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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Change the color of SharePoint modern experience automatically

By Dec 5, 2017 Branding, Office 365 3 Comments

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.

SharePoint Color

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Column Formatting VS SPFx Field Customizer

By Nov 23, 2017 Development, Office 365 2 Comments

If there is something that SharePoint cannot be accused of is to be a static platform, new features are released weekly and sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all the new functionalities.

With so many new features seem that some of them are doing the same thing as the Column Formatting and the SPFx Customizer.

Both features were released this year and both are used to format data in SharePoint lists and even though the result might be similar the purpose of each one is different.

Column Formatting

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What’s new for SharePoint from ESPC 2017

By Nov 19, 2017 News, Office 365 0 Comments

The sixth edition of European SharePoint Conference occurred from 13 to 16 of November in Dublin, it was great to see all the European community together and to see how SharePoint team is developing new features based on the users feedback.

If you hadn’t the opportunity to attend the event in this article you will find a resume of the new features that will start being rolled out this month for administrators and developers.

ESPC Key note

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Save publishing site as template – The right way using PnP Provisioning

By Oct 29, 2017 Office 365 12 Comments

…if you are familiar with remote provisioning technics which I’ve been promoting for years, this is a kind of similar model. You create a site, out of the box site and then apply actions on top of it so you don’t break the site by using something evil like site definitions or web templates…

Save your newly created sites as templates is one of the best features on SharePoint, it saves you a lot of time and work if you want to replicate them in your environment but this is not the best way of doing it as explained in the quote above specially if you are using Publishing features.

In this article I’ll explain you how to save and deploy a Publishing site using the PnP PowerShell and the PnP Provisioning.

Save Site as Template - SharePoint

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Build a breadcrumb using SPFx extensions

By Oct 11, 2017 Branding, Development, Office 365 8 Comments

A few months ago, I’ve built a solution to add the breadcrumb navigation to all SharePoint sites and pages. While that solution still works fine on SharePoint 2013, 2016 and on the classic experience of SharePoint online it no longer works for the modern sites.

In the previous solution I used a script link to add the breadcrumb globally to the site collection, this functionality was disabled by Microsoft in the modern experience and it was replaced by the SPFx Extensions.

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What’s new for SharePoint from Microsoft Ignite

By Oct 3, 2017 Office 365, SharePoint 2 Comments

The third edition of Microsoft Ignite occurred from 25 to 29 of September in Orlando, Florida and had 26 000 attendees, for SharePoint it was an amazing week with a lot of new features being announced, if you hadn’t the opportunity to attend the event in this article you will find a resume of the announcements.

SharePoint is growing more than ever and Jeff Teper made it clear with the announced numbers, over the last 12 months the number of users and organizations that joined SharePoint is higher than the last 12 years. Check down below what will be the features that will continue to bring more users to get on board with the platform.

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How to add Google Analytics to SharePoint without modifying the master page

By Feb 26, 2017 Development, Office 365, SharePoint 51 Comments

Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics service 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 intranets.

Intranet portals are the central hub of companies; important information is communicated to employees through these portals and you need to make sure that everyone can access to it no matter the device or technologies used.

Analyzing your intranet portal will help you to understand how users interact with it, what are the most viewed sites and what sites do you need to improve.

Add JavaScript File

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Customize SharePoint from Mac OS

By Feb 22, 2017 Branding, SharePoint 5 Comments

Create and edit SharePoint files form Windows is simple with SharePoint Designer but if you are a Mac user, you are in though spot!

You can do pretty much everything from the browser but upload a file every time you want to change CSS is a tedious process.

In this article, I’ll explain how you can save time and how you can get access to all the files and folders needed to customize SharePoint sites from your Mac.

Open SPD folder

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Can you still use sandbox solutions in 2017?

By Feb 19, 2017 Development, Office 365, SharePoint 6 Comments

The answer to this question is yes, but… not for all situations and not all types of sandbox solutions.

SharePoint sandbox solutions were introduced with SharePoint 2010 and provided a mechanism to execute code outside of the ISS worker process. The sandbox solutions do not affect the entire farm; they are installed per site collection and they can be installed by the site collection administrator.

Every day I deal with SharePoint users that are extremely afraid of using sandbox solutions mainly because the message about this type of solutions being deprecated was not properly communicated by Microsoft.

sandbox solutions in 2017

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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.