My path to receive the Microsoft MVP award

On the 1st of September, I opened my inbox and found a very  pleasant surprise. I had received the Microsoft MVP for Office Development award!

This post covers some of the things that led to the MVP award and also some personal thoughts about the MVP award program. Please note that this is only my own opinion, I don’t know the award criteria. Hope you find the post interesting.

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Get list of recent documents in SharePoint

recent documents

Similar to my last post Get list of frequent sites in SharePoint , this time I’m using the same approach to query a different API and get the recent documents for the current user.

SharePoint offers an OOB web part that you can use to list the recent documents for the current user. But what if you need the exact same information for a custom SharePoint Framework solution?

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SPFx web parts from different solutions on workbench

workbench customizer

Ever wondered how to add SharePoint Framework web parts from different solutions to your local workbench while developing on localhost? Then look no further 🙂

Even though this may not be a common requirement for everyone, there are cases where it could be handy to have different web parts running on the local workbench that belong to different solutions.

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Thread view for SharePoint classic Discussion Board

thread view

One of the classic SharePoint list types is the Discussion Board. It allows the creation of discussion topics that users can reply to. And users can also reply to previous replies, creating a thread-like scenario.
Unfortunately, Discussion Boards currently only have a Flat view that lists all the replies ordered by creation date. This creates a very poor user experience as it’s nearly impossible to follow the replies to a given topic. Thread view used to be an available feature for discussion lists, but this is no longer the case. There is also a user voice request to bring the feature back.

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SPFx Workbench Customizer

custom-workbench

With SharePoint Framework, Microsoft also introduced a really good development story for creating custom web parts: the Workbench page.
This page is not only available when you are developing solutions locally, but also on a SharePoint site. This gives you the option to access data on a SharePoint site from code running on your machine. Let’s be honest, it’s great!

Unfortunately, the Workbench page also has some limitations for some development scenarios. One of them is, in my opinion, how the overall page styles differ from a normal modern SharePoint page.

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Add Google Analytics to SharePoint modern pages

ga-sp

I had a client requirement to help them add Google Analytics to a modern SharePoint site. The objective was to track all SharePoint page views within the site.

The first thing that came to my mind was to look for a solution available online. As this is a fairly common scenario, I assumed it would be easy to find one for my requirements. But this was also what the client had tried to do before calling us, and they got stuck with some limitations on the solutions that they have found.
There are plenty of solutions available online for using Google Analytics with SharePoint modern pages. From complete implementations, to blog posts with the relevant code snippets. But I was also unable to find one that was able to track full and partial page loads. And so I decided to tweak one to work on the scenarios.

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SPFx solution using PnPjs for Project Online REST API

SPFx Project SharePoint

If you know me or follow me on Twitter/LinkedIn, you must have realized by now how much I like the PnPjs library. Enough to venture myself to speak about it on 3 SharePoint Saturday events last year. The library has packages for SharePoint and Graph endpoints and can be easily used on SPFx solutions. But if you need an SPFx solution that consumes Project Online API, what options do you have?
Kudos to Paweł Hawrylak who started creating the Project module for PnPjs and currently already offers support for a wide range of endpoints. The module is currently in a dev branch and requires additional work and testing, but it’s already a phenomenal effort.

This blog post will cover the required steps to generate a local PnPjs Project package to consume Project Online REST APIs and create an SPFx web part that uses it.

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