SharePoint Online Site Design

If you were thinking of creating templates in Office 365 for SharePoint online, it has staring to become available in Office 365 which is still in preview.
Is this SharePoint PnP Site Provisioning?
No. This is an alternate way of creating templates and creating new instances of sites.

What is site design?
It provides you with reusable lists, pages, layouts, themes and custom actions. In another way it’s a predefined template to create new instances of their sites. The template is collection of actions specified in a JSON script. In execution of the script, each item is actioned.
Once the JSON Script is designed, it must be registered in SharePoint. Then the template is will be available to the users to create new instances.

Prerequisites
Make sure you have installed SharePoint Online Management Shell and you know how to connect to SharePoint Online using PowerShell.

JSON schema
As I mentioned earlier, site design is a set of actions where each action is specified by a verb value. Some actions do have sub actions based on the complexity. Refer to the JSON schema reference. Shown below is the base structure of the JSON script.

 {  
   "$schema": "schema.json",  
     "actions": [  
       ...  
       <your actions goes here>  
       ...  
     ],  
     "bindata": { },  
     "version": 1  
 };  

I will create one List called "Customer Tracking List". List template reference and Field type reference will be helpful to select the base types. You can see the main action "createSPList" and the sub actions "SetDescription" and "addSPField".

 $site_script = @'  
 {  
  "$schema": "schema.json",  
    "actions": [  
      {  
        "verb": "createSPList",  
        "listName": "Customer Tracking",  
        "templateType": 100,  
        "subactions": [  
          {  
            "verb": "SetDescription",  
            "description": "List of Customers and Orders"  
          },  
          {  
            "verb": "addSPField",  
            "fieldType": "Text",  
            "displayName": "Customer Name",  
            "isRequired": false,  
            "addToDefaultView": true  
          },  
          {  
            "verb": "addSPField",  
            "fieldType": "Number",  
            "displayName": "Requisition Total",  
            "addToDefaultView": true,  
            "isRequired": true  
          },  
          {  
            "verb": "addSPField",  
            "fieldType": "User",  
            "displayName": "Contact",  
            "addToDefaultView": true,  
            "isRequired": true  
          },  
          {  
            "verb": "addSPField",  
            "fieldType": "Note",  
            "displayName": "Meeting Notes",  
            "isRequired": false  
          }  
        ]  
      }  
    ],  
      "bindata": { },  
  "version": 1  
 }  
 '@  

Currently site design has a few more actions; add and remove fields and content types, set custom field formatting using JSON, add navigation links, apply a theme a site logo, joining a Hub Site and triggering a Flow. Still Site design is in preview, lets hope there will be more actions added in the future.

PowerShell
Once the JSON script is ready, we need to add the script and create a new site design which is a two step process.

Add Script

 C:\> Add-SPOSiteScript -Title "Create Project Site" -Content $site_script -Description "Creates lists for managing projects"  

Create Site design

 Add-SPOSiteDesign -Title "Contoso Project Management" -WebTemplate "64" -SiteScripts "4a2ef0f9-a1dd-48a1-8703-e73300418eb6" -Description "Peoject management template"  

You need to provide the ID returned from the Add-SPOSiteScript to the Add-SPOSiteDesign cmdlet.

Log in to your SharePoint Online tenant and go to the home page of your SharePoint site. Click "Create Site" and you will be able to see the newly added template.

Once the site is created, it will execute the script call the actions to proceed with the customization.

refer to the link for more info and updates.

Office 365 CLI

Office 365 Management with command line was limited to Windows users. With the recent announcement of Office 365 CLI you are now able to mange different settings of SharePoint and Office 365 using Linux, macOS including Windows. Office 365 CLI is a cross-platform command line interface which can be used to mange some of the Office 365 settings.

Its built in Node.js and is distributed as a npm package. Use the below command to install it using npm.

 npm install --global @pnp/office365-cli  

Next, start by typing "office365" which will change the command prompt.

 office365  

You can start start managing your Office 365 tenant by connecting using the "spo connect" followed by your tenant admin URL.

 spo connect https://quicksilver-admin.sharepoint.com  

As soon as you type the above command you will be give a URL followed by a code to be entered in the browser.

As soon as you add the code, you will be asked to accept the necessary permissions to your tenant through Azure Active Directory, as shown below.

Type "Help" command to get the full list of commands. Testing it, I believe it has a long way to go. But as community driven project, this will evolve so fast. Oh! btw.. use "exit" to exit the console. :)

Experience the Microsoft Forms Preview

Microsoft recently released the Microsoft Forms for the tenants that are in "First Release". Product is still in Preview. Navigate to Microsoft Forms site http://forms.microsoft.com in your browser. You can use http://forms.office.com as well. 

If you have no clue what Microsoft Forms is;
"With Microsoft Forms, you can create surveys, quizzes, and polls, and easily see results as they come in. When you create a quiz or form, you can invite others to respond to it using any web browser, even on mobile devices. As results are submitted, you can use built-in analytics to evaluate responses. Form data, such as quiz results, can be easily exported to Excel for additional analysis or grading."

Microsoft strongly says "Microsoft Forms is not a replacement for Microsoft InfoPath" :) 

Lets give it a try...

If you have not signed in already, sign in to your Office 365 account.

Clicking on New Form will allow you to create a Form of your choice. Enter a name and an optional meaningful description. The start adding your questions.

You get to select the type of the answer and based on it the template for your question will be arranged.
 

I've selected "Choice" and shown below is how the question will be arranged. I added the possible answers and I have the option of adding the choice "Other" as well.

Based on the text you type, it will suggest the type of answers. Well, of course it's for Choices ;)

This is how it looks when you select a Date type

You are allowed to select long answers as well. Where it will adjust the size of the text area.

Once you are done creating your form, you can preview how it looks in a computer and in a mobile device. Yes, it's mobile compatible :)

And you are allowed to change the theme as well.

Sharing is made easy with a click of a button.

What I like the most is, how how you can see the feedback. Clicking on the "Responses" you can see the analytics page.

And my wish is "Let Forms replace InfoPath in the near future, with all the rich features" :)

Azure Roadshow 2016

Another busy day for the MVPs and the techies. It’s the Azure Roadshow time for the year 2016. A day full of technical sessions. This is in parallel to to the Global Azure Boot Camp.

It’s always a pleasure to engage in community activities and share the knowledge with the techies.

Reporting portal in Office 365 Admin Center

Office 365 provides a very rich product suite. Especially for organizations which will help & ease their day-to-day tasks. But what’s missing? The reporting, insights on how the services are used, specially the detailed reports on individual user activities. Few days back, Office 365 team released the new reporting portal for Office 365. This is a part of the new admin center.

New portal and the reports allow the drill down facility; Service level, file level, user level etc. Within the new admin center > Reports > Usage is where you get access to all the currently  released reports. Rollout will start from US, Australia and Canada.

Check below for a few sample reports.

Embed Office 365 Video

I still remember in year 2012, building our own Video portal in on-premises when Microsoft Media services was on beta, when Microsoft allowed it to be used to build your own video steaming service. Later Microsoft released Office 365 Video, but it had its own limitation at the release. User voice was helpful enough to make it a better product for an enterprise (still not a fully fledged product though).

Embedding video published to Office 365 video portal on other sites and pages was a limitation till today. With the release of new features, you can embed videos in your SharePoint Online and also in your SharePoint On-Premises environment.

Edit an existing (or new) page, go to the insert tab and click on Office 365 Video.

Select the video from the Office 365 Video portal.

Once added, you can still change the look & feel by amending the html. Select the Edit snippet and do the necessary changes.

Apart from the above method, if you want to add a video from Office 365 portal in to a page in your on-premises environment, you add the code to embed. Go to your video portal and below the video you can find the embed button to get the html.
 

Selecting the embed code will allow you to add the code.

Simple as that.

Office 365 Planner

I’m a diehard fan of Trello. I’ve been using it since 2012. All my ideas to implementations are planned and managed in Trello. Not only me, my team uses the same for task allocation, collaboration and tracking. Going beyond the web tool, I uses the mobile app as well. But todays post is not about Trello, but probably a Trello killer.

Microsoft has come up with their own planning software (yet to be released in Q4) in Office 365, which is know as Office 365 Planner. According to Microsoft “Office 365 Planner, which offers people a simple and highly visual way to organize teamwork. Planner makes it easy for your team to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what you’re working on, and get updates on progress. Planner can be used to manage a marketing event, brainstorm new product ideas, track a school project, prepare for a customer visit, or just organize your team more effectively.”

Office 365 Planner will be available in preview to Office 365 First Release customers starting next quarter, so keep an eye on your Office 365 app switcher.

Happy Planning!

Using PowerShell with Office 365

Given below are the quick steps to connect to your Office 365 site with PowerShell. As the first thing you need to download "SharePoint Online Management Shell". Get the correct version (x64 or x86) and run the setup.

Then run SharePoint Management Shell (if you have SharePoint in your machine) or SharePoint Online Management Shell.
In my case I already have a SharePoint Online site, if you don't, go to office.microsoft.com and give it a try.
After that go to the admin site and check the availability as it's the admin URL you need to connect to with the Connect-SPOService cmdlet.

With the credential parameter you need to pass a user with admin privileges to your Office 365 site. If it's one of your domain yours, make sure your domain is connected to the office 365 environment with ADFS.

It will ask for your password.

OK, the next thing is to find out the stuff you can do with PowerShell in O365. Simple, type cmdlet help SPO or Get-Command -Module Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell in shell window.

Simply, you are through. Try out the listed cmdlets.