Featured on When Pigs Fly

Deploying Application Customizers with a Site Design

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes things are harder than they need to be. I have been working on Site Designs recently to automate the creation and deployment of different element in a site. For the most part things were pretty straight forward for what I needed to do, add a theme to a site, add site columns, and add content types. This time around I needed to deploy an SPFx Application Customizer that needed to be installed on individual sites. The official documentation on this is a little lacking. It doesn’t really explain what you need to do in order to make it work. I also looked at the PnP Site Design Samples which got me a little closer. It took me quite a while to figure out the right magic voodoo combination that got it to work.

Using Custom Color for Section Backgrounds and Page Headers

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered where the background colors in SharePoint modern pages comes from? You know, the ones for section background colors and site headers? Have you ever wondered how to change them to your own custom colors?

I had a client that wanted to be able to set the background for the site headers to a specific color. Unfortunately, the color they wanted wasn’t one of the four colors available through the SharePoint UI.

More than I ever wanted to know about the SharePoint Search Topology

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The other night I burned way too many hours trying to fix a broken search service application for what seemed like a ridiculous reason. We have an integration server that we are using for a large project. I was working with it earlier in the day testing some front end code. Later in the evening with no apparent cause it decided to throw the error below on the Search Administration screen. This prevented search from operating and all my client side queries returned a nondescript 500 error telling me to check my search service.

Using Widget Wrangler with PnP for IE

Wed, 17 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I am creating client-side webparts using the Widget Wrangler for SharePoint. The webparts all use PnP JS. This site needs to work in IE 10+. The webparts work great in Chrome and most other browsers. However, when i run it in IE I get an error about Undefined Headers. This is because PnP uses Promises which IE 10 and 11 don’t support. To fix that I had to include some polyfills and perform a sacrifice to the SharePoint gods.

Managing Office 365 Identities Made Easy

Wed, 08 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

A friend of a friend of a friend told about this thing that totally changed their life. It wasn’t exactly that convoluted but I was complaining to a friend the other day about constantly having to switch credentials for my office 365 tenants. He suggested a nifty trick that a friend of ours Beatrice Baciu wrote about. He showed me how to use Chrome Personas to manage my different office 365 accounts.