SP Online (o365) Tenant : Public Site

 

Architectural Considerations for a public facing office 365 SharePoint Online site :

Often my o365 clients who have the need for a public site have asked me to look into the option to use the default public site that comes in with the subscription. based on the below facts and changes by Microsoft architects should consider the below before utilizing what we have out of the box ..

With the new changes in place for o365 I wanted to collate all the information related to public SharePoint sites so that we can make an educated design / architectural consideration for utilizing the existing Public site feature of SP Online.

Since January 2015, Microsoft is making changes to the SharePoint Online Public Website feature. Customers who currently use this feature will continue to have access to the feature for a minimum of two years after the changeover date of March 9, 2015. New customers who subscribe to Office 365 after the changeover date won't have access to this feature. Moving forward, Office 365 customers will have access to industry-leading third-party offerings that will enable them to have a public website that provides a complete online solution and presence.

Why is Microsoft making this change?

As part of the evolution of the Office 365 service, Microsoft periodically evaluate the capabilities of the service to make sure that Microsoft's delivering the utmost value to customers. After careful consideration, they concluded that for public websites, Office 365 customers would be better served by third-party providers whose core competency is public websites. Therefore, they’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue the SharePoint Online Public Website feature so that they can focus their efforts and investments on delivering capabilities in Office 365 that will bring more value to their customers.

What does this mean for existing Office 365 customers?

Currently, the SharePoint Online Public Websites feature is primarily used by a small percentage of Office 365 customers for their own external-facing websites. Office 365 customers who currently use the SharePoint Online Public Website feature will continue to have access to the feature for a minimum of two years after the changeover date of March 9, 2015.

Moving forward, these customers will have the option of subscribing to third-party solutions for public website functionality. These customers should plan to move to one of the third-party solutions within the next two years.

What does this mean for new Office 365 customers?

As of the changeover date of March 9, 2015, Microsoft will no longer offer the SharePoint Online Public Website feature to new customers. New customers who subscribe to Office 365 after the changeover date won't have access to this feature. Instead, they'll have the option to subscribe to third-party solutions by using links from Office 365.

How will this change be communicated to Office 365 customers?

All Office 365 administrators who have provisioned SharePoint Online will receive a notification of this change in the Office 365 Message center.

Website hosting partners for Office 365

Office 365 works with other providers to let you create and host a public website to use with Office 365. The partner sites offer access to tools and services that let you create a full-featured website solution, with special discounts available to Office 365 customers who come to their sites using links from Office 365.
Important   You must go to the partner sites using the links provided in Office 365. Sign in to your Office 365 account, and follow the steps here. The discounts are not available if you go directly to the partner websites.
The following website hosting companies currently partner with Office 365.

• GoDaddy
• Wix.com

The partner site offers are supported for most Office 365 customers and markets. If a website partner does not support your country's currency, you'll be directed to the partner's US English website.
If you have questions, there's more information about changes to SharePoint Online Public Websites.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-confirms-it-is-dropping-public-website-feature-from-sharepoint-online/


Here is an online article providing more information about public-facing website in Office 365.

Get started with the Public Website

SharePoint online limitations for boundaries:
SharePoint Online: software boundaries and limits

1.  Not being able to manage the Site Collection features, i,e. Not able to configure public site to use standard functionality like templates, features etc.
2.  A majority of web parts are not available in the public site collection. i.e. CWQP , “Content Search Web Part etc. 
3. Manage Site Collection Features: The link and the page are missing for a public website.
4. Manage Site Features: The link and the page are missing for a public website.
5. Site Content Types: The link and the page are missing for a public website.
6. Site Columns: The links is missing for a public website you can access the page by using the following URL: [URL]/_layouts/15/mngfield.aspx.
7. Solution Gallery: The links is missing for a public website you can access the page by using the following URL: [URL]/_catalogs/solutions/Forms/AllItems.aspx.
8. Web Part Gallery: The links is missing for a public website you can access the page by using the following URL: [URL]/_catalogs/wp/Forms/AllItems.aspx.
9. List Template Gallery: The links is missing for a public website you can access the page by using the following URL: [URL]/_catalogs/lt/Forms/AllItems.aspx.
10. Term store management: The link and the page are missing for a public website.
11. The Variations feature is available for SharePoint Online Enterprise (E1), SharePoint Online Enterprise (E3 & E4), SharePoint Online Midsized Business, SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise. If you have another license, e.g. Small Business etc. then you don’t have that feature.

The only sub site templates that can be used on the online version are:

• Team Site
• Basic Search Site

Reference  : https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3027254

Nintex Forms & Sharepoint Column Validations - Email Address

Email is the one field that has started coming up in most of my forms and a validation for this field is really important when there is a workflow associated with this field.

SharePoint 2010, SP2013 :

Formula :

=AND(     ISERROR(FIND(" ", [Email],1)),     IF(ISERROR(FIND("@", [Email],2)),         FALSE,         AND(             ISERROR(FIND("@",[Email], FIND("@", [Email],2)+1)),             IF(ISERROR(FIND(".", [Email], FIND("@", [Email],2)+2)),                 FALSE,                 FIND(".", [Email], FIND("@", [Email],2)+2) < LEN([Email])             )         )     ) )

Replace [Email] with your list column name and paste this formula in the column validations section.

 

 

The basic rules being enforced here are:

• Email contains No Spaces
• Email should have only 1 @ symbol
• @ symbol cannot be the first character
• Should have at least 1 . after the @ symbol
• Should have at least 1 character between the @ and the .
• Email Field cannot have the last character as the .

Nintex Forms :

I started working on Nintex forms recently and its been a cake walk. Its super easy and simple and I will have a dedicated blog on Nintex forms as well shortly.

 

Meanwhile, if you have validations in your SharePoint columns and have a Nintex form associated with it the validations do not appear in the Nintex form.

 

Nintex form has controls which have huge capabilities

 

In the validation section choose regex : \b[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4}\b

 

Happy Coding!

Microsoft Ignite - Chicago Sparks!

Chicago sparked with approx. 23k attendees in this huge conference. This was one full week of being social & learnings!!

 

 

The Keynote was very well orchestrated and the demos were worth all the attention:

Satya Nadella's main Key focus was :
1. Era of more personal computing
2. Reinventing productivity and business processes
3. Building the intelligent cloud backend for the worlds applications

The demos that fascinated me were mainly focused on the below :

Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge will enable people to take notes on the Internet and share with others. Cortana is able to help with browsing tasks.

Microsoft Cortana is supported with an intelligent cloud backing up Windows 10 so it can intelligently answer complex questions. It's ability to search for questions online combined with helping you with simple tasks like how to use your PC, for instance as demonstrated at Ignite will have a huge impact!Cortana can also connect to PowerBI so you can ask her to answer questions regarding your business data. In the demo Cortana was able to answer questions such as ‘show me the average number of PCs that our attendees have by industry’.


Office 365 Delve
Office Delve is a collaboration tool that show the communication flows amongst teams such as email, Skype and Yammer as well as counts and growth rates. It is also able to keep track of work like balance by monitoring activity out of office hours.
Using the Health Tracker Dashboard you can see a view of team interactions, time spent in meetings and compare it to the average for the organisations. Plus, Outlook remembers the last files you have used saving you time. In addition Microsoft Sway which will be coming to Office 365 for Business next month.

 

 

Public Preview Of Office 2016, SharePoint 2016

Microsoft announced public availability of the preview version of Office 2016 with the final release slated for fall of 2015. Demos of Office 2016 showed emphasis on

• Document co-creation
• Pop-up warning messages meant to thwart corporate data leakage before sharing files via email or cloud services.
• Microsoft will be adding Sway to the Office family of apps with its next release. Sway is a new content-creation tool for mixing text, images and video from around the Web into one seamless Web page for sharing.

During the ignite week a sneak peak into the SP2016 preview was available and I enjoyed the liberty of using it. Still in the build phase this is something I am looking forward to..

 Click here to see/register to view the SP2016 preview (working site during the Ignite sessions)

 

Some great features for Microsoft products were announced and here's my learning's from Microsoft Ignite for SharePoint 2016 compiled in a PowerPoint slide :

 

 

 

 

 

My personal top 15 SharePoint related sessions from Microsoft Ignite are here as a quick reference:

 

1.	A New People Experience in Delve: Discover People Through Content, and Content Through People
2	Advanced Enterprise Content Management and Classification in SharePoint On-Premises and Office 365
3	Best Practices for Design and Performance in SharePoint Online
4	Big Bang: The New Universe of Findability and Discoverability
5	Dealing with Application Lifecycle Management in Microsoft Office 365 App Development
6	Deep Dive into Safe SharePoint Branding in Office 365 Using Repeatable Patterns and Practices
7	Future-Proofing Your On-Premises SharePoint Development
8	How to Decide When to Use SharePoint and Yammer and Office 365 Groups and Outlook and Skype
9	Microsoft Office 365 Groups Overview and Roadmap
10	Proven Ways to Build Robust, No-Code Solutions in Microsoft SharePoint
11	The Evolution of SharePoint: Overview and Roadmap
12	Transforming Your SharePoint Full Trust Code to the Office App Model
13	What's New for IT Professionals in SharePoint Server 2016
14	eDiscovery Redefined: Real Time and In-Place
15	Office Development Matters, and Here's Why...

Happy Learning!! Here is a pic of one of the great times at Ignite...