Embracing the Modern SharePoint Part 2: Site Scripts & Site Designs

Update November 2021

Time to make some updates to this post! Microsoft has recently made some changes to the terminology and user interface (UI) for the process that this blog post covers. Thanks to the new updates, Site Designs are now called Site Templates. So anywhere you may see the term Site Design or Site Template within SharePoint, this post, or other articles covering the same topic, know that they are the same thing with a new name. The basic functionality remains the same – we can apply our own custom themes, create libraries, set some branding properties, edit the navigation, and more. The only major differences with this update are that the UI has changed for applying templates, templates have to be applied after the fact (not during site creation in the admin center anymore), and Microsoft has also opted to include several pre-built templates for you to use as well.

This post has been updated to change most of the references of “site design” to “site template” (the exception here is the PowerShell cmdlets – they still use the term “site design”), and also to describe how to apply the templates within the updated UI.

WFH Series: Are you wasting your Microsoft Teams PSTN Minutes?

Today’s work from home series is for those that manage Microsoft Teams. I have two questions for you:

How to play System Audio through a Microsoft Teams Live Event

A helpful feature available in Teams meetings is the ability to share your PC’s audio with the other members of the meeting. However, this feature is absent from Teams Live Events (where it would arguably be more useful). Fortunately, this feature can be recreated with a third-party program and a few settings changes.

NOTE: Microsoft has updated this feature in Teams Live events. You can find more information about the updated solution here.

Approving and Routing Item Attachments with Power Automate

This post has been updated to reflect the new name of Microsoft Flow: Power Automate.

Document approval processes are a common business scenario. When we send request document approvals in Power Automate we typically point users back to a SharePoint item or document, but in this post I will show you how to approve a request item and then route its attachments a separate document library.

SharePoint, Azure Functions, and Visual Studio (Part 3)

“In old-school SharePoint, if you wanted to run some custom code in a web part, workflow, form, or event handler, you wrote either a sandboxed or a farm solution. Neither of these are supported in SharePoint Online. So what are developers supposed to do when they need to run some code somewhere other than the web browser? How can they run code in the background, elevate permissions, or fill gaps in the “out of the box” configuration options?”

That paragraph opens a blog post series by Bob German entitled Calling SharePoint CSOM from Azure Functions.

SharePoint, Azure Functions, and Visual Studio (Part 2)