Yesterday I participated in the Hackathon at European SharePoin Conference in Stockholm. The main goal was to learn more about Office Add-Ins. I wanted to create a very very simple app to learn the basics. Here in this post I’ll provide some links and describe the steps needed to start developing your Office Add-Ins. The Add-in I created is an Outlook Add-In, it is called “Joke Inserter” and with it you can insert a random Chuck Norris joke. It is just for fun, but it demonstrated how an add-in can be installed, made available in “New E-mail” and interact with the e-mail you are writing.

My blog post about exporting any webpart from a SharePoint Page is one of the most read articles on my blog. I use this method a lot. Now what I want to do is to simplify the process. Inspired by my colleague Dan Saedén’s awesome bookmarklet for reading and updating web properties, I decided to make my own bookmarklet. That was easy. Now we can export any web part from any SharePoint page without even looking at any ids in the html markup and assembling the export url manually. Just add the bookmarklet or run  the javascript code in the browser console. The code (js and bookmarklet) is on Github. Here is an animated gif that explains how to use it:

Adding own search verticals is a common task in the Search Configuration in SharePoint. Here I want to share a code sample for achieving this programmatically. I hope, this model can be added to SPMeta2. First of all, Search Verticals are dedicated Search Results Pages and links to them. How to add them manually is described on technet:

• How to add a custom search vertical to your search results page in SharePoint 2013

There is no API in CSOM for that. Luckily, Mikael Svenson found how to get the Search Navigation and contributed to PnP by writing an Extension: web.LoadSearchNavigation. Here is my sample code for adding new Search Verticals programmatically:

[caption id=“attachment_3759” align=“alignnone” width=“660”] A meaningful collection of Lego bricks is a toy. A meaningful collection of Lists, Fields, Files and other SharePoint artefacts becomes a SharePoint Application. Private picture.[/caption] App, Add-In, List, Web, Site, Sandbox solution, Workflow. There are too many words flying around in SharePoint that confuse users and Non-SharePoint-Developers. I want to introduce a “new” concept that is so simple and that a company can understand and govern: a SharePoint Application. That is so simple. It can be called a tool, a functionality. That can be a SharePoint list, a document library with a workflow, or a document library with custom jslink. All they can be SharePoint Applications. Let’s use lego as a metaphor. Have you seen this? [caption id=“attachment_3760” align=“alignnone” width=“660”] The same toy car in just brics. SharePoint Artefacts like Webs, Lists, Fields, Content Types, JSLink etc are just lego bricks. Private picture.[/caption] These lego bricks together become a cool toy that you can play with (as you can see in the picture above). So it is with SharePoint Applications, too. SharePoint Applications solve actual business needs. A List, or a JSLink by themselves do not solve a business need. It must be a meaningful collection of SharePoint Artefacts that becomes a SharePoint Application. Example Does the lego metaphor make sense to you? To go back to SharePoint, I’ll give you an example of a SharePoint Application. I would say everybody has done such Applications. In a project we created a document library for product icons that were used for all products in a company. Easy? Yes. But the icons had several states (active, inactive…). Versioning and Approval was required. A workflow for new requests and submits was implemented, too, permissions for different roles, metadata navigation in the document library and so on. Sure, SharePoint provided us with great “lego bricks”. But we created a tool, a functionality - a SharePoint Application, that makes sense to our business. What’s new then? Well, we all have done such applications. The new is to understand SharePoint Applications as an own alternative and quality assurance. See more below. Another example is an “App” for SharePoint Online that I converted into a SharePoint Application by adjusting it for SPO and OnPrem. That’s when I came up with the idea of the SharePoint Application. Definition

It is strongly recommended to use https in SharePoint Provider Hosted Apps. In many provider hosted apps I have seen, only https works. I would recommend to configure a simple http to https redirect in IIS and make solutions better. Many Provider Hosted Apps can be done in that way that they are available without SharePoint Context, e.g. for browsing information. In that case that is important to have an easy url and an automatic http -> https redirect. In this post I’ll give a short manual for doing that. I would recommend this step for all provider hosted apps. 1. In the Provider Hosted Apps Server install the URL Rewrite IIS Module using Web Platform Installer:

SPMeta2 (eller bara M2) är ett relativt nytt ramverk för provisionering av SharePoint-artefakter. Bakom ramverket ligger ett gediget arbete. I den här posten vill jag skriva upp mina steg för att sätta upp ett litet projekt. För mig är SPMeta2 nytt och huvudprincipen i den här bloggposten att få en fungerande lösning så snabbt som möjligt. Informationen här kan snabbt bli inaktuell, eftersom SPMeta2 förändras och förbättras väldigt snabbt. Vad är SPMeta2 SPMeta är ett ramverk för att provisionera SharePoint-artefakter, allt från fält, innehållstyper, listor, dokumentbibliotek, user custom actions, ladda upp filer med mera. Klassiskt har vi gjort provisionering med hjälp av XML-baserade moduler och features. SPMeta2 erbjuder ett Fluent API som är kodbaserat. Med hjälp av SPMeta2 definierar man en modell (enkla objekt POCOs) som inte har beroendet till SharePoint. Modellen används sedan av Provision-delen som anropar modellen för specifika versioner: SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2010, Office 365 med mera. Man kan välja CSOM och SSOM. Provision är också flexibel vad som gäller paketering: det kan vara en konsolapplikation, en SharePoint-app, ett wsp-paket, en PowerShell-modul. Se följande länkar:

I troubleshooted a piece of CSOM code in SharePoint 2013. I got the following error:

Method “GetList” does not exist

The reason was that the method GetList was not imlemented until March 2015 CU (15.0.4701.1001), and the SharePoint farm I had was SharePoint 2013 SP1 (15.0.4569.1000). So the solution is to install the Cumulative Update or use web.Lists.GetByTitle. GetByTitle has one aweful shortcoming: it doesn’t work in multilingual environments. So I have recommended to install the March 2015 CU.

We want to make an app available in SharePoint OnPrem, we want to onpremify it. Rethink SharePoint apps and provisioning SharePoint artifacts. It has been a while since I updated my blog – Chuvash.eu. I had my vacation, I visited the sunny and green Chuvashia. Now I am back and I am looking forward to an awesome SharePoint Autumn. One of the first things I had to deal with in this SharePoint Autumn was Onpremifying of a SharePoint Online App. We have an app that has gained popularity and we want to make it available for SharePoint OnPrem. There is no such word Onpremify (yet?), I know, it is a Swenglish happy word making (onpremifiera), but I like the word “onpremify” a lot. There is still uncertainty around the purpose of SharePoint apps. One app type, though, has been used a lot in our company: an app that provisions SharePoint Artifacts – that creates SharePoint Applications. What I mean by SharePoint Applications can be read in my blog post:

I Sverige är engelskan är väldigt stark. Speciellt i IT-branschen är vi vana att ha i princip allt på engelska, från kommentarer i koden till stora upphandlingar, rapporter och dokumentation. Trots det ser jag ett stort behov av att kunna prata om IT på svenska. Det gäller både lokala företag och globala företag. Det finns flera anledningar:

• Företag i Sverige följer svenska lagar som är skrivna på svenska, för att leva upp till kraven ska man kunna formulera sig på svenska.
• Modersmål eller det språk som man använder mest i vardagen (gäller mig bland annat) är den snabbaste vägen för kommunikation som ger en högre grad av nyansering. Att kunna nyansera krav och önskemål tidigt i projekt är guld värt (enligt många av mina korrespondenter). Man behöver spendera mindre tid på att formulera och tolka krav.
• En mer ideologisk anledning (men en viktig sådan) är att vi som bor i Sverige har skyldighet att utveckla och hålla svenskan levande, inte minst inom IT-sektorn.

Svenska är en stor möjlighet för att verkligen ge mervärde till våra kunder, möta dem på hemmaplan, prata ett gemensamt språk. Startpunkten till den här diskussionen har varit en ny webinar som jag planerar hålla den 14 april kl 10. Webinarens titel är SharePoint i molnet.Det finns ganska mycket information om SharePoint Online och Office 365 på engelska. Det är dock ganska sparsamt med information på svenska. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sharepoint-i-molnet-tickets-15976529229 Det här är det som väntar dig som vill delta i webinaren:

I got a question from a customer: We have our processes defined in Visio, we don’t have SharePoint Enterprise CALs to use the Visio webpart. We have links in process maps. What can we do? Well there are three five ways to solve this business need:

1. Find money for SharePoint Enterprise - Very expensive
2. Show Visio diagrams as pdf files on SharePoint Pages - Expensive.
3. Embed Visio diagrams as html image maps - Least expensive
4. Embed Visio diagrams as svg pictures - Separate blog post.
5. Link to Visio files that are opened using Visio Web Viewer in a new browser tab.

If the business needs other features available only in Enterprise, just use the solution 1. Stop reading. If you are looking for alternatives, then consider pdf and image maps. I have seen projects where pdf files were embedded in the SharePoint Pages. It required a pdf plugin in IE, a lot of time to make it look the same in different browsers and the scroll and fixed size was still there. It was expensive because of the development and configuration time. In this blog post, I want to show the alternative number 3: embedding Visio diagrams as html image maps. This is only a Proof-of-concept so far.