The SharePoint Starter Kit is an open source initiative that provides an end to end solution for provisioning pre-built sites, web parts, extensions, site designs and more in an Office 365 environment. If you’ve explored it’s functionality and are looking to see how you can configure and customize it yourself, today we’ll be talking about the Collab footer.

The Collab footer is the menu bar (highlighted in red) at the bottom this image.

The Collab footer is a SharePoint Framework customizer that allows for showing a set of standardized links and supports personalized links for the current logged in user.  You may be thinking this is very similar to the Portal footer. In fact, it is very similar in that it shares the same personal links. That means when a user configures a personal link on the Collab footer, it will automatically show up on the Portal footer in the hub site as well!

The personal links are stored in a property on the User Profile that needs to be created by an admin. Instructions to do so can be found on the GitHub repository at this page.

Here is what the Collab footer looks like when hovering over nested links.

Where are the links stored?

Unlike the Portal footer, where the links are stored in a SharePoint list… the links in the Collab Footer are stored in the Term store which gets automatically provisioned during the deployment of the Starter Kit.

How to modify the links in the Collab Footer

In order to modify the links in the footer, you’ll need to edit the properties on each term within the PnP-CollabFooter-SharedLinks term set. Let’s make a modification to the Legal Policies link. By default, it links to https://intranet.contoso.com/LegalPolicies and looks like this.

If you’d like to change the label for the link, just rename the term in the term set. Select the term and change the default label.

The link value is stored on the navigation property of the term in the term set. Click on the term and select Navigation from the tabbed menu.

Let’s modify the default value to now link to a new library in our HR site that holds policy documents and click save.

Modify the link icon

If you are adding your own links or wish to change the icon of an existing link, it’s very simple. The icon’s used for the links are stored on custom properties on the term and references UI Fabric Icons.

Navigate to the UI Fabric Icons site and select an icon that suits your needs. Let’s modify the lock icon to be the “Documentation” icon instead of a padlock. Hover over the icon with your mouse, and copy the value underneath it.

To change the icon, navigate to the Term Store and select the term you wish to change. Select Custom Properties from the tabbed menu and you’ll find a custom property called PnP-CollabFooter-Icon. The default value for Legal Policies is “Lock”. This value is the icon class from UI Fabric.

Replace this value in the custom property of the term with the Fabric Icon we copied.

If we reload the Collab footer we will see the new icon!

My new icon isn’t working!

You may find when you update the Icon with a different one, that it doesn’t render and instead you see a square box instead.

The reason for this is the SharePoint Framework isn’t using the latest version of Office UI Fabric. Because of this, you’ll have to choose a new icon.

Customize a menu for each Team site

After deploying the Starter Kit, you will notice the Collab footer is identical on both the HR and the Marketing site (this is by design). In the real world, it might make sense for department sites to have their own footer. In my environment, I had deployed an IT site along side the HR and Marketing team sites.

Let’s create a new footer for the Information Technology team site. In order to do so, here are the list of things we’ll need to do.

1. Create a new term set for the IT site
2. Remove the current Collab footer
3. Add Collab footer back with new clientsidecomponentproperties

Create new Term Set

Start by creating a new Term Set under the PnPTermSets group. We’ll call it “PnP-CollabFooter-ITLinks”. Create a couple terms, update their links in the Navigation menu and add the custom property for the icon from the Custom Properties menu.

Remove the current Collab footer.

In order to remove the existing Collab footer that was deployed from the Starter Kit, we’ll need to use PowerShell.

Connect-PnPOnline https://yoursite.sharepoint.com/sites/itsite
Remove-PnPCustomAction -Identity "CollabFooter"

Add updated Collab Footer

Now that we have removed the existing footer, we need up add the footer back and update the clientsidecomponentproperties before we do.

Clientsidecomponentproperties is a JSON object that defines a set of properties to be used by a SharePoint Framework component. Notice the property “sourceTermSet”.

Connect-PnPOnline https://yoursite.sharepoint.com/sites/itsite
Add-PnPCustomAction -Name "CollabFooter" -Title "CollabFooter" -ClientSideComponentId c0ab3b94-8609-40cf-861e-2a1759170b43 -Location "ClientSideExtension.ApplicationCustomizer" -ClientSideComponentProperties "{""sourceTermSet"":""PnP-CollabFooter-ITLinks"",""personalItemsStorageProperty"":""PnP-CollabFooter-MyLinks""}"

In the sourceTermSet value, I have set the value to the name of the new PnP-CollabFooter-ITLinks term set set we created earlier. Run this command and then navigate to your Information Technology site and see the new footer!

Final Thoughts

I hope you find this post helpful. The SharePoint Starter Kit is a great example of how to provision solutions into Office 365. It includes 17 different web parts and 7 application customizers which are free for you use to use and modify! If you have any questions or would like more information on this post, please comment and let me know!

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Welcome back to another post in my blog series on the PnP Starter-kit. If you’ve found this post, it’s likely you already know what the PnP Starter Kit is. However, if you do not, I’ve written a quick starter post about it here. The PnP Starter Kit is an open source initiative that provides an end to end solution for provisioning pre-built sites, web parts, extensions, site designs and more in an Office 365 environment.

Today we’ll be talking about the Tiles web part (highlighted in red)!

The Tiles web part is a grid of links that can be customized using the out of the box page editing experience. This web part allows you to customize which icon to load, the size of the tiles and where the tiles link to. To start customizing, set the page in edit mode and edit the web part.

Icons

If you open up the properties, you will notice in the header a description that specifies how to change/add the icons to your tile. There is a link that brings you to the Office UI Fabric Icon page. This is important, but current limitation (feature?) of the Tiles web part is that you can only source icons from the Office Fabric Icon library.

One caveat you should be aware of as you navigate and start choosing icons, is that the Office UI Fabric site may be more up to date than the icons available in the SPFx solution.  This is because the version of Office UI Fabric used in the SharePoint Framework is a little behind the current release of Office UI Fabric. If you select an icon and it doesn’t load, this would be why.

Configure the Tiles

Unlike other implementations of tile links (promoted links for example), the Tiles web part isn’t list driven. What I mean by that, is in order to change the tiles and their links, you’ll have to actually open up and edit the web part every time. While it is a different editing experience, it actually has some real sweet under the covers. When you click “Configure the Tiles”, you’ll notice a new editing modal pop up.

This editing pane is a table that you can modify properties such as the Title, Description, URL, UI Fabric Icon and specify whether the link should load in the same window or a new tab.

What gets me excited most about this property pane, is that it is not built specifically for this web part. In fact, if you are building SPFx solutions and have a need for inserting complex data types of lists/collections, you can use this! The best part is that this control is included in the re-usable property pane controls repository here.

Create a new Link

Let’s say we are going to build a new Tile link which links to the Microsoft Forms web site. Let’s start by clicking “Configure the tiles” and adding a new record for our new link. We’ll put the title as “Forms” and specify the URL to https://forms.office.com

Next, we need to find an Icon to load into our tile. Let’s navigate to the UI Fabric website and find the icon for Microsoft Forms.

You’ll notice when you hover of the icon, it shows the name of the icon “OfficeFormsLogo”. This is actually the class name that UI Fabric uses to render icon. Let’s copy that value and we’ll paste it into our property pane for a new tile in the “UI Fabric icon name” field.

Now if you click “Add and Save”, you should see your new tile link!

If you’ve found this post, it’s likely you already know what the PnP Starter Kit is. However, if you do not, I’ve written a quick starter post about it here. The PnP Starter Kit is an open source initiative that provides an end to end solution for provisioning pre-built sites, web parts, extensions, site designs and more in an Office 365 environment.

While it really is an exhaustive example of how this can be done, many people are hoping to augment the solution to suit their own business needs. Because of this, I am going to start a series about how to configure and change certain aspects of the starter kit. In this post, we’ll talk about how to modify the footer in the hub site, aka “Portal Footer”.

The Portal Footer is the orange bar (highlighted in red) at the bottom this image.

The portal footer is an expanding footer that allows for showing standard company links and supports personalized links for the current logged in user. The personal links are stored in a property on the User Profile that needs to be created by an admin. Instructions to do so can be found on the GitHub repository at this page.

Here what the footer looks like expanded.

You’ll notice there are columns with a list of links inside. They are grouped by “Applications”, “Internal Modules”, “News” and “My Links” (the links that are held on the user profile).  The “Applications”, “Internal Modules” and “News” group of links are stored within a SharePoint list on the portal site in a list called “PnP-PortalFooter-Links”, which are deployed automatically with the Starter Kit. If you navigate to the list https://yoursite.sharepoint.com/sites/YourSitePrefix/Lists/PnPPortalFooterLinks/AllItems.aspx you will be able to see and modify the existing links and link groups that show in the footer.

Modify a company wide link in the footer

To modify an existing link in the footer, all you need to do is edit one of the links in the PnPPortalFooterLinks list. Let’s do that now. I am going to open up the CRM link item under “Applications” and change the title from “CRM” to “NEW CRM TITLE”.

Once I save the item, and reload the page and expand my footer, I’ll see my new title.

Permission the portal link items

While I rarely recommend item level permissions, there are times where this may make sense. Generally speaking, item level permissions can make it hard for IT staff members to manage what content users have access to in SharePoint. Also, in a list with many items, item level permissions become a performance concern. However, in the case of this links list, it’s unlikely we’ll have that many items so it should be fairly easy to manage.

The footer link can only access items in a list that the current logged in user has access to, thus allowing us to show or hide links to specific users. Let’s say that the ERP application in the “Applications” group should only be visible to a specific ERP team. Using out of the box permission, we can remove access and grant permissions to the item for that team only.

Add my own personal links

As previously mentioned, the portal footer allows for users to create and link to their favorite locations that they access the most. To do this, expand the footer using the arrows on the right. You’ll see the ability to add and edit the links on your profile.

If you are a SharePoint admin, you can navigate to the User Profiles in the SharePoint Admin center and see the values for links that users are storing on their profiles.

Update company name

If you look at the footer, you’ll notice it has a copyright for Contoso 2018 and also has a help desk link to support@contoso.com. Changing these values is the most common request I have seen from users who have tested out the starter kit and want to use these extensions. In order to do this, we actually need to modify the PnP Provisioning template provided with the solution because these values aren’t stored anywhere in SharePoint.

If you have downloaded/cloned the repository, navigate to the provisioning folder and open up the hubsite.xml file. This is the template that defines the structure of the portal site. It includes all of the pages, the navigation, the web parts and identifies which application customizers will load for this site. Towards the bottom of the file you will see an XML node called <pnp:CustomActions>, inside it defines the Portal Footer properties.

Let’s say I want to change the values highlighted in red that correspond to the Copyright and Help link in the footer. My fictional company is Cameronsoft and we manufacture fake widgets, so I definitely want to have my company’s name in the footer at all times. I will change these values in the template.xml before deploying the PnP starter kit.

Now, if i deploy the starter kit, my company’s information will be listed at the bottom instead of Contoso!

Updating an already deployed footer

Let’s say you’ve deployed the footer but you didn’t realize that it would be labeled with Contoso. I wouldn’t try to re-deploy the starter-kit, because you may find complications with that. So here is a set of PowerShell scripts to help you do so. Using PnP, you’ll need to connect to the hub site and remove the existing portal footer, and re-add a new one with new properties.

Connect-PnPOnline https://yoursite.sharepoint.com/sites/demositeportal
Remove-PnPCustomAction -Identity "PortalFooter"

Add-PnPCustomAction -Name "PortalFooter" -Title "PortalFooter" -ClientSideComponentId b8eb4ec9-934a-4248-a15f-863d27f94f60 -Location "ClientSideExtension.ApplicationCustomizer" -ClientSideComponentProperties "{""linksListTitle"":""PnP-PortalFooter-Links"",""copyright"":""@Copyright CameronSoft, 2018"",""support"":""support@cameronsoft.com"",""personalItemsStorageProperty"":""PnP-CollabFooter-MyLinks""}"

We start by connecting to the hub site using Connect-PnPOnline.

Then we remove the application customizer with the name “PortalFooter”. Followed up by Add-PnPCustomAction. Notice, the clientsidecomponentproperties is a JSON object that defines the values on the footer. Just update these to include your company instead of Constoso!

Modify Footer code

You may find the footer isn’t displayed exactly how you like, or you want to add your own custom functionality. Well, no problem there! This is an open source project and you are free to change anything you like. To find the footer code, open your sp-starter-kit folder in VS Code and navigate to /solution/src/extensions/portalfooter.  This is where you can modify the code to suite your needs. Once complete, just rebuild and package the solution then upload it to your app catalog! Instructions on SPFx and how to build and deploy apps can be found here.

Final Comments

I hope you find this post helpful. As I mentioned, I am going to be doing a short series on this for those of you who wish to customize or change the PnP Starter kit. If you have any questions, I suggest going to the GitHub repository first. Eric Overfield has done a fantastic job producing documentation for this solution. If you can’t find what you are looking for, you can ask a question in the issues list or you can just comment on this post and I’d be happy to help!