Paul Bullock

SharePoint Communication Sites, the new Publishing Sites

Today, at the SharePoint Virtual Summit 2017, Microsoft announced the next wave of upcoming innovation around four key themes, Share with confidence, Transform business process, Inform and engage employees and Harness collective knowledge. In this post, we focusing around the awesome new modern experience for the classic Publishing Sites, called “Communication Sites” in the Inform and engage employees section of the Summit.

Create Communication Site

The new name for Publishing Sites better describes what this feature is all about, the Intranet. In our time working with this classic experience, we have developed a few intranets using Publishing Sites, to build extensively customised experiences for our customers, mainly focused around communication providing a hub for users to go to find out news, events, policies and guidance on business processes.

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Paul Bullock

Create SharePoint environments with AutoSPInstaller

Yo Pros! We have found this fantastic tool to help setup farms quickly that we had to share with you!

It’s our fifth project now requiring multiple SharePoint farms to support the ALM process for Dev, Test, Production; which was needed to built quickly whilst maintaining best practice and consistency.

We can unknowingly introduce small differences in deploying each farm. Lunch, tea breaks, consulting, distraction, distraction, distraction…. this is common in the workplace, but if you miss a step then the farms can become further apart in their quality and thus introduce risk and artifacts in deployments that were not expected.

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Paul Bullock

Importance of aligned SharePoint Development environments

In numerous projects I have seen development environments that resemble nothing like production. Only to result in a problematic transition through the ALM process, bugs caused by inconsistency, significant differences in SharePoint updates, configuration and even permissions.

I am not saying that you shouldn’t write your app to “expect a specific configuration” or to avoid best practices around handling configuration issues. However, to reduce issues down the line, as a minimum, environments should be setup with the following:

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