SharePoint site scripts and custom site designs

[John Wynne]

New in the Message Center: https://portal.office.com/AdminPortal/home?switchtomodern=true#/MessageCenter?id=MC125899

[#2]

Thanks John, I had a look and it seems this will be a welcome option.  A way to programmatically consistently configure team sites or communication sites sounds good.

I did a double take on the mention of First Targeted Release, that sounds a bit of a mashup! Also, I noticed the Additional information link - http://aka.ms/spsitedesigns doesn't seem to go anywhere yet!

[#3]

Looks like the message needs an update to get that link live. 

[#4]

The page is live now - Get started creating site designs and site scripts.

Build site designs to provide reusable lists, themes, layouts, pages, or custom actions so that your users can quickly build new SharePoint sites with the features they need. In this article you'll build a simple site design that adds a SharePoint list for tracking customer orders. Then you'll use the site design to create a new SharePoint site with the custom list.

[#5]

This is a nice introductory article on this topic via @Deleted - SharePoint Online Site designs and Site scripts.

"Before the availability of Site designs and Site scripts—there was no easy way to deliver an easy user experience to end users—for creating custom sites. There was no way to customise the Out Of the Box site creation process—other then redirect a user to a custom form. With Site designs we get the possibility to use the Out of the Box site creation proces and choose our custom defined Site design." 

The option to trigger a Flow as part of this process for extra customisations makes this very versatile.

[#6]

Thanks for mentioning my blog post!

[#7]

Anyone having success with site scripts in their targeting release tenants yet?

The PS cmdlets are successfully adding site-scripts and site-designs for me, but at the moment don't appear to be honoring the association between the two (executing associated site scripts with a given site design).

I'm not seeing the property page processing on site creation (using MS' JSON samples).

[#8]

@Patrick Abel i have a similar issue. It doesn't look like it recognizes the site scripts. I actually used a site script from the documentation:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/declarative-customization/get-started-create-site-de...

When creating a Communication site based on a custom design with that script my new site keeps saying:

Getting a few things ready, We're updating your site with additional components and settings.

Initializing...

[#9]

The same result on my side as well.. The page keeps 'Initializing'.
I tried scripts based on the documentation, but the result stays the same.

[#10]

@Michel Verwijmeren good to see it's not just me! I am seeing the same "stuck initializing" behavior when using a 68 web template (Communication Site): 

Getting a few things ready

We're updating your site with additional components and settings.

Initializing...

However, for web template 64 (O365 Group Team Site), I am not seeing the panel pop-out at all (using the same site script).

[#11]

Seeing same results here. But as stated in the message centre: 

We'll be gradually rolling this out to Targeted Release customers in December and will complete the rollout in early 2018.

So maybe not all the bits and bytes are there yet? I will keep on trying and when succeeded, I'll let you know...

[#12]

@Robert Schouten, @Patrick Abel,  @Michel Verwijmeren any progress on your tenants?

In most demo tentants I still got the Initializing notification. 

The interesting part is that currently in one of my newer demo tenants I can't even get passed the creation of the site. I am getting the error when creating a Communication site based on a standard design or a custom site design:
Couldn't create the group, please go back and try again.

[#13]

Unfortunately no progress on my side either. I haven't tried it on a new tenant yet.

[#14]

No luck yet...I also tried at another dev tenant and there I cannot even install the site scripts using powershell. I get error message:

Add-SPOSiteScript : The requested operation is part of an experimental feature that is not supported in the current environment.

[#15]

Today I came across an issue on the sp-dev-docs GitHub. I see the status is that they are still working on it: https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-docs/issues/1182

[#16]

I tried again on new years day with no luck.

Nice find @Expiscornovus – it looks like we're finally getting a response and resolution on the issue. It feels like on this one Microsoft just hit the publish button on their way out the door for the holidays and are just now realizing the blunder. 

[#17]

@Patrick Abel, @Robert Schouten, @Michel Verwijmeren I see the scripts are now working on my targeted release tenant.

Looks like they hit the publish button ;)

[#18]

Nice Dennis and thanks for the update! Chris O'Brien has written a nice blog post on site designs (and PnP templates) too, with some nice considerations.

http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2018/01/site-designs-scripts-or-pnp-templates.html 

[#19]

Thanks for the update @Expiscornovus! A few minutes ago they didn't hit the publish button on my tenant, but I bet that can't take much longer ;)

[#20]

Haha yep – seeing the same on my end as well! Looks like all is well on the Site Design front now.