O365 on When Pigs Fly

Creating Status Indicator using PowerApps

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I was working on creating a demo for a conference session on user experience and design for Power Apps and part of that included creating a PowerApp to illustrate the point. In the session we talk about the 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design and how to map them to the work we do with the Power Platform. One of those heuristics is Visibility of system status.

What this means is:
The design should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable amount of time. When users know the current system status, they learn the outcome of their prior interactions and determine next steps. Predictable interactions create trust in the product as well as the brand.

Site Design for Easy Site Page Management

Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Does your site pages library look totally unmanageable? Have you had instances where you can see a news post that you created but someone else doesn’t? Is your content not showing up in search or highlighted content web parts? This happens all the time and it is generally an easy fix. I had the good fortune to work with Susan Hanley on a project recently. We were discussing creating a site design to automate some of the pieces of the site architecture she created. She mentioned to me a blog post she created, One simple view to improve SharePoint page and site management. In that post she proposes making minor modifications to the All Pages view to help alleviate some of these common issues and make it easier to manage site pages. She challenged me to create a site script that would replace or update the existing view to include the fields like promoted state to help better manage the contents of the site pages library.

Access Denied Error on Styles Library

Thu, 26 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I am going to file this one under the “if you need to do something more than twice you should probably write it down”. This gets me frequently enough that I remember I’ve dealt with it before but not frequently enough that I can commit the solution to memory. I find myself using the SPFX React Menu extension quite a bit as a base for creating custom navigation controls. The navigation on that extension is powered by a json file that is uploaded to the Styles Library. In an OOTB site I whenever I try to upload the json file to the Styles Library I get an access denied error. Other traditional files like .txt or .docx work just fine.

Local Time Zones for PnP Modern Search Web Part

Sat, 21 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I was working with the PnP Modern Search Web Part which is a great tool. If you have not seen it take a look. It provides a lot of robust features that allow you to aggregate content and display results in many different ways. I recently had an issue where I had created a custom Handlebars template to show the events. The layout worked great. The one issue was when the times for the dates were output they were in UTC.

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.

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.