Customize modern SharePoint menu with icons

Creating a well-structured and meaningful menu using just a few words per item can be difficult. Wouldn’t be awesome to customize the menu items with icons?

I’ve wrote about this topic in the past and I even did a solution to customize classic SharePoint with Fabric UI icons.

Since SharePoint has evolved and the methods used in the past are no longer valid, today I bring you a quick tip that will allow you to customize your modern SharePoint menus in just a few clicks.

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By João Ferreira Mar 29, 2020 Branding 3 Comments

How to brand the SharePoint mobile app

If you usually read this blog you might have seen a post or two about SharePoint branding methods and good practices.

With the evolution of the product Microsoft limited the branding options and have defined a set of rules and elements that you can customize to make sure you can still have your corporate identity without breaking the product.

With this in mind everyone using SharePoint Online can now extend the customizations to the mobile SharePoint app available for Android and iOS.

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By João Ferreira Mar 26, 2020 Branding 0 Comments

How to change the page layout on a modern SharePoint page

Modern SharePoint pages can be configured with three different page layouts but unfortunately, until now there is not an option in the UI to change them.

This article describes four different approaches that you can use to change the page layout and explains what you will get with each one.

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By João Ferreira Dec 8, 2019 Branding, Development, Office 365, SharePoint 2 Comments

How to create a Tile view on modern SharePoint lists

Modern SharePoint lists just received the option to include a Tile view to display data on a modern and good-looking layout.

The Tile view is available on document libraries for a long time but the one released for lists is a bit different. While on libraries the layout is pre built by Microsoft on the lists you will have to build your own using the list view formatting feature.

If you are new to the list View Formatting, I strongly recommend you start by reading the official documentation here and here to get familiar with the JSON schema.

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By João Ferreira Sep 11, 2019 Branding, Office 365 16 Comments

How to easily deploy the list view formatting templates built by the community

List view templates are JSON structures that allow you to customize the views on SharePoint lists creating HTML components that represent each item.

The SharePoint community has been sharing a lot of this templates on GitHub but if you want to try them on your own environment you will need create the lists with the same exact column names, add data to the lists and then apply the JSON to format the view.

With more than 20 templates available this can easily take a few hours to build all the lists and add all the templates.

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By João Ferreira Sep 8, 2019 Branding, Office 365 9 Comments

Create a Fabric UI card layout on modern SharePoint pages

I’ve spent most of my professional life building custom intranets using classic publishing sites with custom page layouts and one of the features that was often requested was the card effect around the web parts.

While this was very simple to implement with custom page layouts on classic SharePoint, on modern SharePoint things are a bit different and require a different approach that I’ll explain in this article.

The instructions on this article will provide you a card layout like what is available on the modern Admin Portal.

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By João Ferreira Sep 3, 2019 Branding, Development, Office 365, SharePoint 6 Comments

Change modern SharePoint fav icon using Tenant Wide Deployment

I’m updating some of my old projects to take advantage of the latest functionalities of the SharePoint Framework and today I’m revisiting the solution that changes the favicon on modern SharePoint sites.

The previous solution was built using the framework 1.4.0 and allows you to change the favicon on individual site collections, the solution I’m providing today was updated to version 1.7.1 to take advantage of the tenant wide deployment functionalities.

This means that with a single deployment you will be changing the favicon globally on all your modern SharePoint sites.

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By João Ferreira Feb 24, 2019 Branding, Office 365 0 Comments

Convert Classic root sites to Modern SharePoint

Recently I’ve got a few requests to transform classic root team sites with publishing enabled into modern SharePoint sites.

The technic described in this article allows you to keep all your existent content, and at the same time allows you to take advantage of the out of the box responsive layouts and modern web parts.

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By João Ferreira Feb 5, 2019 Branding, Development, Office 365 42 Comments

Highlight events on Modern SharePoint with images

Do you need to draw the attention of your Intranet users to certain upcoming events on your calendar?

If your answer is ”Yes!”, then this article explains you how to take advantage of modern SharePoint to promote events in a compelling way, using images in your intranet pages.

Modern SharePoint has a dedicated web part to display events on modern pages. However, in the back everything is stored on classic SharePoint calendars, with a few extra columns added to build the modern detail page.

For each event created through the web part, you can define an image that although used in the header of the detail page is not visible in the web part itself, making it less immediate for end users to identify and therefore less engaging.

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By João Ferreira Oct 21, 2018 Branding, Office 365 2 Comments

SharePoint branding in 2018 – What are the available options?

SharePoint branding is one of the most controversial subjects on SharePoint world. There are pros and cons of doing it and there are several different ways to apply your brand to SharePoint as explained in this article.

Branding is often used to change the way SharePoint looks like and to make it aligned with the corporate visual identity. Doing this type of customizations can bring extra functionalities to the product and most importantly can increase the user adoption of SharePoint.

Besides all the positive aspects it can also have a negative impact on SharePoint if not done correctly depending on the branding method used you can easily loose default functionalities or even worse break the entire site.

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By João Ferreira Sep 9, 2018 Branding, Office 365, SharePoint 3 Comments