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MattVarney
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Joined 9 years ago
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Re: When, if ever, should we use the S word?
You could try branding it (the intranet/digital workplace and the associated experience) as its own thing with its own name, but that also carries some risks. We did this with an on-prem SP2007 based system we branded "ThePoint", which allowed us to talk about it and train on it from an interesting perspective. Unfortunately, we over promised and under delivered on it and it ultimately failed. Our current iteration in SharePoint online (and associated M365 tools) is simply called "the intranet" and this is going better, but we have some work left to do. No matter what you call it, though, the bottom line is it has to have some value - even if it is just one or two well managed libraries and a semi-regular news feed. If it has value now, it can grow. Talb about "SharePoint" and what it can do to your content owners and tech support staff, but let the masses enjoy the generic intranet and gain as much value from it as possible.1.2KViews1like0CommentsRe: Can IC work without SharePoint savvy?
Reena_V Audience targeted templates for news (resulting in audience targeted pages) is the best macro-level feature and has been a huge win for us. We have 32 main high level audiences and they all come to a few main sites on our intranet, and those sites pull in news from a few dozen sites. With the news templates on those source sites “pre-audienced”, it becomes a LOT easier to pull in and organize the news for our users. Still wish could audience target at a micro level with the text web part (a feature we had available to us more than a decade and a half ago). Grrr…1.1KViews3likes0CommentsRe: Can IC work without SharePoint savvy?
Looking forward to this article! ReWorked is a great resource. Fully agree on the need to understand and leverage audiences and the concept of targeting specific info for specific people. Along those lines, the most glaring issue of SPO right now is a feature that was present in SP 2007 (maybe even earlier) but was dropped in the move to "modern" online pages. That feature is the ability to audience target the text web part. This is so basic and so critical and there hasn't been any indication (that I've seen) that is something that will be making a return any time soon.2.1KViews2likes0CommentsRe: Organization with more than 1 time zone and SharePoint calendars
Hidreweverett - Yes, this is still the case. We've had to work around the issue through several methods including workflows to write text values of the time into text fields (with Time Zone labels), as well as writing out the times for both time zones in generated communications, etc. It is a pain. It seems like Microsoft should have more than a few customers in multiple time zones and be able to handle this more elegantly.20KViews1like2CommentsRe: Delve roadmap?
Sure, but I was wondering about the overall direction. It seems like the Delve-like functionality (at least the automated search displays) are being refined and will be used in more places, but I don't know if a new single pane experience like classic pure Delve has a future. If one is envisioned, I wonder what that looks like. The O365 profile update page portion of Delve still has a use (a different "action" use and experience than the search result side), so I would think that that functionality would still be around and hopefully improved and expanded in the future as well. Maybe we'll hear more at Ignite?11KViews0likes0CommentsDelve roadmap?
Delve was kind of the first pass at a display interface for all the cool things happening in the Graph, but there seems to be a slowdown in new development and extending the functionality. I could be imagining that or reading too much into this, but I suspect that Delve's replacement (Delve 2.0 if there is one) is where the development efforts are being placed. Can anyone else confirm this? Are new and better interfaces for the Graph on the horizon?Solved11KViews0likes4CommentsRe: Organization with more than 1 time zone and SharePoint calendars
Sorry, I might not be explaining the situation clearly. We have 1 organization spanning 2 time zones. The entire organization needs to get dates and information from one single-purpose calendar (dates for internal professional development training events). That calendar lives in one single defined site collection set to eastern standard time. Our users in the central time zone have their Outlook clients defined to their local time zones.. Eastern time users have their set correctly and natively follow the SharePoint calendar more closely. When a central time user views the calendar and sees an event that starts at 2:00 PM, they currently have to make a manual and mental note that this is really 1:00 PM for them. They can download the ICS file for that event and add it to their Outlook calendar. It will properly register for 1:00 PM local start time, which is good. There is an individual setting (per user) in Office 365 for time zones. This may not always contain data, so a separate and intentional effort (communication and training) needs to take place for our users to correct this. The people creating and managing these events are in both time zones, so they will also have to be extra cautious and aware of what the real time of the even its, what the time will appear to people in both time zones, and what the time will be for users adding the event via ICS to their Outlook calendar. Here is the main question/issue: There should be some automated ways of standardizing - or at least clarifying - this. One way would be to leverage metadata on the SharePoint side (i.e. add a column in the calendar list for time zone). That would be helpful when viewing the event - EXCEPT that modern displays of events do not allow for usage or displays of custom metadata (a big shortcoming in many "modern" displays). Another way to handle this would be to have the SharePoint calendars be more like other Office 365 date tracking mechanisms (calendars leveraging Exchange Online?). Like "real" or traditionally managed date and time data types. That is probably a longer road for development, but I don't know. A lot to unpack here, but hopefully there can be some progress and likely, there are other organizations in a similar situation. Thanks again!22KViews3likes0CommentsRe: Organization with more than 1 time zone and SharePoint calendars
We could add all sorts of extra metadata fields to help organized and properly tag the events to the correct time zone, but the modern views for events do not respect or surface that data. Surely we are not the only customer that spans time zones and surely there is a solution (at least on a roadmap) for this. Either there needs to be an effort to unify the back end of all calendars across O365, or an effort to expand the modern views of SharePoint calendar events to allow for the surfacing of additional metadata.22KViews4likes2CommentsRe: Roadmap question - 21047 "SharePoint News Digest Email"
I am seeing the feature now in our tenant but my account is marked in First Release (the entire org is not in first release). Others in the org do not see this feature yet. Progress, though! Thanks! I did a simple test and it worked almost as expected. The email did not have the images. The image placeholders gave the error "The linked image cannot be displayed. The file may have been moved, renamed, or deleted. Verify that the link points to the correct file and location." The image still exists in the original location and is unchanged. The link in the email to the compiled News Digest page is correct and the images are on that page. Not sure if this is a result of the feature not being fully deployed in our tenant for us, or if it has to do with just my account being one of of the few in first release in our tenant. Thanks for the continued work! Hope these last few issues get worked out.5.4KViews0likes10CommentsRe: Organization with more than 1 time zone and SharePoint calendars
Another solution for the product team: Match the Office365 time zone setting of users with what is already set for the users in Outlook online. The two settings are different. In Outlook online, the time zone value gets set when the user first logs on (there is a first time wizard experience). That setting in Outlook online is connected with and understood by an Outlook 2016 client as well (if they change that setting in the 2016 client, the Outlook online setting is changed as well). So there are links and connections. The odd one out seems to be the main Office 365 time zone setting, which should probably be the authoritative one, I would think. Can this be fixed or set?22KViews0likes4CommentsOrganization with more than 1 time zone and SharePoint calendars
We have a single tenant and our organization spans 2 time zones (EST and CST). Users from both time zones participate in SharePoint calendars. All calendars seem to be following EST (based on a tenant setting?) How can we have the CST users see the events in their local time zone? I know that users can take matters into their own hands and set their specific time zone in Office 365 settings, but can administrators selectively set the time zone value for specific users (perhaps based on OU or group)?22KViews4likes15CommentsRe: Roadmap question - 21047 "SharePoint News Digest Email"
Seriously. This was announced at Ignite in September 2017, promised by Q4 and supposedly released in Q1 of this year. It is almost Q3 and no sign of it our tenant. MS has to do a better job rolling out what they show off. Or at least communicating about why the rollouts are late.5.7KViews0likes24CommentsRe: Modern Communication sites - display links issue
Indeed. The functionality exists in classic view, but not in modern. A link is an object to be acted upon (i.e. open the link), not an object to download. Who does that? Is there a large customer base doing this now? The thought process in this design is perplexing. I think the good news might be that this can be corrected easily since the functionality exists (and has existed for decades).11KViews3likes0CommentsRoadmap question - 21047 "SharePoint News Digest Email"
Has anyone else heard anything more about this? Not much news since the announcement by Mark-Kashman last fall. The roadmap says it was to be released last quarter (Q4 2017), but it isn't even at Targeted Release yet. We are eager to try this and see it as a huge win for our organization as we move more and more services into Office 365.8.5KViews2likes37CommentsRe: Modern Communication sites - display links issue
This suggested solution technically works, but there are additional experience issues that are occurring with the modern web part. I'm hoping these get addressed soon, but the issues are: Column widths in the display are truncated (probably according to screen size?), which causes the values in the fields to be truncated. Sure, you can move the width of the column, but the experience is truncated and the web part is not configurable enough to get around that. The "Add" button appears in the web part, even for users who don't have permission to add items to the list. When such a user selects the "Add" button on the web part, they get a small blank fly-out menu (similar to the one an authorized contributor would see and use, except it is much smaller and empty). Additionally, with the web part, any user gets the select column (the radio button to the right of the item) that allows them to attempt to share the item with EDIT permissions by default. I expect this is by design to encourage sharing, but seems a bit aggressive for communications sites which are generally less "collaborative" and more "publishing" oriented. The item owner (not the site owner) does get an email to approve or deny the sharing, which is good I guess.12KViews0likes0CommentsRe: Modern Communication sites - display links issue
Same issue - because items in lists are just items now. There is no "Links" list app anymore on Modern Communication sites. This used to be very easy and possible. We have it all over the place in classic sites (and on prem). Now, not so much. In order to accomplish this, it looks like we are going to have to either develop custom content types (to replace the ones that they no longer support) or use a 3rd party to dynamically apply XSLT to transform the link item back into a workable link. This is either a bug or a an intended deviation from the past, so I'm hoping the ticket with Microsoft will illuminate that.12KViews1like2CommentsRe: Modern Communication sites - display links issue
Perhaps I wasn't clear and I apologize if so. Yes, it is looking like the modern web parts are in fact missing code and functionality. That is the reason I think this is a bug or missing feature in the current release. You are right and the native experience directly in a document library will work fine and process the request for the .url object as a redirect. But, when you use the out of the box delivered web parts to display the contents of that library on a page, the experience is broken as the browser attempts to download the url items, rather than processing them as actual web links. We've opened a case with Microsoft, so we'll see what they say. I'll share what I can when I learn more. We would love to use a solution that does not force us to use .url files, but that is the delivered functionality from SharePoint. SharePoint is transforming all web links in document libraries to .url items. So, in a standard document library, you click on Add and choose "link", you get a short form where you paste in a URL and give it a title. If you paste in anything (such as https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/hr or even http://www.bing.com), it automatically appends .url on the end and transforms it into that kind of object. That might be part of the issue and where code is missing or wrong (or intentionally doing it for an unknown reason). Perhaps a solution would be to add a content type (hopefully delivered by Microsoft soon) that will not do the .url transformation and will allow for native treatment of a standard web link. So, hopefully that is a bit more clear. I wouldn't think that having a list of links on a page and making sure that they actually act as expected when you click on them isn't an unusual request. We need more than what the Quick Links web part provides because we have a large number of centrally managed links that will be secured (or at least audience targeted). We are trying to provide a premier experience to a wide variety of users. Each user would only see the much smaller subset of links that they need. When that large diverse audience comes to this communications site (a publishing layer of our intranet), we want to guide them quickly to the deeper structures and to other systems as needed. Surely we are not the only customer that has this need.12KViews0likes4Comments