SharePoint in Microsoft 365 is a fantastic resource for building company intranets, and a lot of functionality is available without significant customizations. Even various templates are available through Microsoft’s SharePoint lookbook, showcasing commonly used examples. One feature missing from the default templates is an announcement banner, a specific request for intranets. For example, companies may want to announce important information to their employees who are prominently featured on the intranet home page, such as an office closure due to weather […]

I recently had the opportunity to perform a lift-and-shift migration of a SharePoint 2016 environment to cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in Amazon Web Services (AWS). To support the long-term goals of the client, Okta would be implemented for authentication. Additionally, the client had several product integrations, including SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) (Integrated Mode), Office Online Server (OOS), Gimmal, and Nintex. One of the first problems that I ran into was very little knowledge or lessons learned available. Okta does provide an Integration […]

Why Choose SharePoint Framework (SPFx) for a Teams Application? We can build Teams Apps with Power Platform and SharePoint Framework. Which to choose for any particular customer requirement? To answer, we need to examine both. This post will discuss the SPFx option. A future post will look at the Power Platform option. Not Just SharePoint SharePoint Framework (SPFx) has evolved from customizing SharePoint to providing coding templates for Word and Outlook customizations and Teams. In time we may see the […]

Microsoft has recently released a new office 365 service called SharePoint Syntex. SharePoint Syntex adds Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities to SharePoint document libraries. SharePoint Syntex is the first product to be released from Microsoft project Cortex. SharePoint Syntex provides us with out of the box capabilities to build no-code AI models and apply them to document libraries. SharePoint Syntex is now available for Office 365 commercial customers. You can integrate this service into your Office 365 tenant. There is also […]

Recently, I was working on a SharePoint Framework web part that requires displaying large lists and libraries in SharePoint 2016. As many of you may already know, with a list of more than 5000 items, you may run into a list view threshold error. My requirement is allowing users to be able to view more than 20,000 items. After exploring various options, I decided to create a solution that recursively calls the SharePoint REST service with page and skip-token query […]

Building data and formatting features into MS Office applications using Office Add-Ins can be a crucial productivity boost to an organization. Now Microsoft has given us the ability to build Add-Ins faster and easier using the SharePoint Framework (SPFx). What are Office Add-ins? You will find them in the ribbon of Office apps. Below is the Add-ins pane found in the ribbon in Word. The default installation of Word includes the Wikipedia Add-in, a great example of an add-in, that […]

In this post, I will show you how DevOps practices can add value to a variety of Office 365 development scenarios. The practices we will discuss are Infrastructure as Code, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery. The advances in DevOps and SharePoint Framework (SPFx) have allowed us to make advancements in the way that we develop software and have improved our efficiency. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Practicing IaC means that the infrastructure your applications depend on is created and maintained by code that is source controlled, tested, and deployed to production much like software. When discussing IaC, we’re typically talking about provisioning resources to a […]

SharePoint has been a widely adopted and popular content management system for many large organizations over the past two decades. From SharePoint Portal Server in 2001 to SharePoint Server 2019 and SharePoint Online, the ability to customize the user experience (UX) has evolved dramatically, keeping pace with the evolution of modern web design. SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is a page and web part model that provides full support of client-side SharePoint development with support for open sources. SPFx works in SharePoint […]

ServiceNow is a sophisticated information technology tool and one that can be easily underestimated.    Looking back, I initially thought ServiceNow was limited to a helpdesk front-end intake tool.   But lately, I’ve realized that while becoming the leading request intake tool, ServiceNow must have also recognized its advantage in offering additional capabilities sought by organizations of all sizes. Perhaps ServiceNow came to realize that aggregations of problem-related requests may be viewed from a different perspective: As an excellent barometer for latent pain-points. This prompted ServiceNow to pursue larger goals.   Inside/Out Delving into ServiceNow permitted me to easily write code within SharePoint that reaches into ServiceNow to obtain or modify […]

Calling all SharePoint users and Office 365 developers! AIS is hosting this month’s Meetup for the Triangle SharePoint User Group in Morrisville, North Carolina. The Meetup is this Thursday at AIS’ North Carolina office. There are still a few spots left so be sure to RVSP today. About the Session: In this session we’ll walk through building a client-side web part with the SharePoint framework. By using generic components, we can build web parts that can be reused across an entire […]