Develop SharePoint Framework projects in Visual Studio 2015/2017

Introduction

You will come across so many tutorials on SharePoint Framework (SPFx) which were illustrated using “Visual Studio Code”. But don’t worry you can develop SPFx projects using Visual Studio.

Recently “SPFx Project Template for Visual Studio” was released in GitHub. In this post we are going to see how to install “SPFX Template” and create a new SPFx project after installing the extension.

As of today the extension supports Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017.

Steps

Step 01

Go to GitHub Releases page and download the latest .vsix file. Reason for downloading from GitHub is that you may not find the latest in Visual Studio Extension Gallery.

Step 02

Double click on the download template and install.

Select the Products and click install.

Step 03

Open Visual Studio and add New Project (File –> New –> Project)

Under Templates you will see “SharePoint Framework”. Select it and click OK

Step 04

Then you have to Select a framework which you are going to use; Give Component Name and Component Description.

Also you can select the check box if you don’t want to install Dependencies. Usually installing dependencies make our life easier, So keep it as it is.

Click on Generate.

Conclusion

It took me around 15 minutes to create a new project. So keep calm when you are trying to create a new project.

Your solution will be looking as below and you can start working on the solution.

Run the project by clicking “Start” and your first Workbench project will be opened in the browser.

By clicking on + You can add SPFx webpart. 

Content Search in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center

Introduction

Content Search in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center let us to search for emails, documents, Skype for business conversation, Microsoft Teams data and threads, Office 365 groups, SharePoint Online items and more.

Navigate

Go to https://protection.office.com and Select “Content Search” under “Search and investigation”

Real world examples

I would like to address some real world example where we can use Content Search and if you come across few more please comment; so that all will know.

• Get all documents with one or more particular word in documents which are stored in SharePoint Online or OneDrive
• You notice that data belongs to a particular department is shared with another. So you have to search for all the user’s emails, chat history and other Office 365 services.
• What confidential information are shared in public folders. You can search by one or more term.
• Get Search statistics for audit purposes.
• Want to exports keyword statistics to a local location.
• Are people discussion on a particular topic in Microsoft Teams.
• Check whether a client contacted your business team through Skype for Business.

and many more.

New Search

You can click on +, give a name for the search, provide search location.

Also you can give some conditions.

Search Results

You can see the Search results from the below image.

You can click on Preview search results and navigate to detailed preview and also from there you can navigate to original url and see the original item.

Reference

• https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Run-a-Content-Search-in-the-Office-365-Security-Compliance-Center-61852fd9-fe8a-4880-a339-cb19ed3bff4a
• https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Limits-for-Content-Search-in-the-Office-365-Security-Compliance-Center-78fe3147-1979-4c41-83bb-aeccf244368d

Going to delete a Microsoft Teams channel and recreate it – Read this...

Problem Background

I deleted a channel in Microsoft Teams and when I try to recreate the channel there was a error message saying “Another channel already has that name. Try a different one.”

So, till date (12th of July 2017) Microsoft Teams don’t allow to create a channel with the same name which was already deleted.

See this thread for more.

Alternative

Let’s say you have to delete a channel and recreate with the same name. What you can do it simply rename the channel and delete it.

Once you delete with the new name you can create with the old name but not the new.

Future

We all hope that Microsoft will provide us a solution to overcome this issue and in future we can use PowerShell to do a hard delete.

Start a thread in Microsoft Teams channel via Email

Introduction

You can start a thread in a Microsoft Teams channel by directly sending an email to a Microsoft Team channel, so that the channel members can see, like save and reply to the thread.

Also you can share the channel email address with the third party, so that they can email to the channel using their own email address like gmail, yahoo and others.

Steps

Step 01

Login to https://teams.microsoft.com and go to Team and click on three dots “…” of your channel.

Step 02

Then click on Get email address.

Step 03

Once you click you will get a popup with channel email address. Copy the email address and you can start a thread directly by sending email.

Conclusion

You can see my two threads started via email. The first one is by using Office 365 email and the second one by my personal Hotmail.

Limitation

By today the reply to a thread started via a email can only be seen in Microsoft Teams.

How to enable sideloading of apps for Microsoft teams

Introduction

I started building apps for Microsoft teams. Before we start developing we need to enable side loading as a prerequisite.

Solution

Step 01.

Login to your Office 365 portal with admin account

Step 02

Click on Service & add-ins under setting tab

Step 03

All your services and add-ins will be shown. Click on Microsoft Teams

Step 04

Under Apps  change the state of Allow external apps in Microsoft Teams and Allow sideloading of external apps to on as give below.