What does Sway do?

I was asked this question recently and best I can tell, Sway is like an online presentation system. Unlike PowerPoint, where you need a specific piece of software to play the presentation, Sway handles it all online for you.

Sway uses a card system, much like story boarding a movie, and you can embed all kinds of media in there including YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Google maps, and more. People make newsletters with it, or tutorials.

In doing my research, I came across Microsoft’s Sway YouTube Channel, and I posted the link in the learning resource site as well. I hope this helps you in your discovery of this new way of sharing information.

 The downside of Sway is that it doesn’t generate a file. You can’t take your presentation and store it on a server. It lives on a website. Another downside is that, while you can make some basic edits, you can’t really brand a sway with custom fonts or colors.

Fixing the titles on wiki pages

SharePoint Online has a bit of a glitch when it comes to creating wiki pages. It doesn’t allow us to change the Title without also changing the aspx file name. If you include spaces, then you end up with %20 in the file name (such as file%20name.aspx), which makes the URL tough to read.

Our guru at work whipped up some specialized javascript code for me today that lets me use underscores in the file name, and then his javascript strips it out. Pretty cool. The code he gave me is shown below

< script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" >
var title_replacement_target = document.getElementById("DeltaPlaceHolderPageTitleInTitleArea").getElementsByTagName('a')[0];
title_replacement_target.innerHTML = title_replacement_target.innerHTML.replace(/_/g, " ");
 < /script >

Just remove the spaces from the < and the >

Breaking SharePoint Online

I had been meaning to write a post about how easy it is to break SharePoint, and while that sounds scary, it isn’t quite as bad as it might sound.

First, you need to know that I learned a new concept while I was in Baltimore for training. I would exclaim at several occasions “SharePoint is not doing what it’s supposed to” and Guy, the instructor, would calmly explain that “SharePoint is doing exactly what it’s supposed to; it’s just not doing what you expect it to do.”

Same difference, right?

I thought I would use this opportunity to share a few things that don’t work out OOTB (out of the box), or where additional features would be welcomed.

How to break a list or library

Heed this one – this is real! If you do this, there is no way back from it other than to start over with a clean list or library.

One way to break your list or library is to click on the link for the actual list or library and then to go to the gear and choose Edit Page. Do not do this!

I don’t know why, and Guy in Baltimore doesn’t either, and neither does Microsoft by the way, but when you use the Edit Page function on a list or library page (perhaps to add some explanatory text to it), it actually renders the list itself somewhat useless, and you lose the LIST and LIBRARY tabs at the top of the page, which means you cannot change the settings.

What SharePoint has done is turned your list into a page with a list web part on it. You can still work with your list, but you have to click on the web part in order to make those changes. It’s not a fun experience, and as of this writing, this is not reversible.

What should you do instead?

Create a page from within the sitepages application, and then add the list or library web part to that. It will allow you to write your explanatory text on that page without breaking the functionality of the actual list.

Links list

Wouldn’t it be nice to have links lists allow the option to have links open in a new tab? You can choose to allow links to open in a new window within pages and within discussions, but for the links list, no such option exists.

Another feature that doesn’t work OOTB is the ability to insert links from one site into another. It sort of works, but you have to customize something in the web part settings. There will be a tutorial on this in the future.

Document Library

You would think that if you have the capability of giving a document a title other than file name ID2277_KS_2015, that you would have the capability to show that title and have it link to the file. Another example of a feature we would like to see out of the box. The workaround for this is to create a new hyperlink field with the Document Title and the URL of the file, and then attaching a workflow to populate that field. Again, there will be a tutorial on this in the future.

While we are on the subject of document library, wouldn’t it be nice if we could add the capability of adding a Link to a Document without it breaking the default options for creating a new document? I resolved that one with the creation of DSA-specific templates, but I don’t understand why they couldn’t just allow us to add a feature without breaking other features.

Discussion Boards

Discussion boards don’t let you filter discussions right out of the box. Also, the manage discussions view is broken – it links to replies to discussions, not the actual discussions.

I discovered this glitch when working on DSA Home, and I wanted to filter Aspirations for Student Learning and Keystone discussions on the ASL/Keystone page. It took me a while to learn the workaround, and to fix it you actually need to go into the source code for that feature, so if you need to customize your discussion board views, read this article to activate that hidden lever.

Let’s delve into Delve

Delve is one of the products that comes with Office365. It acts as a kind of dashboard for you and your organization. You can search people, see what files they’re working on (if they have made them available to you), and it’s where you update your profile so that your coworkers can learn more about you.

While I have been in Delve several times over the past 5 months, it didn’t really click for me what use it would be for me, until I had my “ah-ha” moment.

Here are two introductory articles from Microsoft to help explain what Delve is and what the bells and whistles do:

• What is Office Delve?
• Group and share documents in Office Delve

Delve is where your SharePoint profile lives

When you click on the “Me” link, you will see Activity and Profile. When you click on Profile, that is where you tell us a little bit about yourself and where you upload your photo. I recommend you fill in as much as you are willing to share, mostly about work, and if you want to tell us about your kids or pets, go for it – just know that everyone in your tenant can see what you write in your profile.

Delve is where you can Skype your coworkers

Next to your picture there is a message button. Have you ever tried to click on it? It does nothing…. or does it?

When I clicked on it on the Mac, nothing happened. However, on a PC, if you have Skype for Business installed, that little message button will open Skype and get you started with a message to the recipient.

Delve shows you the latest files you’ve been working on… and where those files live.

Now here is where the power of Delve lies in my opinion. I regularly work in about 5-6 different sites. Most of my work is SharePoint related, but where does the file live? It could be anywhere, on the learning site, the blog site, the SPOCK site, the ICC site, my admin site, the CIT site, or on my OneDrive. And as we make open/unrestricted/public versions of sites, files could quite literally be anywhere.

Luckily Delve knows where

The Me dashboard, under Activity, shows the files I work on the most, or the files I worked on most recently. the “See more related” box could be helpful, or not, depending on what it thinks I want to see, but all the “content cards” give me an overview of the files I work on, and it tells me where they live.

From here, I can click on the content card itself and open the file I am looking at. I can also click on the folder or site name, and Delve will take me to the folder or document library where the file exists.

The use of boards

Using boards is a little bit like tagging. Each content card (file overview) has a place to “add to a board” – you type in where you want to save it. You can tag your own files, and you can also tag files that other people have shared with me. In my OneDrive for example, I have a document that includes instructions for uploading images to ShowOff, one of the systems managed by CIT’s web team. I tagged that document webteam so that when I look for documents pertaining to work on the webteam, I will find it there.

You can create as many boards as you want, and you can share those boards with other people.

Privacy is still maintained

Any documents that you have not shared with anyone else, even if they appear on your board, will remain private only to you. Even if someone can see my webteam board, unless I have shared that ShowOff document with the team, they are unable to see it.

Wiki Pages in SharePoint Online

Wiki Pages allow you to create web pages within your SharePoint sites. You can place web parts on them, or you can use them as I do for tutorial writing.

But, as with other OOTB (out of the box) features, SharePoint Online’s Wiki Pages app has a slight glitch. Surprise!

Here’s the glitch:

The file name of the page, is also the title of the page.

In older versions of SharePoint, you could set the title of the page to be different from the file name, e.g. file name aspire.html could be used to show title of “Aspirations of Student Learning.” In this version of SharePoint Online, the name of the file is the same as the title on the page.

Why do we care?

We care because generally titles have spaces. In the example of “Aspirations for Student Learning,” there are three spaces.  Those same spaces will end up in the file name, and the Internet doesn’t do well with spaces in a file name. In fact, they will replace that space with %20, which means “Aspirations for Student Learning” becomes Aspirations%20for%20Student%20Learning.aspx.

What can we do?

Well, to solve the issue of the %20s we in the web world place underscores between words so that we get a file name that looks like Aspirations_for_Student_Learning.aspx, which, I hope you agree looks cleaner.

But, didn’t you just say that the file name of the page, is also the title of the page?

Yes, I did… While we just fixed the file name issue, we now have a title of the page (and links) that look like this:

Aspirations_for_Student_Learning

and that is where our friend Joe comes in. Joe is a magical programmer and he whipped up a magical script that takes those underscores, and replaces them with spaces. This now lets us have a file name called  Aspirations_for_Student_Learning.aspx while preserving the title (and link) Aspirations for Student Learning.

Beware the changing page title

When you change the title of a page, a couple of things happen. As noted in yesterday’s post, the title of the page is the same as the file name, which means that changing the title of a page also changes the file name.

Links to your page could break

Since SharePoint is a database, changing the name of the file often results in SharePoint correcting the address for you, since it doesn’t care what you call a page; it knows it as 00ZKJSD9A8E09JKD9D01 or something like that, and it will change its internal pointer accordingly.

Where it does matter, is if anyone inserts a link to a page and keeps the https://######.sharepoint.com in front of the URL because then it’s not a link within the database, but an actual address. Changing the title of the page may then in fact break the links in other places, so think carefully before you do that. Also think about links from the outside. I recently had this happen where someone changed the title of a page, but had not realized that the link was active from a non-SharePoint site.

Images can get lost

Images uploaded to a page, live within a folder by the same name as the page name. Changing the page name doesn’t move existing images to a new folder, but if you add another image to the page after you have changed the page name, then SharePoint will create a new folder with the new page name, and now you have two folders supporting the same page. Just something to think about as you plan out your site.

Team Sites, Project Sites, Community Sites & Blog Sites

SharePoint Online offers a number of different options when you create a new site. I used 3 different ones when I set up my various SharePoint-related sites as they each have a different purpose.

The different types of sites listed below fall under the “collaboration” type sites. There are other types of sites you can create with SharePoint that I may cover these in a future post as I learn more about them. For now though, these are the most common ones you will see when you create subsites.

Note: italicized content below came from our source at TechNet.

Team Site

This is the one most people default to. At work, the Team Site is the default template chosen for departmental and committee sites. Quite simply, a team site is a place to work together with a group of people.

Project Site

A site for managing and collaborating on a project. This site template brings all status, communication, and artifacts relevant to the project into one place.

Do we have any examples?

I use a project site for my SharePoint Admin site.

What’s different about it?

For one, it seems to focus on tasks and projects, and the home page includes a gantt chart and an overview of upcoming tasks. Other than that, not too different from a team site. A good use for this type of site is for one-off committee work.

Community Site

A place where community members discuss topics of common interest. Members can browse and discover relevant content by exploring categories, sorting discussions, by popularity or by viewing only posts that have a best reply. Members gain reputation points by participating in the community, such as starting discussions and replying to them, liking posts, and specifying best replies.

Do we have any examples?

Within DSA we use the community site in two places so far… the DSA Home site, and the SharePoint Online & Office 365 Learning Resources site.

What’s different about it?

What’s different about it is that its main function is as a discussion board. It comes with pre-configured templates for

• all categories (with thumbnails),
• a specific category with the posts for that category
• a members page showing all members
• a topic page that’s pre-configured to a certain layout

While its primary function is discussions, other features can be added, just like with team sites or project sites.

Blog Site

A site for a person or team to post ideas, observations, and expertise that site visitors can comment on.

Do we have any examples?

The It’s All Greek blog I have at work is an example of a blog site.

What’s different about it?

It doesn’t have a lot of built-in features except for all the features required to have a blog: the ability to create and manage posts, categories. Any other features would need to be manually added.

Unlike the community site, it does not have the out of the box capability to attach images to categories – it just lists the categories on the left. It has the spot for a photo (where the monkey is on this blog site). You can invite more than one person to blog, and you will see going forward that I will invite other people to post a blog post about something they find useful.

Source: TechNet

Making Templates for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Today I made templates in MS Word, MS Excel, and MS PowerPoint. Why? Because of a feature/glitch in SharePoint Online. Site owners – read on.

Creating templates

Using templates in your daily operations is actually good practice. It saves you from needing to open a file, do a save as, and then delete the content before starting over. Working from a template ensures that all documents look the same.

Templates tend do have a t as part of their file extension: Word.dotx, Excel.xltx, PowerPoint.potx

For my Word document, I added the filename, page numbers, and a last modified date to the footer of the document.

For my Excel document, I added the filename, page numbers, and the current date to the footer of the document.

For PowerPoint, I asked one of our CIT designers to provide me with a template and just uploaded it.

All of the templates include corporate colors and fonts.

Once I saved out my templates, I uploaded them to SharePoint for everyone to use. (Note, apparently you cannot save template files directly to SharePoint Online – at least it wouldn’t work for me.)

ONENOTE:

• Unfortunately, OneNote is no longer a file, but rather a collection of files, so if you want a OneNote Notebook on your site, you will need to create a blank notebook yourself in the Desktop version of OneNote, and then save it to your sites, using the URL or webaddress of your site to tell OneNote where to save it.

 

Advanced / site owners:

In document libraries, out of the box, there is no way to just add a link to a document that lives in a differerent library or even a different site. You can add that capability by adding a “Link to a Document” content type to your document list. Cool right?

However, when you do this, it breaks the well-loved feature of the “New” icon, and it now only shows Document, which is a Word Document. Because we like to work in different types of documents, we need to have the other types available to us also. So, I created the templates complete with our corporate color scheme, and in the case of Word and Excel templates, page numbers and file names in the footer to help make it easier for us to work with printed documents.

Integrating Outlook and OneNote for task & project management

I started employing David Allen’s Getting Things Done methods many years ago, and I have had much success with it – when I stick to it.

My challenge has always been keeping things easily accessible. I find I have a task list, and then I have a project notebook. Well, how do they talk to each other?

I had been using EverNote to capture everything I wanted to keep, from recipes to Christmas lists and beyond.

I had OneNote before, but I never quite knew what to do with it. I am not sure why, but it didn’t seem to fit into my plans. I kept it more as a reference system – for things I might need to hold onto for a long time, but not as a working file. In the end, I just think I never really learned much about it, and therefore missed out on some cool features.

I got reintroduced to OneNote when I went through a SharePoint/Office365 course at the University. Then I took a full day class just on OneNote, and I learned how I could integrate Outlook. I filed that knowledge away because I wasn’t using the Office Suite for my work – I was on a Mac and using Gmail.

Now that I am back “home” in my Office Suite (can we get a heavenly chorus sound?) I can fully leverage everything Office has to offer, and organize everything according to project and task.

One peeve of mine is that the Outlook App doesn’t have a task list. I was looking at how I could get my task list onto my phone, and then I saw OneNote. I am just starting to learn how to do this again, so bear with me, but here is a starter video of how to go about “Getting Things Done” in Outlook and OneNote.

At first I thought, “Wow, that’s a lot of steps to go through to add a task, wouldn’t it be much faster to just create tasks in outlook from that email and categorize them?” But then I thought about what they were doing in a greater context, and it’s really quite ingenious. They have their projects in OneNote, and then have their actual todos in Outlook. But the beauty about putting them in OneNote first, meant that now they have all their tasks included in their project notes. GTD on the fly! So they don’t have to cross reference – they have everything together for their project in OneNote, including all the tasks they assigned themselves, and then they also have the actual todos in their task management system within Outlook. Brilliant!

I have just begun making contact with all of my departments and committees, and I can see using sections for my clients, having all the pages together, and then connecting my task list for that. Now I just need to figure out how to then get those tasks into my SP list rather than my computer task list, but that might just be a matter of clicking and dragging. We’ll see. Definitely going to do something with this though! Definitely!