At Cloud Design Box, we have created a free Google search box SPFx web part. It’s a very simple web part to add a Google search box to a modern SharePoint page which then opens up the results in a new tab. Maybe a nice web part for an intranet homepage? You can download it … Read more
It’s the update that schools have been waiting for. Today Microsoft announced parental access to Microsoft Teams assignments through a regular email digest. This update enables the school to emphasise the importance of homework and provide parents with all the information they need to fully support their children at home. Below is a preview (real … Read more
Releasing organisational and team communication via SharePoint news articles is a powerful way to connect with colleagues. News articles in SharePoint appear aggregated on the SharePoint home page and get pushed out to the mobile app via notification. They render great in both experiences. I’ve had several users ask for enhancements for SharePoint news, we … Read more
The future role of SharePoint with the advent of Teams has been on my mind for over a year now. Teams is built on top of SharePoint but is an application rather than a website. Teams has chat and collaboration, but SharePoint has news and is interconnected with related sites through Hub sites in sometimes … Read more
Microsoft Forms quizzes can now be assigned to students in Microsoft Teams for education. These are auto-marked and the results are fed automatically into the teachers markbook. Find out how to use this new functionality in the video below. You can find out more about how we can integrate Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Class Notebook … Read more
Sharing a document via SharePoint has many advantages. Traditional ways of sharing a document (such as emailing) creates many problems such as having multiple versions, removing central governance, it can cause confusion and inefficiency in any organisation. Sharing a document via SharePoint ensures there will only be one version of the truth, it keeps the … Read more
Rubrics are a powerful tool used to assess students’ work. The criterion helps students to have a concrete understanding and visualisation of what they need to do to achieve a particular score. Each criterion also includes a gradation scale of quality. Microsoft Teams for education now includes rubric based grading. They can be created and … Read more
There’s a real buzz around Microsoft Teams. Microsoft have been increasing the momentum by releasing updates to improve the class collaboration tool recently. In this post I’m going to look at some of the updates already released and some coming very soon. You can find out more about the future updates here: Microsoft Education Blog. … Read more
Tagging resources with metadata can provide a range of advantages when it comes to sorting, grouping and searching. You might decide to create a custom view to group items outside of any folder structure. This would be particularly useful if you had a complex folder structure but wanted to group all the documents of a … Read more
How exciting, SharePoint web parts can now talk to other parts of Office 365 rather than just SharePoint using the Microsoft Graph and third party APIs! With the release of the SharePoint Framework version 1.4.1, we now have preview support of the Microsoft Graph API. In this example, I’m going to create a SharePoint Framework … Read more
Microsoft Forms are a great way to quickly gather survey results or produce quizzes. It could be testing employees on health and safety in OneNote or it could be setting students a topic quiz in Class Notebook. In this post, I’m going to go through the steps on how to add a quiz to OneNote. … Read more
I’m going to be at Bett 2018 next week with the Cloud Design Box team, really excited to have some stand space this year with our MIS integration partners SalamanderSoft. Cloud Design Box will be showcasing the best of SharePoint, Class Notebook and Teams integration. Our stand number is C210, opposite Google on the main … Read more
Homework has many benefits for students including learning how to work independently, staying organised and taking responsibility for their part in the educational process. It also gives them a chance to review the lesson and go over the material again. Assignments give teachers the ability to track student progress and to see if the student … Read more
PowerApps is a great tool at building complex business applications using logic and no code. Microsoft provide several themes out-of-the-box to give your app a consistent look and feel. There is no option to create a custom theme (please release this functionality Microsoft)! As a workaround, we can use some logic to have a single … Read more
OneNote Class Notebook is free for education users as part of Office 365, it has some additional functionality which isn’t available in standard OneNote files. In this blog post, I want to focus on the additional learning tools available in this version. There is also a video guide for this post below. How do I … Read more
There’s no denying that Office 365 now provides a fantastic integrated suite of products. Why should schools and colleges look at moving to Office 365? Can it save time, money and improve student engagement? Let’s take a look in more detail. Why is cloud storage important? Office Integration One of the big benefits of using … Read more
When using the SharePoint Framework (SPFx), we can use spHttpClient to manage our REST calls. Creating new fields (columns) in lists is like using jQuery ajax methods, first we feed in the body of our call in JSON format. [code lang=”js”] const spOpts: ISPHttpClientOptions = { body: "{‘Title’: ‘Group’, ‘FieldTypeKind’:2,’Required’:false, ‘EnforceUniqueValues’: ‘false’,’StaticName’: ‘Group’}" }; [/code] … Read more
This web part replicates the classic Promoted Links Web Part but with added features such as web part properties to change the background colour, size of background image and to select which promoted link list to use. You can download it here. For more information on the full Cloud Design Box learning platform for modern … Read more
Have you heard about the virtual Collab365 Global Conference 2017 that’s streaming online November 1st – 2nd? Join me and 120 other speakers from around the world who will be bringing you the very latest content around SharePoint, Office 365, Flow, PowerApps, Azure, OneDrive for Business and of course the increasingly popular Microsoft Teams. The event is produced by … Read more
Note: this is an updated blog post to include reference material and demos from the SUGUK meeting in Leeds on 5th September 2017. I’ve been a SharePoint designer now for over 10 years. By designer, I mean changing the look and feel of SharePoint. Not just adding simple themes, but making SharePoint, “not look like … Read more
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