Brand modern SharePoint Online sites

By Mar 11, 2018 Branding, Office 365 12 Comments

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.

SharePoint Branding

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Manage SPFx extensions from macOS with Office 365 CLI

By Feb 11, 2018 Office 365 1 Comment

SPFx extensions are used to customize the modern SharePoint user experience, built using script frameworks they can be built using any operating system.

Currently there is no graphical interface to manage the extensions and all the operations need to be done from the command line using PowerShell.

Well it use to be like that but not anymore, with the Office 365 CLI you no longer need to use PowerShell and Windows to manage the extensions if you are a macOS or Linux user you can do it directly from your native operating system.

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Create a modern SharePoint site template with multiple pages using PnP provisioning engine

By Feb 4, 2018 Development, Office 365 42 Comments

The PnP provisioning engine is a framework that allows you to create templates based on pre-built SharePoint sites. The framework was not built to be a migration tool and when a template is generated it only saves the home page, although the schema supports multiple pages.

In this article you can find a PowerShell script that saves a modern SharePoint site as a template with all the included pages.

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Create a page layout with custom content areas

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

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.

Page Layout Content Types

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Activate SharePoint Search refiner count

By Jan 21, 2018 Office 365, SharePoint 0 Comments

SharePoint refiner web part has a great hidden feature that shows the count of search refiners, despite being included in the web part there is no graphical user interface to turn it on.

To get the refiners count you will need to manually modify the display template file used by the web part, following the instructions below.

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Export and Import Site Collection Term Groups using PnP PowerShell

By Jan 14, 2018 Office 365, SharePoint 0 Comments

Managed metadata allows the creation of central managed term sets that can be used as attributes in SharePoint sites, term sets can be created globally and shared across site collections or can be created locally to the site collection.

The PnP PowerShell includes commands to export and import terms groups but unfortunately the site collection term group is not exported automatically, this article provides a workaround to get all the site collection term sets into an xml ready to import into other site collections.

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Detect SharePoint environment type and page mode from an SPFx web part

By Jan 7, 2018 Development, Office 365 6 Comments

Knowing the SharePoint environment and if the page is edit mode will allow you to provide tailored web parts to enhance the user experience of your SharePoint solutions.

The code provided in this article gives you the ability to detect if your SPFx web part is running in the modern or classic SharePoint environment and if the page is in edit mode.

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Fix most common issues with SharePoint Import Spreadsheet functionality

By Jan 3, 2018 Office 365, SharePoint 12 Comments

Every once in a while, I stumble across SharePoint functionalities that are only available when using Internet Explorer, on this post I’ll explain you how to overcome two common issues when trying to import a spreadsheet into a SharePoint list.

If you are dealing with the error messages below this post is for you.

Save Site as Template - SharePoint

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How to add Google Analytics to the Modern SharePoint

By Dec 21, 2017 Development, Office 365 73 Comments

Having an analytics tool monitoring your intranet is essential to understand the engagement of the users and how they are interacting with the content that is published.

Google Analytics is widely used in the internet, it provides a concise analysis with reports of everything that happens in your site as well as real time reports, mostly targeted for public sites it also works on SharePoint intranets.

Earlier this year I wrote an article that explains step by step how to add Google Analytics to SharePoint without modifying the master page, while that solution is still valid for classic SharePoint it doesn’t work on the modern sites and libraries.

SPFx Google Analytics

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Asset Packaging and the goodies from SharePoint Framework 1.4

By Dec 11, 2017 Development, Office 365 2 Comments

Asset packaging is an excellent feature for SPFx solutions, until now the manifest and script files had to be hosted in a CDN like Azure or Office 365 CDN. Handling the hosting was a problem to if you want to distribute or sell the solution, with the solution being recompiled to be used in different tenants.

With Asset Packaging the SPFx solution files are deployed to a central CDN without the need to manually specify the url in the solution source code.

The Asset Packaging was released along with the Site Collection App Catalog and both features combined provide the same type of functionality that was provided by the sand box solutions, with all the files included into one package and being able to be installed per site collection and not globally.

SPFx Asset Packaging

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Joao Ferreira

I've been working with Microsoft Technologies over the last ten years, mainly focused on creating collaboration and productivity solutions that drive the adoption of Microsoft Modern Workplace.