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 5 Comments

Change favicon on Modern SharePoint sites

Favicons are associated to a website and are used to easily identify it from the address bar or bookmarks.

Changing the SharePoint default favicon on classic SharePoint usually involves a modification of the master page as explained here, this option is not available on modern sites but it’s still possible to modify it using an Application Customizer.

In this article you will find detailed instructions on how to create the application customizer as well as the final solution ready to be installed on your system.

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By João Ferreira Aug 24, 2018 Branding, Development, Office 365 17 Comments

Customize SharePoint menus with Fabric UI icons and images

Today I’m revisiting one of the first articles and customizations I did for SharePoint, a couple years ago I wrote a custom script to personalize SharePoint menu with icons using Font Awesome.

My previous solution was not easy to setup and had a few dependencies that might not work for all users, to overcome this I’ve decided to write a new version that automates the entire process and provides interfaces to manage the icons.

Since the release of the first solution a lot changed on SharePoint and Microsoft provided its own front-end framework, with this in mind I decided to replace Font Awesome by Fabric UI Icons.

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By João Ferreira Jul 1, 2018 Branding, Development, Office 365 16 Comments

Apply SPFx extensions to SharePoint Hub Sites using PnP PowerShell

Hub sites brig a set of common functions to all sites that belong the hub, but extensions are not propagated to all sites automatically.

With PnP PowerShell is possible to automate the installation of Application Customizers through the sites, the script below search for all sites associated with hub and apply the custom action to all of them.

Before running the script, you will need to have PnP PowerShell installed, the latest version can be installed from here.

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By João Ferreira May 13, 2018 Branding, Office 365 0 Comments

Hub Sites – SharePoint dynamic intranet has arrived

Hub sites were demonstrated for the first time during Microsoft Ignite in Atlanta last year and this week they were released worldwide to all SharePoint Online tenants.

Hub sites are the modern SharePoint approach to dynamic organizations, as business evolve content that lives with in evolves too and your intranet can be reorganized to reflect the organization structure.

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By João Ferreira May 12, 2018 Branding, Office 365 2 Comments

SharePoint Breadcrumb V3 – navigate between folders

Breadcrumb is one of the most requested features by SharePoint users but unfortunately Microsoft removed it with SharePoint 2013 and to this day it was never reintroduced.

Last year I did a solution to bring back the breadcrumb to SharePoint without modifying the master page and today I’m releasing its third version with new features implemented based on the feedback provided by the users.

The new version is configurable according to your needs, includes support for folders inside libraries and supports custom master pages.

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By João Ferreira Apr 29, 2018 Branding, Development, Office 365, SharePoint 87 Comments

Brand modern SharePoint Online sites

With SharePoint Online modern sites the branding options that used to available with Classic sites were removed, however Microsoft introduced new alternatives to apply you company brand to SharePoint.

The new theming experience allow site owners to apply themes to all modern pages in the site collection, to deliver new engaging and familiar looks.

By default, there are 8 themes available but you as an Administrator can create and deploy your owns, in this article you will find instructions on how to achieve it.

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By João Ferreira Mar 11, 2018 Branding, Office 365 12 Comments

Create a page layout with custom content areas

Page layouts are essential on SharePoint publishing sites, they enable the creation of content with specific editable fields.

There are predefined content areas that can be reused however sometimes they are not enough to build the perfect layout.

In this article I’ll explain you how to create a basic custom page layout with multiple Page Content areas also known as Rich HTML Field.

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By João Ferreira Feb 1, 2018 Branding, Office 365, SharePoint 2 Comments

Change the color of SharePoint modern experience automatically

SharePoint modern experience is available for Lists, Document Libraries and Pages and while it delivers new functionalities to the end users it lacks some of the customization options available in the classic SharePoint.

The modern experience is provided with a theme that is responsible to format the colors of the elements in the page. On modern site collections like group and communication sites there’s a native interface that allows the administrator to control the color theme, but on classic site collections things are a little bit different and the modern experience will receive a random color applied automatically.

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By João Ferreira Dec 5, 2017 Branding, Office 365 3 Comments