SharePoint Events and news catch up for Australia - April/May 2016

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I was preparing this list for our April Sydney SharePoint Usergroup event.

April 28-29 Digital Workplace Conference in Melbourne

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This is the annual Australian SharePoint Conference / ShareThePoint Conference by Debbie Ireland.  The biggest Australian SharePoint show for the year.  A lot of opportunity for networking, user cases and physically meeting and talking with the community experts.  Lots of Australian and overseas visiting SharePoint experts across the spectrum (IT Pro, Business, Power User, Dev) at this event.  http://dwcau.com.au/  

 

April 28-29 Cloud Roadshow in Sydney

This is a Microsoft event for a developer audience.  Focused on Azure.

https://microsoftcloudroadshow.com/sydney

 

May the 4th - Future of SharePoint

This is an streaming online event with Jeff Teper, the father of SharePoint (and now OneDrive).  It would be live on May the 5th for Australians and probably very early in the morning.  Check timezones.

https://resources.office.com/en-us-landing-the-future-of-sharepoint.html

 

May 7 Office 365 Saturday Perth

The SharePoint / Office 365 Saturday events for 2016 kicks off again from Perth.

http://www.o365saturdayaustralia.com/perth

 

May 10-12 Collab365 Online Summit

The SP24 / Collab 365 guys are back again for 2016 with a huge lineup of streaming and recorded sessions.

http://collab365.events/collab365-summit-2016/

 

OneDrive for Business

There was a recent blog post was really good with information on 2016 roadmap.

https://blogs.office.com/2016/04/12/onedrive-for-business-recognized-as-an-efss-leader-and-continues-momentum-with-spring-updates/#wsEJ4t8xOHg24iYE.97

(Ignore the marketing intro about industry recognition… the roadmap items like Win 8.1, pause sync, and also Doc Lib sync in 3rd quarter 2016 is good info)

 

New Document Library UX went live

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/What-is-a-document-library-3b5976dd-65cf-4c9e-bf5a-713c10ca2872?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Almost universally, the reception is cautious.  We like seeing updates.  We don't like missing ribbons and hiding team collaboration features.  Robert Crane has one of the earliest pieces on this http://blog.ciaops.com/2016/04/this-seems-like-siloing-to-me.html that I really echo with.

UserCustomAction-ConfigPage adding CSS file links

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I've had several questions in comments about how to add CSS files using the Simplest-Safest-Most-Future-Proof-Way to customize your SharePoint and SharePoint Online using UserCustomActionConfigPage

This is something I wanted to talk about from day 1 of this series - as I did cover you can add more than 1 CSS files, and specify their ranking via the Sequence number.

Because UserCustomAction doesn't create a link for CSS references, the way to do this is via the ScriptBlock and create a LINK element and attach it on page creation.

How to use this?

Grab the latest configure-page.aspx from Github.

Reference a CSS file instead of a JS file.  The ID is optional, but will be respected if specified.

The Sequence is honoured - 1001 will follow 1000.

Result - the CSS reference is loaded into the page.

Happy branding!


SP2013/2016 Responsive-UI and UserCustomActionsConfigPage

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I just pushed an update to my Simplest-Safest-Most-Future-Proof-Way to customize your SharePoint and SharePoint Online using UserCustomActionsConfigPage (UCACP) github repo.  This is an important update because of a BIG thing that has just happened over at PnP side.

The PnP team has just released a SP2013/2016 Responsive UI pack. 

I jumped in a had a read, it uses the ScripLink way to attach a single javascript file, the file then looks for script id="PnPResponsiveUI"  element on the page, and attaches a CSS file.

My single page UserCustomActionsConfigPage does very similar things, except I use the ScriptSrc element in a UserCustomAction and that doesn't set the Script ID.

So this update to UserCustomActionConfigPage adds an additional textbox.  You can leave it blank.  But if you specify an ID, it will use ScriptBlock instead to insert the UserCustomAction.

New ID field

Installing 2013/2016 Responsive-UI pack with UCACP:

Copy three files into your Site Assets.   NOTE some browsers will save github files as HTML (because Github doesn't want to serve the files so it tells browsers these are HTML) - please double check the files are saved correctly as raw CSS or JS.

 

 

ID: PnPResponsiveUI
Url: SiteAssets/PnP-Responsive-UI.js

Usually, you can leave the ID blank.  But PnP-Responsive-UI.js needs it to be PnPResponsiveUI

Install to Current Web.  The Site User Custom Actions list should reflect there is now a SiteAssets/PnP-Responsive-UI.js inserted.  There is no ScriptSrc, because it is inserted via ScriptBlock.

The ScriptBlock is inserted using a Script tag attached to the head element.  This is identical to how PnP is doing it via PowerShell. 

One note - also, switch off your Mobile View feature.


What does it look like?

The Debugger shows both CSS and JS are injected correctly.  Note, I'm injecting from my own SiteAssets library.  PnP creates a folder under Style Library.

See the Responsive-UI in action with the Hamburger menus.

PnP PowerShell Installation

I want to reference drisgill's post on this Responsive-UI http://blog.drisgill.com/2016/03/a-look-at-the-pnp-responsive-ui-package-for-sharepoint-on-premises.html

He talks about the first impressions of the Responsive-UI, as well as a detailed section on how to install the Responsive-UI via PowerShell (as prescribed by PnP tools).

Installation with PowerShell is fine and dandy, but it assumes you are some sort of master magician.  Multiple downloads, and a dependency on 2015-CU.  (Which BTW you should have installed already).

I consider the PowerShell install perhaps a bit daunting and a barrier for people to try this customization on their site.

The UCACP way is 3 files.

Customization with the User Custom Actions is magical.  But we can leave out the PowerShell here this time :-)

Uninstall Responsive-UI Pack

And the Document Library view is back to normal.

Update 2018-05

Fixed some github broken links

Related Posts

ngSydney, Office Add-ins and lots of AngularJS

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I went to my first ngSydney meetup on Wednesday night, and presented a short session on Office-Addin with AngularJS (I also throw in Graph API) and ran over my allocated time to 40 minutes.

I probably should have asked for 1hr.

Presentation

Here is the PowerPoint presentation.  Presentation: office-addin yo ngSydney

Also, check out all the examples on http://dev.office.com/

Updates

Graph API has Excel endpoints "coming soon".  These REST endpoints will let your app reach inside a workbook/worksheet/range/cell and pull/push stuff in and out like JSON goodness.

https://graph.microsoft.io/en-us/docs/api-reference/beta/resources/excel

Unfortunately, no Word REST API yet.

Clarifications

As I rushed through the demo some things perhaps wasn't as clear as I could explain.

1. There were two libraries/APIs - the Microsoft Graph REST API lets you talk to services across Office and eventually Microsoft space.  You need to register an Azure App so Graph knows what permissions you are after.  Your users need to authenticate and grant permission to your app to use the services that it is asking for.

2. The Office.js within a Office Add-In lets you talk to the current document, or mail within the Office App.  You need to register/deploy the manifest.xml file with your Office 365, or through network share or group policy for Desktop Apps.  The manifest describes what sort of permissions you are seeking on the current document, usually there is only Read or ReadWrite.

You can use Office.js and Graph API together as it was in my demo, or separately.

3. The 'app' I was running in the iframe for both Office 365 or Word 2013 is running out of https://localhost/ - I didn't stop to show this.

4. Authentication piece of the puzzle moves forward as well - next on the line is Progressive Permissions where an app can request more permissions on the spot and the user will be asked to allow additional permissions (write) on the go.

5. Office Addin is available in: Office 2013/2016, Office for Mac, Office for iOS.  Not yet available on Office for Android.  It also runs in Office Online (SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Docs.com) and within both Exchange Online (business) and Outlook.com (consumer).

Had a few awesome quotes:



Update on SharePoint and Office Development - 2016 Feb edition

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We rotate through different topics and presenters in the Sydney SharePoint user group.  But I finally got my turn to present a developer topic, and I wanted to do a quick primer on all things Office Developer related.

This turned out to be a REALLY complex talk.  I wanted to cover ALL the cool new stuff in Office Dev.  But as it turns out every month (and now, every week) new things come out. 

I ended up with:

  • Brief Introduction to dev.office.com
  • Brief Introduction to PnP
  • Where we have been with SharePoint Add-Ins
  • Where we are going with Office Addins: 
  • NEW API: Microsoft Graph API
  • NEW AUTH: OAuth 2.0 and ADAL(js)
  • NEW TOOLS: New tools with Node, NPM, and Yeoman Generator (YO OFFICE)
  • Build a demo Office Addin that talks to both SharePoint Online and Microsoft Graph
  • Run on web and desktop

The presentation clocked in at 1 hour and 20mins - I started a bit earlier.  And kind of flopped off at the end as I run out of steam after the demo :-O

Then we gave out all the swag from dev.office.com so all is happy faces.

The PowerPoint presentation is here:

2015 February Presentation - Update on SharePoint and Office Development

 

Demo Fail

So at the end, the Office Add-In didn't load from the App Catalog on my desktop.  I went home and got it to work, here are screenshots to proof it.

Oh NO - no apps

Add SharePoint App catalog to trust center

 

Here it is.  The same addin working on desktop - talking to Microsoft Graph and showing Group Conversations