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Get in touchA project I was working involved retrieving all external / guest users that have been added to Office 365 and especially to Office 365 Groups. As it had to build in to an Office 365 application I choose to work with the Microsoft Graph. First thing I did was retrieving all users with the standard API call:
Read moreSince my last post, I got a couple of questions about uploading files to OneDrive or SharePoint. Last week I worked on a solution to find out how it “could” work(s). The only solution I found is not so elegant and it only works for OneDrive at the moment. There is no solution yet for SharePoint.
Read moreThis week I built my first application with PowerApps for our company. I wanted to create it via PowerApps to finally see its capabilities and to use it as a showcase for our customers. I must say that it is quite powerful, but some things are not so convenient and can be simplified.
Read moreYesterday our tenant got the new team news functionality. This functionality allows you to write news in your team site which gets published on the homepage or via the new news headlines web part. Show image Team news functionality Info: SharePoint Online “team news” begins roll out to Office 365 First Release customers - https://techcommunity.
Read moreShow image webpack After the introduction of Node.js, npm, Gulp and Yeoman. It is time to spend some time on another tool called webpack. Webpack is a module bundler and is one of the tools which is used in the building process of a SharePoint Framework client-side web part.
Read moreA month ago Microsoft announced that the SharePoint webhook functionality is available in developer preview Info: here is the official article - SharePoint Webhooks Developer Preview - Now Available! To test out the functionality myself. I created a sample Node.js application which is available in the SharePoint developer samples repository: Sample Node.
Read moreAzure functions are available for a while now. Their purpose is to have an event-driven compute without maintaining any server or applications. On my Azure environment, I have various of these small functions running. They all do different things like keeping my Azure search index up to date, sending notifications about my NPM packages, etc.
Read moreI have been running this blog since 2010. Over the years I have switched from a couple of hosting providers. Since two years I completely moved to Azure for hosting my site. The experience in performance and configuration is much better compared to the others, the only downside was the MySQL database.
Read moreI just got a question from someone who wanted to know how to retrieve all the Office 365 Group documents he had access to. When you are having a lot of groups in your organization, files could be spread across them. Search is in most cases the answer to finding your documents easily.
Read moreWith the SharePoint Framework it is fairly easy to configure the properties you want to expose in the property pane of your web part. All you have to do is specify each of the property pane fields you want to show in the propertyPaneSettings function underneath the groupFields property. Show image propertyPaneSettings function There are various types of property pane fields like text, dropdown, toggle, checkbox, and if that is not enough or you need a special one, you have the ability to build it yourself.
Read moreImportant I have created a new version of this web part that makes use of Handlebars templates. You can check out the code from this web part here: https://github.com/estruyf/react-handlebars-search. Older version of the web part Today I spend some time developing with the new SharePoint Framework. I must say the SharePoint team did an amazing job with creating the Yeoman template.
Read moreAlready a great number of blog posts have been written about the new SharePoint Framework release two days ago. With every new tool or framework, there is a learning curve. The best way of learning how the SharePoint Framework works is by reading the code and debugging it. This article focusses on how you can quickly debug your web part created with the SharePoint Framework.
Read moreYeoman is yet another tool that you cannot miss in your client-side development toolset. In the previous post, I talked about Node.js, npm and Gulp. To make use of these tools it required some manual actions/configuration before you could start developing your project. By now you may have asked yourself if this is always the case with every new project you are going to create.
Read moreThis is the next article of my getting up to speed series. This article is completely devoted to Gulp. In the previous article I explained Node.js and NPM, but I also mentioned Gulp a couple of time. As you get in this world of JavaScript focussed development, you will see that Gulp (or Grunt - depending on the developers’ preference) often used for various kind of things.
Read moreRecently Microsoft announced the SharePoint framework. This framework makes use of the latest trends in the developer landscape like client-side development and integrating open source frameworks. For many of us, this was great news. The framework will be a great way to build new things for SharePoint. Of course, the SharePoint framework requires you to learn a couple of development tools with which you might not yet be familiar with.
Read moreShow image Default message when there is a problem with your template I receive a lot of questions about why display templates are not working or why managed properties do not contain a value. Most of the times the solution is similar to what has been already asked before, so I thought of writing this down in order that it can help everyone with similar issues.
Read moreLast year I did a couple of session about how to improve the search experience in your environment. In this session, I highlighted a couple of simple things that mostly stay untouched and things that can be quickly implemented. One of these key takeaways was implementing synonyms. Configuring synonyms can be done via the thesaurus functionality and works on-premises differently than on SharePoint Online.
Read moreCreating display templates for SharePoint is a fairly easy job, but we all have our own ways of developing them. Over the last couple of months, I barely touched managed code. Everything I do these days is mainly achieved by using JavaScript and/or TypeScript in combination with Visual Studio Code. As I really like this new way of working, I started testing how this could ease my display template development process and it turned out to be very useful.
Read moreA couple of weeks ago the Office Developer Tools received its second update. These tools include the latest Office add-in project template that help you create add-ins for Excel, Word, Outlook, … Info: The Office developer tools for Visual Studio can be found here - https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/office-tools-vs.aspx With the help of these tools, you should get up and running with Office Add-in development in no time.
Read moreA couple of months ago I switch from the default WordPress search functionality to Azure search. In order to update my Azure search index, I created a web job which runs every hour and adds or updates the latest 25 posts. Each night the web job will do a full re-index of all the articles.
Read moreShow image SPSBE 2016 The BIWUG board is proud to announce the sixth edition of SharePoint Saturday Belgium. This year the event will take place in Brussel on October 15th, 2016. Where will it take place? We listened to your feedback about the venue from last year and we went on a search for a new and even better location.
Read moreLast week when I was configuring a content search web part to show the latest videos from the Office 365 Video Portal. I saw that the default video template which is available is not so feature rich as I expected. The default video display template shows only a preview image with a link to the actual video.
Read moreA while ago I wrote a post about my 10 tips and tricks when working with display templates. Info: you can find the article here: My 10 SharePoint display template tips and tricks In that article, I highlighted two ways of how you could provision your display templates to a SharePoint site.
Read moreThe month May will be a busy this year with a couple of speaking engagements. A few of weeks ago I fantastic news that I was selected as a speaker for SPC Adriatics (http://www.spcadriatics.com/). This conference will be held from May 31 to June 1. Early bird registration is still open till 31 March, so if you want, you can reserve your spot here: registration.
Read moreMicrosoft is currently rolling out a new theming engine for SharePoint Online. The difference between this new engine and the old one is that all the theme CSS changes are applied at runtime. The old engine processed all the CSS files that could be themed and stored them in the database.
Read moreThis week I spoke at the SharePoint Konferenz in Erding, Germany. It was not a very big conference, but that does not mean that it cannot be great. The speaker line-up was amazing and the attendees were very engaging. Info: here is a link to the event site - http://sharepointkonferenz.de/2016/en/
Read moreThe Microsoft Graph keeps getting better and better. Since it was released, a lot more endpoints and functionality has been added. In one of my applications I make use of the sendMail endpoint to send notification about progress updates. I wanted to improve the notification mail by embedding images into the mails.
Read moreA while ago I wrote an article about how to correctly include scripts in your Display Templates. As the $include functions load files asynchronously on the page, it could happen that the JavaScript file is not loaded yet when you need it. Info: here is the link to the article - correctly including scripts into your display templates.
Read moreLast week I finally found some time to get my demo tenant up and running with hybrid search configuration. The new hybrid search experience eliminates the need of the result block. All results are aggregated together right now. So that means if you do a search query, you could get SharePoint Online results and on-premises results.
Read moreA week ago I submitted a pull request to the Office UI Fabric repository to include a new set of offset classes. These offset classes could come in handy when you want to position your elements on the page. Info: here you can see the details of the pull request - https://github.
Read moreIf you created your own display templates, you most probably have used the AddPostRenderCallback function. The AddPostRenderCallback function allows you to execute code once the display template completed rendering and this function can be used in every template (control, item, …). Now when you are creating your own refiner display templates and want to do something once all the refiners are rendered, the first approach would be to create a AddPostRenderCallback function in the refinement control template.
Read moreAt the moment the documentation for Office UI Fabric is focussed on Office Add-ins. For example: if you check the grid styles, there is mentioned that there are utility classes for small, medium and large devices, but there is more functionality hidden inside the SASS/CSS files. In this article I will describe a couple of very useful CSS classes which you can use when building your own applications with the Office UI Fabric framework.
Read moreWill I was doing some preparation for a new talk about how you can make use of the Office UI Fabric in your applications/add-ins. I found a session from Connect() from Humberto Lezama Guadarrama which shows you what UI Fabric is and how to use it (Office UI Fabric - Connect()).
Read moreWishing you all a fruitful and prosperous new year. The year 2015 was just fantastic. I attended great events and conferences in Europe and the United States. I have been awarded my first MVP award in April and made a couple of new friends. Hope to see you all again in 2016.
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