Microsoft Ignite 2023: SharePoint Premium

At this year’s Microsoft Ignite, it was brought forward that Microsoft Syntex has been evolving into a new content management and experience platform. This new platform, Microsoft Premium, combines the powerful features of SharePoint and Microsoft Syntex by integrating AI and machine training to understand content, processing, and compliance services to automatically classify and organize documents in an organization’s SharePoint library. Microsoft Premium will leverage Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), or content intelligence service, to transform data into knowledge. AI-driven solutions will not only prepare content for AI and Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 but will also automate workflow at scale and empower users for greater productivity and collaboration.

Key SharePoint Premium Capabilities

Focused on content services and intelligence, the key capabilities of SharePoint Premium include:

  1. Content Processing

    SharePoint Premium is ready to tag, classify and secure documents, streamline workflows, and maximize content value through the use of AI-driven automation. This includes document processing and content assembly services, and eSignature capabilities, and it offers pay-as-you-go services for handling sensitive information and translation. By classifying, building, and tagging documents, content is being prepared for Copilot, the next-generation, productivity-transforming AI assistant.
  2. Content Experiences

    Productivity is enhanced by driving file collaboration and keeping content fresh and discoverable. Critical business document processes, including invoices, contracts, SOWs, and more, can be optimized, with workflow, AI, and security. These experiences will be elevated further with the integration of Microsoft Copilot into SharePoint Premium.
  3. Content Governance

    With simple but powerful tools, content creators and owners will manage content at scale, prevent oversharing, control access, and manage content lifecycle. To enhance security and compliance, tools such as Data Access Governance (DAG) insights, sensitivity labeling, and site access reviews are included with SharePoint Premium.

Key SharePoint Premium Features

The key features of SharePoint Premium include:

  1. Premium Content Centre

    The starting point of setting up and enabling SharePoint Premium is the creation of a content center. The content center is a special site for managing the Premium models, previously known as the Syntex Document Understanding Models. The content center will also provide the ability to integrate workflows and metadata while allowing configuration for compliant automation. Within the content centre, there is a model creation tool. The model creation tool provides the capability to teach SharePoint Premium to read and process documents in the same manner that a user would manually do so.

    These models are then used by SharePoint Premium to automatically recognize content, extract key and important information, and apply metadata tags. The effectiveness of each of the models is tracked by the integrated visual analytics in SharePoint Premium.
  2. Object Recognition

    By accessing a visual dictionary that contains thousands of commonly recognized objects, SharePoint Premium can automatically tag images. Additionally, it can recognize and convert handwritten text into tags. These tags are then used for further processing by the search engine.
  3. Document Understanding

    SharePoint Premium can be taught how to read content in the way that the organization wants it to be read. These AI models can be built without the use of code. SharePoint Premium can also automatically create or suggest metadata, attach compliance labels to enforce retention, invoke custom Power Automate workflows, or record management policies.

    Document understanding models are based on Language Understanding models in Azure Cognitive Services. As these models are managed and created in a SharePoint Premium content center, publishing, and updating models can be done in any library and any content center throughout SharePoint Premium.
  4. Form Processing

    Based on AI Builder, SharePoint Premium’s powerful forms processing engine will automatically recognize and extract common values from semi-structured or structured documents. Common values can include dates, names, figures, or addresses. These models are also built without code and require few documents to produce reliable results. Of note, this is separate from Machine Teaching models.
  5. Advanced Taxonomy Services

    Through SharePoint hub sites, shared content types can be published to Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. By publishing content types from the central gallery to hub sites, commonly used content types can be quickly and easily deployed and upgraded across broad sections throughout an organization when and as needed. The sites connected to the hubs will automatically receive updated content types as well as content that is being published. Enhanced with content understanding and flexibility, this is the fastest way to enhance the deployment of content.

Every organization’s success is dependent on the management, accessibility, and currency of its content. Content is the basis and result of collaboration between teams and individuals.  It drives customer satisfaction and corporate growth. But content can become overwhelming, lost, unruly, and useless if it is not managed correctly. With SharePoint Premium and AI assistance, the content will automatically have metadata inserted, documents will be tagged, sensitivity labels applied, lifecycle governance and security, and access managed to prevent oversharing. For users, ease of accessibility to the most current and valued content will ensure improved productivity, improved workflows, and faster delivery of deliverables. With content being prepped for Copilot, the future of SharePoint as the go-to cloud platform for collaboration and content management is becoming more and more exciting.

SharePoint Conference 2019 (SPC2019): Announcements

At the SharePoint Conference (SPC2019) held in Las Vegas this spring, many new announcements were shared that will impact SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow and several other applications within Office 365 and Microsoft 365.  

The internet connects the world while an intranet connects the people and content in the workplace. But, an intranet does more than just connect people and content. A properly organized intranet will cause collaboration between people, whether in teams or in siloes, through the sharing of knowledge, the harnessing of this collective knowledge to create solutions and the provisioning of a platform for communication. SharePoint has been the powerhouse behind intranets for more than a decade and can be found in every industry and geography. As a leader, SharePoint continues to set the bar higher and higher, meeting the needs and goals of organizations and its people with intelligent solutions.

SharePoint Home Sites

A SharePoint communication site, but amped up, SharePoint Home Sites is the landing page for your organization and the new home view on the SharePoint mobile app. SharePoint Home Sites, with personalized content, information, and navigation, not only engages through conversation but also through video that is powered by Yammer and Microsoft Stream. It neatly organizes and curates the organization’s news, with official news being marked visually and is available for all users with access to the home site. Relevant content and news are shared based on the role of the person as well as their role while Microsoft Search serves as the main connector of content within the organization.

A key focus with all of SharePoint’s enhancements is the time-to-value for customers. With the improved navigation and activity insights across sites, and coupling these features with views of your documents to get back to work quickly, work processes are greatly streamlined, underscoring the valuable time-to-value gained.

As we all experience, we may come across content that we would like to read, but at that moment, cannot. With SharePoint Home Sites, news and content can be flagged for review at a later time. This feature, enhanced saved for later view, will be an extremely useful and well-used feature.

SharePoint Home Sites are easily deployed – within minutes – straight out of the box with no coding! Customizations to reflect company branding and design are easily done through web parts, navigation, and site design – all straight out of the box.

Being the leader as the powerful platform for delivering applications on the intranet, many SharePoint partners are onboard with integrating their intranet offerings closely to the SharePoint intelligent intranet. Additionally, solutions built with SharePoint Framework by your developers or by SharePoint partners can be embedded.

Yammer and Microsoft Stream

Both Yammer and Microsoft Stream are featured out of the box for SharePoint Home Sites. With Yammer and Microsoft Stream, engaging employees in communication and learning has never been easier.

Yammer provides the platform for employees to engage in open conversations that can drive cultural transformations and cause organizational alignment.  Every employee across an organization is empowered to express their opinions, ideas, and feedback and now, with the new Question and Answer feature, you or a group admin can mark the best answer, making this knowledge easy to find, share, and reuse. Taking it one step further, a group can feature bot-like, intelligent answers to questions that are frequently asked.

There are some major changes for customers using Yammer groups connected to Office 365 groups. For these groups, e-Discovery for Yammer will be available for them. Recognizing the unique data residency requirements for European customers, in-geo data storage for Yammer in the EU is now available for new Yammer networks in the EU. Yammer messages and files attached to these will be stored at-rest in Microsoft EU datacentres.

Video is becoming more popular, and is quite often the first choice, for learning, engaging, and communicating. Microsoft 365’s video capability is powered by Microsoft Stream, a powerful engine that provides users the ability to securely record, upload, and share videos from the iOS or Android mobile apps. By incorporating Microsoft Forms into Microsoft Stream, polls, surveys or quizzes can easily be inserted into the videos.  

A natural extension of video is 3D and virtual reality. SharePoint Spaces has been in development since 2018, and at Ignite 2019, expect to see what SharePoint Spaces is in its early stages.

OneDrive

OneDrive is the Office 365 files application that stores all your individual and shared files across platforms, across browsers, and across devices and is accessible on mobile or on desktop. With so many files stored, accessing has become more streamlined and simple with Microsoft Search in OneDrive as the powering search engine. Personalized recommendations are provided with the new AI-powered experiences. Activity, file insights, and lifecycle signals such as DLP policies are shown on OneDrive’s enhanced file hover cards. Another great feature is the save for later which allows you to flag a file that you can return to later to read.

With the OneDrive web application, you can now work with metadata columns, custom views, sync files to your PC or Mac, and preview more than 320 file types, including 360-degree images and AutoCAD .DWG files. This can all be done with the new, full-fidelity files experience for shared libraries. And, with the comments on non-Office files, comments and be added to any of the 320+ file types, including PDFs, CAD drawings, and images.

Sharing policies set by your organization can now be done directly from OneDrive, making it that much easier to collaborate through file sharing with internal and external collaborators with the create a shared library with a streamlined experience backed by an Office 365 group. With this, you can specify the people you want to share with. Files can also be shared in Teams, which is the hub for teamwork, with the new file sharing control in Teams chat. This allows you to either upload a copy of the file or share a link, and the access provided by the link is configurable. The new sharing control to Outlook will also be implemented.

A new request files capability is being introduced which allows you to select a folder and invite people to add files. Everyone can upload folders to the file, but the only files they see will be theirs. With each file added, you will receive a notification. With request files, you are able to collect files from multiple individuals while preventing individuals from seeing other peoples’ files.  

These are few of the highlights announced and shared at this year’s SharePoint Conference. All are very exciting and will help your organization’s employees collaborate with greater efficiency and productivity while encouraging learning through enhanced media platforms.

Migrate SharePoint Classic to Modern

SharePoint Online is a dynamic collaborative platform that continues to provide visually pleasing, improved and more streamlined processes and accessibility for the end user. The availability of Modern sites is increasing. A Modern site consists of modern Office 365 group-connected team or communication sites. By combining these with improved functionality, content is presented in a modern user interface that is not only aesthetically pleasing, but provides content in a format that communicates clearly, navigates easily, and puts some controls back into the hands of the end-user.

But what if your organization has classic team sites and lots of them? How do you migrate these to the modern SharePoint Modern site? You can fully transform your classic team site into a modern Office 365 group-connected site with in-place modernization. Modernizing the sites will involve one or more of the following steps:

  1. Maximize and Leverage Modern List and Library: The modern user interface is the most visible aspect of a modern site. In the classic sites, particular pages will appear in the modern user interface, on the condition that modern experience has not been turned off. The pages will appear in the modern user interface include List and Library pages for most lists and libraries, site usage page, site contents page, and recycle bi pages. However, Home page and all other site pages such as wiki pages and/or web part pages, and List and Library pages for certain libraries and lists, will continue to the classic user interface.

    Starting April 1, 2019, it will no longer be possible to restrict an entire organization (tenant) to classic mode for lists and libraries. Refer to Chris McNulty’s Post.

    To transition to a modern user interface from the classic user interface, there are two areas that require attention. The first is transitioning of lists and libraries to the modern list and library experience, basically, the modern user interface. The second is to transform classic wiki and web part pages, your classic pages, to modern client-side pages.

    Planning is the foundation for a successful migration from classic to the modern user interface. Involving key players is an important step towards a successful migration.

    Identify and educate your stakeholders and they will include:

    a. Key business stakeholders – this group will be playing a crucial role in assisting end-users in adopting the modern user interface. Prepare them by working closely with them. Provide direct involvement through access to the play environment so they can become familiar with the upcoming changes. Listen to their needs, their feedback, and their recommendations. Ensure that their business needs are met;

    b. Customization team and developers – this team will need to be available to redesign customization that were built in the past for the classic user interface. Not all customization will be transferable to the modern user interface;

    c. SharePoint administrators – the admins are the ones who will enable the modern user interface to your tenant and sites; and

    d. Change management and governance teams – switching from the classic to the modern user interface will have an impact on users, and an update of internal training materials will be needed. Change management will be important for users who are affected by the switch.

    Analyze your site collections once your stakeholders are involved, educated, and supportive.

    How will you know which site collections are ready to be modernized? How is it determined which site collections are good candidates for this modernization? Luckily, Microsoft has built a scanner to help with transforming site pages, lists, and libraries or connecting sites to an Office 365 group. The SharePoint Modernization scanner will provide a detailed analysis of the readiness of the sites for connecting to an Office 365 group. This analysis will provide a deeper understanding of the compatibility between the modern user interface, lists, and libraries. It will also perform a detailed analysis of the web part pages and wiki pages so you can prepare for page modernization. Armed with the results of the scan, remediation work can begin to prepare the collection sites for modernization.

    a. Incompatible Customization – replace with equivalent ones that work in a modern user interface;

    b. Modernize User Experience – this is done by:

    i. Enabling lists and libraries to show in the modern user interface by replacing customization, remove incompatible columns from the used views, or move data into a modern user interface compatible list type (this should be the last resort);

    ii. Connecting the site to an Office 365 group. By doing so, this will provide your site a modern home page which, in turn, enables the end user to use modern app versions;

    iii. Creating modern client-side pages and configuring them to be “similar” to the key classic wiki and web part pages. For key pages of your site, programmatic page transformations should be done. However, not all pages will require this as it is resource intensive. The usage information can be obtained from the SharePoint Modernization scanner for the web page parts and wiki page; and

    c. Communicate with the End-Users – inform, educate, and prepare your end-users for the modern user interface as the sites will work differently than in the classic modern user interface.
  2. Connect Your Site to an Office 365 Group: Classic team sites are not connected to an Office 365 group. To modernize these sites, they will need to be connected to an Office 356 group. Once connected, the site will be able to access other Office 365 services such as Teams, Outlook, and Planner. Modern team sites are already connected to Office 365 groups.

    How do you connect the classic team site to an Office 365 group? There are two methods to do this. The first is to launch a wizard from the user interface. The wizard will walk the site owner through the process. The second method is to do a bulk operation or a group-connection. With a group-connection, a series of sites can be connected, at one time, to an Office 365 group. With this method, control over configuration, including site classification, alias name, the privacy of the site as public or private, are maintained. For this reason, it is the preferred method for large organizations.
  3. Switch to Modern Tenant-Scoped Branding: Connecting to an Office 365 group results in a modern site home page and it will also allow the use of a modern site theme. The new modern site home page accepts corporate branding on SharePoint team sites. With classic sites, branding was created by using site themes, master pages, and alternate CSS. The latter two are not compatible with the modern user interface, and evaluation of these branding customization will be required to determine their relevancy. Classic site themes can be transformed into the modern user interface. Even so, it is highly recommended to switch to tenant-controlled site themes which will be respected in future modern team sites.
  4. Transform Classic Site Pages into Modern Pages: This is the final step. Even though you have completed the previous steps, your site pages will still appear in the classic user interface. Transforming pages is not an easy or simple process. There is no one-on-one mapping between the functionality of classic web parts and what is offered by client-side web parts on modern pages. As such, it is recommended that only frequently used pages be transformed into modern client-side pages.

Migrating SharePoint Classic to Modern experience entails several steps and engages several audiences. Successful transition and migration of the classic user interface to the modern user interface require planning, remediation, analysis, and prioritizing sites and pages that are to be transformed into the modern user interface. Without a doubt, there are many positives to switching from the classic user interface to the modern user interface.

Microsoft Search and SharePoint Search

Sharing of information and knowledge is the basis for a collaborative environment, but the collaborative environment is only as powerful as the capabilities built into the software that provide the abilities for the user to search for this information. Without strong searching capabilities, navigating to find specific information would be a major struggle, working against the whole premise of collaboration.

Microsoft Search is the powerhouse for bringing together search results from several data sources in Office 365 including SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Teams, Groups, Yammer, and more. Driven by Bing’s search engine and leveraging AI, Microsoft Search brings data from within your organization and from the web in a single experience. Worry-free security authenticates users to ensure that only users allowed to access corporate content will receive the content by de-identifying search queries and logs, thereby separating these from public Bing search traffic. Microsoft Search is fully customizable allowing you to add your logo, use branding colours, company name, and more. This can all be accessed through the Microsoft 365 admin center.

With Microsoft Search, you have the flexibility to target specific groups of information to be shared with. Finding answers to questions, like troubleshooting, policies resources, can help support wise resourcing and decrease support costs by allowing users to become more independent in finding the answers that they are seeking.

The key admin features of Microsoft Search include the following:

  1. Enterprise Bookmarks: find information including sites and tools within your enterprise;
  2. Enterprise Q&As: here, you will find answers to the most frequently asked questions in your organization;
  3. Import and Export Bookmarks and Q&As: bulk importing, exporting and editing streamlines the creation and updating process;
  4. Location: on a map, locate your organization’s buildings, workspaces, and offices;
  5. Management: create content, configure, and define search keywords and phrases;
  6. Users and Permissions: both the Microsoft Search administrator and the Global Administrator will be able to authorize and add admins to manage the Microsoft Search configuration, editors who can create content, and end-users who can have access to Microsoft Search; and
  7. Analytics: provision of data of how your organization is using Microsoft Search.

What benefits will the end-user receive? These are a few of the key features for end-users:

  1. People: find people, understand their company role, projects they assigned and working on and contact information;
  2. Organizational Charts: a visual depicting a person’s place in the hierarchy of the organization, their peers, management and direct reports;
  3. Files: find relevant and contextual files on SharePoint and OneDrive for Business;
  4. Office 365 Groups: Find a group by its name, or by a member name, explore groups that a person belongs to, and browse shared content;
  5. Resources and Tools: find the information you need with links to internal and external resources;
  6. SharePoint Sites: search a site by name or see results for a group or person;
  7. Teams and Yammer Conversations: from public and group conversations, you can find contextual and relevant results;
  8. Locations: find the address and map results for buildings, campuses and offices; and
  9. First-Run Experience: for first-time users. With an initial sign in to Microsoft Search and Bing, they will receive information about using it including the types of work results they will find when they search.

SharePoint Online provides both a classic and modern search experience. Even though both experiences differ, they have one commonality and that is they use the same search index to find search results. With a modern search experience, your results shown are based on your previous activity in Office 365 and are very personal. Two users can use the same search parameters, but different content will be presented due to previous searches. Visual, intuitive and easy to navigate, the modern search experience provides ease of access and use for your users.

Because the modern search results page is not built with web parts, the modern search experience cannot be customized. However, the classic search experience can be customized and some of these customizations will have a limited impact on the modern experience. The following classic search settings will also apply to the modern search experience:

  1. Search Schema: this determines how content is collected in and retrieved from the search index. This will affect both experiences with the exception of the Sortable, Refinable and Company Name Extraction schemas which only apply to the classic search experience;
  2. Default Result Source: in the modern search experience, the results displayed are from the default result source only. If the default result source is changed in the classic search experience, it will also impact the modern search experience
  3. Remove Search Result: temporarily removing a search result will remove it from both experiences; and
  4. Promoted Result: users in both experiences will see organizational level promoted results. For the modern search experience, users will need to navigate to the All tab on the search results page and have searched across all of SharePoint to see the promoted results.

Whether you use the classic or the modern search experience, it is important to:

  1. Make sure that content can be found. Content will only be searchable once it has been crawled and added to the search index;
  2. Make the search results look amazing. Choose and create the right presentation format so that is it easy for your users to understand, access, and navigate;
  3. Show relevant search results. These can be customized by managing the search schema, query rule, query suggestions, result sources, result types, search dictionaries, authoritative pages, and with the export and import of search settings as well as using query transforms; and
  4. Check your analytics including logs, limits, and reports. These will provide information on whether the crawler has added content to the search index and if users are finding what they are searching for.

This all sounds great, but how does SharePoint Online search work? A simple explanation is that each document’s detailed information is stored within the site columns in the lists and libraries. The search follows this path and is graphically depicted:

  1. Crawling: Search crawls the lists and libraries. Site columns and their values are added to the search index;
  2. Search Index: in the search index, site columns are mapped to manage properties;
  3. Query Entry: the query that the user enters in a Search Box Web Part is sent to the search index; and
  4. Results: matching results are found by the search engine. These are then sent to a search results page and displayed in Web Parts.

By using the power of Bing’s AI search engine, Microsoft Search provides the powerful capability of searching for contextual content across several Office 365 platforms and the web to bring results to your organization and its users. Microsoft Search drives SharePoint Search, thereby providing your users the ability to search for content that is relevant to their projects, knowledge base, and skill sets across platforms and the web. Collaboration has never been easier and intuitive.

SharePoint 2019 New Features

The new features in SharePoint 2019 are based on three themes. These themes involve the users’ experience that is developed through SharePoint Online, content engagement across all platforms, and powerful scaling security and compliance capabilities.

What is new for SharePoint 2019? SharePoint 2019 will have many new and added features that enhance the “modern experience”, making it flexible, mobile, compelling and easier to use, especially for on-prem users. These new features include:

  1. SharePoint Home Page: The home page will provide users with the ability to easily find and access SharePoint sites within the organization. Additional information will include the news from the sites that they are following as well as from suggested sites. If the administrator has given the user permission, the user will have the ability to create new communication sites from the home page. There are three out-of-the-box templates available:

      Topic which consists of four default web parts (Hero, News, Documents, and Events);
      Showcase leverages the default Hero and Image Gallery web parts to visually highlight products, events, and people; and
      Blank which provides a clean canvas so that you can customize with your own modern web parts;

  2. Modern Lists and Libraries: Bringing List and Libraries in parallel with SharePoint Online, the modern experience is now the default for team sites, though Classic is still supported. Users will be able to copy and move files using the command bar as well as add files as links, filter and sort easily, pin documents, and apply column formatting including adding columns and rows to SharePoint Lists with JSON markup.

    By combining the powers of SharePoint 2019 and OneDrive, Libraries has a modern sharing experience with an updated and intuitive UI. Previous syncing and integration issues are now solved so that tasks, like creating new folders, saving documents, and uploading files in SharePoint and/or OneDrive, can be done at any time and from anywhere;
  3. New Team, Site Pages: As the communication site, users and teams can share messages, news, broadcasts and they can also display stories. With the new Hero web part, five items with text, image, and links can be displayed, drawing attention to the most important content;
  4. New Pages: Comprised of web parts, new pages are fully customizable to the needs of the user. Users will have the ability to add Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, images, feeds like Yammer, site activities, and embed videos;
  5. Modern Search Experience: Using intuitive logic, the modern search experience will suggest relevant content before the user enters a keystroke. The results update as the user types in the criteria. The search results page shows an overall of search results and is grouped by type;
  6. Lists: The modern lists simplify how users and teams create, curate, and interact with the information. Individuals and teams will be able to share, access, and collaborate around structured data. Additionally, information from other systems can be leveraged into SharePoint to support business processes.

True to its purpose, SharePoint continues to support collaboration between teams and individuals in their organizations. As SharePoint updates to 2019, there will be some features in 2016 and 2013 that will be deprecated and these six features will be:

  1. Aggregated Newsfeed: The tile in the app launcher and the option to implement the newsfeed capability will be removed. The existing aggregate newsfeed will become read-only. The suggested solution is to use communication sites and Microsoft Teams;
  2. Custom Help: The existing engine in SharePoint will be removed in the future. For the Microsoft legacy on-prem SharePoint help engine, it will be updated and will synchronize with O365;
  3. SharePoint Designer 2013: SharePoint Designer 2013 will continue to function with SharePoint Server 2019 until 2026 where support will officially end. Alternatives include PowerApps and Microsoft Flow and both are available via the on-prem data gateway;
  4. Multi-Tenancy: Inline with migrating services to the cloud, multi-tenancy capabilities are building dependencies on cloud technologies, and for on-premises environments, these capabilities are not available. Due to costs and complexities of providing on-prem alternatives, multi-tenancy will no longer be available;
  5. Visio Services: Rendering based on Silverlight will no longer be supported effective October 12, 2021. Switching to PowerBI is the recommended solution; and 6. Code-based Sandbox Solutions: These customization packages deployed at the site collection level have already been removed from SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online. They will be removed from SharePoint 2019. SharePoint add-ins are the suggested alternatives.

Summarizing the added new features and the deprecation of others, is a handy cheat sheet below:

Credits: ShareGate.com

The Modern Experience is not only here to stay, but it is being integrated into SharePoint 2019. If an older version of SharePoint on-prem is being used, it is highly recommended that the upgrade to SharePoint 2019 be implemented. With nearly all the modern functionalities available, it will bring on-prem up to par with SharePoint online. With SharePoint 2019, user experience and collaboration become modernized with greater ease of access and use for individuals and teams. 

SharePoint Online: Site Design and Site Scripts

Administrators of SharePoint Online can create and upload custom site templates with the use of the Site Designs and Site Scripts features. These two features are supported for SharePoint Online subscribers and for the Modern Team and Modern Communication Sites. With Site Designs and Site Scripts, users will be able to use these customized templates during their site creation process.

Why use site designs and site scripts? Standardizing and maintaining branding consistencies are two examples of why site designs and site scripts should be used. These features automate the provisioning of new or existing modern SharePoint Online sites with custom configurations when new sites are created by users within the organization.

How do Site Designs Work?

A Site Design is very similar to a template as it can be applied each time a new site is created so that a consistent set of actions occur. Site Designs can be applied to existing Modern Sites, especially to connected groups in Team and Communication Sites. Site Design can include various actions such as setting the site theme, creating lists, sending a tweet, or recording the new site URL to a log (these are just a few examples).

Site Designs can be created and then registered in SharePoint Online to either the modern template Team Site or the modern template Communication Site. This can be done by:

  1. Go to the SharePoint homepage on your developer tenant;
  2. Choose Create Site;
  3. Two options will appear: Team Site and Communication Site;
  4. Choose Communication Site; and
  5. Choose one of the three default Site Designs that appear in the Choose a Design box. The three options are Topic, Showcase, or Blank. For each site design, there is a title, description, and image.

SharePoint creates the new site based on the site design that is selected. As it creates the new site, site scripts are ran in the background that provide the details for the site design. Details might include theme colors that match corporate branding, a color scheme that works with branding, or the creation of new lists. The site creator can click on the notification bar to view the status of the actions being applied.

Once the site scripts are completed, the notification bar message will change, offering options for the site creator to either refresh the page to see the results of the applied scripts, or to view the site script details.

In December 2018, with roll out to be completed worldwide by early 2019, the site design information panel can be invoked by a site owner to see what site designs have been applied to the site. This can be invoked at any time. Script details will also be available plus new or updated site designs can easily be applied through the panel.

SharePoint will display the detailed results of the actions in the scripts in a progress pane once the actions are completed. An excellent point to note is that site design can be applied to previously created modern site collections!

What is a Site Script?

What composes a site script? Site scripts are JSON files that specify an ordered list of actions to run when creating a new site. The orders are ran in the order that they are listed. We could delve into the anatomy of a JSON script file, but we will leave that for now. Instead, understanding what a JSON script file consists and its schema will suffice.

Each action in a site script is specified by a verb value in JSON. Actions that are available include: creating a new list or library, modifying the default list or library that is created with the site, creating site columns, content types and configuring other list settings, applying a theme, setting a site logo, adding navigation, triggering a Microsoft Flow, installing a deployed solution from the app catalogue, setting regional settings for the site, adding principals such as users and groups to SharePoint roles, and setting external sharing capabilities for the site.

After provisioning, Site Scripts can be re-run. Re-running the Site Script will not cause any damage to the script. It will simply ensure the site matches the configuration in the script. There is a new limit of 100 site scripts and 100 site designs per tenant. Site designs and site scripts can also be created by using PowerShell or the REST API.

Triggering a Microsoft Flow

Microsoft Flow can be triggered by a site script, which provides the flexibility of specifying any custom action that is required beyond the native site scripts.

Microsoft Flow can be integrated with site designs if the PnP provisioning engine is used to automate site creation. All existing provisioning scripts can be maintained, and new custom provisioning scripts can be created by using this technique. How does this work? The process works like this:

  1. The script instantiates your Microsoft Flow using an URL with additional details;
  2. The Flow sends a message to an Azure storage queue that you have configured;
  3. The message triggers a call to an Azure function that you have configured; and
  4. The Azure function runs the custom script to apply the custom configurations. An example of the custom script is the PnP provisioning engine.

Targeting or Scoping

To ensure that only people that are intended to see the site see it while excluding others, site designs can be configured for specific groups or individual people in the organization. When a site design is created, the default is to allow everyone to view it. Your target group or individuals, your scope, can be applied by using the Grant‑SPOSiteDesignRights cmdlet or the GrantSiteDesignRights REST API. The scope can be specified by user or a mail-enabled security group.

With Site Design and Site Scripts, site owners can ensure consistent and standard values to Modern Team and Communication Sites that users in the organization are creating. These automated actions run in the background and provide assurance that users will create new sites that will reflect the organization’s branding and will also ease the process of creating new sites. New sites can be scoped for specific groups, or individuals, to ensure that only the users who need access to view and use will have it while excluding others.

SharePoint: Modern List Column Formatting

Column formatting provides the ability to customize how columns or fields are displayed to the end users and is available within SharePoint List and Libraries. It provides fast, informative, and visual information to the end user. To achieve this, a JSON object describes the elements that are displayed when a field is included in the list view, and it also specifies the styles to be applied to those elements. Column formatting will not affect the data in the list item or file. The column formatting only changes how this data is presented to the users who browse the list. Those who have permission to create and manage views in a list can access column formatting to configure how the view fields are displayed.

The following on the left is an example of a List without any column formatting:

However, if fields are customized with column formatting, then the appearances of the fields Effort, Assigned To, and Status can convey the information graphically and quickly, as shown in the graphic on the right.

The GitHub repository (link: GitHub repository),  dedicated to open-sourced column formatting definitions, provides numerous examples and samples. Column formatting can be simple like the one above, or it can become quite complex whereby each field is customized, including colour themes as shown in the graphics below.

How to Apply Column Formatting

There are three opportunities to apply column formatting. You can apply column formatting to:

1. A Site Column. This then provides the flexibility to apply the same column formatting to multiple lists which use the site column or content type;

2. An existing column. Select the Column drop-down. Choose Column Settings and then Format this Column; and

3. A new column. When creating a column, apply the column formatting by editing the properties of the column.

Column Formatting versus Field Customizer

It is important to note that column formatting is not the same as the Field Customizer. Though both provide the ability to customize how fields in SharePoint lists are displayed, their applications are different.

The Field Customizer is more powerful than column formatting as it allows you to write code to control how a field is displayed. This includes dynamic action links, such as active hyperlinks that invoke custom scripts when clicked on, as well as arbitrary data visualizations.

Column formatting is less flexible as it does not allow custom code. Instead, it allows for predefined elements and attributes, which makes it much easier for users who are not JSON experts. Data visualizations supported are simple and these can be expressed using HTML and CSS. Action links, such as active hyperlinks, are not supported. There is only support for static hyperlinks that do not launch a script.

Column formatting is much easier and quicker and is the suggested method of customizing column fields. For advanced scenarios where column formatting does not provide support, then one could use the Field Customizer.

Column Formatting

  1. Open the column formatting pane;
  2. Click on the drop-down menu under Column. Choose Column Settings and then Format this column;
  3. In the box, enter the column formatting JSON.

    If a field has no specified formatting, then the default rendering will be applied.

    Unless you are experienced in JSON, it is suggested that for the column formatting, you go the SharePoint GitHub repository and find an example or sample that closely resembles what you want the column to look like. Once you find the sample, copy the JSON column formatting. Paste this into the box.

    Edit the lines to customize to your needs.

    This is simpler and quicker than writing the code from scratch;
  4. You can Preview your formatting before Saving your changes;
  5. Once you are satisfied with the column formatting, choose Save to save your column formatting.

    Once saved, users who view the list will see the customization that you applied.

What can you do with Column Formatting?

With column formatting, you can do the following:

  1. Display basic field values;
  2. Apply conditional formatting;
  3. Apply advanced conditional formatting that is based on the value in a choice field or text;
  4. Apply formatting based on date ranges;
  5. Format items based on arbitrary dates;
  6. Compare a date/time field against another date constant;
  7. Create clickable actions:
    a. Turn field values into hyperlinks;
    b. Add an action button to a field;
  8. Create simple data visualizations:
    a. Format a number column as a data bar;
    b. Show trending up/trending down icons; and
  9. Create a button to launch a Flow.

Because not all column types are supported for column formatting, it is important to remember which ones are. The supported columns include single line of text, number, choice, person or group, yes/no, hyperlink, picture, data/time, lookup, and title (in Lists).  Column types that are not supported include managed metadata, filename (in Document Libraries), calculated, retention label, and currency.

To simplify things further, predefined classes exist in the style guidelines. The predefined classes are explained in the adjacent graphic.

Note that the icons for the sp-field-severity classes are not a part of the predefined class. These can be added by using the iconName attribute. Only the background colour is included for these classes.   Alternately, you can use predefined icons from Office UI Fabric.

What if I Want to Write My Own JSON?

Whether you are an expert with JSON or you are new to it but have an understanding of its schema, you can create and write your own custom JSON.

Creating your own custom JSON for column formatting has been made simple by following these steps:

  1. Download Visual Studio Code (it is free!);
  2. Create a New File;
  3. Save the empty file with the extension .json;
  4. Copy and paste the following lines of code into your empty file: 
    { “$schema”: “https://developer.microsoft.com/json-schemas/sp/column-formatting.schema.json”  }

This provides validation and autocomplete to create your JSON. You can now start adding your JSON after the first line that defines the schema location. Visual Studio Code will offer suggestions for properties and values. Simply select Ctrl + Space at any point.

With the versatility and flexibility of column formatting, you can visually communicate relevant information to the users. It is simple, quick, and with the help of the GitHub repository, one can access hundreds of samples and examples of various JSON objects to achieve the field customization that one wants. And for those who are well versed with JSON, you also have the option of writing your own to customize the column formatted fields.

How to Tag SharePoint Modern Pages

Tagging and Metadata – An Overview

In a previous installment, Modern SharePoint Metadata, we discussed the importance of tagging a page with accurate metadata to curate the appropriate information to your targeted audience. Through the use of correct and accurate metadata, or tags or properties, on SharePoint modern pages, your audience will receive targeted, relevant, and important information in their news feed and when they do a search.

What is the Difference Between Tagging: Then and Now

Prior to this enhancement, tagging modern pages was cumbersome and not entirely intuitive. Once would have to add a custom property to a content type that was inherited from the Site Page. Not only cumbersome but from an end-user perspective, it was not easy to set up or configure. Additionally, the property on the page’s content could not be viewed. With this new enhancement, these issues have been addressed and solutions are being implemented to rectify them.

What can be Tagged in SharePoint Modern Pages?

SharePoint modern pages can be tagged based on categories that you would like to use, such as page type for specific end-user groups, business function, target audience, location, and other categories that would enable you to reach and group your end users distinctly from other groups.

How to Tag Modern Pages and Display Based on End-User

Adding the Page Property (or Tag)

The column on a Site Page houses the page properties. To define a new page with new properties, go to the Site Pages page and choose Add Column to the Site Pages Library. Provide a name for this column. The name of the column becomes the Page Property. From this page property column, you can then provide the Description, choose “Choice” as the Type of column, and then choose the “Definition” for the Choice column. The values in the side illustration use options like “News Release”, “Announcement”, or “President’s note” as the choices.

Adding the Page Property to a Page

Once the page properties have been added to the Site Pages library by adding a new column, all new site pages can be tagged with that value from that page property.

To tag a page, go into edit mode on the page by clicking Edit Page. Then click Page Details located on the top ribbon. This will then open up the page’s property panel. This is the property panel for the new site page that you have added to the Sites Pages library and this is the location where you can edit its property. In the below illustration, then this is where the property category was chosen to be blue. Once the property (column) has been added to the Sites Pages library, all new site pages can be tagged with the same value for that page property. Click Save when done.

Tagging a page

Customizing the Page

By following the steps above, one can create more pages with the same properties. You can also customize the look of the page. For the example below, if the property is to group by category, such as announcement, then the header of the page can reflect blue.



Page Property
If there is a need or desire to show the value of the property on the page, one can do so with the use of web parts. Simply add the web part Page Property, click the Add Properties button. Add the value that you want to be displayed on the page on the right hand sided pop-out panel.

Time Saving Tip

Once your page is set up with all the values and tags that you require, simply create a copy of the page to create a new page. Not only will the content be copied, but also the page property. You can update or change the content as needed.

Summary Page: Creating for Each Category Property

A summary page which displays links for news or pages under one category can provide detailed information of what your targeted audience is seeing and receiving in their news feed.

To create a summary page for each Category property:

1.   Create a new Site Page with an appropriate title;

2.   Add web part Highlighted Content;

3.   Configure properties of Highlighted Content. A property panel will appear on the right-hand side displaying the properties;

4.   Set the Source of the content to “The page library on this site”;

5.   Choose the Type of source, either Pages or News;

6.   If Pages is chosen, then Filter will provide an option for Page Properties;

7.   Under Property Name, choose the page property from the drop-down menu; and

8.   Options to Select Values will appear in another drop-down menu. Here you can choose the filter that you want the pages to be filtered by.

Once these filters are saved, the Highlighted Content web part will curate and display the results almost instantaneously even though the content has been retrieved based on tags and not solely on filters. The summary page will display thumbnails of the curated pages based on the tagging.

Getting Organized

By adding custom columns to your pages, you can now organize your pages by creating views and grouping them in the Site Pages library. Having the ability to group your Site Pages by a Page Property will provide you an overview as well as greater flexibility in organizing and grouping your pages.

As you can see, accurate metadata and tagging will provide not only appropriate and useful content to your audience, but will also provide the abilities to organize, plan, and scale SharePoint with corporate growth.

Classic Sites vs. Modern Sites

 

The question many are asking is: Should we stay with SharePoint Classic Sites or should we switch to SharePoint Modern Sites?  In this post, we will delve into the advantages and disadvantages of the SharePoint Classic and Modern Sites.

Classic SharePoint is the SharePoint you are familiar with up to SharePoint 2016, and recently with SharePoint Online, which was based on ASP.NET web technology that was run from the desktop. Routing information back and forth from the server to the client is not only time intensive but is not new-technology friendly. SharePoint Classic Sites is developed for function, whereas SharePoint Modern Sites is developed for form and mobility.

Modern SharePoint pages, written in JavaScript, run faster on devices and are mobile responsive. Written and based on modern web development standards, native iOS and Android applications such as SharePoint OneDrive, Planner and Teams can leverage the new modern sites and pages in SharePoint.

In this article, we will try to address questions many are facing when it is time to deploy their new SharePoint Online experience, through a portal, global intranet or an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) implementation.

Architecture: Flat vs. Hierarchical of Classic vs. Modern

Since the early days of SharePoint, we have designed the portals, intranet and ECM sites as our traditional hierarchical structure where you have home site collection and either you will have subsites or you divide your intranet into multiple site collections with many subsite levels (depending on how big your organization is). Regardless, with any decision you have made, one or more site collections, each site collection usually contained many deep levels based on how the departments managed and maintained their sites. I have seen this architecture many times:

Classic Information Architecture

Although one site collection created a great place to manage your content types and metadata centrally, and it gave you the ability to maintain consistent global navigation and branding, it also gave many organizations a lot of headaches to maintain. The above architecture gave SharePoint administrators a lot of grief to manage the sites, specifically when it came to broken security inheritance at each site level. It was a nightmare to manage and administrators were always and consistently faced with two scenarios:

  1. Access to sites that you are not supposed to have access to; and
  2. Not being able to access documents even though you belonged to the team.

In addition to managing the sites, from a performance point of view, SharePoint Online did not handle many subsites well. Cloud architecture, for maximum performance, prefers a flat structure. The more sites you add to your site collection, the more trips it takes to load all the site structure, which in turn results in taxing the performance and loading of the sites, slowing it down considerably.

SharePoint has been adapting to new technology and new methodologies of collaboration on the go, and the architecture is once again changing to accommodate this. Flat architecture is once again preferred, but collection sites are organized by Root (Classic Sites), Modern Communications Sites and Teams with Modern Team Sites. Why? Deep hierarchies are more difficult to work with while shallow hierarchies allow content to be more easily discoverable. With proper navigation and metadata, hierarchies can be simulated. If binding sites together is required, then utilizing the Hub Site is the preferred method.

With one site per function, one can achieve simple security, clearly show the purpose of that site, and clearly show who owns the content. All this makes tracking easy. The utilization of Hub Sites gives us pause to rethink the hierarchical architecture that is required in SharePoint Modern Sites. SharePoint doesn't automatically add navigation for new site collections, only sub-sites. Each site collection is its own secured silo. The site doesn't exist until you make it visible through navigation. The flat architecture allows the movement of subsites through repointing of links. When corporate restructuring requires subsites to fall under their new reporting structure, the subsite is not moved, rather, the navigation link is repointed to the new destination. Simple and clean.   

Design and Branding – Master Page/Page Layouts vs New Branding Approach

Intranet sites customized with Classic SharePoint utilize Master Page to create strong branding on their SharePoint sites. Customers have full control of the UI but in exchange, they take full responsibility to risk breaking their design with future upgrades and maintenance in Office 365 and they must ensure that all customizations are working with SharePoint. Challenging, though doable, customization requires CSS knowledge and, quite often, JavaScript injection. This is more complex and costly but does not pose the same supportability challenges. The most important drawback is that Classic Sites do not provide a good mobile experience.

Modern SharePoint Sites does not support Master Page, though there is limited ability to brand on Modern sites.  Themes with simple colours, headers, and footers can be customized, but it is not as flexible as Classic Sites.  One of the main advantages of Modern Sites is the accessibility of online, on the go content that is both usable and legible on all devices. Unlike Classic Sites, Modern Sites naturally rearrange to fit onto the device screen. Gone are the tiny words and lines along with the impossible buttons to push. Instead, readable text and a user interface that provides links and buttons that one can use without a micro-sized finger. Microsoft’s decision to remove Master Page and retain full control over the UI guarantees that SharePoint online will show and maintain a consistent, visually pleasant, and usable mobile experience.

With SharePoint Classic Sites, it was common to inject the pages, including the Master Page, with scripts to customize for branding and looks. However, this practice was not supported by Microsoft and could result in the loss of functionality within SharePoint after upgrades and releases. Realizing that many companies require a methodology to brand and customize, Microsoft has provided SharePoint Framework web parts and design patterns. Framework allows the same type of functionality as script injection; however, it provides control and organization around it. SPFx Application Customizer provides access to well-known locations on SharePoint pages that you can modify based on your business and functional requirements. Once again, it maintains its mobile-first advantages. It is important to note that, technically, if a customer truly wanted to customize their Modern Site, it could be done but this could result in breaks in other areas of SharePoint and/or with future additions and upgrades.

So, coming back to the original question:  should one stay with SharePoint Classic Sites or switch to SharePoint Modern Sites? Since SharePoint Modern Sites is focused on having content at your fingertips, whether you are in your office or on the go with your mobile phone, a consideration to migrate or not is to factor in how important it is to your corporation for mobile access.  If it is high on the priority list, then migrating to SharePoint Modern Sites is advisable.

Can you have both? Yes, you can migrate to SharePoint Modern Sites and toggle to Classic Sites, but it is important to ask whether your users will be appreciative of the different feel and inconsistency between the two sites.  Sometimes, it is better to commit to one side of the fence than sitting on it, as it is in this case, as the inconsistency may result in confusion for your users. 

When we consider and review the Road Map for SharePoint and Office 365, it is clear Microsoft will continue on the road for mobile applications that provide super responsive content while on the go with out of the box, ready to use while being easily customizable for content. It is also noted that new features, web parts and enhancements will be made on the modern SharePoint, where classic will stay as is without any further enhancements. Eventually, the decision will have to be made to migrate to SharePoint Modern Sites, but there is time as Modern Sites is still in its infancy. Until then, keep in mind the architecture, the Road Map, and the targets as you design your corporation’s infrastructure for SharePoint and Office 365.