Author: Bob German

Provisioning Teams with Azure Functions and Microsoft Flow Part 1: Solution Overview

~ Bob German ~ 4 Comments

Today I’m happy to share a new open source solution (located here) I’ve been working on for provisioning Microsoft Teams. The solution is based on Azure Functions which communicate with Microsoft Flow (or really anything) using Azure queues. This allows a Flow, PowerApps, or Logic Apps developer to use whatever logic they wish and, when a Team is to be created, queue a message to an Azure Function which will do the work.

This is Part 1 of a five-part series:

  1. Solution Overview (this post)
  2. Installing the solution
  3. Building a Flow for the solution
  4. Looking at the code
  5. A Change in Direction

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Idempotent Site Scripts for SharePoint

~ Bob German ~ 5 Comments

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Image by geralt on Pixabay

As you probably are aware, SharePoint site scripts are used to set up content and settings in SharePoint sites. They’re applied using site designs, which allow the same script to be reused with different names and permissions. Site designs can be applied when a site is created, when it’s added to a hub site, or on demand via PowerShell or the SharePoint UI.

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Calling Microsoft Graph from a single-page application: Part 2

~ Bob German ~ 1 Comment

This post was part of the “30 Days Microsoft Graph” blog series, now cross-posted to my personal blog. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to this excellent blog series. Many thanks to Brian Jackett, who organized this excellent blog series, and to Srinivas Varukala, who kindly edited my articles. In addition, thanks to others from the Graph and Azure AD teams who helped to test and QA the articles.

In Part 1 you learned how to register apps for both Azure AD v1 and v2 that can be used from the browser to enable Graph API calls. Today, we’ll use those registrations in some simple applications.

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Calling Microsoft Graph from a single-page application: Part 1

~ Bob German ~ 1 Comment

This post was part of the “30 Days Microsoft Graph” blog series, now cross-posted to my personal blog. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to this excellent blog series. Many thanks to Brian Jackett, who organized 30 Days Microsoft Graph, and to Srinivas Varukala, who kindly edited my articles. In addition, thanks to others from the Graph and Azure AD teams who helped to test and QA the articles.

In this article and the next, you’ll learn how to call Microsoft Graph APIs directly from a web browser in a Single Page Application much the same way that the Day 15 article showed how to call Graph from a .Net Core Console Application. This article will walk you through updating your app registrations (for v1 and v2) so they’ll work from the browser; in Part 2 we’ll dig into the code.

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Branding SharePoint: The New Normal

~ Bob German ~ 3 Comments

Modern SharePoint is catching on, and sites are looking better than ever right out of the box. With mobile-ready pages and easier editing, customers and partners are starting to ask for it. And as SharePoint 2019 brings the modern experience on premises, the demand is likely to grow even more.

Yet even as sites look better than ever “out of the box”, there are constraints on how they can be customized. Partners and customers who want to completely change the look sometimes run into these boundaries and get frustrated.

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Building SharePoint Site Designs with Themes and Azure Functions

~ Bob German ~ 3 Comments

This article is the sequel to Swooping into SharePoint Site Designs, in which I related my experience working behind the scenes on the world’s first SharePoint reality show! This time I’ll explain the code so you can build similar solutions if you so desire.

The sample shows how to build a site design and script for a simple department site, as created in the SharePoint Swoop video. A team of experts worked to redesign an Intranet site in just three days. This site design was developed behind the scenes to provide a template for all the company’s department sites.

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Swooping into Site Designs

~ Bob German ~ 2 Comments

A few months ago a group of SharePoint MVPs gathered to film a new kind of reality TV show and remake a company’s Intranet. You may have seen it – SharePoint Swoop!

This is a story from behind the scenes,in which I got to make their work reusable with SharePoint Site Designs and Scripts. It was quite a thrill to be involved, even though I wasn’t there in person! I’ll start with the story, then dig into the details of Site Designs and Scripts.

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Teams and SharePoint: Better Together

~ Bob German ~ 2 Comments

Collaboration Silos

Traditionally, our collaboration tools have been divided into silos based on the mode of communication. In the Microsoft space, we’ve used Outlook and Exchange for persistent messaging, Skype for Business for real-time communication, and SharePoint to provide a place to share documents and other information.

CollaborationSilos

These tools work together to provide for our communications needs, whether they’re real-time, message based, or documents and other content. They work well together, but they’re still separate programs we have to run, and constantly flip between. As we do, the information is organized differently in each tool: most of us view email by date, Skype by person, and SharePoint by project or team. That’s a lot of context switching. Of course we’re all used to this, and probably don’t even notice how much of our attention goes into it.

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Using SharePoint Permissions in Microsoft Teams Channels

~ Bob German ~ 1 Comment

A lot of people have asked for “private channels” in Microsoft teams. Microsoft has stated publicly that they’re working on it; there’s even a page in the documentation all ready for when it comes along!

In the meantime, a question came up about using SharePoint permissions to restrict the level of access to channel files. Recall that every Team has a SharePoint site, and the files in the Files tab land in a document library on that site. Each Teams channel gets a folder in that site. (For more details see this article by Matt Soseman.)

So is it possible to make a “semi-private” channel by simply modifying the folder permissions in SharePoint? The idea is that while the conversation might be open, the files are only available to a subset of team members.

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Localized strings in solutions that span classic and modern SharePoint sites

~ Bob German ~ Leave a comment

This article builds on an earlier one, Building Headers and Footers that work on Classic and Modern sites. That article, with associated sample code, was about how to create a top menu and footer that work on both modern and classic SharePoint pages. On modern pages, the solution is a SharePoint Framework extension; on classic pages, it’s a stand-alone solution that just happens to use SharePoint Framework tooling like TypeScript, WebPack, and React. That allows a very high degree of common code between the classic and modern implementations.

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Figure 1

The good news is that my POC was successful, and the partner and their customer liked it!

The sample code has moved! It’s now in the SharePoint Framework Extensions repo.

I skipped over one key capability in my project, which was localization. The customer in this case is a large multi-national company, so it’s not too surprising they would want to show some information in the user’s preferred language.

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