Creating a visually appealing SharePoint site is vital if you want people to engage with it regularly. But you don’t need to spend hours designing and curating your sites for them to look good. We’ve created a video to show you that it’s possible to create a professional and captivating SharePoint site in under 20 … Read more
Class Notebook has a really nice feature which allows teachers to distribute pages to student sections so that they can work on their own copy of the page. Since we originally looked at this in a previous blog post, Microsoft Teams now supports setting assignments using Class Notebook pages too. Essentially there are two ways … 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
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
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
September is here and new collaboration tools are being tried for the first time in Office 365. Microsoft Teams now has class sites, watch my full review in my blog post earlier this summer Latest updates include: Options to disable chat Full screen Class Notebooks Fully working Class Notebooks with settings available OneNote Edit in … Read more
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 SharePoint”. It’s a common request for companies and schools to have an intranet or communication portal which reflects their brand and identity. Although … Read more
Over the last few months, we have received lots of positive feedback about the new Microsoft Classroom Preview product. Today Microsoft announced in the Office 365 message centre that this would be replaced at the end of July 2017 with Microsoft Teams for Education. No need to panic, MS Classroom functionality will still exist but … Read more
Your users may have noticed that the default reply button in Outlook Web Access is “Reply all”. This can result in emails accidentally being sent to the wrong person (as many users assume this is the reply button without reading it). Luckily you can change this default behaviour. Change for an individual user The user … Read more
The new list and library experience is here in SharePoint Online. It is great news for the SharePoint community (better integration with OneDrive, responsive, platform independent). For users with customisations or for companies who are not ready for the change yet, you can delay the new experience from the administration panel. There are certainly things … Read more
I’m often asked how to give the Microsoft Office 365 login page a branded and customised look and feel. It’s really easy so if you are using cloud only or AD synced users, you can apply branding to the login page. This method does not apply to ADFS as the login page is hosted on … Read more
Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) allows your school/organisation to use your own Active Directory to authenticate users. While Azure AD Connect (formerly DirSync) seems to give this functionality, it is actually a copy of the usernames and passwords in Azure AD which authenticates the user onto the site rather than your own AD server. The … Read more
It can be time consuming to update multiple calendars. You can now setup custom flows using Microsoft Flow to copy and edit data between the two calendars. In the example below, I create a Microsoft Flow to detect when a new Google Calendar item is added and then create a new item in a SharePoint … Read more
For anyone using the new style SharePoint lists, there is now a new action for Microsoft Flow integration. It’s a really cool product that integrates all the Office 365 products (and more) into your workflow. SharePoint Designer workflows still have their place but the Microsoft Flow interface offers rich functionality and is easy to view … Read more
In this post, I wanted to show how you can modify the SharePoint framework Hello World web part and add other custom JavaScript libraries to create a simple slideshow. Prerequisites I’m going to start my tutorial after following these steps: Setup SharePoint Tenant Setup your machine HelloWorld WebPart HelloWorld, Talking to SharePoint Once that is … Read more
It’s finally been released as a preview! Please note that backwards compatibility will not be supported so don’t start any production work yet, this is for testing and feedback only! It can be downloaded from GitHub now, I go through the process below but the official instructions are here (and really straightforward): https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-docs/wiki/Setup-your-machine Getting familiar … Read more
Below I have created a quick guide to show you how to gain access to a user’s OneDrive within your organisation. This video is for SharePoint administrators and you will need to be at least a SharePoint admin in Office 365 to carry out these steps. A OneDrive site is effectively a SharePoint site collection … Read more
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