February 21, 2020

Modern Team Site without an Office 365 Group

These are my findings around Modern Sites without Office 365 Groups. It is, of course, a subject to change.

Today (2020-02-21) when you create a Modern Team Site without a group, you will get a site with the template STS#3. This oldie has been around for a while, hasn’t it?

I would always recommend creating Office 365 Group Connected sites.

How it is created

Through PowerShell/REST or from SharePoint Home, if your account is not allowed to create Office 365 Groups, it will automatically create a site without a group.

February 14, 2020

Multilingual MS Forms

Want to translate your MS Forms into other languages? Create a form, not a quiz. It is available in both Forms and Forms Pro licenses.

Today I want to share one of my findings. One of those that seem obvious once you know, but that take time to find out.

Unfortunately, there is no official comparison of what is included in MS Forms vs. MS Forms Pro. So I thought that the ability to have forms in multiple languages was connected to the license.

February 11, 2020

Using Sway as a simple static site builder

Sometimes all you need is just a simple static web page: instructions, a landing page, a collection of links. I think I have a perfect use case for Sway. Consider a scenario similar to what Laura Kokkarinen writes in her blog post:

How to build a guest user self-service registration for office 365 with azure

An external user invitation needs an inviteRedirectUrl. Usually it is myapps.microsoft.com. In Laura’s case it was a given extranet url.

January 22, 2020

Kalendern i SharePoint

Dags för ett svenskt inlägg igen. Idag vill jag titta på kalenderfunktionaliteten i SharePoint Online.

Fortfarande gammalt (classic) utseende

Tyvärr är det gammalt utseende som gäller och det finns inga planer från Microsoft att modernisera kalendern:

SharePoint UserVoice: Modern Calendars

Jag förstår att det är väldigt mycket kod för att få till kalendervyn och att det inte är så lätt omvandla till ett modernt utseende, men det ställer till eftersom det upplevs som gammalt och inte användarvänligt ute i verksamheten.

January 21, 2020

Hiding Teamify Prompt

If you want to remove the Microsoft Teams Banner on your SharePoint Site, the only thing you need is to set a web property on a site: TeamifyHidden=TRUE. I’ll give you some guidance below. But before you do that, consider following:

If there is already a team created for a group connected site, the prompt won’t show up. Why fix something that is not a problem?
Only group owners will get the prompt, if they are few and they know what it is, it is better to let them to decide whether to create or not to create a team.
Only licensed users within your organization will be shown that choice. No external users or users without a license.
And the most important part: if any site owner selects “Don’t show me again” it will stop popping up for all other site owners. If you happen to have a manual step in the group creation process, then you can just click it away.

January 10, 2020

Using secrets in Logic Apps in a secure way

This is a guide for how to handle secrets in a logic app in a secure way. It combines three resources:

First, enable a Managed Identity for your Logic App:

In the KeyVault, add a new Access Policy for the new Managed Identity (from the previous step). Use the least priviliges. In my case it is just enough with GET for secrets.

January 9, 2020

Filtering Azure Table Data directly in the Azure Function Binding

Instead of filtering values from an Azure Storage Table, you can do it directly in the bindings. It might not be a solution for everything, but in the right place, it is fantastic. I was very surprised to see how little code was needed after this binding change:

	module.exports = async function(context, req) {
	context.res = {
	body: context.bindings.inputTable
	};
	};

view raw binding-filter-index.ts hosted with ❤ by GitHub

For that to work, define the filter attribute in the bindings: “filter”: “(PartitionKey eq ‘{package}’)”

	{
	"bindings": [
	{
	"authLevel": "anonymous",
	"type": "httpTrigger",
	"direction": "in",
	"name": "req",
	"methods": ["options", "get"]
	},
	{
	"type": "http",
	"direction": "out",
	"name": "res"
	},
	{
	"type": "table",
	"name": "inputTable",
	"tableName": "metadata",
	"connection": "AzureWebJobsStorage",
	"direction": "in",
	"filter": "(PartitionKey eq '{package}')"
	}
	]
	}

view raw binding-filter-function.json hosted with ❤ by GitHub

To try it out, add a new row in a table defined in the bindings (“metadata” in my case):

December 11, 2019

Site Collection App Catalog vs. Tenant App Catalog

Site Collection App Catalogs are great for special cases (like developing apps or site unique apps), but using them on scale would be a mess.

I got a question: Why should we use the Tenant App Catalog at all when we could enable a Site Collection App Catalog on every teamsite? So the suggestion here is to install SharePoint Framework Packages on many Site Collection App Catalogs, instead of the Tenant App Catalog. In that way those wouldn’t be visible for all users in the “Add an app” page.

December 11, 2019

Permissions in SPFx apply to your whole tenant

Once you approve a permission request from an SPFx app, it will grant the same permission to all other apps in the same tenant.

Nothing new, but I want to emphasize that in that blog post only dedicated to that. You can read it here:

MS Docs. Connect to Azure AD-secured APIs in SharePoint Framework solutions

A simple sketch over the permissions.

Here is a simple FAQ to explain what it means:

December 5, 2019

Azure Key Vault vs. Pipeline Variables

Using Azure Key Vault in a Pipeline is cool, but it is less secure.

The Key Vault setup

Have you tried the Key Vault Step in an Azure DevOps Pipeline? If you haven’t, please follow these awesome guides:

The steps described in these guides are easy, but that effort made me think about the first pair of pros and cons.