Running from April 26 - April 28 the community is hosting sessions for Microsoft 365 - SharePoint, PowerApps, Power Bi, Power Automate, Teams - you name it! Register and check out the link below to join the session! This is a free event and great way to learn for other community experts and sessions from Microsoft 😊

Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon

Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon is a free online, 36 hour event happening May 27-28 2020 with sessions going the whole time with speakers from around the globe.

If you missed Ignite 2020 you would of missed a very exciting annoucement of the SharePoint App Bar coming to SharePoint Online at the end of this year. The app bar will bring global navigation across all of your sites and will use the navigation that is setup from your SharePoint home site.

The app bar will not only feature a link back to your home site but links to your recent and followed sites, news from your sites and recommended sites. I would highly reccomend checking out the video that goes more in depth about this feature at this link: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/video-hub/architecting-your-intelligent-intranet-with-sharepoint-global/m-p/1681225

You may have noticed that when setting up a new 365 group it will send out a welcome email to every member you add, sometimes this is nice but what if you want to prevent this email from being sent out? Maybe you are still setting up the group or you want to send 1 email to everyone that will be apart of the group to give them a better introduction to the group and it's purpose.

In this post I will walk through the steps to disable this default welcome email.

Prerequisites:

• Microsoft Exchange Online PowerShell Module

Installing Microsoft Exchange Online PowerShell Module

• If you already have this installed you can skip this step.

1. Launch PowerShell as an administator
2. Set your execution policy to RemoteSigned using the below command:
   Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
3. Run the below command to install the PowerShellGet module:
   Install-Module PowerShellGet -Force
4. Close and reopen PoweShell as administrator and run the below command to install the ExchangeOnlineManagement module:
   Install-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement
5. Run the below command to connect to Exchange Online - you should be prompted to sign in with your Microsoft 365 email and password:
   Connect-ExchangeOnline

Congrats! You should now have the Microsoft Exchange Online PowerShell Module installed 😊

Disabling the welcome email

1. Launch PowerShell and run the below command:
   Connect-ExchangeOnline
2. After signing in and the module has loaded run the below command against the group you want to disable the welcome email for:
   Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity "ExampleGroup@spodev.com" -UnifiedGroupWelcomeMessageEnable:$false

After the command completes you have now successfully disabled the welcome email for the Microsoft 365 group!

In this post I will describe how to change the default home page in a SharePoint Online site user PowerShell.

Requirements

• SharePoint  PnP PowerShell Cmdlets installed - Can find installation here

Lets Get Started

Knowing this command may be helpful if you want to change the default home page of a SharePoint site to the document library, list or a different page you setup on the site. In this example I will be changing the site to use the document library as the home page.

I will get requests from users for a SharePoint site that is going to be used majorly as a place to store and collaborate on documents, setting up the document web part on the home page is useful but it lacks some features that are in the full document library page and changing out the home page for the document library page solves these issues.

1. Run the below command to connect to the SharePoint site you want to change.

Connect-PnPOnline -Url https://YOURTENANT.sharepoint.com/YOURSITEPATH -UseWebLogin

2. Once connected to the site run the below command to set the document library as the new home page for your site.

Set-PnPHomePage -RootFolderRelativeUrl 'Shared Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx'

Now you should be all set, refreshing the page on your SharePoint site and the document library should be your new home page.

For more reading about the cmdlet used follow the link below 😊

Link: Set-PnPHomePage cmdlet

Microsoft has been working on revamping their Microsoft Edge browser based on the Chromium engine. It has come a very long way and they have just recently announced the new logo! At the time of writing this article the edge browser is still in beta.

A feature they recently have released is you can sign into your organization in the browser, this will sync your history, favorites and other browser settings across multiple devices additionally you can have the options to on a new tab show relevant information about your organization, files you recently worked on and SharePoint sites you are following or recently visited.

How to:

1. If you don't have it already go ahead and download the new edge browser! You can choose from the multiple preview builds of the browser here.
2. When you launch the browser select the user profile icon in the top right corner and select sign in.

3.  Sign in with your Work or School account

4. After logging in you will be signed into the browser, go ahead and open a new tab,  select the gear in the upper right hand corner and then change the setting to 'Office 365'

The tab will refresh and start to load information from Office 365. This may be a very nice setting for your users and give them another option of working in SharePoint or Office 365.

I recently created a web part for SharePoint Online that retrieves the current user's Office 365 Groups and generates a list with thumbnails and links to that group's SharePoint page.

I have submitted this web part to the SharePoint repo on GitHub and it was accepted! Feel free to check it out: React-My-Groups

Update: I participated in a community demo on 11/21/19. You can find the video at the link below, in the video you will find the latest updates for SPFX and two other awesome web parts that were demoed.

SharePoint Framework Community Call - Nov 21st 2019

I will be posting a series on the development of this web part so stay tuned! This series is almost ready and will be posted soon!

In the first post we discussed how to create an actionable message and send that to a user through outlook using Flow. I am now going to demonstrate on how to receive the response from the user and take action on it in Flow.

Edit your card

We need to wire up the Action.HTTP in our card to make'Submit Response' button do something, if you used my JSON from the previous example you only need to add the URL to send the response to. To get this URL we need to make another flow to capture the response.

Head over to Microsoft Flow and create a new flow.

1. Add the 'When a HTTP request is received' trigger.
2. In the trigger card select 'Use sample payload to generate schema' and enter in a sample of the JSON data we are expecting to get when the card is submitted. After clicking done the sample data is used to fill out the body JSON.

{
	"response": "text",
	"suggestionID": 3
}

3. Add create SharePoint List Item step to your flow and set that up to insert an item with the ID and response received from the user.

4. Save your flow and copy the URL that is generated. You need to paste this URL into JSON card that gets sent to your user.

<script type="application/adaptivecard+json">

{
    "type": "AdaptiveCard",
    "body": [
        {
            "type": "TextBlock",
            "size": "Medium",
            "weight": "Bolder",
            "text": "Additional Feedback Required"
        },
        {
            "type": "TextBlock",
            "text": "",
            "wrap": true
        },
        {
            "type": "FactSet",
            "facts": [
                {
                    "title": "Suggestion ID:",
                    "value": ""
                },
                {
                    "title": "Respond By:",
                    "value": ""
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "type": "Input.Text",
            "placeholder": "Response",
            "id": "responseText",
            "isMultiline": true,
            "separator": true
        }
    ],
    "$schema": "http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json",
    "version": "1.0",
    "actions": [
        {
            "type": "Action.Http",
            "title": "Submit Response",
            "method": "POST",
            "id": "submit",
            "url": "",
            "body": "{\"response\":\"{{responseText.value}}\",\"suggestionID\":@{triggerBody()?['suggestionID']}}",
            "headers": [
                {
                    "name": "Authorization",
                    "value": ""
                },
                {
                    "name": "Content-type",
                    "value": "application/json"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}
</script>

5. Head back to the new flow you made and you need to add a compose step to create the card that is sent back to your user. Below is a simple card saying 'your response has been received'

{
  "type": "AdaptiveCard",
  "body": [
    {
      "type": "TextBlock",
      "size": "Medium",
      "weight": "Bolder",
      "text": "Thank you for your feedback!"
    },
    {
      "type": "TextBlock",
      "text": "Your response has been submitted successfully!"
    }
  ],
  "$schema": "http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json",
  "version": "1.0"
}

6. After the compose step add a response step here we will send a status code back to the submitter and updated the card. The step should look like below using the output from the previous compose step as the body.

Test it out!

Alright you should have a functioning card that your users can submit a response, save it to a SharePoint list and update the user that the response has been received. You can do a number of neat things with this functionality!

Hello in this series I am going to go over a solution to help you create flows to send an actionable message to outlook, we will go over how to create and send the card in this post. In the 2nd post of this series we will discuss how to receive feedback from the user and update them with a response.

What are Adaptive Cards?

Microsoft has some great documentation on adaptive cards at their site please check it out and we will touch base on the designer they provide to help streamline the process of creating an adaptive card.

Lets create our card!

Head over to the adaptive cards designer.
Once at the designer you should see an example already loaded for you. We are going to change the host app to 'Outlook Actionable Messages'

I am going to click the New Card option to start with a blank card you can do so as well or edit the the sample card to your liking. The designer will output the adaptive card in JSON below the card - this is what you will need to send your card. If you would like to you can copy the JSON below to see the card I created for this demo post.

<script type="application/adaptivecard+json">

{
    "type": "AdaptiveCard",
    "body": [
        {
            "type": "TextBlock",
            "size": "Medium",
            "weight": "Bolder",
            "text": "Additional Feedback Required"
        },
        {
            "type": "TextBlock",
            "text": "@{triggerBody()?['additionalInfo']}",
            "wrap": true
        },
        {
            "type": "FactSet",
            "facts": [
                {
                    "title": "Suggestion ID:",
                    "value": "VARIABLE_HERE"
                },
                {
                    "title": "Respond By:",
                    "value": "VARIABLE_HERE"
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "type": "Input.Text",
            "placeholder": "Response",
            "id": "responseText",
            "isMultiline": true,
            "separator": true
        }
    ],
    "$schema": "http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json",
    "version": "1.0",
    "actions": [
        {
            "type": "Action.Http",
            "title": "Submit Response",
            "method": "POST",
            "id": "submit",
            "url": "",
            "body": "{\"response\":\"{{responseText.value}}\",\"suggestionID\":@{triggerBody()?['suggestionID']}}",
            "headers": [
                {
                    "name": "Authorization",
                    "value": ""
                },
                {
                    "name": "Content-type",
                    "value": "application/json"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}
</script>

Create the Flow

With the adaptive card ready we can create a simple flow to send an email to a user in which they will receive the adaptive card.

I am creating a 2 step flow that is triggered by the button card and the user triggering the flow will have a text box to fill out that will provide context of what they are requesting. The flow will then send an email using the Outlook send an email step.

You will need to expand the 'Advanced Options' on the outlook step and change is HTML to Yes. You can then paste your JSON for the adaptive card into the body of the email. Once that is done lets test our flow.

You should receive an email like below or what your card looks like.

In the second post I will go over how to handle the response to save it to a SharePoint list and then even update the card on the user's end when they hit submit.

Second Post

In this post I am going to walk you through creating a simple webpart for SharePoint Online. This webpart that we will be creating will calculate sales tax of an item, not super exctiting but it is an easy first intro into setting up a webpart and getting an overview of React in SharePoint webparts.

If you don't have your development environment setup yet no worries just open the link below in a new tab and follow the steps in that guide and you will be ready to rock in no time. If you are all set lets get the show on the road!

1. Scaffold the WebPart

Open your console window of choice - I will be using Hyper, and enter the commands below.

Create your project directory and change your consoles location to that directory.

mkdir tax-webpart
cd tax-webpart

Enter yo @microsoft/sharepoint to start the yeoman generator.

Respond to prompts like below

1. Enter for the first prompt.
2. SharePoint Online Only.
3. Use the current folder.
4. N
5. N
6. WebPart
7. Enter 'Tax' as the name for your webpart.
8. Enter to accept the default description.
9. React Framework.

The yeoman generator will begin structure your project, this can take a few minutes depending on your internet connection.

When finished you will see the below result in your console window.

Enter the following command if you have VS Code installed to open your project in VS Code.
Code .

Also while in your console run the following command gulp serve to start a local instance of your webpart where you can test and preview your development. Your default browser will open to the webpage.

*NOTE you will need to run gulp trust-dev-cert before running gulp serve. This only needs to be done one time.

After your browser has launched with the SharePoint Workbench you can add the WebPart we initalized like below!

This is the default webpart that is created every time you start a new webpart. It has one property attached to it where you can edit the webparts description. You can do this by clicking on the 🖊 next to the webpart to open the property pane. The property pane is where you can setup your webpart settings and allow your users to change the settings of a webpart with out changing the code. If you edit the text inside the 'description' field it will update as you type!

Its not much right now but lets dig a litter deeper and get this web part to calculate some sales tax for us....woot!

2. Lets Code!

Ok the moment we've all been waiting for lets get our hand's dirty and start to code this webpart. Open your code editor and open the file below.
src/webparts/TaxWebPart.ts

First lets get rid of the 'description' field and add a field for the WebParts title and a field to set the percent for the sales tax.

At the top of this file you will do the following changes replacing descrdescription: string; and description: this.properties.description

In the top section of this edit we are creating an interface for this webpart and declaring the type of these properties, since webparts are created using TypeScript (Check it out here!) the types must be declared.

We also need to remove the description reference in src/webparts/components/ITaxProps.ts and add in the title and taxPercentage property.

Finally we need to update the TaxWebPart.manifest.json file located in src/weparts/

Yes that is right you will need to update 3 locations when adding a new property to your webpart, it might seem like a lot but you will likely only add properties a few times during the development of your project.

Ok so lets add these properties to the property pane. Back to src/webparts/TaxWebPart.ts and the bottom of the file make the below changes.

Ok so we now have our property fields setup but before we can go ahead and view them in the workbench lets make the following updates to our webpart.

src/webparts/components/Tax.tsx

Now if you go to the workbench you will see the following. You can also open the property pane and enter text into the fields and see them update on the webpart.

Neat! Ok lets do some math....yay!

Lets add the following code to our Tax.tsx file.

After making the above changes you have now made a webpart that can calculate the total and sales tax of an item! So cool 😝!!

Next steps would be styling this webpart and making it even more reactive where a user wouldn't have to click on the calculate button for the math to run. Lets tackle that in a part 2!

Download the finished code from GitHub https://github.com/zachroberts8668/SPODev-tax-webpart

In this post I am going to walk you through the steps to get your computer ready to start developing for SharePoint Online.

• Install Visual Studio Code (Or your favorite text editor)
• Install NPM
• Install SharePoint Generator

Install Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code or VS Code as many people refer to it (and how I will in the rest of this post or any future posts 😊) is a new code editing software from Microsoft. I highly recommend using VS Code when working with SharePoint projects because alot of the dependecies are already built into the editor. You can however use any of your favorite text editors.

Download Visual Studio Code - it can be installed on Windows, Mac and Linux

After installing VS Code I recomend familiarzring yourself with it. The Microsoft documents are a great place to start. VS Code Getting Started

Installing NPM

If you don't have Node installed use the following link below to install Node. Node will install NPM (Node Package Manager) to your computer which will use to scaffold projects and install supporting packages.

Download Node - Be sure to install the LTS version.

Install SharePoint Generator

The SharePoint Generator is the tool that you will use to kick off all of your SharePoint Online projects. This will scaffold your project so you can start coding in it right away.

Launch PowerShell and run the following command

npm install -g @microsoft/generator-sharepoint

After the install you are now ready to start developing SharePoint Online solutions!