Whats all the hubbub about!? You may have heard that Microsoft has recently deployed Office 365 Hub sites to  targeted release tenants! Hub sites are a new way to organize and join your existing SharePoint sites into a centralized hub to allow for rolling up content, sharing themes between sites and maintaining a consistent navigation across multiple sites. This post will focus entirely on the shared navigation that lives on the hub site and why I think it needs a little bit of improvements in it's current state.

One of the biggest questions I see is, "How do we create site templates using Office 365 groups?". It is no surprise that site templates were one of the most widely used features in previous versions of SharePoint. Site templates give site owners and SharePoint admins a way to incorporate some governance into the creation of team sites and expedite the creation process. However, this out-of-the-box functionality, until recently wasn't available for new modern sites.  In this blog, we'll step through creating our own using an Office 365 group.

Did you know modern SharePoint has a maintenance page for modern web parts?  That's right!  Have you ever had a need to figure out what versions of front end frameworks your modern SPFx web parts use or find specific internal properties of your web parts? In this post I am going to show you a surprisingly uncommon (many devs aren't aware this exists) feature built into modern SharePoint web parts! 

It's true. Clippy is back! I've come to find that there are three types of people when it comes to opinions of our favorite Microsoft Office productivity friend. The first type of person is "oh no, please don't!". The second type of person is "Wow, this is great! Very retro!". Followed up by the people who are too young to even know who Clippy is. 

Well it's 2017 and it's about time he came back to our Microsoft products. A few months ago, a friend tempted me to incorporate Clippy into a SharePoint Framework application customizer. It didn't take long before I found a Clippyjs Library online. This was quite fantastic and it even lets you configure multiple agents, I fell in love.

Column Formatting is a new feature that is rolling out into first release tenants in Office 365. Column Formatting provides a new way for users to format the physical appearance of columns within a SharePoint List. To learn more about column formatting, please follow this post.

In this blog post, I am going to show you a very cool way to improve the out of the box column formatting for person/group fields in SharePoint

Welcome back to another series of "beau experiments with SharePoint Field Customizers". If you saw my last post you'd see that I have been experimenting with SharePoint Framework Field Customizers (in preview). In this tutorial I wanted to augment the OOTB person field by rendering more relevant content about the user specified on the list item.

Here is the end result of this tutorial.

I swear, exploration always gets the best of me. I've been using the SharePoint Framework for some time now and I always try to figure out cool things I can build with it. I've been really enjoying figuring out how I can replace existing JSLink implementations with the new SharePoint Extension framework.

As a front-end developer I much prefer working with native JSON and using REST. I find the SharePoint Client Object Model (JSOM) to be a bit clunky and complicated to use. Recently I was working on a project where I had a custom form and I needed to update a Managed Metadata Field on a new document that was being uploaded. Everywhere you look on the web says... "Microsoft does not support updating Taxonomy Fields using REST". -- and while this is completely true from Microsofts point of view, there is a way you can use REST to update a Taxonomy Field. Caveat - This only works with single value Managed Metadata fields. You cannot use this method to update Multi-Value Managed Metadata fields, however you can use this one.

Lets assume I already uploaded a file in a previous method call and then I used REST to retrieve that file, to then update the Metadata (as you cannot update Metadata in the upload REST call). 

One of the many questions I've seen on SharePoint forums is "How do I customize OOB SharePoint list forms when created in a SharePoint App?." Outside of the SharePoint App Model, customizing OOB list forms is easy! You just open up SharePoint Designer, go the list and copy the DispForm and start modiyfing!