Set up a Microsoft Graph App for Office 365 and SharePoint Online management to use in Azure Functions, Flow, .Net solutions and much more

4th of May, 2018 / / No Comments

Microsoft Graph API can be used to connect and manage the Office 365 SaaS platforms such as SharePoint Online, Office 365 Groups, One Drive, OneNote, Azure AD, Teams (in beta) and much more.
A Graph app is an Azure AD app that has privileges (with provided permissions) to authenticate and then execute operations when using PowerShell, Azure Functions, Flow, Office Online CSOM, SharePoint Online and many other tools.
It is quite easy to set up a graph app, below is a brief preview of the process.… [Keep reading] “Set up a Microsoft Graph App for Office 365 and SharePoint Online management to use in Azure Functions, Flow, .Net solutions and much more”

Automation and Creation of Office 365 groups using Flow, Microsoft Graph and Azure Function – Part 1

1st of May, 2018 / / No Comments

Automating the creation of Office 365 groups via an event triggered process can help business teams use a consistent template across all their groups, especially if there are numerous groups provisioned throughout the year.
For example, in our case we have 500+ custom Office 365 groups that are created and maintained each year. Hence in this case it became obvious we wanted to spin up an Office 365 group from a SharePoint list where users could make the request on their own.… [Keep reading] “Automation and Creation of Office 365 groups using Flow, Microsoft Graph and Azure Function – Part 1”

How to make Property Bag Values indexed and searchable in SharePoint Online

26th of April, 2018 / / 1 Comment

In an earlier post here we have seen how we can set Property Bag values in Modern SharePoint sites. One of the major reasons for setting Property Bag values in SharePoint sites is to make the SharePoint sites searchable based on custom metadata.
However, property bag values are not crawled by the SharePoint Online Search index directly. To make a property bag value searchable, we must explicit set the property bag values to be indexed by the Search crawler.… [Keep reading] “How to make Property Bag Values indexed and searchable in SharePoint Online”

Report of All Taxonomy Fields containing a term in SharePoint Tenancy

24th of April, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Recently we had a request to find fields/columns in all lists across the tenancy which have a specific Taxonomy term because we needed to report on field usage across all site collections. However, we found that getting a report of all Taxonomy fields in your SharePoint tenancy that is linked to a specific Term Set can get quite daunting because there is no direct SharePoint Query to fetch the associations.
The technical challenge is that using PnP PowerShell, the Taxonomy fields are returned as a generic SP.Field… [Keep reading] “Report of All Taxonomy Fields containing a term in SharePoint Tenancy”

Promoting and Demoting Site pages to News in Modern SharePoint Sites using SPFx extension and Azure Function

23rd of April, 2018 / / No Comments

The requirement that I will be addressing in this blog is how to Promote and Demote site pages to news articles in Modern SharePoint sites. This approach allows us to promote any site page to News, add approval steps and demote news articles to site pages if the news need to be updated. The news also shows in the modern news web part when the site page is promoted.
Solution Approach:
To start with, create a site page.… [Keep reading] “Promoting and Demoting Site pages to News in Modern SharePoint Sites using SPFx extension and Azure Function”

Creating SharePoint Modern Team sites using Site Scripts, Flow and Azure Function

16th of March, 2018 / / No Comments

With Site Scripts and Site design, it is possible to invoke custom PnP Provisioning for Modern Team Sites from a Site Script. In the previous blog, we saw how we can provision Simple modern sites using Site Scripts JSON. However, there are some scenarios where we would need a custom provisioning template or process such as listed below:

  • Auto deploy custom web components such as SPFx extension apps
  • Complex Site Templates which couldn’t be configured
  • Complex Document libs, content types that are provided by JSON schema.
… [Keep reading] “Creating SharePoint Modern Team sites using Site Scripts, Flow and Azure Function”

Create Modern Pages and update metadata using SPFx Extensions, SP PnP JS and Azure Functions

13th of March, 2018 / / 3 Comments

Modern Site Pages (Site Page content type) have a constraint to associate custom metadata with it. In other words, the “Site Page” content type cannot have other site columns added to it as can be seen below.
SitePageContentTypeMissing
On another note, even though we can create a child content types from Site Page content type, the New Site page creation (screenshot below) process doesn’t associate the new content type when the Page is created. So, the fields from the child content type couldn’t be associated.… [Keep reading] “Create Modern Pages and update metadata using SPFx Extensions, SP PnP JS and Azure Functions”

Update Managed Metadata and Hyperlink column in a SharePoint list using PnP PowerShell

7th of March, 2018 / / No Comments

If you are trying to update a Managed Metadata and Hyperlink column in SharePoint online using PnP PowerShell and it is not getting updated, then this blog might be of help.
I had been working on a quick requirement for updating Managed Metadata columns using a PowerShell script for a bulk update requirement and it was not working as planned. The managed metadata column we were updating didn’t have the right format of Term store hierarchy and this was the cause of the issue.… [Keep reading] “Update Managed Metadata and Hyperlink column in a SharePoint list using PnP PowerShell”

Intro to Site Scripts and Site Designs with a Simple SharePoint Modern Site provisioning

6th of March, 2018 / / No Comments

Microsoft announced Site Scripts and Site Designs in late 2017 which became available for Targeted release in Jan 2018, and released to general use recently. It is a quick way to allow users to create custom modern sites, without using any scripting hacks. Hence, in this blog we will go through the steps of Site Scripts and Site design for a Simple SharePoint Modern Site Creation.
Before we get into detailed steps, lets’ get a brief overview about Site Designs and Site Scripts.… [Keep reading] “Intro to Site Scripts and Site Designs with a Simple SharePoint Modern Site provisioning”

How to set Property Bag values in SharePoint Modern Sites using SharePoint Online .Net CSOM

8th of February, 2018 / / 1 Comment

If you think setting Property Bag values programmatically for Modern SharePoint sites using CSOM would be as straight forward as in the Old Classic SharePoint sites, then there is a surprise waiting for you.
As you can see below, in the old C# CSOM this code would set the Property Bag values as follows:

The challenge with the above method is that the PropertyBag values are not persisted after saving.… [Keep reading] “How to set Property Bag values in SharePoint Modern Sites using SharePoint Online .Net CSOM”