Everything you need to know about SharePoint – December 2018 Edition

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You better read this! I know that it is rolling into your inbox right about the time you are thinking about your plans to party like it is 1999 but calm down. There is plenty of time for you to party later do a little lite reading first. Surprisingly there were a lot of really cool things released this month. Guess the people who actually do work in Redmond got that work done while the slackers used up a bunch of holiday time. Anyway. Check out the stuff on updating your site and list looks, the really cool new web parts, and then sign up for the conference to get that expense on this year’s budget. Happy New Year!

SharePoint column formatting now with no code

No, this isn’t me pitching you PowerApps (note to self what a great idea for a new video) what this is, is Microsoft extending (fixing?) the column formatting capability they released earlier this year. With the previous release, you could update columns with the help of some guy name JSON. Most of us didn’t know what that meant. Starting to roll out now is the same concept of formatting columns, but for Choice, Date, and Boolean columns there are pre-built templates — no more JSON. This is pretty cool. And in case you are having a tough time with what do they mean by formatting columns just think color coding. Change the column in the view so that based on the color you can tell if an item is overdue by data or the status they chose. Pretty helpful for what seems like a small boring change. The announcement is here.

Modernize your SharePoint pages

I feel like every month I write about a new guide or capability for modernizing SharePoint. I think they might be serious about their focus on modern SharePoint. To keep our proud tradition alive this month I bring you this gem. It is an overview of the different ways you can modernize your SharePoint sites. It covers doing it via the browser, PNP PowerShell, and ever .NET. Pretty handy stuff if you find yourself trying to modernize your existing sites. It even talks about adding Groups into the mix. A pretty handy little piece of content that is worth a read for sure.

Speaking of modernizing

One of the new pieces I don’t see enough content on is Communication Sites. Their goal is to be all things beautiful in our SharePoint world and to help you get rid of those old school Publishing Pages. With that goal in mind on the docs site, there is now a doc Moving from Publishing Sites to Communication Sites. I think if you are someone who’s brain is wrapped up in Publishing Sites this is the perfect piece of content to help you connect all of the dots to Communication Sites.  There are just so many nooks and crannies even if you aren’t super focused here I think there is a lot to take away from this one.

SharePoint Conference 2019 in Vegas is coming soon

If you are reading this article, you are either a major Shane groupie or you work with SharePoint A LOT. Good news, either way, the SharePoint Conference in Vegas is the place you need to be May 21-23. If it is anything like the past Microsoft will have lots of major announcements, will show off their vision for things to come, and will help us all be better equipped to do our job of being awesome at SharePoint. And don’t fret, I will be there also. So sign up today while you still can. And because I love you if you sign up with my code YOUNG you get $50 off. Wow, I just looked if you sign up before Jan 14th you can get an Xbox, a Cortana speaker, or other cool stuff. Make your boss pay for it, and you keep the gift. BONUS!

Cool new web parts rolling out in SharePoint

To keep all of us on our toes, Microsoft seems to change SharePoint Online about once every seventeen minutes. As I was reading through all of those changes this one hopped out as pretty cool. Mark Kashman covers a whole pile of new web parts that are making their way out. What is funny though is I think he was trying to hide them from us. Why do I think that? Because he put Yammer in the title of the article which made it really hard for me not to skip. I didn’t and was rewarded. The new web parts include personalization web parts for things like my documents and sites, embedding YouTube, code snippets, a countdown timer, and a lot more. This article is gold and if I wasn’t so lazy, I would move it to the top of the page. <shoulder shrug> The bottom is the new top.