Wictor Wilen

SharePoint Framework is all about rendering stuff on the client side, avoiding the long overdue ASP.NET Web Forms technology that SharePoint (Online) is still fundamentally based on. When rendering things client side everything is done asynchronously, to avoid locking down the UI threads and having a user experience that is fluent. In order to give the user good feedback that things are happening in the background, you need to have some kind of visual cue that tells the user - hey I’m doing stuff now, gimme a minute. There are thousands of different ways to do this and everyone does it differently; ranging from animated gifs to “loading” texts. And everyone using different methods does not always help with the user experience - so why don’t we have a common way to do this?

Summer is over, slacking time is over, it’s time to get up to speed and learn some new stuff. There’s very much to talk about this fall if you’re interested in SharePoint. And this fall I will do a couple of conferences as a speaker, which I very much looking forward to. TechDays 2016, Amsterdam For the first time I will attend and present at the TechDays 2016 in Amsterdam, the 4th and 5th of October. A local conference hosted by Microsoft. I will present three sessions:

At the Future of SharePoint event in San Francisco on May the 4th Microsoft announced the new and improved customization option and/or development model called the SharePoint Framework. This is a development model that solely focused on client-side development. There’s been some confusion going on on Twitter and other social medias and podcasts and I thought I should put together an Q&A post for this.

Today is the day many of us have been waiting for since the big SharePoint event at May the 4th. The highly anticipated SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is here and announced in at the SharePointFest, in this blog post, as well as in the new Github repo for SharePoint. Personally I’ve been waiting for this even longer after being involved by the product team to give early feedback and also attending the first top secret DevKitchen “hackathons” where we could try out very early bits.

Here’s one of these real life stories that caused some headache for quite some time but was in the end very easy to resolve. I’ll write it down and hopefully some of the search engines pick it up and help some other poor soul out there. Background We have a solution that uses publishing pages to manage news articles and information pages in SharePoint Online. These articles and pages have a custom page layout with a custom content type, so they look decent and have proper metadata. They are all deployed using the PnP PowerShell cmdlets.

I have long thought that GUIDS are unique, well GUID actually stands for Globally Unique Identifier. And SharePoint is one unique product using GUIDS everywhere. There are 2^128 possible GUIDs to choose from, so there should be no need to reuse GUIDs as long as I’m alive methinks. SharePoint uses GUIDs to uniquely identify Site Collections and Sites, and more, and this is for instance exposed through the ID property of the SPSite and SPWeb objects. If you take a look at the documentation for SPWeb.ID it actually says: “The globally unique identifier for the website” - which I interpret as this ID is unique, globally! Period.

This is by no means an official support statement from Microsoft, rather an unofficial compilation of official statements. Last week the SharePoint Online team rolled out the preview of the Modern SharePoint lists. Modern Lists are the new incarnation of ye ole Classic SharePoint lists that we all loved and hated over the last decade or so. The Classic SharePoint lists and libraries has been one amazing and powerful tool and I would say that they have been a big part of the success SharePoint has had. Customizations using XSLT, SharePoint Designer and JSLink has all contributed to its success.

As many of you have noticed I have not been posting my What’s new on the Office Roadmap updates. Well, I’ve been on a vacation not trying to think of Office 365 to start with, and then also, I’m ending my series of these posts. Sorry. I have to start with saying that I love the amount of changes we see now in the Office 365 service. The team(s) is/are doing an amazing job with kicking out new features and updates in some areas. Our favorite SharePoint is killing it with features at the moment, and more is to come. And do believe this will continue for the foreseeable future.

Happy Friday and welcome back to another Office Roadmap update. This time the day before the big SharePoint Saturday, here in beautiful Stockholm, where we all are going to indulge on the goodness that was announced a couple of weeks back at the SharePoint Futures event. Lot of new stuff in the mobile space this time around. Changes 2016-05-20 Launched Windows Universal App: OneDrive UWP (Universal Windows App) are now launched and live (new) User Activity Reports: Compliance center improvements for OneDrive/SharePoint on document views/edits/downloads etc (from in development) Intelligent Discover for Android: Discover (Office Graph) view in the Android OneDrive app (new) Mobile Access to SharePoint Online for iOS: Access your SharePoint files from the OneDrive app (new) Office 365 Groups: easily add users from a distribution list to a group: this is cool, now you can add all members from a DL to an O365 Group instead of one user at a time (new) Self-service NGSC setup and goove.exe takeover: Simplified setup for NGSC (Next Gen Sync Client). Finally. Goove.exe (giggles) (new) Rolling out Office 365 Groups: scripts to migrate Distribution Lists (DLs) to Groups: Some sweet scripts for migrating DL’s to O365 Groups (new). Funny it’s listed as rolling out, the script is there! What’s missing. Project Online - Developer Samples: Project Online goes Github: http://aka.ms/pppmapisamples (new) Project Online - OData performance improvements: and when they have some sample code, they of course want it to perform (new) SharePoint home in Office 365: the new SharePoint Home tile is being rolled out. Check /_layouts/SharePoint.aspx in your tenant. (from in development). Office integration added back to NGSC: improved office integration in the NGSC (Next Gen Sync Client) (new) Improved image attachment viewing in Outlook on the web: Always nice to see improvements to the web client, it’s now way ahead of the desktop one, this time big thumbnails and side by side view (new) In Development Annotating and inking for Mac: Draw using your mouse on you Mac - cause you suck and don’t have touch on that shiny thing (new) Copy and move to SharePoint: Intelligent Discovery for iOS: Discover (Office Graph) for the iOS OneDrive app (new) Intelligent Discovery for Windows Phone: Discover (Office Graph) for the Windows Phone OneDrive app (new). Anybody want to buy a couple of Lumias, I have several as paper weights. Mobile Access to SharePoint Online for Android: Access SharePoint files and not only OneDrive on your Android OD4B app. (new) Mobile Access to SharePoint Online for Windows Phone: Access SharePoint files and not only OneDrive on your WP OD4B app (new) Office 365 Groups: Exchange Admin Center (EAC) UI for migrating Distribution Lists (DLs) to Groups: Evolution of the migration scripts mentioned above. You will soon be able to migrate from DL’s to Groups using a single button in the Exchange Admin Center. Nice! (new) OneDrive for Business Shared folder Sync: this is a nice new feature. If someone shares a folder with you from their OneDrive you will be able to sync them (new)