The New SharePoint Home Page Web Experience

Sriram Varadarajan
 
Solution Architect
July 17, 2016
 
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6061

The new SharePoint home page web experience enables us to easily get to, find and discover important sites and portals throughout your intranet – online, on-premises and everything in-between. Today, many Office 365 users use the "Sites" page – the 4th most clicked tile in the Office 365 app launcher. MS is working hard to modernize this experience and transforming it into a true home for SharePoint. What was the ‘Sites’ page is now the ‘SharePoint home’ and the “Sites” tile becomes the “SharePoint” tile – same logo, redesigned for a modern, responsive user experience. Clicking into the SharePoint Home displays the recent sites and portals you are most active in and following, recommended sites per the Office Graph, plus company-wide sites promoted by your company. From the SharePoint home, you, too, can create new sites – simple and fast.

Here comes our next question, what is Office Graph? Before we get to know about it we should also know something called MICROSOFT Graph.. The terminology looks very similar isn’t… MS is not that good at naming convention as we all know Smile

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In a typical layman term;

Microsoft Graph: Power of Microsoft Graph, a unified API endpoint, for accessing data, intelligence, and insights coming from the Microsoft cloud.

Office Graph: The Office Graph computes insights across Office 365 and makes these insights available through the Microsoft Graph, the single endpoint that you can use to access a number of Microsoft’s cloud technologies.

As we all know both MS graph and office graph is still in its early phase and we might see some issue in the way it’s functioning. Let me take you all through the MS graph stuff in a separate article, here I would like to talk more on office graph part. As mentioned earlier, clicking on the SharePoint link lists all the site which I’m following, sometimes the data that shows there is kind of different that the actual. In my case, I was able to see very limited site than I actually follow.

Here are steps which you can try to make sure that is this showing the actual site which I’m following:

1. https://<tenant>.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx?v=following.

a. Check the count if it’s different go to step 2

2. Try unfollowing and following the site (Which I know it’s tedious) but you can give it a try.

3. Else the last option;

This script below displays the items that are being followed in SharePoint online, which in turn we can use for comparison.

 <html>
 <head>
     <script type="text/javascript"  
 src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
     <script type="text/javascript">
             var followingManagerEndpoint;
             var followedCount;
             var followingEndpoint;
             var URL;
             var website;
             var clientContext;
 
             SP.SOD.executeFunc('sp.js', 'SP.ClientContext', loadWebsite);
             function loadWebsite() {
                clientContext = SP.ClientContext.get_current();
                website = clientContext.get_web();
                clientContext.load(website);
                clientContext.executeQueryAsync(onRequestSucceeded, onRequestFailed);
             }
 
             function onRequestSucceeded() {
               URL = website.get_url();
               followingManagerEndpoint = decodeURIComponent(URL) + "/_api/social.following";
               getMyFollowedContent();
            }
 
            function onRequestFailed(sender, args) {
              alert('Error: ' + args.get_message());
            }
 
            // Get the content that the current user is following.
            // The "types=14" parameter specifies all content types
            // (documents = 2 + sites = 4 + tags = 8).
           function getMyFollowedContent() {
             $.ajax( {
                  url: followingManagerEndpoint + "/my/followed(types=14)",
                  headers: {
                      "accept": "application/json;odata=verbose"
                  },
                  success: followedContentRetrieved,
                  error: requestFailed
            });
         }
 
         // Parse the JSON data and iterate through the collection.
         function followedContentRetrieved(data) {
             var stringData = JSON.stringify(data);
             var jsonObject = JSON.parse(stringData);
             var types = {
               1: "document",
               2: "site",
               3: "tag"
            };
 
            var followedActors = jsonObject.d.Followed.results;
            var followedList = "You're following items:";
 
            for (var i = 0; i < followedActors.length; i++) {
               var actor = followedActors[i];
               followedList += "<p>" + (i + 1) + ". The " + types[actor.ActorType] + ": "" +  
 actor.Name + ""</p>" + "<p>Site URL " + ": "" +
               actor.Uri + ""</p>";
            }
            $("#Follow").html(followedList);
         }
 
         function requestFailed(xhr, ajaxOptions, thrownError) {
           alert('Error:n' + xhr.status + 'n' + thrownError + 'n' + xhr.responseText);
         }
 
     </script>
 </head>
 <body>
     <div id="Follow"></div>
 </body>
 </html>

Conclusion:

Though we couldn’t fix it but on a whole we at least have a mechanism to compare Smile

Category : Office 365, SharePoint

Author Info

Sriram Varadarajan
 
Solution Architect
 
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Sriram is a Technology Evangelist with 15+ years experience in Microsoft Technologies. He is an enterprise architect working for large pharmaceutical organization which has presence globally with largest Microsoft implementation ...read more
 

Custom Branding Feature in SharePoint 2013 – An Introduction

Sathish Nadarajan
 
Solution Architect
April 1, 2015
 
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10799

Almost in all of the projects, we require to upload some JS, CSS, Images to the SharePoint and we will be using that from our Code. Usually we will be uploading them on the “Style Library” folder. Now, let us see, how to Organize that from our WSP and on the Feature Activation, how to make them to upload into “Style Library” folder.

1. Create an Empty SharePoint Project from Visual studio. Name it as Branding.Demo

2. Create a Module under the Branding.Demo Project. Name it as “Style Library”

image

3. By default, there will be a file called sample.txt will be created and an Element.xml file will be created.

4. Now, Create a folder called “Demo” Inside the “Style Library“ Module.

5. Move the sample.txt inside the “Demo” folder.

6. Now modify the Element.xml as below.

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
 <Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
   <Module Name="Style Library" Url="Style Library" RootWebOnly="TRUE">
     <File Path="Style LibraryDemoSample.txt" Url="Demo/Sample.txt" Type="GhostableInLibrary" ReplaceContent="TRUE"  />
   </Module>
 </Elements>
 
 

7. Select the Project Property.

image

8. Under SharePoint Tab, Select the Deployment Configuration as “No Activation”. This will make sure that whenever you deploy our WSP, the feature will not be activated. We need to explicitly activate the feature.

9. Double Click on the Feature and see the Feature properties. Make sure that the “Activate on Default” should be False and “Always Force Install” should be True.

10. Name your feature appropriately and set the scope as “Site”.

11. Now, deploy the WSP. You can see a new feature as we created.

12. On Activation of the Feature, the Sample.txt file will be placed on the “Style Library/Demo” folder. Like, this we can organize the JS, CSS, Images etc based on our requirement.

Hope this is very simple. But, this will be highly useful, when executing the project in a structured way. Instead of uploading the files manually, always we should maintain them in the Source Code and deliver it as a WSP rather than adding these things in the Release Notes.

Download the Source HERE

Happy Coding.

Sathish Nadarajan.

Category : Branding, SharePoint

Author Info

Sathish Nadarajan
 
Solution Architect
 
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Sathish is a Microsoft MVP for SharePoint (Office Servers and Services) having 15+ years of experience in Microsoft Technologies. He holds a Masters Degree in Computer Aided Design and Business ...read more
 

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