How to effectively manage SharePoint news – Part 1

Modern SharePoint gives you the possibility to easily create News using the same interface you use to create Pages, it even includes the possibility to link to an external News post from your SharePoint and is displayed in the SharePoint home page and SharePoint news web parts as regular SharePoint news.

The creation process is very easy and efficient however managing the news could become difficult after a while.

If you have difficulties to find the news page you need to edit or publish let me tell you that you are not alone, this post will help you get straight to the location where the news are stored.

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By João Ferreira Aug 23, 2020 Office 365, SharePoint 0 Comments

How to enable SharePoint Spaces in all modern sites

SharePoint Spaces Preview have just arrived, however they are disabled by default and you must enable the feature in any site where you want to build VR environments.  

This can be a tedious process if you want to enable it to all your modern sites, but thanks to PnP PowerShell this process can be easily automated.

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By João Ferreira Apr 29, 2020 Office 365, SharePoint 2 Comments

How to build an interactive library using SharePoint Spaces

SharePoint Spaces have been introduced almost two years ago and finally we can start playing with the preview version. If you are not yet familiar with the Spaces concepts you can read more about it here and here.

To test how SharePoint Spaces work I’ve built an interactive library inside my library site collection, the idea is to display the CompartiMOSS magazines with a modern and futuristic interface. Let’s see how it was made and how you can also use Spaces to build something similar.

SharePoint spaces are disabled by default, to enable this feature follow the steps described here.

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By João Ferreira Apr 28, 2020 Office 365, SharePoint 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

Save a modern SharePoint list as a template

Save list as a template is one of the features that I miss the most on modern SharePoint, it was very handy to copy list definition and even to migrate lists with its content.

This functionality is not completely gone and with a few workarounds it’s still possible to bring it back however it’s not recommended to follow this path.

On this article I’ll explain you how to save a list as template on a communication or modern team site including lists with data.

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By João Ferreira Sep 15, 2019 Development, Office 365 5 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

Share SharePoint list and library items to Microsoft Teams

I’m a strong believer that Microsoft Teams and SharePoint will transform the way people collaborate with each other in the enterprise environment.

Over the past month I’ve been building solutions to help users and administrators with the adoption of Microsoft Teams by adding share buttons to SharePoint portals to quickly share relevant information to teams and channels.

Today I bring you a Command Set for modern SharePoint lists and libraries that will share a direct link to a list item or to a document on a document library.

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By João Ferreira Sep 1, 2019 Development, Office 365 4 Comments

Change the root site collection of your tenant to modern SharePoint

Back in February this year I posted an article explaining how you can transform and modify a classic root site collection on SharePoint Online to look like a modern communication site.

This is by far the most viewed article on my blog this year with more that 10k visits, meaning that there are a lot of SharePoint admins trying hard to get a consistent modern experience on their intranets.

With the latest version of the SharePoint Online Management Shell a new command was introduced to swap SharePoint sites and it can be used to define a modern site collection as the root site of your tenat.

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By João Ferreira Aug 23, 2019 Office 365 23 Comments