Have you ever wondered why some people do better at work, especially in large organisations, when they don't appear to be any better than others? They have a glow about them that makes them appear to stand out more and attract more attention. When it comes to promotions, they are ahead of others and mentioned by all levels - sometimes positively, sometimes negatively.

What is is about them that often makes them stand out? Confidence.

![Confidence is the preference of the habitual voyeur of what is known as...](e.jpg)

I have been listening a lot more to audiobooks in the last couple of years, including some autobiographies. One of the phases I went through was comedians and there was a common theme where they often did not think they were better than others and felt that there were others more naturally gifted than they were. Both ![John Cleese](https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/So-Anyway-Audiobook/B01KG20M68) and ![Eddie Izzard](https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Believe-Me-Audiobook/B0727KV8RP?qid=1547298136&sr=sr_1_1&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_1&pf_rd_p=c6e316b8-14da-418d-8f91-b3cad83c5183&pf_rd_r=C07CHDQ4P51S9CCDGMP9&) spoke on this and that it was their confidence to push on through that saw them get to way they are now. Yes, this absolutely needs to be backed with hard work but in the face of much adversity, especially for Eddie Izzard in the early years of his career, it was the confidence to keep going and that he was doing the right thing. Both John and Eddie came from an English public school system (which meant their parents paid for their education rather than the state for those not in the UK) and attribute a large part of this to their confidence. However, this isn't the only way.

## How does it help?

This is where I will drop away from my nature of being scientific and evidence based and go with my experience and feeling. Confidence helps to keep you on a single focus. It ensures that you move ahead with one idea without the debate and slowdown that can take place with uncertainty. Confident people can usually pull people along with them, bringing teams together where uncertain teams can be pulling in different directions and meandering towards no ending.

The reason that others are drawn to them in big organisations is that the confidence to move forward gives direction to others when teams can feel drawn to different routes. Confidence ensures momentum and while it may not always be the best direction, the push forward can make if become a good direction.

## The risk of overconfidence

But what if it's not the right path to take? What if that confidence blinds you to the problems and ignore the risks and red flags that are so obvious in hind sight? This is where balance is the key - holding enough confidence to get things done while being ready to listen to others and adapting based on it.

In my earlier career, a head of technology made a great difference where his confidence to make change drove through a modern program and helped to improve the way that technology ran. He took away a hero culture where the focus was on working hard rather than working smartly and gave focus to the organisation. Unfortunately, this took a bad turn when he stopped listening to any opposition and focussed on his way or no way. There was no listening to what was going wrong and so no adjustment away from bad paths. Soon, the dissenting voices were louder than the backers and it was time for a change.

The answer is to hold some people around you who you trust to tell you when you are wrong and listening to them. Don't be diverted by the noise of dissenters but do look back at why they are there and if there is merit to it rather than their own cross purposes.

## How can I get more confident?

That's a great question and not one that can be answered in a short blog. The great news is that you can change no matter how old you are, as noted in [this article](https://www.forbes.com/sites/margiewarrell/2015/02/26/build-self-confidence-5strategies/#6a6feb7b6ade) from Forbes. Your neural plasticity is adaptable enough that you can change the way you think. Look back at what you have done well and stick to those for a while to build your confidence.

The other thing is to act confident. Both John Cleese and Eddie Izzard noted that they did not always have the conviction in things but acted like they did. This will have the dual effect of you appearing confident to others but it will also boost your own confidence. The way people treat you affects how you feel so appearing confident will help people treat you as confident and be a self-fulfilling cycle.

Finally, I would say that you should prepare and practice. As with sports, building muscle memory helps you succeed, the same is true mentally. By repeating activities, you will be comfortable with what is going to happen. Practice what might go wrong as well so that you feel prepared and don't panic as they hit. You can also read plenty of pithy lists online but don't get too hooked on those.

## Bouncing back from low confidence

Now this is a hard one. It's often caused by an event such as an embarassing moment or a failure. Losing your job or having an argument with someone you respect. You get caught in a cycle where thinking about it can dominate everything and distract from what you are aiming to do.

So stop, take a breathe.

![Pause a minute](

Have a look at what happened before. What went wrong? Why did it happen? What was good about it? What did you learn? From all those things, what can you do to help make sure it doesn't happen again. How should you adjust your focus? Was it just a one-off that you should put to one-side? Only you can truly know. But whatever happens, do not let it entirely dominate and stop you.

## Tighten your tie, straighten your back and hold your head up high

So now is the time to look at the projects you delivered well, the presentations that wowed the attendees, the flowers that grew, the goals scored in Fifa, the likes on Twitter and the refactored lines of code that shrank the project to half the size. Those things that made life better and made you shine. Remember that feeling and hold on to it because that was you and can be you again.

p.s. this is no excuse to [just be incompetent](https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-why-incompetent-people-often-seem-so-confident), only to make the most of your ability and stop the incompetents winning!


An Advent series - The power of confidence

The other day, I was doing a deployment to Azure Functions and I sat there and knowingly clicked right click and publish. I had a CI/CD Pipeline on Azure Dev Ops but I still did a right click publish. Now this isn't the right thing to do. This doesn't check that it works on other machines, this doesn't log it with release comments and it doesn't run automated tests. But I knew this was all ok. I knew it wasn't the completely right thing to do but I was ok with that. Does that make me a bad person?

## Let's take a trip back in time

![Time warp](/images/2018/12/timewarp.jpg)

A little bit of history about myself. I started working in an investment bank in the UK on the technology side on a graduate programme. From day one, it was all about getting stuff done, it was all about keeping the traders happy, keeping them making money. I was learning new technologies but just enough to be useful. It was not necessarily about making sustainable code the majority of the time, it was about getting it done quickly. There was a real hero culture with people working long hours just to keep things running. The louder voices that supported the main users were the big winnders. And this is how I started off.

After a couple of years, I had the opportunity to work in Singapore for the same company. I had never been obsessed with back-packing but wanted to see a new place from the inside so this was perfect. It also introduced me to a new way of doing development. Working with more people who had come through formal training in school on development techniques rather than many self-taught people, there was more of a focus on doing things the right way. There was also the massive benefit of a timezone gap that meant the majority of users in the UK were not really online until around three in the afternoon, meaning that the morning's were less pressured and time was spent working on the code. This was the early 21st century and so agile techniques were really starting to take off, even if not understood by the management teams (especially the Project Management Office) but it meant exploring different ways of gathering requirements and tracking work done.

I also started to introduce unit testing to my code, something I hadn't really heard of before. I pushed for the extra time to have automated tests instead of the more usual iterative hit and hope that I had done before. This made me think more about the repeatability of my code and reducing code complexity, improving my code to be more testable with interfaces and learning about Dependency Injection.

This wasn't just a coding lesson though. I started to see the benefit over the long term of doing things the right way. When I spent more time on work and made sure it all worked from the start, there was less of a need for long nights working out problems. Having regular daily calls with the users to ensure that we were meeting the right requirements was very different to the long phases of projects that we had done before. I thought about documenting as part of my code and learnt about the benefits of Behaviour Driven Development where users (or at least product owners) could understand the tests we were writing through well named code, helping ensure that we had understood the requirements.

![Flying back from Singapore](018/12/jumbojet.jpg)

## Applying my learnings

A few years later when I moved back to the UK and there was once again the pressure to just get things done. However, it was different now. I had the knowledge on what was the right thing to do. I knew about having unit tests with more than 90% coverage and automated UI tests. I knew that we should have a daily stand-up meeting and run regular retrospectives to make sure that all voices were heard and we continuously improved. So I made sure I continued doing all this?

No, is the simple answer. The difference was that now I could make an informed decision. I did make sure that I had unit tests but there may only have been 60% or so coverage. We made sure that we got things done and when projects were larger than a few people, we had daily stand ups and tracked as user stories. But the retrospectives would often only happen once a quarter if at all. I would sometimes copy code directly in to Production if it needed a quick fix. There are definitely times I wish I hadn't but it all helped me get the right balance.

As I moved further in to the world of SharePoint, the same logic applied. I worked hard to know the right of doing things (i.e. never use SharePoint Designer) but if there was a genuine requirement to have a fully customised page to meet a need for the business, I would take that step. I knew enough to document it well and know that it would be painful later when we had to migrate but it was an informed decision.

## TL;DR

Make sure you know enough about how to do the right things so that you also know enough about when to do the wrong things. Know what the consequences are and be prepared to take a known risk. Balance the devil and the angel on your shoulders with facts, not just a reckless push to get things done.

![Angel and devils are waiting to chat](018/12/devilangelducks.jpg)


An Advent series - Knowing when you’re not doing things the right way and being okay with that

Much of the focus on modern SharePoint has been on the pages and lists but for me, the true magic has been the introduction of modern development tooling with the [SharePoint Framework](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/spfx/sharepoint-framework-overview) (SPFX) that has introduced tools like [Node](https://nodejs.org/en/), [Gulp](https://gulpjs.com/) and [Webpack](https://webpack.js.org/) to deliver powerful front-end solutions. When coupled with the great community of developers like the [PnP community](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/community/community) that deliver [samples](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/SharePoint/gallery/?filterBy=SharePoint,Samples) and other tools (like [PnP JS](https://github.com/pnp/pnpjs)), it is much easier to develop modern looking solutions that match the new look. To demonstrate this, I have extended the Policies pages from my [last](/2018/12/15/advent-day-fifteen-adding-page-approvals-in-modern-site.html) [posts](/2018/12/14/advent-day-fourteen-building-policies-site-in-modern-site.html) to have a webpart that allows you to search by the tagged metadata for each of the documents. You can see the full solution at https://github.com/kevmcdonk/Mcd79PoliciesViewer.

![Policies Viewer](/images/2018/12/PolicesViewerWebPart.PNG)

## Getting started

There are some great documents from Microsoft around getting started with SPFX at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/spfx/set-up-your-developer-tenant so I won't replicate too much of that. I picked the webpart and went for React as the Framework. So instead the focus of this is what I used to show the documents. I wanted it to look like SharePoint so I used [Office UI Fabric](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric) to integrate it well. To retrieve the data, I used the PnP JS Core framework.

## How does it work

The webpart retrieves the list of policies from SitePages on the site. It also expects two lists - Departments and PolicyRoles. These provide the metadata that can be assigned to policies and can also be searched for.

PnP JS gives a good looking bit of code for querying lists, such as the code below for retrieving the departments:

    public getRoles(): Promise<any[]> {
        return pnp.sp.web
        .lists
        .getByTitle('PolicyRoles')
        .items
        .select('Title','ID')
        .get().then((items: any[]) => {
            return Promise.resolve(items);
        }).catch(error => {
            console.log('Error ensuring list: ' + error.message);
            return Promise.reject('Error returning list');
        });
    }

## What's next for it?

I would like to add some more magic to the look of it by using Isotope to give better animation to filtering. It would also be great to introduce search as well so that it searches the content alongside the tags themselves.


An Advent series - Building a modern SPFX webpart to search policies

Modern SharePoint Page Approvals have really added to the possibilities of modern pages for real life situations, especially where teams want to control the content that is displayed to all. With classic pages, you could use the default publishing or use the clunky SharePoint Designer Workflows but now the Flow backed approvals are far easier.

## Setting up page approvals

To set up an approval process on your Pages library, you navigate to that library and expand the Flow menu.

![Setting up page approval](/images/2018/12/ModernSharePointSetupPageApproval.PNG)

You can then configure the name of the flow and who the approvers should be. Expanding details shows the connections that are either used or set up if they do not already exist.

![Configure Flow](/images/2018/12/ModernSharePointConfigureFlow.PNG)

You now have a flow set up. Any amendments you make to a page now show the option to Submit For Approval instead of just saving.

![Configure Flow](/images/2018/12/ModernSharePointSubmitForApproval.PNG)

Once clicked, you must enter some approval comments and then wait for the approver to get moving. If you happen to be the approver, you can approve the page straightaway by clicking on Review Approvals and reviewing the approval.

![Configure Flow](/images/2018/12/ModernSharePointApproveEdit.PNG)

If you have the Flow App on your phone, you get a notification that you can approve there and then. If you have an Apple Watch, you get even more interupted!

![Configure Flow](/images/2018/12/FlowApproval.PNG)

The approver can reassign or add comments before approving or rejecting. It's as simple as that. But what if you don't want it to be as simple as that?

## Customising the Flow

What about if you wanted two levels of approval? Or what if there are different approvals depending on the department selected? The great news is that you can configure the Flow once it is created. Navigate to https://flow.microsoft.com and you will find the Flow that you created under My Flows.

![My Flows](018/12/MyFlows.PNG)

Editting the Flow, you can add a condition to send an approval based on the Relevant Department.

![Flow condition](/images/2018/12/FlowCondition.PNG)

This means that you can extend the logic or change the details as needed.

With all these in place, we have met all the requirements I spoke about in the previous post. Next, it's time to look at some customisations.


An Advent series - Adding page approval to the policies site in Modern SharePoint

Modern SharePoint sites are taking hold and so people are starting to make real use of them, including the latest changes like Page Approvals.

I have worked on a few different Intranet/Digital Workplace projects now and in almost all of them, there has been the requirement to have a Policies site. Whether it was for the HR policies only or included all policies for the whole organisation, it needed to make it easy for staff to find the latest changes and not be hidden away. In many cases, there was also the requirement to have approvals for any changes to a policy. So how could this look on a Modern SharePoint site?

![Modern SharePoint Policies Site](/images/2018/12/ModernSharePointPoliciesSite.PNG)

I had a few requirements:

- It should be able to cope with Policies as documents and as pages
- There should be an approval process for changes to policies
- Policies should have metadata, initially Department and Role that the policy is relevant for
- You should be able to see the latest policy changes
- It should work on mobile devices

I started out with a standard Communications Site and then took a look to see which policies I could use. Thanks to the wonderful sharing nature of the internet, I have added the following:

- Project Management Policy - https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/upload/pdf/Project_Management_Risk_Management.pdf
- IT Architecture Policies - https://ict.police.uk/national-strategic-ict-principles/
- Sales and Marketing Policy - https://www.infogovbasics.com/challenges/sales-marketing-customer-expereince/
- Security Policy - https://www.projectmanagementdocs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Security-Policy.docx
- Company Handbook - http://www.human-resource-solutions.co.uk/HR-Policy-Pages/HR-Policy-Manual/Document_Management_HR_Policy_Manual.html

Some of these I copied out in to pages and others I left as documents which were then displayed on a page using a File Viewer WebPart.

![Company Handbook](/images/2018/12/ModernSharePointCompanyHandbook.PNG)
![Sales Governance](/images/2018/12/ModernSharePointSalesGovernance.PNG)

For the list of policies, they are displayed as tiles in a list and grouped by the metadata such as by role. The content can be searched using the standard site search box and users can create their own views if required.

![Policies by role](/images/2018/12/ModernSharePointPoliciesByRole.PNG)

The latest changes are shown as tiles on the home page so staff can easily see the latest.

![Policies by role](/images/2018/12/ModernSharePointLatestChanges.PNG)

Finally, you can show these policies on other sites, such as the Human Resources site. Eagle eyed readers may notice that this is from the SharePoint Starter Kit - more on that in a minute.

![Policies on HR site](/images/2018/12/ModernSharePointCrossSitePolicies.PNG)

So is this all that is needed?

## Next steps

The lack of search box on the main part of the screen and the inability to show the policy metadata on the tiles reduces some of the benefits of the improved looks. It is also not possible to show a policy in multiple departments or roles in this way, even though it can be possible to mark a policy with multiple values.

What is better news is that all this can be changed. You can develop a custom webpart to show the policies in a single view that can be sliced and diced by the metadata and a search box added. This is something I will cover in a future blog post.

I would also like to submit this to the SharePoint Starter Kit but before I do, I would love to get some feedback as to the sort of extra requirements you have seen or requested before. Drop me a tweet with any thoughts.


An Advent series - Building a policies site in Modern SharePoint and Page Approval

Have you ever wanted an easy way to show off how good Modern SharePoint looks for an Intranet? The PnP Community have a great solution for you.

Modern Sites in SharePoint work fantastically out of the box and it is very quick and easy to get a great looking site. What the Starter Kit offers on top is to demonstrate how to add additional customisations to the site with items like a custom footer and additional webparts. It demonstrates how you can integrate custom changes that maintain the same look and feel to the rest of the modern site.

## How do you set it up?

One of the real benefits of this kit is the demonstration of creating a set of sites and supporting metadata which is set up with a single command. The installation of the starter kit makes use of the [tenant template](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-pnp/apply-pnptenanttemplate?view=sharepoint-ps) scripts from the PnP community meaning that a single line can be used to build up multiple site collections:

`Apply-PnPTenantTemplate -Path starterkit.pnp -Parameters @{"SiteUrlPrefix"="demo"}`

A couple of things I found while using the scripts:

- You need to be the TermStore admin which isn't set by default in a new tenant - https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-starter-kit/issues/196
- At the moment, it doesn't appear to work when you have MFA enabled but hopefully someone out there will be able to solve this soon - https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-starter-kit/issues/179

## What do you get?

![Contoso Portal](/images/2018/12/ContosoElectronics.PNG)

The script will add a set of Site Designs and Site Scripts which can be used to create department team sites and others, a set of webparts such as the world clocks, people directory and tiles and finally some page customisations such as the portal footer. It is a great example of building on the standard sites that can be used without breaking the look and feel. It demonstrates how you can keep it SharePoint-y while retaining a corporate brand.

What is great to see is how the list of web parts are expanding and it is good opportunity to start contributing yourself. Don't forget...

### Sharing is caring!

![Sharing is caring](/images/2018/12/SharingIsCaring.jpg)

> Image courtesy of Toa Heftiba via Wikimedia https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sharing_is_caring_(Unsplash).jpg


An Advent series - Have you discovered the PnP SharePoint Starter Kit

After recently writing about ways to learn, today I went along to one of those ways with the UK Tech Communities Hackathon on Bots and AI. This was a chance to hear from some experts on AI and the Bot Framework in the morning and then work in groups of people who haven't met before to try and meet a challenge.

## What did we learn?

The presentations in the morning covered a range of topics but started with a very interesting talk from [Michael Robson](https://twitter.com/mrobson1975) on Ethics in AI, reminding us that it is our responsibility as developers and technology implementers to ensure that we consider the impacts of the solutions we create. It is right that Microsoft is putting so much focus on this and pushing to developers to keep thinking, not just mindlessly pushing ahead. This may not guarantee that Terminator doesn't come true but it helps to do what we can to avoid it.

Experts like [Bill Ayers](https://twitter.com/SPDoctor), [Gosia Borzecka](https://twitter.com/GosiaBorzecka), [Mark Stokes](https://twitter.com/MarkStokes) and [Stephan Bisser](https://twitter.com/cloudguy_pro) spoke on [Cognitive Services](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/cognitive-services/) and the [Bot Framework](https://dev.botframework.com/), keeping us all engaged at the Microsoft Reactor in London. Then, they introduced us to the challenge for the hackathon itself.

## Learning by doing

The challenge was to create a Bot from scratch using the Bot Framework to pull information from an FAQ to act as a IT helper. Ultimately, all the teams were able to get something working with a range of people from developers to power users and systems analysts.

![HelpMe365Bot](/images/2018/12/HelpMe365Bot.PNG)

However, the point I am hoping to make here is that all of us learnt from the event by getting hands on. Whether it was the technical detail of using Dispatches in the Bot Framework, how to pull FAQs from a SharePoint list to a Bot or the benefits of using the Language Understanding service to understand intents and entities from natural language.

I came back home energised by others and bubbling with ideas on how I could use my new understanding. Many of the Bots shown were tailored to be for the attendees organisations or clients so people were already applying their thoughts in to reality. Microsoft had advocates and specialists to answer questions and engage with us all, meaning it was not just a case of learning at the pace of a presentation but learning at our own pace too. We learnt from each other, realising what was harder for others to take onboard and what needed more explanation.

If you are interested in trying out a hackathon, sign up for the [UK Tech Communities](https://uk.communities.tech) mailing list and get along to their next events or keep an eye on the [Microsoft Reactor London site](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-gb/reactor/) if you are in the UK.

![Bots and AI Hackathon](/images/2018/12/BotAIHackathon.PNG)


An Advent series - Learning through hackathons

I have [talked about using the Bot Framework to create Bots on my blog](/tag/bots) previously and think it's a great solution for creating code that works across multiple channels with minimal extra effort. Microsoft has continued to build on its platform by looking at the earlier complexities while retaining the ability to work across the channels.

V4 was made [generally available](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/updates/microsoft-bot-framework-v4-sdk-is-now-generally-available/) in September 2018 and it has been a major difference to V3. [Stefan Bisser](https://twitter.com/cloudguy_pro) has a great slide showing a breakdown of the elements the build up the Bot Framework. The patterns and concepts layer is where the big changes are, improving the ability to modularise the dialogs (i.e. groups of conversations) and middleware such as connections to [Language Understanding service (LUIS)](https://www.luis.ai) and other Azure Services.

![Bot Framework V4 breakdown](/images/2018/12/BotFrameworkV4.jpg)

If you have used earlier versions, you will find v4 a big leap and a very different way of working. The focus on Dialogs has shifted and the use of DialogContainers has made it simpler to group expected conversations together. The use of State has been simplified and more samples for saving state using Azure Storage and Cosmos DB made more prominent.

One thing I found very interesting was the ability to create a Dispatch to wrap around multiple instances of [LUIS](https://www.luis.ai) and the [QnAMaker](https://www.qnamaker.ai/) that will route to the appropriate service based on the responses received. This reduces the amount of custom code and helps simplify how it appears there, something I have found a struggle in the past. The downside is that setting up the Dispatch is too complex with slightly random command lines needed to be run to merge Luis intents with the QnAMaker. The idea is solid but there is more that can be done with the implementation.

If you are looking to get started with a brand new bot, the Bot Framework Blog has a great post:

https://blog.botframework.com/2018/05/07/build-a-microsoft-bot-framework-bot-with-the-bot-builder-sdk-v4/

And there are some very useful samples around Bot-Builder:
https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder-Samples

Sadly, I have not found much in the way of guidance on migrating Bots to V4 and my experience so far has been to review what your Bot is doing and re-write it, rather than update in place. The ways of constructing your Bot can gain so many benefits in the new format that it is worth the pain.

Finally, a shout out to the [Bot Builder Community](https://github.com/botbuildercommunity) for all the work they are doing and making available to fill in some of the gaps in the Bot Framework.


An Advent series - What has changed in the Bot Framework

As someone who has been working in technology and development since the early 2000s, there is always a risk of becoming jaded and just seeing new technologies as the same old thing. But there are still things I get excited about. One of those was the advent of the Modern SharePoint push that started with the [Future of SharePoint event](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2016/05/04/the-future-of-sharepoint/) in May 2016, showing that Microsoft could work in a responsive way and make good looking sites with little effort.

There was still a lot of work to do to make sure that all the features of class SharePoint pages could be met and I believe that almost everything can now be done (with the exception of full branding and in my opinion that is a good thing). The problem now is that while migrating between SharePoint versions is not needed, there is still a big step to migrate pages to the new version. Until now, this required a lot of manual work, blood, sweat and tears to take the old pages and copy the content to new pages. Not any longer.

## Modernize your SharePoint pages

![Create Modern Version](/images/2018/12/createmodernversion.png)

With yet another example of the power of the SharePoint Community, the PnP Core team has got together has worked to create a tool that can automatically migrate a classic webpart page in SharePoint over to a modern page. They have created a set of libraries that can be used to:

- Automate the migration of pages using either PowerShell or .Net
- Allow users to migrate page by page using the SharePoint UI

The second part there is the amazing part where you can allow site owners to take control and move across the content as they want to. This is so key to help migrations work as site owners are the people who know how they want their sites to work but are often busy people with a bigger focus on their main business, not on updating SharePoint. This puts the power in their hands. They can view a preview and choose whether to proceed or role back.

That's not to say that IT Pros and Developers are left out as the migrations can be scripted and run automatically as well. Whether you are more comfortable in C# or PowerShell, the options are there.

You can read more about modernizing SharePoint pages at:

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/blogs/modernize-your-sharepoint-pages/

And you can view an example by [Bert Jansen](https://twitter.com/O365Bert) from the SharePoint Dev Community Monthly Call:

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/blogs/sharepoint-dev-community-pnp-december-2018-monthly-community-call-recording/

Or get stuck in with some code at:

https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-modernization


An Advent series - The power of the SharePoint Modernizer

Have you used [PnP PowerShell](https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP-PowerShell) or many of the other great community initiatives under the [SharePoint PnP banner](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/community/community)? Have you ever hit an issue with it? What did you do? Raise an issue? Tweet one of the community? Did you consider trying to fix it?

Here's my little story of making a fix to an issue I found. The [issue](https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP-PowerShell/issues/1051) was that I was trying to copy files that had ampersands in the name. These were supported in SharePoint Online and OneDrive but I was hitting an error when copying using Copy-PnpFile between site collections - strangely, this didn't occur when in the same site collection.

The first step to try and fix the issue was to get the source code running - the details for this can be found at the bottom of the [PnP PowerShell Github](https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP-PowerShell) page. You can then follow along with the details [Contributing](https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP-PowerShell/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md) page.

In the issue I encountered, it was more complex as the issue could either been considered in the core PnP or in PnP PowerShell. I decided that it made more sense to make the change in PnP PowerShell, as I noted in the issue description:

> So why haven't I logged this in Core? Well I think that this logic may need to move back in to PowerShell and cater for different platforms as the characters above are still relevant for 2013. Therefore I think that the Upload File should be brought in to the CopyFile.cs class and use different Regex expressions for the different platform.

Once I had fixed the issue and tested it but using this version in my migration scripts, I added some unit tests and created a pull request. At this point, I started a discussion with [Erwin Van Hunen](https://twitter.com/erwinvanhunen) aka the Godfather of PnP Powershell. The reason was that the tests needed two site collections but this broke the fundemental assumption of needing a single site collection.

As with many people running open source projects, any complication can cause changes to take longer to get sorted. As I had a fix for my situation, I didn't chase as much as I could have so it sat as an open pull request for some time. What I loved though was that it was left open and robbert-vanandel commented on the Pull Request. This was a spur for Erwin to agree to some changes on the additional site collection and there was my first accepted Pull Request.

It was a relatively simple change but I hope the first of more changes to make. Just need to find more energy to pick up some more!


An Advent series - Getting started with PnP PowerShell by allowing file move across site collections

I promised this blog a couple of months back and after a [tweet](https://twitter.com/gregor_suttie/status/1072024346825244672) from [Gregor Suttie](https://twitter.com/gregor_suttie) asking about what people were using if not Wordpress, it seems a good time to write this.

## The journey to Jekyll

I wrote a [blog previously](http://www.mcd79.com/2017/03/02/hosting-a-ghost-publishing-blog-on-aws-using-a-custom-office-ui-fabric-theme-2.html) on using the [Ghost blog engine](https://docs.ghost.org/?_ga=2.17361915.390977825.1544461432-1817619238.1544461432) on AWS as that is how I had hosted my blog. After my trial year on AWS finished, the costs started creeping up so I flipped over to Google Cloud Engine. Sadly, despite good initial impressions, the free level VM just wasn't enough to run Ghost well and I had quite a few complaints of things not loading. I tried running Ghost on Google App Engine but it was more expensive for the same level of experience.

I had always wanted to run my blog on Azure as that's where I do most of my work but had not found enough options to do that cheaply. That was until the [Azure Blob Static Website preview](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-storage-static-web-hosting-public-preview/) hit and when coupled with [Microsoft Cloud Show](http://www.microsoftcloudshow.com/) mentioning Jekyll, the stars had aligned.

## What is Jekyll?

[Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/) is a lightweight engine that allows you to write your blog in [markdown](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) and then build out your blog as static pages. This makes them lightening fast to load and easy to host as you just need static storage. The [getting started guide](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/) is simple and you don't need to know any Ruby to get going.

There are two main pain points:

- You need to compile your posts to deploy them each time
- There aren't so many templates

However, if you are a bit of a developer, the first point is simple as you can build a CI/CD process and simply check-in your posts to trigger an update - more on this later.

For the template, I had purchased a Ghost template to add a better look than my Delve inspired one previously so I adapted this to work with Jekyll. This was the most complex and onerous step as there were no guides I could find to adapt the syntax directly but running Jekyll locally, it was just a case of iterating through across a couple of evenings. You can also start with one of the base templates and implement your own with basic CSS knowledge too.

## Migrating content

One other concern I had was migrating all the content but you could easily extract from Ghost as a large JSON file. There are importers written for most of the main blogging engines such as [Wordpress](https://import.jekyllrb.com/docs/wordpress/) and [Ghost](https://import.jekyllrb.com/docs/ghost/) listed and this ran quickly and without any issues.

There was some manual formatting needed through some pages although nothing four or five bulk find and replaces couldn't solve. The biggest manual pain was the image assets as some of my earlier posts appear to lose the context but I did not have enough posts for this to be a large problem.

## Creating a static website in Azure Storage

Creating a very simple website is not very easy when you create a new Blob Storage account. Under the left menu, there is now a Static Website Preview link. Enabling this, creates a container called $web where you can then upload your static content.

![Static Website Preview](e.PNG)

Upload an index.html with basic content and you will be able to access the page at the link described on the static website screen, e.g. https://blabla.z6.web.core.windows.net.

## Deploying posts

On to the fun part! Running the command:

`bundle exec jekyll build`

creates the blog in the \_site folder. You can then upload these files to the Azure Blob Storage in the $web container and ask your blog with that link. If that is all you are looking for, then you are good to go.

## Using custom domain names

A great step with the static website is that you can now use custom domain names and also with https.

There are some details on this mentioned in the [Microsoft Docs](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-static-website) around static websites but I found myself getting lost in circles around the set-up. So here are my steps:

- Create a new Azure CDN

![Azure CDN Create](018/12/AzureCDNCreate.PNG)

- Configure the CDN Profile choosing whichever CDN you like - I chose the Microsoft one for the pricing

![Azure CDN Profile](/images/2018/12/AzureCDNProfile.PNG)

- Once created, add an Endpoint to the CDN with the following properties

![Azure CDN Endpoint](018/12/AzureCDNEndpoint.PNG)

- It may take a little time but you should now be able to access your blog via https://mcd79blogdemo.azureedge.net
- Select custom domain from the left menu
- In another window, use your domain registrat to set up as per [this link](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cdn/cdn-custom-ssl?tabs=option-1-default-enable-https-with-a-cdn-managed-certificate#custom-domain-is-mapped-to-your-cdn-endpoint-by-a-cname-record) - below is my example from GoDaddy

![GoDaddy www config](oDaddyCDN1.PNG)
![GoDaddy CDNVerify](oDaddyCDN2.PNG)

- Add a Custom Domain in the Azure Portal with the CDN endpoint URL and your custom domain
- Select the Custom Domain and enable HTTPS as below

![Azure CDN Custom Domain](ustomDomain.PNG)

It may take a little time for the domain to be validated and the certificate correctly provisioned but after a couple of hours, you should be able to access your blog via the custom domain name.

## Deploying with Azure Dev Ops

The steps to build and deploy are relatively simple if a little slow to run due to the requirement to set up Ruby and the Ruby Gems for Jekyll. The first step is to check-in your code to either Git in your Azure Repo or to Github. Then you need a new build pipeline.

- Connect to the repo you have created
- Select an empty template
- Add the "Use Ruby Version" task and configure for version spec ">= 2.4"

![Ruby Task](ldRubyTask.PNG)

- Add a command line task to install jekyll bundler using `gem install jekyll bundler`
- Add a command line task to install any custom gems using `bundle install`
- Add a command line task to build the blog using `bundle exec jekyll build`
- Create a Copy Files task to put the \_Site directory to a staging area

![Copy Files task](evOpsCopyFiles.PNG)

- Add a Publish Artifact task to publish the \_site directory

![Publish Artifact](evOpsPublishArtifact.PNG)

I have this build set to Continuous Integration so that it builds on every check-in but it could also be manually triggered.

Next create a new release pipeline with an empty template:

- Add the defined build as an artifact
- Add an Azure CLI task with the command `az storage blob upload-batch --source _site --destination $(containerName) --account-name $(storageAccount) --output table --no-progress`

![Dev Ops Release Task](018/12/DevOpsReleaseTask.PNG)

- You will notice two variables which need to be added to define the storageAccount and containerName (which should be $web)

![Dev Ops Variables](/images/2018/12/DevOpsVariables.PNG)

Again, you can set this up to release automatically with the build completing but in my case, I decided to allow this to happen manually to control when it took place. The main reason for this is at this stage I do not have an automated way for the CDN to be purged to get the latest home page showing the updated blog posts but I would like to build this in with a script later.

## Summary

As you are reading this, you know that a Jekyll based blog hosted in Azure static website can work. I see this as a great option for blogs and other static websites for more technical writers and at a much lower price than many other blog engines that need https and a custom domain. Any questions or thoughts, please do [tweet me](https://twitter.com/kevmcdonk)!


An Advent series - Building a blog with Jekyll and Azure Blob Static Website

How do you learn new things? Do you organise a course and spend a long day in front of a blackboard? Do you prefer to get a book and read to learn or spend your commute listening to audiobooks and podcasts? Or do you prefer to delve in to new ideas yourself and explore through doing?

In Daniel Levitin's great book [The Organised Mind](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Organized-Mind-Thinking-Straight-Information-ebook/dp/B00M8PUC8K), he talks about three types of learning:

- Explicit learning - the most well known type where you actively try and learn, such as at school
- Implicit learning - being exposed to something such as a language while in a foreigh country
- Learning through self-discovery

Daniel notes that recent studies have suggested learning through self discovery helps you to learn better and for longer than the more traditional ways. In practice, this means exploring ideas, thinking through theories yourself and not just accepting the way things are.

## Is this the end of books and courses then?

![Books]()

My first thought is that if it is working for you then don't change things. For many people, explicit learning works well and in certain circumstances, it fits much better. In 1991, [this study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1834770) found that there was a wider range of results for explicit learning compared with implicit but that those with a higher IQ tended to perform better in explicit.

There is also the benefit that sitting in a training course offers to allowing you to consider the topic during the quiet times. Apologies to any Trainers reading this but daydreaming has been shown to allow the brain to process knowledge and let it sink in more effectively. I find courses trigger considerations not just on the topic but how it can be applied as well. They are also the most cost effective way to introduce groups of people to a topic in one go.

## So should I sit on my laptop each night and try things out?

Short answer - yes.

Many people (if not most) reading this blog will work in technology in one form or other. You can attend courses but in many organisations, these are hard to arrange and negotiate time out of the office. Exploring technology in your own time is the way to get hands-on experience with new ideas and theories. I would still not have found the pleasure of developing in the SharePoint Framework or realised how helpful that the PnP patterns can be. You shouldn't shun your family or cats while doing it but make the most of your time to understand outside your day to day.

This can be supplemented with implicit learning by joining user groups and attending conferences. Being immersed in new ideas that you try out and explore further establishes better engagement with the topics and builds contacts to help you along the way as well.

## Finding time

The challenge with these are finding the time to think. Find a quiet time with either no music or [focused music](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWZeKCadgRdKQ) and allow the thoughts to flow. Back to Daniel Levitin's book and a study by Angeline Lillard and Jennifer Peterson of the University of Virginia studied the difference in four year olds watching the fast paced Spongebob Squarepants vs the the slower Caillou. The fast moving Spongebob had impacts on the children's executive function, causing problems with attention, working memory and problem solving. The slower show allowed the children to build pathways in their brain and think through the ideas to completion.

So to learn better and perform better, it's time to be less SpongeBob and more Caillou.

![Brain](rain.jpg)


An Advent series - Are you learning the right way?

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