Nick Cottrell

In my first post: SharePoint Site Design: An Introduction , I gave you a brief overview on site designs and what they can do. In this post I want to show you how to get started building a simple design that you could add to an environment.  Creating your Site Script  To get started take a look at the Site design JSON schema on Microsoft Docs. From here you copy the overall JSON structure into your script. Once inserted to your script it will look like the below. {   "$schema": "schema.json",   "actions": [     ...     <one or more verb actions>     ...   ],   "bindata": { },   "version": 1 } The yellow highlights text that can be removed and replaced with the actions you want to add to your script. The  Site design JSON schema  on Microsoft Docs provides you with example JSON, which you can copy and paste into your script to add a specific actions between the two square brackets ([ ]). The text I've highli...

This is one of those posts I've been wanting to do for over a year.  When I first started looking at SharePoint site design I found it challenging to get started. I couldn't find the guidance anywhere that would help me understand it. As a result each time I looked at SharePoint Site Designs it felt a bit like black magic!  I understood and could see the benefits of being able to use site designs to create sites with predefined elements and automation of actions, but the actual building of the site design and scripts seemed shrouded in mystery. I searched across the internet looking for guidance on how to create and implement the designs but of the material I found most was written in a way that I found hard to follow as a beginner in this area.  My aim in this post is to share what I have learnt and help you get started. To make this subject more manageable to digest I have split it into separate posts: Introduction to SharePoint site design  Create and deployi...

SharePoint Online Site Themes: SharePoint comes with a number ready made out of the box themes that you can apply to your SharePoint site(s). The themes can transform your site to give it a more unique feel. You can change the theme by navigating to the Settings (Cog) > Change the look > Theme . Once there you will be presented with the available themes. More recently you are able to customise the out of the box themes. At the time of Although this allows you to customise existing themes you may not find the colours that match your branding.  Often organisations want to use there own brand colours to personalise their SharePoint sites. With a few steps it is possible to create and import your own theme(s) in to your SharePoint environment. You can then utilise the theme(s) by adding them manually to sites or in your site designs. Benefits of having a custom site theme You or other site owners can switch to the company branded theme once added to your tenant It will be availab...

Background There have been a number of occasions where I've needed to create images and animated images for different SharePoint related projects.  I've used a number of tools in the past with varying success.  More recently I've been using PowerPoint to create custom images, which has saved me time and allowed me to do what I wanted without buying new tools or using free ones with adds. Although I had been using PowerPoint to create images it was only recently I discovered a new feature in PowerPoint that allows you to create GIFs "Graphic Interchange Format". GIFs are animated or static images.  There could be many reasons you want to create an animated image most common would be to display an action with moving images rather than creating a video. Another reason might just be that you want to jazz up your SharePoint page or presentation.  Here's an example of a GIF I created in PowerPoint. Steps to create your GIF To create an animated image follow these 12...

Intranet adoption survey guidance Background  Adoption is an important area that often gets overlooked, in this post I discuss some guidance on reaching out to your users after launching your intranet. Connecting with your users and getting their opinion on the new tool will aid towards its adoption. Form their feedback you can assess what's working and what needs some work. Creating a survey as part of your adoption work is often not given the time or effort to be as useful a tool as it could be. Spend time developing a survey that will yield actionable results rather than gain responses that just tells you the users like or dislike the tool. Getting responses that have detail will help you evolve the intranet into a tool that continues works for users and improve adoption. Planning the survey When writing your survey consider what it is you want to discover from your respondents.  Are you trying to identify why adoption is low?  Or to identify areas of th...

Background Recently I had a request to update 50 plus SharePoint Online sites with a group email address so that this mailbox received all site access requests.  This group was being used as the owners of the SharePoint sites and as it was a group they had not been receiving the access requests. As a result we decided we wanted to forward these requests to the group mailbox.   Using the resources from Microsoft Docs I was able to set the request access email in a SharePoint site, using PowerShell.   Using the guidance command provided in Microsoft Docs I was able to create a PowerShell script and added a step to repeat this on multiple sites by importing a spreadsheet (CSV) with the site addresses. If had done this manually it would have taken around a day to go to each site and set. Using the script in a matter of minutes the job was done and I was able to focus on other tasks.  I did a few random spot checks to ensure it worked.  What you need to get...

A SharePoint admin can now make a SharePoint Online site an organisation news site . This gives news post created in the SharePoint site a visual marker and makes them appear on the SharePoint start page (SharePoint App) for users across the business.  At the time of writing, this is achieved via a simple PowerShell script. Below is an example of the script I have been using. PowerShell Script # Sets the specified site as an Organisational News site. Update the URLs below. $adminSiteUrl = " https://XXXXX-admin.sharepoint.com " $newsSiteUrl = " https://XXXXX.sharepoint.com/sites/SITENAME " # Connection to tenant Connect-SPOService $adminSiteUrl -Credential $cred # Set specified site as organisational news site Set-SPOOrgNewsSite -OrgNewsSiteUrl $newsSiteUrl # Confirms process completed and specified site has been set as organisational news site Write-Host "Organisational News site has been set" -ForegroundColor Green What do you need to get started? Ensure ...