Forum Discussion
Customizing the "modern" experiences in SharePoint Online - your opinion?
VesaJuvonen has posted a pretty good article on customizing the "modern" experience in SharePoint Online:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/modern-experience-customizations
I think the effort MS has put into not supporting/allowing customizations in modern sites is pretty intense. Changing the color (Theme) and manually adding SPFX WebParts is pretty much all you can do in those sites now. Looking back in history, one of the key pieces of sharepoint was customizations and the wide variety of those. Whether it was for hardcore developers working with code or power-user working with SP designer and workflows. I think this is what made sharepoint so successfull.
What do you think about this?
Will this be sufficient for your company/customers?
Are you all sticking to classic right now?
Do you think this strategy will be successfull for Microsoft in the long run?
Do you think your company/customers will move back to onprem?
15 Replies
Oliver Zeiser This current inability to customize headers and CSS is making Sharepoint online almost useless for us. We are doing a major migration and I have a less experienced team that set the intranet up in modern sharepoint. We need to emulate the previous classic site, and we need to adjust colors to our corporate colors. But we are not able to do it. This is compromising our project and it's not a great introduction to SPO.
I think it's very risky right now to consider "modern experience" when designing a system with specific needs as it doesn't support CSR. Field formatting via JSON for the "modern experience" is very limited and doesn't go far enough. CSR provides endless possibilities & therefore some comfort in the knowledge that you could come up with a solution to a problem when architecting a solution. Since the classic view and modern experience will coexist, stick to classic view.
I only have permissions to build solutions that do not involve the app catalog, do not require access tokens, basically if the technology requires SharePoint Admin permissions or approval, I'm not able to use that technology to build my solutions and I currently see Modern Pages, the way they are today as another restriction.
I recently implemented a new intranet site with Modern Pages, the repsonse was not favorable, it was actually over whelmingly negative.
#1 complaint by users and management - the huge unmodifiable header. #2 - limited ability to modify the page, #3 - Branding - having the departments logo cutoff and placed inside the Sqaure in the upper left, why?
For now all Modern pages have been replaced with Classic Web part pages.
Dynamic functionality:
All the new technologies, Add-Ins and SharePoint Framework - for building Modern Page Webparts, are great unless you do not have permission to add them to the App Catalog.
As you may know, getting in-house custom apps approved to be included in a large Enterprise is a tough sell. Lot's of things to consider before this type of solution is allowed into the eco system, IP protection policies, black-out periods, long review board processes, long term support issues etc...
Nothing new, but at least in Classic mode I can rely on InfoPath or the Script Editor webpart without having to worry about going through all the red tape everytime I need to build or modify something.
Currently I see a lot of emphasis on the developer story for Modern Pages and very little on the PowerUser, Domain Expert, Citizen Developer with limited permissions story, which are the ones who in my experience are the primary solution devs for their departments. I completely understand that changes take time and I'm really looking forward to a better story for the Citizen Dev concerning Modern Pages. But until then no Modern Pages will be implemented in my departments Sharepoint sites.
Sure there's also PowerApps, which I understand is replacing InfoPath and I'm currently trying to get a couple of apps I'm developing implemented in the Enterprise, but this type of solution is outside of Modern Pages for now. Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding but currently from what I've read, there's no way to embed these forms, apps in a Modern page without special permissions, special work arounds. Not all solutions should be mobile enabled, which is what PowerApps are by default.
It will be interesting to see how all this plays out.
I really do appreciate all the efforts of the Sharepoint Engineering team, I'm learning all I can about these new technologies which I think are very useful, but are unfortunatley non starters for myself unless I develop them outside of my employer, which is another layer of red tape.
I'm just trying to explain why I'm currently not able to use Modern pages in my day job from the perspective of having limited permissions and no ability to modify the pages outside of the provided Webparts.
Basically if the technology used to build the solution requires the App Catalog, it will be in a lot cases a non starter and I will need to look to other solutions outside of Modern Pages.
At this point still I'm advising my clients to stick with Classic Pages until more progress is made on the Modern Ones. Simple things such as being able to change the header image, having a multi-column page layout, etc. need to be addressed before I feel comfortable evangelizing widespread usage. It's one thing if I were a FTE at a company who can work through the growing pains, but as a consultant I don't have the luxury of being able to iterate on work. Usually I'm in for a few weeks and then gone, I would hate to lead a client down a path where they are impacted on burdened but an incomplete solution.
How can we share a complete document library like in classic view? We have about 30 folders in the library and we allways share all of them.
for now we stick to classic view.
- VesaJuvonen
Microsoft
thx Oliver Zeiser for starting this thread. We are absolutely interested on input around this. Would like to also point out that whatever is currently supported from customization perspective, is just a start and more capabilities will be supported gradually when those are finalized and ready to get published.
We would though absolutely be interested on hearing what are the key missing capabilities currently and other input around the questions what Oliver pointed out.
Your input truly matters, so thx for everyone's feedback and comments advance.
Vesa wrote:
► thx @Oliver Zeiser for starting this thread. We are absolutely interested on input around this. Would like to also point out that whatever is currently supported from customization perspective, is just a start and more capabilities will be supported gradually when those are finalized and ready to get published.
We would though absolutely be interested on hearing what are the key missing capabilities currently and other input around the questions what Oliver pointed out.
Your input truly matters, so thx for everyone's feedback and comments advance.
C'mon Vesa, you are turning into a shepherd who's sole Microsoft job it is to keep the flock at ease.
Your response is straight from the Community Manager 101 Textbook, chapter "How to silence threads"
You very well know what everyone wants to customize, you have been in this game for years.
You also know about Oliviers UserVoice post, so this reply here is kinda stupid to all those who are watching these threads.
https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/329214-sites-and-collaboration/suggestions/13385364-allow-javascript-customization-and-css-branding-th
- VesaJuvonen
Thx Danny for the feedback. Let's be clear on few things.
- We are absolutely aware of the generic scenarios what we need to support
- We are working on enabling these in the modern experiences, like mentioned in the MSDN documentation and in Ignite presentations - we simply do not have infinite resources, so things happen gradually and input always helps on prioritizing which scenarios will be implemented first, since we no longer wait two-three years on showing new capabilities - and I think this is great
- I do not see any harm on asking scenario input from the community - maybe someone has missed the previous UserVoice entry or the discussion, so getting more input on the functional scenarios can't cause harm
- We absolutely understand that frustration around missing capabilities and team is working hard to address these gradually as fast as we can
We absolutely take community input into account around the new experiences, since we want to ensure that existing customers and partners benefit from the new capabilities. We do however release capabilities now gradually, which no doubt causes challenges to follow up on what's exactly supported and when you can enable your required scenarios.
I'd encourige people to evaluate modern experiences and take them into use, when needed capabilities and customization options are available. Each deployment has slightly different requirements, so this is definitely not black and white decision. We do highly value constructive feedback and try to align on the input we get from the field. We also understand that it might seem that it takes too long every now and then, but everyone from MS side is working hard to ensure that modern experiences will also support needed scenarios.
thx for your input.
In no particular order
- Ability to customise or replace the "SharePoint" landing page
- More/improved web parts - currently it's too basic and cannot even add tables, lists of links or even change the font colour.
- View/edit source, to at least keep us going until later improvements
- More flexible navigation options
- Custom page banners
- Alternative layouts
- SharePoint Add-ins in modern pages, or a spfx alternative (thinking about accessing on premise sql servers here)
- Ability to add Office 365 navigation elements to Azure AD (provider hosted) apps
One concern I do have is that we have created new sites as Team sites, as they support Modern pages. I will not be happy if it turns out we can only customise on sites originally created as publishing sites.
I think there is nothing wrong with adding new capabilities over time or replacing existing techniques with new ones or changing technology. But taking away existing options by adding deny policies without replacement is just wrong. Also making the modern sites the new default is wrong.
I have been involved in so many SharePoint projects over the last 13 years and I have not seen a single one that was successfull without some sort of customizations.
Defining the key missing capabilities is almost impossible as each project has different requirements. But i'll try my best:
1. Corporate design and full flexibility in how the sites look like. This is even more important, when using SharePoint not only as intranet, but as an extranet solution.
2. Adding certain elements (e.g. global cross site navigation) or hiding certain elements (e.g. site settings or sharing button). Especially hiding things that do not respect security trimming and show error messages to the users when clicking on them.
3. Custom page layouts or custom webpart pages. (e.g. multiple columns of webpart zones)
4. Preprovision certain elements befor the user hits the page for the first time. E.g. additional libraries, fields, contenttypes, policies, webparts....
5. Custom Ribbon/Toolbar buttons to enhance functionality via apps.
6. Enrich the site with metadata. (e.g. indexed property bag)
To sum it up. There is no real order of what is more important over the other. It always depends on the project and the requirements as well as the skills of the people involved. This is also not a discussion about the technology. It is about taking away key functionality of the product that people have used over the years without replacing it in some way or another.
Yes there still is classic. But how long will it be there? Customers are asking themselves, how big is the risk to still invest in classic? What is the future direction? What will be possible in the future? What if we would like to use groups and teams that depend on modern sites? Right now we and our customers are stuck in a situation where we have to decide whether we stick with classic and make not use of the new functionalities or make use of the modern sites knowing that this is not going to cut it in most projects.
So what would really help is a clear roadmap together with an explenation why Microsoft is taking away all those options people have loved and used over time.
- To me is very important a Microsoft does a good communication about what customers can expect in regards of new capabilities and for how long classic view is going to be supported so we as consultants can advice them what are the best options for them without having to throw way their money. I know that providing dates can be difficult, but seeing the nature of changes coming to SPO, it's absolutely required to be able to talk to customers in terms of what they can expect and when....and it's not enought to talk about roadmap stuff
