Latest Customization, Integration & Extension topics

We had another highly productive “Ask Sympraxis Anything” session! Our heartfelt thanks to everyone who submitted questions and actively participated. Here are the key insights and takeaways from the session! What are the ramifications of breaking permission inheritance in SharePoint online? We highly emphasize the importance of avoiding haphazardly breaking permissions. In the past this resulted in performance issues. This isn’t as much of an issue now as the landscape of SharePoint has evolved, especially in SharePoint Online.

Intranet owners have a wealth of resources at their disposal, catering to their needs across various aspects of intranet management. Whether you’re looking to configure your intranet, enhance your knowledge through self-guided learning, explore powerful user configurations, or seek inspiration from configuration examples, there are numerous community-driven assets available to you. Basic Configuration Intelligent Intranet by Microsoft Intelligent Intranet is a Microsoft site that offers insights into their vision for intranets, providing a comprehensive understanding of what an intranet entails.

In the dynamic landscape of PnP Modern Search, fine-tuning your search experience is not just a possibility, but a powerful tool in your hands. Dive into these insightful tips and techniques to elevate your search experience. Crafting an effective information architecture To pull precise data subsets based on metadata, you first need to build a strong foundation. This is done by an efficient information architecture. The root of success lies in robust and well-defined content types.

Is having employees complete their Microsoft 365 profiles the most effective method to enable a searchable “area of expertise” property in our employee directory? There are multiple approaches to achieve this, and your decision should depend on your long-term goals and platform extension capabilities. The simplest solution is to utilize the existing “skills” and/or “you can ask me” sections in SharePoint User Profiles. To enhance this solution, you can map the values from the skills section to a refinable string managed property, enabling the use of PnP Modern Search for a user interface with filtering capabilities.

The Microsoft 365 conference took place Spring of 2023 and introduced the community to a lot of updates road mapped for the platform. Continue for Sympraxis’ take on many of these changes! Copilot Microsoft Copilot is going to be rolling out slowly and is a new artificial intelligence software. Although there is a lot of excitement about this introduction, we need to mention that it’ll likely be a service you’ll have to pay for and the cost is yet to be announced.

Business use case: Benefits documents Join the Ask Sympraxis team for this session focusing on building sustainable information architecture (IA) through the use case of benefit documents management in your Microsoft 365 environment. From backend management of the content owners, to easy front-end consumption in your intranet, we walk through many of the challenges that are unique to benefits documents. Maturity model approach The Maturity Model for Microsoft 365, based on the capability maturity model, takes a holistic view of this technology and focuses on different business outcomes so you can distinguish your current state versus your desired state.

In this session of Ask Sympraxis Derek, Julie, and Todd are joined by Andrew Connell, developer and SPFx expert, and Stefan Bauer, developer and designer, to discuss when and why to build custom Microsoft 365 code that extends its functionality, particularly in SharePoint and Teams. However, we only suggest extending the platform when the out-of-the-box solutions fail to meet 80% of your business requirements. From there, try some of the tried-and-true technologies that exist such as PnP search web parts or list/column formatting, which give you more configuration options.

This session of Ask Sympraxis focuses on different methods and steps you can take to empower users while you build your intranet and how to set up Microsoft 365. Not every suggestion will be pertinent to your organization, which is why we suggest starting with the Maturity Model and determining your current and desired levels! This session is also a great reference to come back to as your organization levels up in maturity.

SharePoint Search has been available for quite some time and can be managed by a variety of flexible tools. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Microsoft Search tends to be more rigid as it’s not as mature. Although Microsoft is constantly adding capabilities to Microsoft Search, we are focusing primarily on SharePoint Search for this article. Building columns In SharePoint, a common use is to build a list or library with columns to organize information.

We’ve come across many clients who express the need for an employee directory. We have learned this may mean something slightly different for each company. We always return to, what problem are they trying to solve? This week we are discussing how you’ll find people, their information, and different surfacing options. User stories User stories are a great resource to define outcome goals. For example, an employee directory might be used for a wide variety of different reasons so having your goals outlined upfront and identifying who will be the users, why they need it, and what they’re going to achieve by using it, is important.