CDN Requirements for the Slideshow Web Part?

[Marc DeSantis]

According to this link, you have introduced a breaking change into the environment by requiring that Slideshow picture libraries are now tied to a CDN origin. Now, unless you have the "Show Toolbar" enabled on your Picture Library Slideshow web part, no picture displays at all! I opened a ticket with Premier support, and they said this was expected functionality and that the feature was "deprecated".

So... I jump through the hoops and enable CDN. But that's not even good enough. Now, every picture library has to be enabled as a CDN Origin in order for the slideshow to work. How is this manageable? Every picture library has a unique name, with it's own unique directory. It is unreasonable to expect:

1. Your average user to know that they have to request a CDN origin for their library if they want to use it in a Slideshow
2. Administrators to keep up with the demand if people knew they had to do this to get their slideshow working.

While the CDN feature seems promising, I have no clue why the CDN would be required in order to add a slideshow, since the images in a slideshow are generally not common assets that you would host in a CDN. The fact that you introduced this as a breaking change to the environment, with no rails that prevent a user from using a "deprecated" feature (I call it a broken feature) makes me question whether I can rely on Office 365 as a platform that users can trust.

[#2]

Hello Marc,

We apologize for the issues you were facing where the Picture Library Slideshow web part was not displaying images when no toolbar was specified for display.  We’re now rolling out a change to fix this issue in the next few days, so that an image will be displayed.  You can see updates around this via SP101452 on the Service Health Dashboard in the Admin Center.

Regarding autorotation and the content delivery network requirement – with the volume of imagery and content served through picture libraries, and with the recent roll-out of CDN support for libraries, some image libraries might be good candidates for use in conjunction with recently rolled-out CDN capabilities.  Updating the picture library slideshow web part to look towards CDN usage for autorotation functionality was a step towards improving performance across SharePoint sites. As you note, configuring a CDN does require some Powershell to deploy – we definitely take the feedback here and will look to consider improving the ability to turn on CDN functionalities for libraries.

Thank you for the feedback here around the Picture Library slideshow web part.

-- Mike

[#3]

I can certainly understand why you'd want to improve performance, but performance improvements shouldn't hobble functionality. 

I would be in favor of adding a feature toggle within the Admin Center that enables CDN across picture libraries. If this feature is disabled, the slideshow might be slower, but it shouldn't prevent a slideshow from working.

[#4]

Marc,

What did you end up doing for your slideshow?

Thanks,
Rob.