SharePoint and Office 365: Patterns & Practices – Part 1: The Basics

 

What is SharePoint Patterns & Practices (PnP)?

SharePoint Patterns & Practices (PnP) is an initiative that was launched in 2013 with the vision to simplify development by providing an open source, reusable components, and solutions that have been built collaboratively between the community and Microsoft. Through sharing of knowledge of implementation practices in SharePoint and Office 365, Microsoft and the community collaboratively create the starting points for PnP guidance and code samples. 

How does it look like?

There are three levels of engagement.  Imagine a target with 3 concentric circles with the centre of the target being the Core Team.  Encircling the Core Team is the second layer comprised of the Special Interest Groups (SIGs) while the final outer third layer is the Community. 

1.   Core Team:  As the title implies, the Core Team has the greatest direct involvement with the PnP library of code samples and guidance documentation.  Comprised of a small group of individuals from Microsoft and the community, they have been granted permission and direct access to the PnP library to merge approved changes in the PnP library.  By keeping the Core Team small, control can be maintained to ensure proper and appropriate value is added to the PnP library.  

 

2.   Special Interest Groups (SIGs):  Special Interest Groups are being brought together and are currently being piloted with SharePoint client side development to develop the JavaScript Library.   SIGs meet weekly to exchange thought, processes, and code to build the JavaScript Library.  SIGs do not have access to the PnP library though what they produce will have an impact on the PnP Library.

 

3.   Community: With the least access to the PnP Library, this group is comprised of both the internal and external community.  Their involvement is through either of the following methods: 

 

a.    Bi-weekly office hours: hosted by members of the PnP initiative, they review and explain what the Core Team is doing, what they plan to do, and they provide suggestions as to the various areas or topics that could use community contribution.  At the end of the session is an open mic where the community is provided the opportunity to voice suggestions as to what they would like to contribute to the initiative.  These are then pitched to the Core Team, who is then tasked to render the final decisions.    

b.    Monthly Community Calls:   a unidirectional communication informing the community what changes have been proposed, names of members who have been contributing, and names of those who have been doing demos or presentations for the bi-weekly office hours.  Recognition during these calls improves the exposure of members who participate, which in turn, provide endless networking opportunities.  These Monthly Community Calls are held the first Friday of every month.  On every second Tuesday of every month, the community is provided the latest changes in the PnP Library.

 

What benefits do I receive from PnP?

By becoming an active member and recipient of PnP, not only will you gain a community of peers and experts, but you will also have access to useful libraries and an unfathomable amount of code.  Some of the libraries include the PnP Core Library, which is a NuGet ready to go package, PnP Components, Samples and Solutions, PnP Provisioning Engine, and PnP PowerShell. These are just a few examples of the libraries that you will gain access to.  Under one umbrella, there will be an establishment of common architectural patterns and standardize guidance that is available upon immediate publication of the code.  For those who would like more detailed instructions, there are webcasts available as well as on-line training material.  The best part of joining and participating in the PnP Initiative is that all materials, including videos, presentations, webcasts, are not only available for your viewing, but they are free for re-use in any way that you want! 

 

How am I supported in the PnP Initiative?

Being an open source community program, there are no sales level agreements (SLAs) for Microsoft support.  As PnP is not a product like Word or MS Office, it is not supported through Premier Support or other official support channels.  Instead, support can be accessed through the SharePoint Developer Group in the Microsoft Tech Community to provide input and/or to ask any questions regarding existing material. 

Microsoft and the community work collaboratively to provide open source code samples with standardized guidance documentation.  Both the code samples and guidance adhere to the PnP guidelines for support and recommended techniques.  These materials are maintained by Microsoft while all PnP implementations are reviewed and approved by SharePoint Engineering.  Most importantly, PnP retains its uniqueness by being supported from within the community by the community.

SharePoint 2016 – User Profile Service and Microsoft Identity Management

 

User Profile Service – The New User Profile Service Application

The User Profile Service Application, ForeFront Identity Management (FIM), in SharePoint 2010 and 2013, will be replaced with a new User Profile Service in SharePoint 2016. The new User Profile Service will provide two methods for profile synchronization:

1.  Active Directory Import (ADI) – User Profile Service Instance is the simplest and most direct route to Active Directory;

2.  External Identity Manager (EIM) – use of an external FIM or custom coding provides possibilities to connect external systems to the Active Directory. 

ADI is included with SharePoint 2016; therefore, it will not need a separate server installation. As a separate server installation is not required, the fastest way to get up and running with profile import is by using User Profile Service Instance with Active Directory Import (ADI). It is one of two User Profile Sync application options, where Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) is the second option. 

Active Directory Import

Active Directory Import is the most heavily used sync engine for SharePoint and is used by Office 365 to import profile data from the intermediary directory that is synced to SharePoint’s profile store. This fact alone should remove any doubts regarding its capability of handling large volumes of data for large enterprises.     

ADI assumes one source of identification in the corporation and imports from one system, making it very easy and smooth for administrators. Unlike the old 2010/2013 User Profile Synchronization Service with FIM, importing with ADI is one directional, allowing it to be super fast and efficient. This means you cannot export or update your AD from SharePoint profiles using ADI. Importing capabilities support secondary accounts, custom property mappings, account mappings for Windows, FBA, and Trusted Identity Providers. However, there are some limitations of ADI where support for the following are either lacking or insufficient: cross-forest contact resolution, mapping to SharePoint System properties, augmenting profiles with data from BDC, mapping multi-value to single or vice versa, and mapping two different AD attributes to the same SharePoint property.

Microsoft Identity Management

As Microsoft transitions to mobile cloud computing, many features in SharePoint are being revisited and either removed or replaced. For Microsoft, the importance of security, whether it be data loss prevention, control of user profile information, or enterprise security through management access, is a top priority. 

One such feature that has been revisited and replaced is the ForeFront Identity Management (FIM) technology that was first introduced in SharePoint 2010 and 2013. FIM was built years ago, and although it was great back in the days, it is too much to re-build or extend to meet today’s needs. Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) is the successor to FIM. It is important to note that MIM is not built into SharePoint 2016; therefore, it requires a separate server installation.  

Unlike its predecessors, MIM provides an identity and access management system that begins on ground with on-prem environments and reaches up to the sky with cloud environments. It is a vast system that provides identity management, user provisioning, device registration, application access control, data loss protection and federation. 

Corporations can easily secure their modern hybrid infrastructure through the combination of MIM with Windows Server Active Directory and Microsoft Azure Active Directory. Multiple on-prem authentication stores, such as Active Directory, LDAP, and Oracle, are bridged seamlessly with MIM through Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions. The result is consistent experiences for on-prem LOB applications and SaaS solutions. 

There are three notable features of MIM:

1. Cloud-ready identities: provides standardized Active Directory attributes and values, partitioned identities for cloud synchronization, reporting connected to Azure Active Directory and preparation of user profiles for Office 365;

2.  User Self-Service: password resets with Multi-Factor Authentication, account unlock, REST-based APIs for AuthN/AuthZ, certificate management support for multi-forest and modern applications;

3.  Enhanced Security: privileged user and account discovery, management of workflow with elevated administrator access, reporting, and auditing specific to privileged access management, Windows PowerShell support, and REST-based API.

What MIM has that ADI Doesn’t

Since MIM is not built into SharePoint 2016, being external has its advantages. The main advantage is that MIM can be customized for bidirectional data flow which provides a great advantage over the unidirectional data flow for ADI.  In addition to this, MIM is flexible and allows for customized import. In fact, it automatically imports user profile photos. MIM also supports non-active directory LDAP and multi-forest scenarios. 

Not only does MIM offer customizable solutions to the SharePoint farm, it is a sound financial choice, being cost effective as it uses existing MIM expertise, infrastructure, and investment. 

With the future of SharePoint heading straight for the cloud, enterprise security has become even more important than it has been in the past. In response, SharePoint now has two options of syncing User Profiles: Active Directory Import and Microsoft Identity Manager. Depending upon the needs of your enterprise, ADI and MIM provide unique capabilities in managing global security.       

Microsoft Forms in Office 365 and SharePoint 2016

 

After Microsoft announced the deprecation of InfoPath Web Forms in 2014, there has been much speculation as to what would be coming forth to replace InfoPath.  As explained during this announcement, Microsoft was setting itself on a path to develop an integrated forms technology that allows the user to design and deploy intelligent forms across various platforms including tablets, smart phones and PCs all the while providing quick access to the data.  

In April 2016, Microsoft announced Microsoft Forms would be available in its early format in Office 365 but only for the Education module.  There has been some ability to access the preview, and from what can be seen, Microsoft Forms is not a replacement for InfoPath. Rather, it is an excellent tool for forms collaboration across platforms and audiences on both PC and mobile.

Once launched in the preview, Microsoft Forms has a look and feel like any other Microsoft application – top three dots in the top right corner provides the options to provide Feedback, ask for Help, navigate to your Office 365 Account Profile, or sign out. 

The site has integrated the look and feel of Sway with each created form represented by a tile.  If you’re not familiar with Sway, Sway is an application that allows the user to create and interactively share presentations, stories, reports and much more.  Similar to SharePoint Mobile App, Sway has the intelligence to provide suggestions for adding content like images, videos, and tweets that are relevant to your project without you having to exit and search on the web. 

Sway provides an organized and clean view of your forms.  Each form is represented by a tile and each tile clearly shows the title of the form along with its subtitle.  From this page, you have the ability to create a new form by selecting New Form

Once selected, you can begin creating your form by naming your form and providing a subtitle.  You are now ready for the next step – creating the form.  Creating the form is very simple.  You must decide upon the format of the form and there are three styles that you can choose: Choice, Text and Rating

Choice is set up as a question and answer form with choices.  You have the option of adding additional questions to the default two question slots. The form can be customized to an extent.  There is the capability of adding the parameter of “Answer Required” to ensure that the question is answered.  There is also the ability to add a subset question to the main question if more context is needed.  Quite often, the answer for a subset question is one that the responder answers in their own words, and this can be done through the Other option. 

Text is a simple and straightforward question and answer form.  You develop the questions and the responder is provided space to respond with their own answers. Answers can be limited or unlimited in character count. 

Rating forms provide your audience the opportunity to rate something such as skill, applicability, abilities, taste, or satisfaction.  The rating scale is set at either 5 or 10 with the option of expressing the rating with stars or numbers.

Microsoft Forms web app continually and automatically saves your work and once you have finished designing your form, you have the ability to either preview it before sharing or share without previewing.  If you choose Preview, then you will have the opportunity of previewing from two views:  a computer view and a mobile view. 

Once you are satisfied with your form, you can proceed to share it with your audience.  Sharing your form, or quiz, can be as simple as sharing in an email the URL, a QR code or the embed code.  There is also the opportunity to provide additional information to your audience such as whether they need to login to access the questions, whether it is a one-time only quiz or if they can answer the quiz multiple times, and the deadline to complete the quiz. Because this will be launched with the Education module, there is an excellent option that allows you to shuffle the questions when they load.  This is great for administering classroom quizzes. 

Providing a form for a quiz or survey is only as good as the information that can be gathered from it.  Microsoft Forms provides a summary of how your audience has answered the quiz or survey.  Under the Responses tab, one can find the results of the quiz including the number of responses, the average time to complete, whether the form is still active and open for submissions, a visual graph of the responses and the average rating.  Currently, there is the option to download your quiz to your PC with the Open in Excel option. Perhaps in the future, this option will be replaced with Save in OneDrive to maintain consistency with the direction of SharePoint Mobile App and Office 365.   

Though Microsoft Forms for Office 365 and SharePoint 2016 have not been released, it has been released as a preview for the Education Module.  From this preview, we can see that this application provides the user the flexibility to elicit information from a targeted audience, gather analytics, and based on this, provide solutions.  Microsoft Forms is another step towards the direction of integrated, cross platform, collaborative, and mobile applications.

SharePoint Everywhere, SharePoint Mobile App

 

Today, we are more on-thego than we have ever been and access to digital information has never been more critical with on demand immediate access.  Have you ever lost your smart phone or your tablet?  Been in a remote area without any connection?  Felt flustered and lost because you could not reach out to the digital world to grab the information that you require? Have you walked into a meeting ready to “wing it” because the updated information on the project was not accessible once you left the office? SharePoint Mobile App is the solution that has been developed to meet the need of keeping in communication with your corporation’s intranet while you’re on-the-go. 

SharePoint is evolving. Changing. Adapting. Meeting users’ needs.  SharePoint is now available for your smart phone or tablet with SharePoint Mobile App. SharePoint is now available in your pocket while you’re on the go, providing accessibility to your intranet from any location, 24/7 and across on all your personal mobile devices. 

The SharePoint Mobile App works with SharePoint Online in Office 365, on-prem with SharePoint Server 2013 and 2016 and your hybrid environment.  It is cloud based, working synergistically with OneDrive, and is available for iOS as well as Android and Windows (the latter two will be available later this year).  It is driven by Office Graph, a backend tool which facilitates searches across integrated applications in Office 365 including its content repositories and OneDrive.  The artificial intelligence of Graph allows the program to machine learn – analyzing, building and connecting people based on the content that each user accesses the most frequently.  As a result, it provides the most pertinent content, sites, portals, and contacts for given projects within a corporate enterprise with extreme ease of access.  SharePoint mobile has brought intranet corporate collaboration to a whole new level. 

On the Discover screen, one can quickly and easily access corporate news and announcements, most frequented sites, contact list of co-collaborators and search across the corporate structure for digital information through navigation tiles which resemble the Sway environment.  With Graph operating in the background, the tiles will feature the information that is most relevant to the collaborator based on their usage, assignments and hits in SharePoint 2016 and Office 365. 

With early release versions of SharePoint Mobile App, there will be smaller tiles, or tabs, and when touched, will open and provide details and specific information.  Let’s start with the first tab – the Sites tab. By selecting the Sites tab, a list of sites that the collaborator frequents and follows will appear.  The next level will provide additional information including recent activity, files and assets, which also include lists, documents, pages and subsites.  True to the definition of collaboration, these sites can be easily shared. 

As with all Microsoft products, SharePoint Mobile App is linked with other Office apps.  What does this mean for the collaborator?  This means that there is a seamless integration of Office 365, SharePoint Mobile App and other Office programs such as Word, Excel and the remainder of the suite.  For example, when the collaborator is looking at Recent documents and clicks on a Word document, SharePoint Mobile App will take the user directly into the corresponding mobile app so they can readily edit, manage, share or view the document and/or information.   

As SharePoint is an intranet collaboration app, having the ability to see who you are collaborating with and having the ability to communicate with them would be vital for a successful project.  By touching the People tab, you will be able to browse and find colleagues within your network.  By tapping on the individual, pertinent information including their contact information, projects they are collaborating on and team members of these projects will appear.  

Though Graph provides the most frequently used and accessed information on an individualized basis, there are instances when it is still necessary to find digital information manually. This brings us to SearchSearch in the SharePoint Mobile App provides a full enterprise search so that not only can you search for content, but you can also search for people by applying filters such as sites, files and people.  Search crawls across the corporate intranet including the SharePoint team sites, folders in OneDrive for Business, restricted to the ones which you have access to, company portals, and Graph’s recommended content. 

Though individual collaborators will see their recommended content, management requires the ability to make announcements, provide resource information, and provide standardized sites and programs that can be accessed by all members in the company.  Created by the SharePoint administrators in Office 365, the Links tab will provide corporate wide information for all employees. 

SharePoint Mobile App is an extremely powerful tool for on-the-go collaboration.  By integrating SharePoint, Office 365 and OneDrive, Microsoft is reshaping and redefining how intranet collaboration is done, what intranet collaboration should look like and why intranet collaboration is vital to the on-the-go corporate work style. 

The Future of SharePoint

 

On May 4, 2016, Jeff Teper Corporate Vice President for the OneDrive and SharePoint Teams, unveiled the new cloud-first, e-mobile version along with the vision and roadmap for SharePoint as well as updated and new features which will empower end users to collaborate, stay organized and communicate from anywhere and on any device. 

What is the future of SharePoint?  Simply put – it is all about people like you and me!  SharePoint was created and developed as a platform to share information amongst team members within an organization in a live environment, thereby removing redundant versions of the same document by allowing collaboration in real time. 

Microsoft has not lost its focus on this point.  In fact, it has been working on strengthening the foundation for collaboration and in-the-moment information accessibility.  Truly, SharePoint was designed with people in mind and continues to be developed with people, work productivity and ease of use as focal points.

There are many new features of SharePoint, but the most notable is the ability to access SharePoint from any device – whether it be your mobile phone, tablet or computer.  You will have access to the documents that you need, in real time, no matter where you are and no matter what platform you are using. 

Naturally, mobile access has been focusing on the Cloud based systems, so what about those who need to remain on-prem?  Microsoft is addressing this issue by acknowledging that some customers must remain on-prem and has shifted gears to work with these customers to develop solutions which will allow them to stay on-prem.  For others, transitioning may take a bit of time. Again, Microsoft is working with these customers in developing transitioning packages that are tailored to their needs. 

SharePoint 2016 brings a lot of new features around hybrid solutions. As the end user, you will not know whether your assets are being accessed in the Cloud or from the on-site server.  The Windows experience is seamless – Office 365, OneDrive, Outlook and other business/personal productivity tools have been flawlessly integrated to provide an exceptional product and resulting in many user interface updates.

One of the most useful implementations of software is Discovery view. There is nothing more frustrating than hunting for a document amongst a sea of hundreds or thousands.  Instead, in Discovery view, all you need to do is type in the information you are looking for, and the search engines in the background will pull up possible matches based on the people you are working with, the project and the number of hits.  Microsoft has incorporated this into SharePoint which only enhances its power of collaboration. 

Trying to find a document in the library list?  It was cumbersome, time intensive and caused frustrations when you had a lot of documents in the library.  The second most useful update in SharePoint 2016 is the ability to pin a document that you use frequently so it stays at the top of your library list.  As if this isn’t cool enough, you can also pin links to a file or folder located in a different document library or website. 

True to heart as being a collaborative operating platform, SharePoint has aligned SharePoint Team Sites with Office 365 Groups for ultimate collaboration between products.  How will this work?  Every group will have a team site and every team site will have simple membership management which, in turn, gives groups the benefits of metadata which will be used for compliance and information classification.  This alignment is win-win!

Sometimes, it’s not always a win-win.  Even though SharePoint is a collaborative platform, it does have a single weakness:  it is not aligned to the way that we work.  Let me elaborate on this.  For example, how many of you actually write and publish within SharePoint?  If you are like the average contributor, you will actually write off-line, save off-line and then, when ready, copy your document to SharePoint and then publish it.  Sound familiar?  This methodology completely undermines the goal of SharePoint and collaboration.  Not only are there multiple versions floating out there on hard-drives, but the very idea of collaborating on one document in real time is thrown out the window.  Why are we doing this?  It is because moving the document is not easy and when we try to move cross platform, it is even more difficult.  Our solution:  write, save offline and then copy it into SharePoint, or use an external solution to circumvent the issue.  Microsoft recognized that is an issue, a major issue, for their users.  To align SharePoint to the way we work, Microsoft’s response is the alignment of Office 365 Groups and SharePoint Team Sites.  In addition to aligning these two features, SharePoint will be improving the capability of moving files from OneDrive Business to SharePoint, thereby reducing redundancy in duplicate files and use of external solutions. With these key updates, and the ease of simple page authoring within SharePoint, one will be able to create and publish within SharePoint with ease and confidence. 

The future of SharePoint is about the now with your team.  The ability to have intranet in your pocket, easily accessible from anywhere from any device.  The ability to communicate, update and contribute with ease despite time, distance or place.  SharePoint 2016 will provide you the ability to make key decisions in real time on any device.  This is the future of SharePoint 2016 – on the go connection, collaboration and key decision making on any device, in any place and at any point in time.