SharePoint Dev Kitchen 2016

I was really happy when I heard that the embargo was being lifted on the current SharePoint development stuff, and I could finally tell the wolrd about the amazing SharePoint Dev Kitchen experience of this past March in Brussels. An invitation only -event for SharePoint dev community, the bootcamp was full of people with ideas, views and passion, and the core of the Microsoft SharePoint team.

The big meeting room was buzzing with electricity as we all settled into our seats to hear what the SharePoint team wished to share with us. The preparation emails had given but a little hint on what was happening in our SharePoint world. 

When the keynote ended, I felt a whoosh of delight. The SharePoint team was not only being candid with us but also looking to get feedback, thoughts and ideas from us who crowded the room. Still, the most exciting thing was the message [NOTE: this is purely PRE-RELEASE info]:

SharePoint is going towards more and more open source coding
Instead of doing a whole lot of behind the scenes closed-cirquit development, the SharePoint team has adopted the usage of JavaScript libraries and frameworks that enable the third-party developers to create add-ins and solutions for SharePoint with any JavaScript framework they wish to use.  

Mobile leads development
They were pretty clear on this one. All develoment is done mobile first. Not desktop first keeping mobile in mind but actually mobile first, then desktop experienve. 

SharePoint Home
If I had a euro for each time a customer has asked me: "But where's the SharePoint here in O365? There's only this Sites... is that it? But how do I find my workspaces if I haven't followed them?" As far as I understood, SharePoint Home will asnwer this question once and for all. It's where SharePoint is, it's where the workspaces are. 

A lot of nice new features are coming to SharePoint
Document libraries will get a bunch of new features. Publishing sites will get a new page model as an addition to the current one (i.e. the current publishing pages aren't going anywhere; your data is safe) with the feel of Sway to them - adding modules (or cotnrols or web parts, whatever the name will be) to a page canvas (or several). Publishing sites will get a gallery of these modules - new web parts - that are fully JavaScript based. 

Office UI Fabric
In addition to this new more open way of developing for SharePoint, Microsoft is providing a "fabric" of CSS and (HTML) controls for unified look and feel of any app or add-in that made for Office environments. It provides a grid for responsive design, fonts, animations etc. to be used freely - but no one is forcing it either.

One thing the Microsoft people really emphasized: the old way is not going away; this new model simply enable more.

Dev Kitchen was a very social three day "training". Sure, Microsoft people were giving sessions on what they are working on, the technologies that are used and there were hands-on labs to try out the things in a test environment. However, there was also a lot of discussion of ideas and questions and priorities and wishes and whatnot. There were a lot of people already getting their hands dirty with the new stuff, trying out real life scenarios and showing their work in demo sessions. 

Now the team is ready to come out with the stuff, but this is only the beginning. A lot is brewing in the SharePoint Dev Kitchen and it will be truly interesting to see the outcome! 

Branding SharePoint - What, How, Why?

In our own SharePoint seminar Hyvät, pahat ja rumat (the good, the bad and the ugly) I gave a presentation on SharePoint Branding - what you can do and how you should do it. Many aspects of this topic I have covered in several posts in this blog from a quite technical perspective, jumping straight to how. Let's have a look at the what and why, and a bit more general how.

Why?

SharePoint out of the box is fully functional and ready to use from the UI perspective, too. But to be honest, it's not exactly pretty. Whereas the v4.master for team sites is maybe adoptable for a team site based intranet, the nightandday masterpage can really not be seen as anything else but an example of a publishing master. Neither one of them has the look and feel of the company implementing SharePoint, naturally. The best you can do without some sort of web development is use themes and change the logo, and save the site as template.

In most cases this is not enough. Even the intranet should look nice and reflect the company brand. Once I had made this branding solution to a company, the page all branded and looking nice, but when the customer representative first saw it, his first comment was: "That ribbon is the wrong color!" I changed the color of the ribbon row and he sighed: "Now it's feeling more homey." Despite what the IT guys and the developers might like to believe, branding is important, beyond the usability issues.

What?

SharePoint pages are HTML and CSS, just like any other web pages. It's got a whole lot of server side C# code and client side JavaScript in it, but as for the UI, it is (to be exact) XHTML (1.x) and CSS (2.1), and thus almost as customizable and flexible as web development in general. Almost. So why isn't any web developer capable of SharePoint branding? Because of the server environment, special functionalities and UI with the ribbon and webparts, and that server side code.

It is essential to understand the structure of SharePoint in order to understand what can be done, what not, and how to do it in a SharePoint way. You need to know about the SharePoint controls in order to know what to use and what to maybe ditch. You need to know that you can never ever delete the PlaceHolders from the masterpage (the what from where? - exactly! you need to know!). You need to know that there are limitations to the branding. E.g. webparts have a table-based HTML structure with a limited amount of unique IDs and as for the branding of web parts you are tied to this. You can go to an extent, but you may not be able realize all of the wild visions of the designer who knows nothing about the SharePoint limitations.

How?

Microsoft and several other instances promote SharePoint Designer a lot. But seriously: it is a good tool for e.g. external data connections, customizing list views on a specific page, creating a custom workflow etc. stuff for a single existing site, but it is not a branding tool when you want to have a managable branding solution that can easily be deployed in several site collections and not breaking with migration. For that, you really need a proper SharePoint branding solution made in a managable way in VisualStudio, deployed as a .wsp package, full with features.

A typical branding solution can contain:

• 1-4 custom masterpages
• 0-4 custom page layouts
• 1 or more CSS files
• branding images
• possibly JavaScript files
• possibly content types
• possibly custom Content Query Web Parts
• feature and event receivers to automatize the masterpage implementation

Currently I still use XHTML and the CSS v2. There are a whole lot of IE7s still in use in the customer organizations, and even these web technologies create some problems with IE7 and require some specific CSS rules (instead of separate stylesheets, I prefer the * prefix to target IE7) in order to look like it should. HTML5 used in the way intended requires a whole lot of polyfills to work in older browsers, and CSS3 features are still partly browser tech dependent (i.e. webkit vs. moz) as is, so using those already means double work in many places, let alone targeting IE7, unless we simply decide the IE7 users be left with a less rich UI.

But, the future is in HTML5 and CSS3 plus JavaScript, so it's only a matter of time really. Mobile world is already there, more than the regular PC.

Some resources for browser compatibilities:

http://html5readiness.com/
http://mobilehtml5.org/
http://www.findmebyip.com/litmus/
http://www.quirksmode.org/m/table.html

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Sessioni TechDaysissa: SharePoint-sivujen ja Office-integroidun sisällön advanced muokkaaminen, pe klo 14:30

Lue lisää Technet-blogista: Vieraskynä: Sanna Pehkonen - SharePointin edistynyt muokkaaminen

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