Rollup news from @SharePoint #Communication Sites
Microsoft recently rollout the great new Communication sites in Office 365, to me this is one Great Innovation, make my work a lot easier.
Most of us who want to use this as a new Intranet site in O365 will face a couple of challenges, I’m trying to work through some of the most common scenarios, please feel free to give me feedback in comments section:
1. Branding
2. Use #ComsiteTemplate as Root site collection
3. Rollup corporate news across other #ComsiteCollections
Branding
My view on branding is simple, do you really need it?
In the past SharePoint wasn’t mobile friendly and there was a lot of challenges with the complexity in UX, but with the new #comsites and the innovation with the “modern” layouts we’ve got mobile friendly sites out of the box and a beautiful UX. The user experience in SPO is now a lot more user friendly, it have some flaws but things are a lot easier for end-users.
For me the need to use hundreds of hours on branding, custom masterpages, custom scripts, custom page layouts is simply not there anymore.
I’ll recommend most of my customers in O365 to spend those resource’s on collaboration and productivity tools, like user adoption, business workflows and forms.
Use #ComsiteTemplate as Root site collection
I simply don’t know why Microsoft hasn’t make this an option out of the box, but I’ve found a way around too remedy that in another post here, beware that this is MY work around, I haven’t see any issues yet. And as far as I know, it’s just a SharePoint site template so it shouldn’t be a problem.
https://hangconsult.com/2017/06/29/change-sharepoint-online-root-site-collection-to-use-the-new-communication-site-template/
Rollup corporate news across other #ComsiteCollections
This is not entirely a work around, more like a big guide on how to use SharePoint.
Many of my customer are Enterprises with offices across many countries, we’ll like news to flow from Head Office to Regional Offices and offcourse from the Regional Offices to flow to Head Office.
Currently we don’t have an official support from Microsoft just yet, but again it’s just SharePoint, the foundation is there, it’s just a matter of making the “Lego’s in SharePoint” work the way we need it to work.
What we’ll need
– A custom news content type base on “Site Pages” | this will allow us to add custom metadata to the news
– A custom metadata column “News Category”
– A custom managed property of the above column in the search schema | this will allow us to filter the rollup result to display news from the category we want
– Some news, then rollup using “Highlighted Content” webparts
Create a new custom content type in O365 Content type hub
In SharePoint Online we have a hidden site collection that default created when signing up:
https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/contenttypehub/SitePages/Home.aspx
This SC works as an on-premises content type hub, and is provisioned by the SharePoint Online multi-tenant setup, if you’ve done SharePoint on-premise multi-tenant setup of SharePoint you’ll know.
In the content type hub, navigate to Site Settings | Site Content type | create a new content type based on the “Site Page” content Type
After it’s created, I’ll like to add custom metadata to the content type, to better categorise news. Create a new site column based on “managed metadata” type, with the term set below:
The new metadata column should be connected to your “news” content type | you can now publish the content type
After the content type has been successfully published navigate to your #comsite | site content | Site Pages | library settings | add an existing content type | add your news content type
Now create a new news page then publish it
Currently we don’t have the possibility to “tag” a page directly in edit mode, this means that we need to navigate back to the pages library in order to adjust the metadata.
Remember to publish the page after you have added the metadata, otherwise SPO search will not index the change.
Now navigate to your other #comsite | https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/Marketing/SitePages/Home.aspx
Repeat the process to add the “news page” content type to the pages library | then publish some news
After you have done this, be patience, because we cannot control the index in Office 365, in my dev environment for everything to be indexed and ready took almost two week.
I really don’t know why, but it might be because of the #Comsites are still not GA, might be some issue with SPO index. I just don’t know, and SPO support don’t know either.
Now navigate to SPO search admin | Managed Properties
https://tenant-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/searchadmin/ta_listmanagedproperties.aspx?level=tenant
We want to map one of the available string managed properties in SPO with the crawled property of our custom metadata column.
After this perform a quick search to verify that the SPO index is correct: RefinableString00:”corporate”
Now navigate to the page where we need this pages to rollup | add the “Highlighted content” webpart | configure as below
After all that work, this is what you can expect, no development needed it’s just SharePoint.
I really love the things the @SharePoint team is doing recently.. thank you @SharePoint!
Change SharePoint Online root site collection to use the new “Communication Site Template”
My tenant just got the new Communication site template. Thank you @SharePoint
As I’ve built numerous Intranet sites both with SharePoint On-premises and SharePoint Online, I want to see if I can use the new template on the root team site.
Because the root SPO site is a team site, it turn out no matter what I did I cannot get rid of the left NAV bar, even though I’ve got all the new webparts and layouts.
Tried with PowerShell, still no luck..
New-SPOSite -Title “Comsite2PowerShell” -Template SITEPAGEPUBLISHING#0 -Url “https://jimmydev.sharepoint.com/sites/Comsite2PowerShell” -Owner jimmy@hangconsult.com -StorageQuota 1000
Until Microsoft release a means to change this, my work around is as follows, remember that this works best for new customer or customer with an empty root SPO site, existing customer need to plan a migration of content.
First, create a new site using the Communication Template
Navigate to the “Save site as a template” page, this page is hidden from the menu so use the following URL
https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/comsite/_layouts/15/savetmpl.aspx
Give the new template a name | click OK
When completed click “Solution gallery”
Click on the name of the template to download it, save it to a location on your computer, you’ll need it later
In SharePoint Admin | delete your root site collection | then create a new one | for template for “Custom | Select template later”
After the site has been created, start a new browser tab and navigate to the new site.
It will now ask you to choose a template | click solution gallery |
Now choose to upload your “template.wsp” file you downloaded earlier | then Activate the Solution
Navigate back to the root site | now choose the “Custom” tab | you should see your template | choose the template | then OK
Wait for it
Choose your SharePoint Security Groups | OK
That’s it enjoy your Root site with the brand new communication template, It’s quite beautiful!
Orphaned SharePoint Online Site Collections after an O365 Group
O365 Groups or Unified Groups is a cool O365 feature, except when it don’t work as expected.
You just deleted the Group, but the hidden SharePoint Online Site Collection connected to the group didn’t got deleted automatically with the group.
Guess what it’s now an orphaned site collection in locked state.
To Remove these sites, follow the script below:
##Connect to SPO
Connect-SPOService -Url https://tenant-admin.sharepoint.com
#Get all SPO Sites | find your orphaned O365 Group Site Collection
Get-SPOSite
#The SPO site Collection is actually locked, unlock it
Set-SPOSite -Identity https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/site -LockState Unlock
#If you were not Site Collection Admin before the O365 Group was deleted
Set-SPOSite -Identity https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/site -owner tenant-admin@yourdomain.com
#Then remove the orphaned site
Remove-SPOSite -Identity https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/sites -NoWait
FIX THIS MICROSOFT!!
SharePoint 101 – Image Column in SharePoint list view
SharePoint list is a really powerfull tool, now and then we want it to do even more.
Example:
- I want the list the have a picture column
- This column is should contain a link to a picture
- But I don’t want the picture to be shown in full size as it will “destroys” the list view
- I don’t want to use code or workflow or css/javascript fix
I want something like this:
Step by step:
- Create you list, then you will need a column of type “Hyperlink or Picture”| choose format url as “Picture”
- Create a standard SharePoint picture library
- Go to Site Settings | Image Renditions | If you don’t see it, turn on publishing feature
- Create a rendition of your choice
- Then navigate to your Picture library and upload your image, when you select the image, in the ribbon you will se Design | Edit Rendition | Click “Edit Renditions”. This will give you the full link of available renditions og the selected image
- Copy the URL and paste it in the Picture Column and you’re done
#MS #PowerApps fix Your stuff!!
I’m really not sure why Microsoft released #PowerApps, it’s absolutely not ready for businesses. It’s supposed to replace InfoPath?? Lucky we got InfoPath for another 10 year.
Why:
- It’s not responsive by design, you have to choose a layout, shouldn’t this be the facto standard in 2016?
- It’s doing #stupid translation to “Norwegian” my computer regional setting is Norwegian, stop doing this, the translations doesn’t help at all.
- What’s worse the current version of #PowerApps cannot handle something as simple as a “SharePoint List Date Column” at all. How weird is that, look at my screen below
