment, in terms of:

  • The size of each sub-site underneath the top-level
  • Number/ size of libraries and lists
  • Number of items in each of the above
  • Any workflows running in any of the above

From this I ran a trial migration of a sub-site from SharePoint 2010 to a newly created team site in SharePoint Online.

Pre-migration

Before I kicked off the migration, I ran the source analysis tool within the Migration > Plan section of ShareGate. I noted the following obersavations:

  • The source analysis within “migration” in the ShareGate tool, although listed as only being able to analyze up to SharePoint 2013, does in-fact work for 2010
ShareGate source analysis
  • The source analysis cannot run at the sub-site level, meaning that you need to run it at the site collection level then just filter down to the sub-site in question through the report itself
  • Source analysis gives you a report of all checked-out files within a source site.From this, I created a simple view within each of the libraries that contained checked-out files to send to the site owners for action

Post-trial migration

The trial migration completed successfully as expected, however there were several interesting results I noted:

1. Everyone receieves a welcome email

If you migrate the permissions, once the source permission groups migrate each user will recieve a welcome email to the new SharePoint Online site.

There’s no GUI control for this as of this time of writing, but you can switch off the email notifications via PowerShell.

2. /Pages/ or /SitePages/…that is the question

Publishing sites seem to be the trickiest to migrate, especially those with custom master pages or page layouts. When migrating publishing sites, the Pages library is migrated wholesail, meaning the content won’t reside in the SitePages library (where new client-side pages are located).

3. Un-editable modern homepage

After the migration had completed, the new team site homepage threw up an error every time you tried to edit it.

I tried some of the documented resolution steps found here, but none of them worked for me. My solution was to just create a new page to replace the broken homepage, add all the relevant webparts and make this one the new default homepage.

Transforming classic publishing site pages to client-side pages

Publishing site pages will all be migrated as classic SharePoint pages, without the modern look and feel of a client-side page. My understanding is that for publishing pages with custom page layouts, additional metadata or custom content types will need to be transformed via PowerShell and creating a custom mapping file.

(I’m planning on writing a seperate blog post walking through an advanced publishing page transformation in the near future)

Its also worth considering that in the release notes for ShareGate 11.0 it makes mention of the fact they are researching the ability to transform classic to modern pages, so that could well simplify this process in a future release.

Conclusion

Overall, I was happy with our trial migration and believe it is a viable approach for us to move from on-prem to O365. Some lessons learned for myself would be to consider and SharePoint permissions audit prior to migration to remove any unecessary permissions, send an inventory out to site owners aswell as checked-out files, all in the name of reducing the migration effort.

This will be an ongoing series of posts, which i’ll focus more the on the nitty-gritty of the migration effort than anything else, but as always if there is any feedback or suggestions on how to improve this site, please let me know!

Walkthrough: how to deploy spfx sample webparts

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A while ago I did a short series on how to provision and deploy the SharePoint Starter Kit. From this, I thought it would be fun to detail how to take one of the many, great spfx web part samples available in the SharePoint GitHut repository and go through the steps involved to deploy it end to end.

As with my last series on the SharePoint Starter Kit and generally with all my posts my aim is to simplify and detail every step involved to show that you can these things working without huge effort of developer expertise, I am not a developer by any stretch of the imagination so hopefully putting all the pieces together is useful 🙂

spfx client-side web parts

All the samples are available in the sp-dev-fx-webparts repository on GitHub from the link below. For the purpose of this example, I am deploying the Modern Experience Theme Manager web part, as I wanted to test out how easy it makes applying, removing and updating custom themes (it does).

https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-fx-webparts
https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-fx-webparts/tree/master/samples/js-theme-manager

Pre-requisites

All of the pre-requirement steps detailed in part one of my SharePoint Starter Kit series are also required for deploying web parts. Make sure you have followed all the steps here before continuing:

How to provision and deploy the SharePoint Starter Kit: part one

Install GitHub

Before you can begin, it’s much easier to clone a repository from GitHub than downloading and extracting a zip file. I also couldn’t get the web part to open from the localhost workbench when I manually downloaded the code.

You can install github for desktop here: https://desktop.github.com/

NOTE: I originally wrote this walkthrough a while back, when I came to finish it up I tried to update by cloned repo but it just wouldn’t work. I just removed the repo from Github desktop, then deleted all the files from the /sp-dev-fx-webparts/ sub-folder and cloned from scratch and it worked.

Make sure a developer certificate is installed

If you followed my SharePoint Starter Kit series, you can skip this step as you’ll of already done it, but if not run the following to install a dev certificate: gulp trust-dev-cert

Step 1: get the webpart working locally

Clone repository/ run web part on localhost

Now we need clone and build the repository to start using the webpart sample. Clone the repository by following the steps below:

  • Open cmd prompt, then navigate to the samples folder > then the web part samples folder you wish to use for example:
cd \sp-dev-fx-webparts\samples\js-theme-manager
  • Run the following command to install the npm packages to build and run the client-side project
npm install
  • Run the following command to preview your web part in the SharePoint Workbench
gulp serve

Your browser should now open and a localhost version of SharePoint Workbench will allow you to add the web part and access the properties:

(When I first wrote this I was using a different webpart as an example)

NOTE: I tried this using IE at first, it didn’t open at all, so i just switched to using another browser and the workbench loaded just fine.

Test the web part in your tenant workbench

Copy the URL of the localhost workbench, open a new browser window and paste the URL but update it to reflect your sharepoint tenant, for example:

https://sstuff.sharepoint.com/sites/dev/_layouts/15/workbench.aspx

Step 2: package and (soft) deploy!

Package/ deploy the web part to your tenant

Now we have tested our web part is working locally and within the context of our sharepoint tenancy, we can now package our solution and deploy into our SharePoint environment.

  • If gulp serve is still running, press CTRL+C to stop it in cmd prompt
  • In cmd prompt, enter the following command
gulp package-solution
  • This command creates a package in the sharepoint/solution folder called something like “js-theme-manager.sppkg”
  • Navigate to your SharePoint Admin site, open the app catalog site, under apps for sharepoint, drag and drop your sppkg file
Drag and drop the sppkg file straight into apps for SharePoint
  • Press the deploy button on the pop-up window, notice the localhost domain is showing here, we will need to change this once we’ve tested our web part is working
  • Back to the console, run gulp serve to make the local assets available for the web part
  • Navigate to a site where you want to deploy the webpart, press the cog button, add an app
  • Select the webpart you just added (this might take a minute or two to be available)
Add the newly added app to your SharePoint site
  • Add your new webpart to a page!

Enable CDN for your tenant

Now we’ve deployed and tested the webpart in our SharePoint environment, we can update our solution to host the assets directly in our tenancy or a content delivery network .

  • Open PowerShell, connect to your SharePoint Online tenant using the following command:
Connect-SPOService -Url https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com
  • Get the current status of public CDN settings from the tenant level by executing the following commands one-by-one. 
Get-SPOTenantCdnEnabled -CdnType Public
Get-SPOTenantCdnOrigins -CdnType Public
Get-SPOTenantCdnPolicies -CdnType Public

spfx solutions can automatically benefit from the Office 365 Public CDN as long as it’s enabled in your tenant. When CDN is enabled, */CLIENTSIDEASSETS origin is automatically added as a valid origin.

  • Enable public CDN in the tenant by running the following command: 
Set-SPOTenantCdnEnabled -CdnType Public
  • Confirm settings by selecting Y and then Enter

Step 3: ready for final deployment

Go back to the console, make sure you are still in the relevant web part project directory, end sure gulp serve by pressing CTRL+C.

  • Open explorer, then open the package-solution.json in a code editor, from the config folder and check you see the following: 
"includeClientSideAssets": true,
  • Run the following task to bundle the solution: 
gulp bundle --ship
  • Then, run the following task to package your solution: 
gulp package-solution --ship
  • From the same sharepoint/solution folder, drag & drop the newly updated solution package into the app catalog again. As it already exists, press Replace
  • Check the domain now shows as SharePoint Online, rather than localhost
  • Make sure your updated app isn’t checked out, if it is – check it in
  • Navigate back to where you previously deployed the app, add it to a page and test that it works!

Microsoft 365 update for April 2019

AnthonyLeave a comment

Another bumper post for April, in this months update:

Let’s get started!

SharePoint updates

Files restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams

Files restore offers a self-service recover solutionthat allows administrators and site owners to restore files from any point in time during the last 30 days. Look for a new “Restore this library” option within the library settings panel.

Files restore example for SharePoint document libraries
Find out more:

Modern Document Sets

Long awaited modern document sets will update the user interface to bring them inline with modern sharepoint. Document sets allow you to group related documents together using shared metadata. Modern document sets also unlock the same intuitive user actions like drag and drop content, link to content that lives outside the document set, pin files and much, much more.

Modern Document Sets in SharePoint
Find out more:

News Audience Targeting

Audience targeting is a new feature within the news and highlighted content web parts that enables authors and site owners to tag news articles with Azure Active Directory groups to filter content through web parts to people within those groups.

Find out more:

Author reply emails for comments, replies and likes

Now when someone comments on your page or news post, SharePoint notifies you via email. Multiple comments will be batched so that you receive a single email. This feature will start rollout to targeted release in April, with worldwide rollout currently scheduled to be completed in mid-June 2019.

Find out more:

Connected web parts for SharePoint

Coming soon are three new connected web parts for SharePoint Online that allow you to display data from list and library web parts. With the List Properties, File Viewer and Embed web parts you can now connect to a data source and interact with lists and libraries in new ways.

Find out more:

Multi-Geo in SharePoint Online and Office 365 Groups

SharePoint Online and Office 365 Groups now joins Exchange Online and OneDrive in having the ability to enable where SharePoint sites and their content is stored.

Multi-Geo in SharePoint and Office 365 Groups enables global businesses to control the country or region where shared resources like SharePoint Team Sites, Office 365 Groups content (associated SharePoint Sites and Groups mailboxes) are stored at-rest.

Introducing Office 365 Multi-Geo
Find out more:

Autodesk AutoCAD integration for SharePoint and OneDrive

New integrations with Autodesk connect OneDrive and SharePoint to the drafting tools available through AutoCAD. As you work with DWG files across these applications, you can open and edit them in the AutoCAD desktop application, the AutoCAD mobile app, and the new AutoCAD web app.

Find out more:

You can now use larger, more flexible image types to upload your company logo in the Office 365 navigation bar. You will be able to upload a custom logo of any file size/ format via a URL in order to improve the clarity of the logo image that your users see.

Find out more:

Office 365 Group card enhancements

Improvements to the Office 365 group “hover cards” so that you can act on the group within the context of what you’re doing, rather than going to a separate page. You can search through all group members, renew the group per any set expiry, and approve pending members.

Office 365 Group card enhancements
Find out more:

Microsoft Teams updates

Praise badges

Praise in Microsoft Teams is the new way to show your appreciation and encourage each other at work. Send in a 1:1 chat or post it to a channel for the entire team.

Find out more:

Teams PowerShell module GA

The Teams PowerShell module is now generally available. This PowerShell module allows you to manage the lifecycle of teams within your organisation.

Find out more:

Request to add on behalf of

You can now request on behalf of someone else to join a private team. Teams can be created as either private, where admins control membership, or public, where anyone in the organization is welcome to join.

Increased member limits

Organisation wide teams now have higher size limits, so they can have up to 5000 members in a team. Global administrators can easily create a public team that pulls in every user in the organisation and keeps the membership up to date with Active Directory as users join and leave.

Org-wide teams now have higher size limits

Show/ hide teams

It’s now much easier to keep your teams list tidy. What used to be Favorite and Remove from favorites is now Show and Hide. Choose which teams and channels you want to show in your teams list and hide the rest. You’ll still get notified when @mentioned, they just won’t clutter your teams list.

Hiding a team from a list view
Find out more:

OneDrive updates

Golden folder icon design

OneDrive is introducing golden folders with subtle, yet noticeable clues emblazoned on the icon to remind you of the contents and sharing status of each folder. Golden folders are being rolled out across mobile and web in OneDrive, SharePoint and connected experiences in other apps.

Golden folders in OneDrive and the OneDrive mobile app
Find out more:

OneDrive sync client improvements

The OneDrive sync client lets you can access and share all your files directly from your desktop in Windows File Explore or macOS Finder. Some new updates for the sync client include:

  • Self-help option: “Illegal files names not syncing” 
    A new in-app resolution to sync errors – like when using an Asterix “*” symbol or any file name starting with “~$” – to help avert and solve naming blockers, to then rename the file and continue with upload
  • Request assistance
    Look for a new “Get Help” option in the OneDrive activity center on your desktop. This enables people to initiate a support ticket.
  • Prompt for pending uploads
    And one last “wait, before you go” feature… the OneDrive sync client will also notify users when they have pending uploads when the computer is shutting down or going into standby
Find out more:

Block download option for specific people sharing link

You are now able to use the “Block download” functionality that allows people to block recipients from downloading, copying and pasting shared content when using the “Specific people” style sharing links.

Find out more:

Office client apps – required document properties updates

Users will now be able to save Office files with missing required properties. This change only applies to the Office files synced by the OneDrive sync client. Additionally, users can add, or update required properties for a document by navigating to the file in the SharePoint document library and entering the appropriate value.

Find out more:

Other, related updates

Yammer conversations & highlights web part

The Yammer conversations wep part enables you to integrate topics, groups or users into SharePoint. This combines the social nature of learning across organizations with the content and knowledge management powers of SharePoint.

The Yammer Highlights web part, provides a quick overview of active conversations and a targeted portal to specific groups or conversations in Yammer.

Microsoft Search in Bing Preview includes Yammer conversations ​

Yammer conversations or conversations between co-workers will now start appearing Microsoft Search in Bing. Microsoft Search will only return information and files that you have permission to see.

Find out more:

New icons in Office 365 apps

Microsoft have updated their available icon set, with nearly 350 new icons being added to choose from. You are able to rotate, resize, and recolor the icons without any loss in the quality of the image. You can also separate the icon into its components and use only the pieces you want.

Find out more:

Power BI web by example connector

The Power BI web by example connector allows customers to scrape data from HTML pages. It supports ingesting any data element on the page, beyond just HTML tables. You can now automatically suggest Power BI tables based on HTML element repetition patterns.

Find out more:

Custom assessments in Compliance Manager

Compliance Manager now allows you to create custom risk assessments of any application used in your organization. This customised assessments capability enables IT to import their own security and compliance controls into Compliance Manager, including those for corporate policy, local law, and industrial standards.

Find out more:

Security Policy Advisor

Office Security Policy Advisor is a new intelligent service, now available in preview, that uses behavior-based analysis to help IT admins to quantify the risks and benefits of applying a tailored policy, and monitor policy health over time, for their Office clients.

Admins can now deploy policies with a single click and easily update, or even roll back, policies.

Find out more:

Links and resources

Microsoft 365 blog – New in Microsoft 365 – April 2019
New in Microsoft 365 video – April 2019
SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop – April 2019
What’s new in Teams – April 2019
OneDrive Roadmap Roundup – April 2019

Microsoft 365 update for February 2019

AnthonyLeave a comment

Take a look at some of the best bits for the improvements and enhancements to Microsoft 365 throughout February:

SharePoint

SharePoint Migration Tool updates

The SharePoint migration tool now supports migrating content types and managed metadata term stores for SharePoint Server 2013. Global tenant admin permissions are required to do so.

Also, many of the on-premises SharePoint web parts can be migrated into Microsoft 365. Examples being blogs, chart viewer, content search, list form, list view media plus many more.

You can now pretty much migrate every element of a SharePoint site that is most important to you such as web parts, pages and site navigation.

Find out more: full list of supported web parts 
Find out more: new and improved features of the SharePoint Migration Tool

Drag and drop to re-order the left-hand site navigation

You can now re-arrange the order of your site navigation elements with a nice, user friendly drag and drop gesture. This removes the multiple clicks involved in he ellipsis, move up or down options of old. This new gesture also works for dragging/dropping into a sub-navigation location.

Drag and drop the left-hand site navigation

Bulk check in/out

This one I’ve been waiting for awhile for! You will soon be able to check in/out multiple files at the same time form the modern ribbon in a document library.

Bulk check-in/out documents from a modern library

File signals

File signals or status icons are being added into SharePoint to add visual clues regarding the status of a file, such as check-out status, sharing, DLP blocks or missing metadata. This applies to modern lists and libraries.

File signals give visual clues regarding the status of a file

Column totals

A revamp of an old favorite, column totals and subtotals are coming to modern lists and libraries. These totals and subtotals are displayed in the footer. This is a welcome change from the old total count in classic views!

Modern column totals

Add columns between columns and drag and drop

You can now insert new columns in place between existing in and modern list or library view, plus move a column around by simply dragging the header to a new location in the view.


Adding a column between an existing column in a modern SharePoint list or library

Smarter file hover cards

The file hover card gives you a sneak peek into your most important files. Now, as soon as your hover over a file you will be able to see important stats like number of views, who’s viewed and who’s modified. This functionality is now being extended to almost all file types.

This new experience will also appear for files listed in your Shared by Me view.

Find out more: file hover cards are getting smarter and is now available for all file types!

Hover over a file in a SharePoint library or OneDrive folder to see more information about a file

Microsoft Teams

Priority notifications and message delegation

Priority notification alerts will notify a recipient to an urgent message on their mobile and desktop devices and repeat the alert every two minutes for up to 20 minutes, until a response is received.

Priority notifications in Teams

Also coming soon is message delegation. Message delegation enables a recipient to delegate messages to another colleague when they are unavailable.

Message delegation in Teams

Priority notifications are currently in private preview.

Find out more: New capabilities in Microsoft 365 empower healthcare professionals

Microsoft Authenticator

Microsoft Authenticator allows you to receive security notifications for important events on your personal Microsoft Account. When you receive a notification, you can quickly view your account activity to take action if needed.

Microsoft Authenticator can be used to add two-step verification for added security if needed. It supports fingerprint, face ID or PIN authentication.

Microsoft Authenticator

Find out more: Microsoft Authenticator app now sends security notifications

Links and resources

How to provision and deploy the PnP SharePoint Starter Kit part two

Anthony3 Comments

Update: The SharePoint Starter Kit is now a solution that’s available to apply from the SharePoint Online Provisioning Service:
https://provisioning.sharepointpnp.com/

This is second part of my two-part series on how to provision and deploy the SharePoint starter kit into your SharePoint tenant. You can read part one below:

How to provision and deploy the SharePoint Starter Kit part one

At this point all the pre-requirement steps should be completed, our Office 365 tenant should have an app catalog site, a dev site collection and a custom user profile service property.

Download the SharePoint Stater Kit

In order to deploy the SharePoint Starter Kit to your tenant you will need to clone or download a copy of the repository. I downloaded a copy of the repository and followed the steps below:

Downloading the SharePoint Starter Kit

Deploy the SharePoint Starter Kit

Now for the fun part…deploying the SharePoint Starter Kit to your tenant! Before you begin, make sure you have run the following cmdlet to connect to your tenant:

Connect-PnPOnline https://contosodemosk.sharepoint.com

  • Change the path in PowerShell to the location where your SP Starter Kit provisioning folder is located

Set-Location -Path C:\sp-starter-kit-master\provisioning

  • Finally, in PowerShell run the following command

Apply-PnPTenantTemplate -Path starterkit.pnp

Deploying the SharePoint Starter Kit in PowerShell

Once the SharePoint Starter Kit has concluded it will provision 3 site collections as well as other tenant level settings like themes, site designs and taxonomy term sets. You will be able to access all the site collections and web parts deployed through the starter kit in your tenant either through the new SharePoint admin center or through the SharePoint app in Office 365.

References

https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-starter-kit – SharePoint Starter Kit repository from GitHub

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/spfx/set-up-your-development-environment – steps to install the required developer tools from Microsoft

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/sharepoint/sharepoint-pnp/sharepoint-pnp-cmdlets?view=sharepoint-ps – steps to install PnP PowerShell from Microsoft

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/spfx/set-up-your-developer-tenant – setting up your Office 365 tenant to build and deploy client-side web parts using the SharePoint Framework from Microsoft

https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-starter-kit/blob/master/documentation/tenant-settings.md – creating the new user profile property/ requesting API key to Alpha Vantage from GitHub

https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-starter-kit/tree/master/provisioning – PowerShell commands and minimal path to success from GitHub

https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-starter-kit/blob/master/documentation/common-provision-results.md – Pre-requirement steps added from general cascading errors from GitHub

How to provision and deploy the PnP SharePoint Starter Kit part one

Anthony5 Comments

Update: The SharePoint Starter Kit is now a solution that’s available to apply from the SharePoint Online Provisioning Service:
https://provisioning.sharepointpnp.com/

This is the first of a two-part series on how to provision and deploy the SharePoint starter kit into your SharePoint tenant. Part-two of this series can be found below:

How to provision and deploy the PnP SharePoint Starter Kit part two

Although there is plenty of great documentation out there already (I’ll also reference and link to said documentation throughout) I wanted to provide a comprehensive step-by-step guide for those with little or no experience of SharePoint Framework, PnP Powershell or anything else with the least amount of steps required to get the SharePoint starter kit up and running in a Office 365 tenant.

I followed the all of the steps below to get the SP starter kit working in my environment:

Pre- requirements

Make sure that all of the pre-requirements below have been met to ensure that the SharePoint Starter Kit will work in your tenant.

  • Ensure you are connecting to the tenant account using an administrator account
  • Your tenant must be set to targeted release for all users, and you must wait at least 24 hours after setting targeted release before deploying SP Starter Kit
  • Check that the account being used has been added as a term store administrator

LINK: setting up the targeted release option in Office 365

Install developer tools and setup SharePoint Framework dev environment

Before you can get started with the starter kit, you need a SharePoint Framework development environment, this consists of:

  • Install NodeJS LTS version 8
  • Install a code editor – I used Visual Studio Code
  • Install Yeoman and gulp – I installed these using the command prompt
  • Install Yeoman SharePoint generator – as above
  • Install PnP PowerShell – you need to be running Windows 10 or have PowerShellGet installed to run these commands. I’m running Windows 10, so I just ran the Install-Module SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline in PowerShell as an administrator
  • Run Update-Module SharePointPnPPowerShell* to make sure its the latest version

LINK: setting up the SharePoint Framework development environment
LINK: Installing PnP PowerShell
LINK: updating the PnP PowerShell version

Office 365 tenant configuration

Once you have been through the pre-requirement steps, configured your environment for SharePoint Framework development and you are using the latest version of PnP PowerShell, you now can move onto the tenant configuration steps:

Create an app catalog site

  • In the SP admin center, on the left sidebar select the apps menu item, then select app catalog
  • Press OK to create a new app catalog site
Select app catalog from the apps menu option
  • Enter the following details
    • Title: app catalog
    • Web Site Address suffix: enter your preferred suffix for the app catalog; for example: apps
    • Administrator: enter your username, and then select the resolve button to resolve the username
  • Press OK

Create a new developer site collection

In the SharePoint admin center, in the ribbon select New > Private Site Collection. Enter the following details:

  • Title: Enter a title for your developer site collection; for example: Developer Site
  • Web Site Address suffix: Enter a suffix for your developer site collection; for example: dev
  • Template Selection: Select Developer Site as the site collection template
  • Administrator: Enter your username, and then select the resolve button to resolve the username
  • Press OK

Remember the SharePoint Workbench URL

SharePoint Workbench enables you to be able to test and preview web parts without fully deploying them into your SharePoint environment. You can access the SharePoint Workbench by using the following URL:

https://your-sharepoint-site/_layouts/workbench.aspx

LINK: Office 365 tenant configuration steps

Create a custom property in the User Profile Service

In the SP admin center, on the left sidebar select the user profiles menu item, then under People, select Manage User Properties

Select manage User Properties from the User Profiles menu option
  • Select New Property from the ribbon options
Select New Property

Configure the new property with the following settings:

  • Name: PnP-CollabFooter-MyLinks
  • Display name: PnP-CollabFooter-MyLinks
  • Type: string (Single Value)
  • Length: 3600 (which is the maximum allowed)
  • Policy Setting: Optional
  • Allow users to edit values for this property: Checked
  • Leave all the other properties with their default value

LINK: preparing your tenant for the PnP SharePoint Starter Kit

Request a custom API key to Alpha Vantage

The API key from Alpha Vantage uses the live stocks service in the Stock Information Web Part. This is not a mandatory step, but I’ve included it for completeness for the starter kit:

In part two I’ll cover downloading the SharePoint Starter Kit, deploying it to your tenant and testing everything has worked.