Power Apps - Introduction to Power Apps

Overview

Power Apps is a robust low-code/no-code development platform provided by Microsoft that enables users to create custom applications quickly and easily. Whether you're a business user, a developer, or an IT professional, Power Apps empowers you to build tailored applications without the need for extensive coding knowledge. In this blog post, we will provide an overview of Power Apps, highlighting its key features and capabilities.

What is Power Apps?

Power Apps is a suite of tools, services, and connectors that allows you to create, customize, and deploy applications for web and mobile platforms.
Low-code/No-code: Power Apps utilizes a visual development approach, enabling users to create apps through a drag-and-drop interface and minimal coding.
Integration with Microsoft Ecosystem: Power Apps seamlessly integrates with other Microsoft products like SharePoint, Teams, Dynamics 365, and Excel, enhancing data connectivity and collaboration.

Key Features of Power Apps:

• App Templates: Power Apps offers a wide range of pre-built templates for common scenarios such as expense tracking, asset management, and employee onboarding, providing a head start for app development.
• Data Sources and Connectors: Power Apps supports integration with various data sources, including SharePoint, SQL Server, Common Data Service (CDS), Excel, and third-party services like Salesforce and Twitter.
• Canvas Apps and Model-driven Apps: Power Apps offers two types of apps. Canvas apps allow you to create pixel-perfect, highly customizable user interfaces, while model-driven apps provide a metadata-driven approach with out-of-the-box components for data entry and validation.
• Responsive Design: Power Apps enables you to build applications that adapt to different screen sizes and orientations, ensuring a seamless user experience across devices.
• Power Automate Integration: Power Apps can be combined with Power Automate (formerly Flow) to automate workflows and create seamless end-to-end solutions.
• AI Builder: Power Apps incorporates AI Builder, allowing you to add AI capabilities like form processing, object detection, and sentiment analysis to your applications.

Use Cases and Capabilities:

• Data Collection and Forms: Power Apps simplifies the process of creating data entry forms, digitizing paper-based processes, and capturing data efficiently.
• Workflow and Approval Automation: Power Apps combined with Power Automate enables the creation of automated workflows for approvals, notifications, and data integration between systems.
• Custom Business Applications: Power Apps empowers organizations to build custom applications tailored to their unique business needs, enhancing productivity and improving operational efficiency.
• Mobile Applications: Power Apps enables the creation of cross-platform mobile apps, allowing users to access and interact with data on the go.
• Reporting and Dashboards: Power Apps can be used to build interactive dashboards and reports, providing real-time insights and data visualization.

Conclusion:

Power Apps is a powerful platform that revolutionizes application development by providing a low-code/no-code approach. It empowers both technical and non-technical users to create custom applications quickly and easily, enhancing productivity, streamlining processes, and driving digital transformation. With its extensive features and integration capabilities, Power Apps is an invaluable tool for businesses looking to build tailored applications and unlock the potential of their data.

SharePoint Framework (SPFx) - Setting up development environment

To set up the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) development environment step by step, follow these instructions:

Ensure you have Node.js installed on your machine. You can download the latest version from the official Node.js website (https://nodejs.org).

Download the appropriate version of Node.

Follow the instructions on the installation wizard

Click Finish once the installation is complete.

Verify the version of node on your computer. Go to command prompt and type: node -v

Install Yeoman and Gulp globally by running the following command in a command prompt or terminal:

Install Yeoman SharePoint Generator:

Create a new directory on your machine where you want to store your SPFx project.

Open a command prompt or terminal, navigate to the newly created directory, and run the following command:

You will be prompted to enter the solution name, description, SharePoint Online or on-premises version, and framework to use. Follow the prompts to set up your project. Choose the desired options based on your requirements.

To run the project locally, use the following command: gulp serve

This command will start a local development server, and you can access your SPFx project in your browser using the provided local URL.

To connect your project to a SharePoint site, run the following command: gulp trust-dev-cert

That's it! You have now set up your SPFx development environment. You can start developing and customizing SharePoint components using the SharePoint Framework.

SharePoint Framework (SPFx) - An Introduction

SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is a development model for SharePoint that allows developers to build custom web parts, extensions, and other components using modern web technologies such as TypeScript, React, and Node.js. SPFx was introduced by Microsoft in 2016 and has since become a popular choice for SharePoint developers looking to build customized solutions for their clients.

What is SPFx?

SPFx is a client-side development model that allows developers to build custom solutions for SharePoint using modern web technologies. It is designed to be used with SharePoint Online, SharePoint 2019, and SharePoint 2016 Feature Pack 2 or later. With SPFx, developers can build web parts, extensions, and other custom components that can be added to SharePoint pages and used by SharePoint users.

Why Use SPFx?

• SPFx offers several advantages over traditional SharePoint development models such as server-side development and sandboxed solutions. Here are some of the reasons why developers might choose to use SPFx:
• Modern web technologies: SPFx uses modern web technologies such as TypeScript and React, which are popular among developers for their performance, maintainability, and ease of use.
• Client-side development: SPFx is a client-side development model, which means that all the processing is done on the client-side rather than on the server-side. This results in faster load times and improved user experience.
• Cross-platform support: SPFx solutions can be used across multiple platforms and devices, including desktop, mobile, and tablet.
• Easy deployment: SPFx solutions can be easily deployed to SharePoint, making it easy to add custom components to SharePoint pages and make them available to SharePoint users.

Microsoft 365 apps to cease Internet Explorer 11 support

Microsoft has announced that going forward Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support Internet Explorer 11.

Summary

• Beginning November 30, 2020, the Microsoft Teams web app will no longer support IE 11.
• Beginning August 17, 2021, the remaining Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support IE 11.
• Customers will have a degraded experience or will be unable to connect to Microsoft 365 apps and services on IE 11. 
• Customers should be using the new Microsoft Edge to get the most out of Microsoft 365 . 
• The new Microsoft 365 features will not be available or certain features may cease to work when accessing the app or service via IE 11.
• Customers’ own legacy IE 11 apps and investments will continue to work.

References

• https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/microsoft-365-apps-say-farewell-to-internet-explorer-11-and/ba-p/1591666

SharePoint 2010 - Workflow retirement announcement

SharePoint 2010 workflows will be retired starting August 1, 2020. This applies to all environments, including Government Community Cloud (GCC) High and Department of Defense. If you’re using SharePoint 2010 workflows, migrating to Power Automate or other supported solutions is recommended by Microsoft.

Timeline

• Aug 1, 2020 - SharePoint 2010 workflows will be turned off for any newly created tenants.
• Nov 1, 2020 - SharePoint 2010 workflow services will be removed from existing tenants.

Replacement Platform

After August 1, 2020, new Microsoft 365 customers can use SharePoint 2013 workflows or Power Automate. 

Note: As per Microsoft, SharePoint 2013 workflows will follow a similar retirement path in the future, so it's highly recommended to use Power Automate or other supported solutions. 

Also, no contents will be lost during the transition. However, all migration of workflows is a manual process.

References
Please read the entire deatils in the following link:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/sharepoint-2010-workflow-retirement-1ca3fff8-9985-410a-85aa-8120f626965f

SharePoint 2019 Announced in the Microsoft Ignite 2017

SharePoint 2019 has been announced by Microsoft in the Ignite 2017 conference which was held from September 25, 2017 to September 29, 2017 at Orlando, FL.

SharePoint 2019 will be released by mid 2018 and expected to have a great deal of new improvements.

Also, some of the improvements that are in pipeline for SharePoint and One Drive  discussed in the Ignite 2017 are listed below:

OneDrive New Features
1) Files on demand
2) Improved File Sharing Capabilities
3) Shorter urls
4) Share from office
5) No Microsoft account needed for sharing securely!
6) File view analytics
7) File previews
8) Sync IRM-enabled libraries

SharePoint New Web Parts
1) Microsoft Forms
2) Planner
3) File previewer web part
4) Activity web part
5) Connector web part
6) Improved Yammer web part
7) 3D file viewer web part

Hope this post was helpful! This post will be updated with more features and add-on announced by Microsoft shortly.  

Document Set Content Types

A document set is a special kind of content type which can be used to group together different  documents with similar metadata as single unit.

Why Document Sets?
You may wonder why go for a document set instead of a folder. Well, behind the scenes, document sets are folders, but they have the ability to include metadata specific to themselves.

Limitations of Folders
For example, inside a document library called "Employee Documents", suppose you need to organize all the relevant documents of each employee like Offer Letters, Resume, Salary Increment Letter etc.

1) No Folder Metadata:  If you create a folder for each Employee and upload the documents inside it, the folder doesn't hold any other information other than the name (which hopefully should be spelled correctly).

2) Inconsistent Metadata
Also, within the folder, you may need additional columns for defining the employee metadata which may be possible through a document content type but the information should be uniform across. User could enter wrong Employee ID or Employee Name metadata for the different documents inside the same folder as highlighted below.

Introducing Document Sets
The above Folder limitations can be resolved using "Document Sets". Lets quickly look how the above scenario and issues are handled by a document set.

As shown below, the Document set is similar to a folder but can hold the metadata for the employee.

Also, all the Document Set metadata information can be shared by all the documents residing inside. Therefore the document metadata remains consistent for all the documents.

Advantages of using Document Sets:

• Welcome Page: Document Set provide an user friendly interface along with a “Welcome Page” for  providing an overview of the contents of the document set. 
• Metadata: Custom metadata/properties can be defined for each document set.
• Shared Metadata: A metadata define for a document set can be further shared by all the documents within it.  The “Document Set Field Synchronization Job”  runs at 15 minutes interval and ensures that the metadata for all the contents within the document set is synchronized with the parent metadata.
• Default Content Types: Default content types can be assigned to Document sets while creating new instances.  A default templates can also be specified for the default content type.
• Available Content Types: The document sets can be configured to have only selected content types. User will only be able to add the content based on the available content types for the document set.
• Workflows: Document sets can have workflows for different events like creating  new document set or  adding new document to it.
• Information Management Policies: Information Management Policies can be easily defined on the document sets. Document set can be archived as a single unit to the record center and content organizer rules can be implemented on the metadata of the document set.The document set is converted into a zip and moved to the specified location using “Send to feature.
• Capture Version History: Document set allows to maintain and capture the version history of the content stored in it on a single location. Folders do not maintain any version history.
• Search: Search Results displays the document sets with a different icon which is easy for end users to identify. Also the documents/ content within the document set can be searched using the search bar given on the welcome page.

Limitations of Document Sets

• Searching ability and performance might degrade as the number of document set increases.
• While downloading documents from document set, the metadata will be lost. 
• Nesting is not possible in Document Sets. Document Set cannot cannot be created inside Document Set
• Document set can be created only for libraries. Lists cannot have document sets but can have folders. 

Points to remembers

• There is no limit on maximum number of documents sets in a document library, but as a best practice, it should not reach 5000 listview threshold limit.
• Document set may have folders in it, but metadata navigation cannot be used.
• There is no limit on total size of a document set. But while using “Send To” feature, if the sum of all documents in the documents cannot exceed 50 MB. For larger work product or number of documents (i.e. more than 50 mb), one should consider Folders.
• In case of shared metadata, if the total number of documents in document set is more than 10, then the job will run every 15 minutes which will update metadata. If the document library has upto 9 documents, the metadata will be updated instantly, without a job.
• Document set maintains the version history, but the end user needs to manually capture the version history of the document set. Whenever a new document is added to the document set, the version of the document set remains unchanged unless version history is manually captured.
• “Content and Structure” option in Site Settings is used to move/ copy the items from one folder/ library/ subsite to another folder/ library/ subsite. But, in case of document sets this functionality does not work as expected. This appears to be a bug.
• Bug in Content and Structure for Document Set: Copying/ moving a “Document Set” from one document library to a specific folder or sub folder in another document library. When we are using OOTB “Content and Structure” feature of SPO, it is moving the selected document set to root of the document library rather than in the selected folder or sub folder. The functionality is working fine for Documents.