SharePoint Online

Create a simple a – z in SharePoint (modern SharePoint)

Anthony13 Comments

This is a take on my a previous post on creating an a – z page in classic SharePoint, but this time using modern SharePoint pages. If you want to take a look at the classic SharePoint example, please click on the link below.

Classic SharePoint
Modern SharePoint
Continue reading →

Microsoft 365 update for August 2019

AnthonyLeave a comment

In this month’s update:

SharePoint – Site swap, site owners can join to hub sites, activity highlights in file hover card
OneDrive – Popular around me, comments on non-office files, Samsung + OneDrive
Teams – Focus time, content cameras, meetings first, share audio, partner provided calling plans for Japan, audio conferenceing via direct routing GCC High & GCC DoD, Personal apps (developer preview), enhanced assignments Teams for Education
PoweApps – October PowerApps release wave videos, publishing changes to Portals, PowerApps CLI, new functions, provisioning/ admin updates, inline navigate, SharePoint declaration improvents, data source experience & CDS views, share canvas apps with guests
Related – Work-in-progress slides in PowerPoint, direct links to PowerPoint slides, enhanced Yammer mobile experience

SharePoint

Site swap

Finally, you can make your root site a modern communication site or a modern team site! Using the new PowerShell cmdlet: Invoke-SPOSiteSwap, switches the location of a source site with another target site.

Note: the source or target sites cannot be “associated” with an Office 365 group or connected to a hub site.

Invoke-SPOSiteSwap
         -SourceUrl <string>
         -TargetUrl <string>
         -ArchiveUrl <string>   
      [<CommonParameters>]
Find out more:

Site owners can assoicate sites to a hub

Site owners can now associate their sites to a hub they have permissions to join. Previously this ability required site collection level admin privileges.

Find out more:

Activity highlights in the File Hover Card

The activity highlights shows you if someone you work with edits, comments, or @mentions you on files you’re working on. This is displayed in the File Hover Card, with a link to the relevant activity.

Recent activity in the File Hover Card
Find out more:

OneDrive

Now you can find relevant content at the top of the Shared with me view in OneDrive. Files which are recommended based on your working relationships will surface to help you find trending information faster and discover new content.

The new popular around me view in OneDrive
Find out more:

Comments on non-Office files

You can already comment on Office docs in Office on the web, but now you can comment on other file types in OneDrive on the web such as PNGs, JPGs, or PDFs. You can also comment while using the viewer in OneDrive.

Comments on non-Office files in OneDrive
Find out more:

Samsung + OneDrive

OneDrive will be natively integrated into the Samsung Gallery app, providing automatic syncing of your photos and videos and enabling new protection and cross-device experiences. The Galaxy Note10 will be the first to get the OneDrive integration, with more Samsung devices to follow.

Find out more:

Teams

Focus time

When you schedule “focus time” through MyAnalytics, Teams will automatically help you stay focused by changing your presence to “focusing” and silencing all notifications during the focus period (based on your priority access settings).

Find out more:

Content cameras & intelligent capture

The Microsoft Teams Room app has been updated to include a “content camera” feature. This detects the whiteboard in the room, crops and frames it, and shares the content with remote participants.

Microsoft Teams Rooms
Find out more:

Meetings first

Meetings First is a configuration mode that allows organizations to continue to use Skype for Business Server for their chat and enterprise voice needs, but move their meetings workload to the cloud.

Any version of Skype for Business Server is supported, though more recent clients will have a better coexistence experience. In addition, organizations need to be licensed for Teams, including Audio Conferencing if PSTN dial-in/dial-out functionality is required.

Teams Meetings First
Find out more:

Share audio in Teams

Now, you can share your audio during a Teams meeting, so all participants can hear whatever media you’re presenting.

Find out more:

Partner provided call plans for Japan

SoftBank has released their UniTalk calling plans to Office 365 customers in Japan. The Softbank Calling Plans enables SoftBank to sell and support PSTN calling services specifically for the Japanese market.

Find out more:

Audio Conferencing via Direct Routing for GCC High and GCC DoD

  • o Conferencing via Direct Routing for GCC High and GCC DoD

This feature enables participants to join your organization’s meetings using a standard phone number. Configuring this feature requires your GCC High or GCC DoD organization to use its own numbers for dial-in access and all meeting dial-outs to phones are via Direct Routing.

Find out more:

Personal apps on mobile (developer preview)

Currently in developer preview, Personal apps can extend and customize Microsoft Teams for your organization. It provides a capability for people in your organization to use 3rd party apps within Teams.

Personal apps in developer preview has been rolled out, with a a broader target rollout in the last quarter of 2019.

Find out more:

Enhanced assignment tab in Teams for Education

The enhanced Assignments tab now shows a clear view of what’s coming up next, when creating a class assignment, educators can add resources from your Staff or PLC team. Simply select Add resources on your assignment and choose it from the file picker. You no longer need to move your content between teams.

Add resources in Teams for Education
Find out more:

PowerApps

PowerApps October release wave updates!

In August the PowerApps team added videos to the release notes show casing upcoming innovations as part of the wave 2 releases. You can see the video below:

PowerApps 2019 release wave 2 overview
Find out more:

Publishing changes to PowerApps Portals

PowerApps Portals now uses the selective entity caching approach to improve reliability and performance of your portal. With this update, you can now see changes reflected on the portal immediately.

Find out more:

New features for the PowerApps CLI

PowerApps component framework can now see changes in the test harness as they are made and push components directly into an org using the CLI.

The push capability will make you more efficient because it bypasses the custom component versioning requirements and does not require you to build your solution in order to import into your development environment.

The watch capability removes the need to reload your test harness after every change is made.

Find out more:

SetFocus function

The SetFocus function gets data entered faster by having the app position the cursor in the input field where we should begin. When you go to validate, the app will take you directly to the offending entry, even if it scrolled off screen.

SetFocus function in PowerApps
Find out more:

With function

You can now simplify large formulas by dividing them into named sub-formulas, eliminate redundant sub-formulas, and easily work with functions that return records.

Find out more:

Provisioning & administration updates for Power Platform admin center

Several changes were rolled out in August to the Power Platform admin center, including:

  • Provisioning environments
  • Provisioning based on available capacity
  • Administrators can view all environments in the admin center
  • Simplified license requirements to administrator environments
  • Top table trend is now available in the capacity report.
Power Platform admin center
Find out more:

Inline navigate to all of our modern model-driven designers

To reduce the amount of clutter within your browser while building apps, Microsoft have introduced an option to open the modern view and form designers inline. To get back, you can simply press the back button in the designer.

Inline navigate for modern model-driven designers
Find out more:

Improvements to SharePoint delegation

Delegation of SharePoint complex objects and Query and filter operations on objects such as Person and Choice is now supported in PowerApps.

In addition, the DateTime and Date values are still not yet delegable, but a null value can be delegated for a DateTime and Date field.

Find out more:

Data source experience & Common Data Service views

New data source experience and Common Data Service views that allow adding data sources into the app, or creating new connections without inserting a control have been updated.

Also updated is enabling a Common Data Service entity view that can be selected in the property pane and the Items property.  The property pane will update the Items property to add the Filter function taking the the view name as the filter.

Find out more:

Share canvas apps with guests

Now in public preview, this feature enables canvas apps to be shared with guests of your organization! This enables teams of individuals made up of different organizations participating in a common business process to access the same app.

Sharing canvas apps with guests of your organization
Find out more:

Please note: there are also several updates for the PowerApps Unified Interface that I haven’t been able to list here, but you can find all the details from the link below:

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/august-2019-updates-for-microsoft-powerapps/

Related

You can now transform standard shapes in PowerPoint, Word, and Excel into rough outlines that look handdrawn and convey a sense of in-progress work. Sketched Shapes is perfect for building wireframes, drafting designs, or adding an artistic touch.

Work-in-progress diagrams and slides in PowerPoint
Find out more:

You can now get a link to an individual slide from PowerPoint and share it with recipients. This will help others land on the most relevant information without having to find what you were trying to show them through a stack of presentation slides

Find out more:

Recently announced, a new Yammer mobile experience to iOS and Android devices. Some highlights include a modernized feed experience that reduces visual clutter and delivers improved readability, live events, and townhalls that you can view on the go; Seen Counts to let you know how many people have viewed your messages; and group search to cut down on search time and find the information you need.

Find out more:

Links and resources

Tales of a SharePoint migration – part one

Anthony4 Comments

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!

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

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 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

File naming restrictions in SharePoint

AnthonyLeave a comment

This post is a reference point for all the restrictions and limitations around the restrictions that apply to file names and file types in SharePoint and OneDrive.

When uploading files into SharePoint or OneDrive that are subject to any of the restrictions, you may receive an error similar to something like this:

filename-error

What are the restrictions?

Restrictions have become more difficult to untangle in Microsoft 365 with SharePoint and OneDrive, plus the ability to sync. The key takeaway is that the entire decoded file path, including the file name can’t contain more than 400 characters. This limit applies to the combination of the folder path + file name after decoding:

  • The entire decoded path can’t contain more than 400 characters
  • File uploads cannot exceed 250GB
  • You can’t share more than 50,000 items
  • You can’t copy or move more than 100GB in total, no more than 30,000 files and each file must be less than 15GB

Invalid characters, file or folder names

  • ” * : < > ? / \ | all aren’t allowed in file or folder names, plus leading or trailing spaces
  • # & are supported and can be enabled in the SharePoint admin center
  • .lock, CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM0 – COM9, LPT0 – LPT9, _vti_, desktop.ini, any filename starting with ~$. are not allowed for files or folders
  • “forms” isn’t supported when the folder is at the root level for a library
  • You can’t create a folder name in SharePoint that begins with a tilde (~)

Blocked file types

  • There are currently no known types of files that cannot be added to a list or library in SharePoint Online. Custom scripting must be allowed for custom script file extensions to be work
  • Temporary TMP files will not be synced to OneDrive
  • Files that are used by your local computer, such as desktop.ini on Windows or .ds_store on macOS, don’t normally sync
  • Outlook .PST files are supported, however they are synced less frequently compared to other file types to reduce network traffic

File uploads, names and path length

  • The file size limit for uploads is 250GB
  • Each segment of a path cant exceed 255 characters if files are synced to a PC or Mac
  • The length of the root folder in OneDrive, or synced SharePoint library, plus the relative path of the file (up to 400 characters) cannot exceed 520 characters
  • In SharePoint Server, the entire path of files can’t exceed 260 characters
  • Thumbnails are not generated for images larger than 100 MB
  • PDF previews are not generated for files larger than 100 MB

Sharing

  • There is a limit of 50,000 items that can be shared within a folder and any sub-folders
  • You can’t synchronize the Shared with me view grouping of files from a OneDrive for work or school site

Syncing, copying or moving files

  • Although SharePoint Online can store 30 million documents per library, for optimum performance Microsoft recommend syncing no more than 300,000 files across all document libraries. Additionally, performance issues can occur if you have 300,000 items or more across all libraries you are syncing, even if you are not syncing all items in those libraries.
  • If you use the previous OneDrive for Business sync client (Groove.exe), the sync limit per library is 20,000 items (including 5,000 items per team site)
  • Differential sync is possible for Microsoft Office files in the new file format, .docx, .pptx, .xlsx
  • You cannot copy or move more than 100 GB of the total file size
  • You cannot copy or move more than 30,000 files
  • Each file being copied/ moved must be less than 15 GB
  • SharePoint libraries/ lists can hold 50,000 major versions and 511 minor versions
  • When using onedrive.com, you can only copy up to 2500 files at one time

How it used to be – restrictions in SharePoint Sever

Here are some, more specific restrcitions again applying to site collections, sub-sites, libraries or lists:

  • Can’t be longer than 128 characters
  • Can’t use: ~ # % & * { } \ : < > ? / + | ”
  • Can’t use: ~ ” # % & * : < > ? / \ { | }. in SharePoint 2013
  • Can’t use the period character consecutively in the middle of a file name (blah…blah.docx)
  • Can’t use the period character at the end of a file name
  • Can’t use the period character at the start of a file name
  • Can’t end with:

    .files

    _files
    -Dateien

    _fichiers

    _bestanden

    _file

    _archivos

    -filer

    _tiedostot

    _pliki

    _soubory

    _elemei

    _ficheiros

    _arquivos

    _dosyalar

    _datoteke

    _fitxers

    _failid

    _fails

    _bylos

    _fajlovi

References

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming-a-file – Names, paths and namespaces by Microsoft

http://www.sysadminsblog.com/microsoft/file-name-length-and-character-restrictions-for-sharepoint/  – Original write up by Mischa Oudhof of Sysadminblog.com

Office 365 updates for November 2018

Anthony1 Comment

November 2018

Teams: Blur background to improve video call focus

The new Background Blur feature in Teams eliminates potential distractions that might be lurking behind you on video calls and keeps the focus on you. Once you’re in a meeting, select the more options button (that’s the one that looks like an ellipsis), then click Blur my background. You’ll appear nice and clear while everything behind you is subtly concealed.

This feature is currently available in the desktop app for most newer PCs. To find out if it’s available on your device, select more options while in a meeting.

teams_blur_background
Teams: blur background to improve video call focus

Find out more: What’s new in Microsoft Teams

10 new ways for everyone to achieve more in the modern workplace

SharePoint: SharePoint migration tool to migrate your files to the cloud

At Microsoft Ignite several new capabilities were annonced as coming soon to the SharePoint Migration Tool. This tool provides a simple, no cost, and intuitive point and click interface that helps you migrate your existing SharePoint, OneDrive, and File Shares content to SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointmigration/media/a2a20032-f3ea-4248-8dd3-d3f079488503.png

Find out more

New capabilities coming soon to the SharePoint Migration Tool

Download the SharePoint Migration Tool

Release Notes: New and improved features in the SharePoint Migration tool

New to Microsoft 365 in October: Tools to create impactful content and help transition to the cloud

SharePoint: Revamped SharePoint admin center

Microsoft are introducing a completely revamped SharePoint Admin center that draws heavily on our modern design principles. It’s designed to help IT achieve more, so their users can achieve more.

Microsoft are making it much easier to manage Office 365 group-connected sites by allowing SharePoint administrators to manage ownership, change sharing settings, and delete and restore sites.

Admins can now more easily manage existing hub sites, and associate existing sites with a hub site, even in multi-geo scenarios.

Finally, Security and compliance enhancements in the admin center include access control policies for unmanaged or non-compliant devices, idle-session sign-out, and the ability to restrict or allow access from known IP address ranges.

SP_admin_center
New SharePoint admin center with access control

Find out more:

Unleash your SharePoint admin superpowers with new admin center capabilities

New to Microsoft 365 in October: Tools to create impactful content and help transition to the cloud

Office 365: HITRUST CSF Certification

Office 365 has earned HITRUST Certification from the Health Information Trust Alliance, the widely adopted security and risk management framework in the U.S. healthcare industry. This also includes the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, Cybersecurity Framework certification. The HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF) helps health organizations address security, privacy and regulatory compliance through a comprehensive, flexible, framework of both prescriptive and scalable security controls.

Office 365 now enables health and life sciences organizations to be trusted data stewards and grow capabilities to transform patient care and experiences.

Find out more

Office 365 Earns HITRUST CSF Certification

Service Trust Portal

Compliance certifications for Office 365

New to Microsoft 365 in October: Tools to create impactful content and help transition to the cloud

How to find open with explorer in modern SharePoint libraries

Anthony1 Comment

Explorer view in classic SharePoint sites has been a widely used bypass for users actually interacting with SharePoint libraries for a number of years.

Now in some cases that’s for good reason, from being able to upload multiple files easily in older versions of SharePoint to a familiar navigation of nested folder structure.

With modern SharePoint libraries, the old school ribbon has gone the way of the dodo…and so it seemed had open with explorer.

But fear not! If you still use IE you can still use the trusty open with explorer

How to open with explorer

  • Go to the library that you wish to open with explorer
  • On the right-hand side, press the drop-down icon next to all documents
    all-documents2.jpg
  • Press View in File Explorer
    file-explorer

Some weird stuff will then happen, where a classic 2013 version of your SharePoint site/library will open in a new tab and for me I got a message at the bottom of the browser window to allow popups from Microsoft then got another, more serious popup like this (multiple times):

IE-security

I pressed allow to all of these then voila! we have file explorer!

PLEASE NOTE:

File explorer only works for Internet Explorer, I tested in IE11 and it categorically doesn’t work in Firefox, Chrome, Edge or Edge Dev (beta).

Hide a SharePoint list or library from view all site contents

AnthonyLeave a comment

Have you ever been asked to hide a list or library from a SharePoint site? If so, you go straight for selecting ‘no’ to displaying the list or library on the Quick Launch or removing it from the navigation. However, your eagle eyed users notice the handy view all site contents option and see that it is still listed there – they want it gone!

Luckily, all you need is SharePoint Designer and it is as simple as a click of a button…

(These steps were created using SharePoint Server 2010)

  • Open the site that where list or library resides in SharePoint Designer
  • Under Lists and Libraries – Select the list or library you wish to hide
  • On the main list settings page – find the Settings section
    SPD
  • Check the Hide from browser option
    hidefrombrowser

Thats it! when you option the view all site content page now, that list or library will no longer be showing. Also, if you want to re-instate it at a later date, just un-check the box and it will re-appear.

This also works for SharePoint 2013, 2016 and SharePoint Online, under the site contents page.

Get a list of all SharePoint sites without PowerShell

AnthonyLeave a comment

One thing that has been bugging me recently is being able to get a list of all my Office 365 SharePoint group sites all at once. With the new SharePoint Admin Centre due to be rolled out any time now, this will soon be a solved problem, but i just want a list of all the sites i’ve created now, should be simple right?

An easy way to get a list of all SharePoint Online/ Office 365 group sites

There are ways online to do this using PowerShell, but surely there has to be an easier way…here’s what I did:

  • Navigate to the Office 365 SharePoint group sites landing page
  • Click in the search bar – press enter to start a search
  • In the all results type filter – change to sites
  • Press enter

Bingo! All of your SharePoint sites are now showing, you’ll notice that the classic sharepoint sites and Office 365 SharePoint group sites are both included in the results, which is exactly what I wanted.

Hope this is helpful for someone else 🙂

Fun with PowerApps part 4: Creating a custom PowerApp

AnthonyLeave a comment

This is the final part in my fun with PowerApps series, in this post i’ll go through the steps involved in creating a new PowerApp from scratch and highlight some of the difference with using a template or generating a PowerApp from a SharePoint list.

You can read all the other parts in this series below:

Part 1: setting up the default gateway
Part 2: creating a data connection
Part 3: my first powerapp

Creating a PowerApp from scratch

So far we have generated our very first powerapp from a SharePoint list or library, but now we want to take it a step further and create a brand new PowerApp from the beginning to enable us to create a desktop experience.

To create the bespoke PowerApp we will need to begin in the PowerApps studio, the steps below walk through creating the bespoke PowerApp:

  • Navigate to https://web.powerapps.com/
  • In the Home screen, select Start from blank – make sure the desktop view is selected – Press Make this app

The PowerApps studio will give you some useful tips on how to create forms or galleries which are definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already!

  • On the canvas, press Connect to data
  • In the Data window, select the data connection we created earlier

  • Enter the URL of the SharePoint site you want to access
  • Once entered, you will see all the available lists and libraries you can use as the primary data source, select the one you wish to use

Conclusion

And there you are your custom PowerApp is all set up and ready to go! Of course this is just the very beginning and you now have the fun bits to come like adding all of the elements that will make up your PowerApp but from my experience I think there are a few approaches to achieve this.

My idea was to create and open up the template helpdesk PowerApp side-by-side with my custom one to get a better understanding of how to re-produce things like the totals across the top and some of the finer details that make up the PowerApp. I think doing it this way is much easier than trying to pick apart the templates as you are starting with your own data source rather than the static ones provided within the templates.

As well as the desktop and mobile experiences you now have the ability to create list forms using PowerApps too, so now there is even more fun to be had with PowerApps!

Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/customize-list-form

Thanks for reading 🙂