Office 365: What’s new from Microsoft Ignite

Ben Prins Office 365

During Microsoft Ignite many innovations that transform the workplace communications have been announced. Its impossible to name them all, so instead I will share with you my favorite innovations. Note that some of these features are already live, being rolled out or still being developed.

SharePoint app bar

The SharePoint app bar might even be my favorite announcement from Ignite. The app bar will be visible on every site on your intranet providing a consistent navigation experience. But it’s not only for navigation, that is just the beginning. The app bar also shows personal relevant sites, news feed and the files.
The SharePoint app bar will appear after you set a SharePoint site as a home site.

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Home site in Teams

Your intranet (home site) is coming to Microsoft Teams. With the home site app for Microsoft Teams users gain direct access to the SharePoint Home site in Teams. The home site app in Teams gives your users global navigation across sites, communities, and teams; quick access to sites they use regularly; and a personalized news feed.

thumbnail image 1 captioned The home site app for Teams brings the power of your SharePoint-based intranet home site seamlessly into Microsoft Teams.

SharePoint: News boost

Microsoft listened to our request; we are getting the ability to boost news! With this feature you wil be able to boost the visibility of your important news articles. You can boost a news post until it has been read, for a set number of impressions, or until a given date.

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SharePoint: news digest 

Keeping up with all the all the news and information can be harder than it seems. With the automatically generated news digest you will receive an email summary of the news articles you have missed. This will ensure that everybody will be well informed. The news digest can be customized with your organization’s branding.

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Teams: Dynamic view

Dynamic view makes uses of AI to optimize shared content and video participant, it intelligently arranges the elements of your meeting for an optimal viewing experience. The viewing experience will change when people join, turn on video, start to speak or when starting to present. You will still be able change the layout based on your preference.

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SharePoint spaces 

SharePoint spaces is a very powerful new tool for 3D interactions. SharePoint spaces enables you to make immersive and engaging mixed reality experiences for 3D content, models and 360° imagery.

Office 365: What’s new?

Ben Prins Office 365

The updates for Office 365 keep coming and coming, Microsoft is not sitting still! I am very excited for the following new features. Note that some of these features are already live, being rolled out or still being developed.

Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform, helping you create a work environment that puts people first, driving better business results.

It consists of Topics, Connections, Learning and Insights which are (partly) modules based on Microsoft Project Cortex technology. It brings together people, knowledge, e-learning using Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. And it also brings a Viva Insights app into Teams, utilizing data from Workplace Analytics.

Teams: Virtual Breakout Rooms

The virtual break out rooms are here! The meeting owner can create break out rooms to be used by the meeting participants for smaller group discussion. Participants can be assigned to a room and call them back to the larger group when the breakout is complete.

Teams: End-of-meeting notification

Microsoft Teams will notify the meeting participant when there is 5 minutes left in the scheduled meeting time. This will help users to be on time for the next meeting or shorting meetings that might drag on for too long.

Teams: Attendee Dashboard

Download the attendance list with a simple button.

Teams: Spotlight

It’s now easier to see if you are in the spotlight and to remove yourself from the spotlight.

SharePoint: 250GB file size support

The new upload limit for large files is now 250 GB for Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive

SharePoint: Image Lightbox

Users can click on an image web part while in view mode, to see a larger version of the image.

Office 365: Lists

Ben Prins Office 365

Lists in Office 365 is a powerful tool and it integrates perfectly in Teams or your personal OneDrive. You can use one of the list templates provide by Microsoft or create your own. The best way to use Lists is with Teams, then you can work together in real time with conversation and lists side by side. Track what matters most to your team using rules, reminders, and comments.

The bonus is that you can also create a Power App directly from the list. Now you can really use the list anywhere and anytime. The Power App can also be connected to the Team for easy access.

Lists in Teams

  • Add a Tab in Teams and select the List and click on save.
  • Create a new list.
  • You can use a template or create a blank list.
  • Click on the Work progress tracker template and click on Use template.
  • Fill in the name and description.
  • You have now create the List in Teams.

List with Power App in Teams

Its very easy to create a Power App based on a list. This Power App can also be added to Teams to be as productive as possible.

  • Navigate and open the Work progress tracker list.
  • Open the list in SharePoint, this is the SharePoint site that is connected to the Team.
  • Click on Power Apps and Create an app.
  • Note that you can also create a Power Automate Flow for the list.
  • Fill in the name of the Power App and click on Create.
  • The app will be created, this process takes a few moments.
  • If required, you can change the Power App.
  • In this example I don’t change the Power App.
  • Navigate to the Team and add a Tab.
  • Find the Power App and click on Save.
  • You can now use the Power App in Teams.

Lists in OneDrive

  1. Open Lists and click on New.
  2. Select a template or create a blank list.

3. Select the Work progress tracker and click on Use template.
4. Fill in the name and description.
5. The Save to location for your OneDrive is My lists.

Power Automate: Start a Flow from a column change

Ben Prins Office 365

With Microsoft Power Automate we can now create flows that start based on specific columns being updated in SharePoint!  This is a feature I have been waiting on for years! The action is called Get changes for an item or a file. The action returns a boolean for each field, whether it was just changed or not. Based on this boolean you know if a field was changed.

Creating the flow

  • Create a SharePoint list, I created the following project list.
  • Enable versioning on the list.
  • Create a flow and use the trigger When an item or a file is modified.
  • Select your site and list.
  • Add the action Get changes for an item or a file (properties only).
  • Fill in the site address, library name and the ID of the item that was triggered.
  • The field Since is used to get the changes we need to make a comparison. If you use 1.0 you will compare the current item version with version 1.0. But we want the latest changes so we use the following expression.
sub(int(triggerOutputs()?['body/{VersionNumber}']),1)
  • I want to send an email when the end date of a project changes.
  • Add the action Conditions to check if the end date was changed.
  • Add the dynamic content Has Column Changed: End date.
    This returns a boolean value.
  • Put the required actions in the If yes section after the condition.
    In my example I am sending an email.
  • Add the action Send an email (V2) and fill in as follows.

Power Automate: Creating and updating a document set in SharePoint

Ben Prins Office 365

Many colleagues have asked me how to create or update document sets with Power Automate. I had never done this before so I told them to use a web service. From now on, I can point them to this blog post. The flow is created with the help of my colleague Jasper Voskuilen, because this web service is a bit more complicated to setup.

Creating the flow

  • Open Power Automate and create a new flow (automation).
  • I created a flow with the trigger, for a selected item.
  • In my situation I get all items from a list and then create a document set for each result.
  • Create the following variables with the related values.
  • This will make the flow more dynamic for later changes.
  • SiteURL as a string, fill in the Site URL.
  • ContentType as a string, fill in the content type id.
  • URLLibrary as a string, fill in the library name part of the ULR.
    For this example it is: Library
https://domein.sharepoint.com/sites/ExampleSite/Library/Forms/allitems.aspx
  • TitleLibrary as a string, fill in the title (name) of the library.
  • WebServiceURLBibliotheek as a string, fill in the Library URL used by the web service.
  • You can find the web service url by using the following URL
https://domein.sharepoint.com/sites/ExampleSite/_vti_bin/listdata.svc/
  • Add the action Send an HTTP request to SharePoint
  • Use the varibles to configure the web service.
  • The name of the document set needs to be unique. I used a value from my list item, your situation might be different.
  • If required you can update the newly created document set.
  • Add the action Parse JSON and parse the Body of the Create Document set HTTP request.
  • Add the action Send an HTTP request to SharePoint
  • Use the variables to configure the web service.
  • The properties you need to set might be different than mine. I used values from my list item but your situation might be different.

SharePoint Online: Custom Search Refiner Display Templates

Ben Prins Office 365

The Refinement Panel is a solid part of almost every classic search solution. In most cases we can configure the selected refiner perfectly by changing the settings, but not always. Fortunately we are also able to change the display template per selected refiner and create our own custom Refiner Display Templates. In this example I created a custom display template with the following customizations.

  • Removed the first two characters of the filter option.
  • Made the refinement panel wider.

More information about display templates in general can be found on MSDN Display Templates.

Create a custom Refinement display template

First we need to make a copy of the default refinement display template, the name of the display template is Filter_Default.

  • Navigate to the filter display templates: Master Page Gallery / Display Templates / Filters.
    (http://your-site/_catalogs/masterpage/Display Templates/Filters)
  • Copy the HTML file Filter_Default and give it a new name for example: Filter_Custom.html
  • Remember not to copy the JS file, this will be created automatically.
  • Update the Title field of the display template.
  • Open Filter_Custom.html in your favorite editor.
  • Remove the code which is not needed.
    • I removed rows 33-201 and 209-229
    • Note that this might be different for you

Solution for removing characters

  • Find the following code. 
    <div id='Container'>
  • Find the following div located below the previous one. 
    <div id='Value' name='Item'>
  • Between these divs add the if statement that shortens the shown filter options.
  • Note that is does not remove the show all items feature.
  • In my example I remove the first 2 characters. 
    var refinementNameShorter=refinementName;

if(refinementName!="All")
{
    refinementNameShorter = refinementName.substring(2);
    refinementNameShorter = refinementNameShorter.substring(0, refinementNameShorter.indexOf("|"))
}

Solution for wider refinement panel

  • Find the following code. 
    <div id='Container'>
  • Inside this div is the following div located. 
    <div id='Value' name='Item'>
  • Change this into the following code. 
    <div id='Value' name='Item' style="width: 500px;">

Configure the refinement panel

  • Open the page with the refinement panel
  • Select by Display template the newly created Filter_Custom

Code result