Thursday, June 23, 2016

Introducing Microsoft Forms*



June 20th, 2016 Microsoft announced the preview of Microsoft Forms, a new formative assessment and survey tool in Office 365. The caveat is that it’s targeted to Educational licenses only. This means Enterprise customers can not use this at the moment, but as the announcement says, Microsoft is exploring the possibilities for it but with no time line.

You can find it at https://forms.office.com if you have an EDU license.

Let’s not dwell on license issue and see what Microsoft forms all about? The product today is an answer to educators to have a quizzing function inside of Office 365 – not a replacement for InfoPath if that is what you are looking for.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

How to favorite a Groups calendar for easier access in the Outlook Windows client

Office 365 Groups comes with a real Exchange calendar, but accessing a Group calendar is a bit cumbersome via the Outlook 2016 client. You first have to expand the Groups listings in e-mail view, select your group, and then click the calendar button in the ribbon. A different experience than clicking the calendar view and then the calendar.

image

When clicking the Calendar button, a new window opens. In the new window locate your group in the folder navigation pane, right click the group and pick Add to Favorites…

imageIf you go back to the original Outlook window, click to view calendars in the folder view, you should now see your Group calendar in the My Calendars list, much more accessible.

image

I hope the Groups navigation experience towards the different services proliferate into all contexts and apps over time, but for now this is as good a workaround as any to have Group calendars appear side by side with your other calendars.

Want to remove the calendar? Use the same approach, but Add to Favorites has turned into Remove from Favorites.

Friday, June 3, 2016

Bringing out the client side hammer - The one thing you should learn about SharePoint search in 2016

image

SharePoint 2013 has been out for a good while now with SharePoint 2016 well on it’s way, and over the years there are some major flaws which has crystalized itself to me in SharePoint search - especially if you are working in SharePoint Online. So if you plan on learning just one thing about how SharePoint search work this year, this post is for you!

The top four flaws in my opinion are:

  • Best bets / promoted results via query rules
  • Synonym handling / Thesaurus
  • How query rules trigger
  • Remove custom noise words from the query

This post covers a client side solution to solve the last three points above, and I started this back in January based on a conversation with Thomas Mølbach at Microsoft about solving synonyms in SharePoint Online. I’ve had it linger for a while and finally Elio Struyf finished the code and pushed me to get it out there. The solution can be found at the the Github SPSCR project.