Come Sway with me

So, Sway.

It has been positioned as something between PowerPoint (beautiful presentations) and SharePoint pages (easy newsletters). Sway can be found between your Microsoft apps – it is available for both your free Microsoft account and it is included in the Microsoft365 suite.

I like the idea of Sway, but since it has become so easy to work with both PowerPoint and SharePoint, I wonder what it’s use is. So, when I had nothing better to do 😉, I decided to find the benefits of Sway.

In case you are new to Sway, or want to learn how to use it, you may want to watch this video by Kevin Stratvert.

Paid or free – is there a difference?

My first question is if there is any difference between the business (Microsoft365, paid) and the free version?

I created a simple Sway in my Microsoft 365 tenant. I did not use a template. This is what the edit (Storyline) screen looks like:

The storyline page in the paid version (Business Sway)

I then created one in my personal Microsoft account. I used Firefox browser to make sure there is a separation between the two accounts. (Edge has a tendency to mix things up). The Storyline part looked the same, so I clicked on the Design button top left. This was the result:

The Design page in the free version – it is the same as the paid version

Trust me, this is the same as the paid version.

You see there is a warning at the top that from May 15, 2024 you will no longer be able to upload your own videos or audio files, but will have to work with embedded videos, so videos living on “other platforms”. Hope that is not an issue for anyone. I have removed that message from further screenshots.

What can I do about the look and feel?

If you click on the Design tab, and then on “Styles” top right, you will get a number of options:

• You can select whether the direction of your presentation is vertical, horizontal or slide
• You can customize colours, fonts and textures – more about that later
• You can click one of the buttons below and get a surprise look-and-feel (I assume over time you will know what’s under which button). There are some clues, such as background and letter colours, and typeface.
• Or you can remix (top left) for a completely “random” look and feel

I clicked “Remix!” and now my business Sway has suddenly turned into a knitting pattern or recipe 😱

A remix – but this is not very business-like

I have the same set of styles to use for my free Sway. I chose a horizontal style, which looks a bit more compact than the vertical business one.

A design of my free Sway. It has the same options as the business version.

Can I apply my house style?

Communication and Marketing peeps will want to know how how to create all messages consistent in look-and-feel. I asked CoPilot and apparently you can freely choose colours, but you are limited to the existing typefaces. That is a bit of a bummer.

To see what can be done, let’s click on the Customize button in the Design pane.

You can add a colour at the bottom of the white box in the middle

If you click on the colour button you can add a colour of choice; let’s go for #C133FF, a hot pink/purple.

After uploading a colour hex code, the styles change to incorporate that colour

Your available colour palettes will change to the uploaded colour. I chose the most right one and well, that is impressive! (NOT)

Better colours, but it looks like a tea-towel 😁

All appears to be dependent on the selected style button, so you can play around with it to find one that changes the background or the letters into the desired colour.

This style looks much better!

On we go. Below the palette you can select from 22 typeface combinations. And as much as I love all things Charles Rennie Mackintosh, I do not think that many organizations use this for their house style.

Lovely font, but not suitable for all businesses

This one is also very nice, but unsuitable for most businesses, unless you sell gothic novels or create horror movies.

Another style that is not too business-like

Fortunately, there are some good combinations, but still they may not be your company typeface.

This looks more business-like

At the bottom you can change font size and something about animations.

As for the front image, you can of course ask people to use one certain image, but there is no option to make it the default. You can save a Sway as a template, but that is personal.

The free version behaves in exactly the same way.

So, after a long check, the answer to this question is NO. You can not use your corporate or brand style.

What happens when I share?

If you click the Share button top right business and free Sway are really different.

Business

Sharing options in the business version.

This gives you the option to share with 3 audiences (specific people or groups, people in your organization with the link, or everyone with the link).
The URL is generic, it does not show any hint of your tenant name.
You can also allow people to edit.

When you select “everyone”, it will be a public Sway and people will also be able to share to Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
(Twitter? That has been X for more than a year and a half, right?)

You can create a visual link, which is a picture with the introduction text, that you can paste into an email.

The visual link

You can also embed it on SharePoint. But why you would not create the content directly on SharePoint, is beyond me.

Under “more options” you can set a password and make the share buttons visible. You can also change the Share settings, which means you create a new link.

Free

You can only share your Sway with the whole world. Additionally to the visual link and embed, you can share to social platforms.
Again, you get a very generic link but I expect that with the free version.

The “More options” are the same as for the business version.

Sharing options for the free version

Where do my Sways live?

Your Sways are personal and live online in your Sway app. You can also see them mentioned on your Microsoft365 homepage.

This means that if you want to create a repository of Sways for your organization, e.g. weekly Newsletters, you will need to store them manually in SharePoint for easy distribution. That can be done in document format in a Document Library, or in a Links List.
This also means that any important Sways that are shared in the business need to be handed over before the author leaves the organization. 😱

Can I turn a Sway into a document?

Yes, you can export it to Word or PDF. If you click … top right of your Sway, you can select this from the menu.

Where to start exporting to Word or PDF

However, this does not always export the colour and typeface correctly. Below and example of my business sway as PDF, where the typeface is suddenly italic and the colour blue instead of hot pink.

This does NOT look like the Sway I exported!

It downloads to your PC so you will have to upload it to OneDrive or SharePoint.

You see from the menu above that you can also print (e.g. to PDF – this also changes the design) or save this Sway as a template. But the template is for yourself, not for the organization.

How do I keep a Sway for later?

If you want to revisit a Sway, you should be able to find it under the “Viewed” tab.

The “Viewed” tab shows the Sways you have looked at.

If you expect to have many Sways, you can also make them a favourite on your Microsoft365 homepage. In the paid version of Microsoft365, there’s a new Tag option which might help you keep things together.
By the way, do you see how much the Sway icon (the top 2 in the screenshot below) looks like the SharePoint one? (bottom of the screenshot). Confusing!
(But not if you use the free version, as that does not have SharePoint)

How to favourite a Sway for later usage

How do I hand over a Sway?

When you leave the organization, you may need to handover any important Sways that need to stay in the organization. Otherwise your Sways will be lost after removal of your account. Here’s how – thank you, CoPilot!

1. Share the Edit Link:
   • Open the Sway you want to transfer.
   • Click on the “Share” button (usually located in the top-right corner).
   • Choose the “Edit” link option.
   • Copy the provided edit link.
   • Share this link with the person you want to hand over the Sway to.
2. Recipient’s Actions:
   • The recipient should open the edit link you shared.
   • They’ll be able to edit the Sway as an author.
   • If they only need to view it, they can do so without editing.
3. Remove Yourself (Optional):
   • If you no longer want to be associated with the Sway, you can remove yourself as an author:
     • Open the Sway using the edit link.
     • Click on the “Edit” button.
     • Go to the “Authors” section.
     • Remove your name from the list of authors.

What do I think?

To be perfectly frank, I fail to see the use for business purposes:

• You can not enforce a house style. You can add a colour, but not use your own typeface. I think this is a major issue for organizations where corporate branding is important.
• Sways live in the creator’s Sway app, so any series that needs to be published together (e.g. weekly Newsletters) has to be published through SharePoint.
• You can print or export a Sway, but the colours and typeface may not be the same as your online Sway
• Sways are all stand-alone “things”; there is no “glue” such as a Team- or SharePoint site to hold related Sways together. There are also no company keywords to act as a binding factor.
• Sways are personal, so whenever an important Sway author leaves, they will have to consciously hand over those Sways that need to stay. Do you really think this is going to happen?
• Sharing creates a generic URL with no information scent about your organization. This is like Forms, but Forms are generally a means to an end and temporary, so it is less of an issue there.

All this screams: “USE SHAREPOINT!” I think SharePoint is so much better for sharing content. It has more robust content management and News and Newsletters are SO easy to create these days that I really do not see the added value of Sway. Perhaps for sharing Newsletters externally? No, there are better newsletter tools.
And PowerPoint has so many easy design options, and the possibility of enforcing a template in house style, that Sway is just too weak to compete.

At my last two organizations we removed the app from people’s view.
In my second organization we were afraid that people would start hobbying and producing lots of content that was not “on brand”. Also, we did not have the bandwidth to support it.
In my third organization people were not very computer savvy and did not like functionality that was “optional”. They needed more guidance. (That is one of the reasons why we introduced our News publishing guidelines)

I can imagine Sway may be a nice tool for private purposes if you do not have too many requirements for typefaces etc. But for my private use it had too many limitations. I wanted to create my “Curses for intranet and digital workplace peeps” in Sway, and wanted an image to the left or right of each paragraph. But that cannot be done; you can only select a background image, not a left or right image.

My findings are consistent with Ami Diamond’s recent question on LinkedIn. He asked about the similarity of the SharePoint and Sway icons and many replies were: “I do not know Sway” or “I do not use Sway”.

But then, Dean Martin liked to Sway so it cannot be all wrong! From this video, it even looks as if he used it for the lyrics! 😁😁 Oh no, Sway does not do animations 😉

What do YOU think?

What are your thoughts on Sway? Do you, or your organization, use it? Are you happy with it? If so, let me know what makes this a good tool for you!

SharePoint site naming conventions – my experience

The other day, Gregory Zelfond’s SharePoint Maven newsletter featured best practices for naming conventions for SharePoint sites.
In the three organizations I worked for, I have used very different naming conventions. So let me share them to illustrate Greg’s points.

My first intranet

We had central creation of sites, but not really a naming convention. We checked if there was already a site with that name, tried to keep names short, avoided spaces and special characters, and tried to bring some order in the chaos by adding business or brand abbreviations into the name, such as AP (AmbiPur), CT (Coffee & Tea) and some others.
It all worked, which is strange for such a large organization (120.000 employees at one time), but then SharePoint was not yet widely used, so we had a few hundred sites at most.

Good practice: central site creation; short, no spaces or special characters; somewhat meaningful for users
Bad practice: no formal naming convention (but best efforts)

My second intranet

This was an excellent example of bad practices before and after migration 😁
(Read more at: my second SharePoint intranet)

When I arrived at the scene, every business or corporate department had their own site collection. (Yes boys and girls, site collections were still all the rage then!)
Ownership of the site collections (including site collection administration permissions!) was with the business, and ICT was site collection admin for general support. And every site owner could create subsites. 😱
As most business owners did not really know about URL character limitations, we also experienced that documents could not be opened due to a too long URL, caused by endless “nesting” of subsites and sometimes very long site names.
Every business had a number of sub businesses, all in that same site collection. As soon as someone needed a site for Marketing, the business owner created one called Marketing under their own sub business, or created a subsite under Marketing if there was already a site with that name. So we ended up with several layers deep and various sites called Marketing (or even “…/Marketing/Marketing/…”) within one site collection.
You can imagine this was a bit messy. 😁

It was fun to support.
“Ellen, could you help me with the Marketing site please?”
“Which Marketing site?”
“Ours”
“Can you send me the link please, as we have four sites called Marketing in different parts of the site collection.”
“Oh really?”

Good practice: meaningful to users
Bad practice: no central site creation, no formal naming convention, spaces turning into “%20” in URLs, long URLs

After migration to SharePoint Online, every subsite became a stand-alone site, as recommended. We finally had central site creation and adopted a naming convention. This was simple: a number, starting with 00001 for the first site being migrated and then onwards. There was no other logic, nothing like “we reserve 00001 until 09999 for this business” so the order was the order of migration, then creation, which is completely irrelevant.
We changed the site name after creation to something more meaningful, but that number was still in the URL, providing no information scent whatsoever. I think it was rather cruel to users.

A site with a numeric URL

On site pages (see above) the number is not so bad, as the site name is shown in various places. Also across SharePoint you will see the site name, not the site URL.

But in documents you only have the number to remind you which site you are in, as seen in the screenshot below.

A document in a site with a numeric URL

Good practice: central site creation, formal naming convention
Bad practice: not meaningful to users

My third intranet

My last employer had central site creation and a solid naming convention when I arrived, and we never felt the need to change:

• a letter to mark the purpose of the site, determining the template, e.g. a for archive, p for project. We later added g for groups (Teams-sites) and i for intranet sites.
• a dash – to separate the letter from the rest
• 3 letters to mark the part of the organization
• 3 letters as abbreviation for the required name

So, that could be “p-ictprt” for a printer replacement project from ICT, or “c-fehsec” for a collaborative site for secretaries of the FEH unit.
After creation, we changed the site name to a more intuitive name.
It was short, it had an information scent, and it allowed us to filter and sort for housekeeping purposes. (In the Active Sites list in the SharePoint admin center)

The homepage of a site with a (somewhat) meaningful URL

Good practice: central site creation, formal naming convention, short, no spaces or special characters, meaningful for users, useful for maintenance and support
Bad practice: none (well, perhaps the dash in the URL but I think that added meaning and it is still short)

Remarks:

1. Please note that the site’s icon displays the characters from the original URL. It will not change upon changing the site name. You may need to change the site icon to get rid of that “2” in the screenshot below.

The first character(s) of the original URL will be displayed

2. You may also want to think about a naming convention for Teams, see this article from Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/community/microsoft-teams-naming-importance
In my third organization, we used the same convention as for SharePoint sites but then with g as the first letter, and we changed the Teams name after creation into something meaningful.

3. Please sign up for SharePoint Maven’s Newsletter if you have not done so yet. Gregory knows a LOT and explains things very well.

Which naming conventions have you used?

Please let me know in the comments!

SharePoint: the good old intERnet days

Did you know that SharePoint used to have internet sites? If you have been there from the start, or from about 2008 or so, you will know that, but if you started after 2015 you may not realize. So, as part of SharePoint’s 23rd birthday celebration, let’s talk about SharePoint and intERnet. And I am not talking about sharing sites and documents with your customers, suppliers or other business partners, but about real websites.

Brand and product sites

I do not know the exact dates anymore, but around 2009 we had a large project at the organization I worked for at that time. We had a successful intranet based on SharePoint (see My very first SharePoint intranet), and at that time you could use SharePoint also for internet sites.
Management decided that we were going to move all our brand and product websites to SharePoint. We wanted to make the best use of our investment in Microsoft tools, have more control over the hosting and maintenance, and save money.
We had a long-term partnership with a good, but very expensive web and brand design agency. They would still be responsible for the design and branding and action mechanisms.
Everyone in Marketing and Sales was very upset as at that time it was fashionable to hate SharePoint. They were very afraid that “it would look like SharePoint” and that was the worst critique you could give a website. (Some people still have that attitude, but I guess they have not seen SharePoint for years 😉)
The design agency was most dismissive, as “you could not build decent websites on SharePoint”. Of course.
Our SharePoint support team was hesitant because they expected tons of questions from Marketing and Sales about maintenance and new requirements, especially about functionality that SharePoint did not have. (And the “I-told-you-so”s that would be the result)

I would love to tell you a story of successes or horrors, but I left the organization before the project was in full swing, so I am curious if it was ever brought to a conclusion. If they had done it, they would have had to change everything back a couple of years later, when Microsoft phased out the website options in 2015 because they realized that other parties could do a better job on internet and web sites.
Do you have any real-life experiences from websites-on-SharePoint? Please share!

Personal sites in Office 365

When I started with my Office365 subscription in 2011, it came with an external site. As I have a “Small business plan” it was meant to promote my small business and services, but I have never put a lot of work in it.
The site is no longer accessible from the internet, but I can still see and even edit it! It is in Classic SharePoint, so it does not look as nice as modern SharePoint and it is also less easy to manage. This option was discontinued in 2015.

This is the homepage of my former internet site. Please look at the URL. The message in red says “Reminder, this site will be deleted shortly. Click here for more info” and then I get an error message.

In the “Edit mode” (accessible via the gear wheel) you recognize Classic SharePoint.

The site in edit mode.

Libraries and lists, site settings are still there, and I could probably rework this into a Modern site, but it is easier to create a new one. 😁

External sharing

Of course you will know the options to share sites, documents, Forms etc. with your customers, clients, suppliers and other external business contacts. That has been around since around 2005 and has proven to be very useful. But it is not the same as an internet site where everyone can access.

As part of the preparation for this post I asked CoPilot about SharePoint and internet. The answer will be something for my next post. 😉

SharePoint, the good old intranet days

As SharePoint celebrated its 23 year birthday last week, as mentioned by Veronique Palmer and many others, I thought it might be nice to share my personal history with SharePoint.

The beginning: SharePoint 2001

The first version of SharePoint that I worked with, SharePoint 2001, was a document management solution. It was comparable to the current document library, but with very limited functionality and a different design. There were folders and subfolders, you could subscribe, you could set permissions per (sub)folder and that was it.

The picture below has been taken from this post.

A document library from SP2001. Jussi Roine was also already active at that time! 😉

At the company I worked for at that time, we had developed our own “document cabinet” functionality on a different platform. It was just one flat list of documents with permissions on the cabinet level.
We provided the SharePoint solution to “serious” users only: people who had experience with document and records management, such as research departments, quality control functions, finance etc. Everyone else, such as Communications or Marketing, had to make do with the document cabinets, as SharePoint was considered “too complicated” for “normal people”. Can you imagine? 😁

My first intranet: moving to SharePoint 2003

We had built an intranet around the year 2000 using our own document cabinets, a third-party Discussion Forum functionality and Frontpage webs. When we started to develop a new intranet for the organisation, we found out that the next version of SharePoint, SharePoint 2003, was something more than just document management. It was a complete intranet platform, so we could replace everything with SharePoint! It sounds very simple and obvious now, but at that time we were so used to building things ourselves that we were very confused at first. How would this work? How should we replace our Forums? Could we move documents from our cabinets to SharePoint? What would it mean to our developers? How could we inform people about this complicated new functionality?
Despite making a few mistakes (such as wanting to replicate old functionality) we created a rather successful intranet on SharePoint 2003.
I wrote about that here: My very first SharePoint intranet.

My second intranet: moving from SharePoint 2007

After that came SharePoint 2007, which had more functionality. After that, there was a split in SharePoint on-premises (the installed version on an organization’s servers) which has versions SP2010, SP2013, SP2016 and SP2019 (I do not think any versions have been added since) and SharePoint Online, which is the cloud version used by most organizations, I think.

I have worked with SharePoint 2007, struggling with storage space, and moved to SharePoint Online from there. I wrote about that here: My second SharePoint intranet.

My third intranet: moving to SharePoint Online

The third intranet project I was involved in meant moving to SharePoint Online from a very outdated non-Microsoft platform. By that time (2021) most employees were already familiar with SharePoint Online and the complete Microsoft365 suite. Combined with just a few requirements and a very good project manager, this was a model project completed in record time. I wrote about it in this post: My third SharePoint intranet.

So, I have worked with various versions in the years that I worked with SharePoint. And I still love it, it can do so much!

Next time, I will discuss the external capabilities of SharePoint. It used to be more than what you can do now. Did you know?

Colour your collaboration

When you open my clothes cupboard you will see , from left to right: red, orange pink, purple, blue, white, grey and black. That is right:  I organize my top garments (blouses, sweaters, jackets etc.) according to their colour.  

Colour sends a very strong message, it is almost the first thing you notice when you look at something. Colour can also be used to highlight differences and similarities between entities. 

So, I am very happy that it is now possible to change the colour of a folder in OneDrive or SharePoint. I think this can help with finding the content you are looking for. 

Gregory Zelfond shares a pretty complete how-to and a number of facts about coloured folders:
How to Color Code Folders in SharePoint and OneDrive | SharePoint Maven 

Colour can give a very fast indication of the contents of a folder, but no more than that. It should not be your only organizing principle: 

• Some of your colleagues may have eyesight issues, so if they use a screenreader they may hear the name of the folder, but not the colour; they may be colour-blind (especially common for red/green colours), or they may suffer from cataracts, which may make it hard for them to distinguish colour nuances.  Light red and light orange have little contrast between them, as have light green and light teal, and perhaps light purple and light pink. 
• Light can influence contrast, both the light in the room as the brightness of the screen. 
• A colour may mean different things to different people, for instance a favourite (or hated) football club.  ⚽🏉
• The colour sequence green-yellow-orange-red may confuse colleagues if used in a different context than meaning something like good, not so good, bad (or variations on that theme).
• Colour is not specific enough to be a stand-alone attribute. You will still need a good folder name, and possibly a number and an emoji.  (I wrote about the use of emoji earlier) 

Light Green and light Teal may be difficult to distinguish from eachother

Light Orange and light Red do not differ that much

Light Pink and light Purple are quite close to one another

So, how can you use the colours to your best advantage? It depends….on the owner but mostly on the audience. 

OneDrive 

OneDrive is your own set of folders, so you can do whatever you like. You can create a rainbow, make all folders pink, use the favourite colour of the person you share a folder with, or apply the colour according to the app where the folder comes from. (Remember that Microsoft365 creates folders in your OneDrive when you use certain apps?)

This is the latter:

My OneDrive folder colours reflect the colour of the app they originated from (approximately).

So, whatever works for you.  

SharePoint team sites 

For SharePoint it is slightly different.
Firstly, your OneDrive is one document library, and you will see your folders immediately. In SharePoint you will need to open a document library first to see the folders.  
Secondly, team sites are for collaboration, so colours may not be your decision alone. You will generally know the people working in this site, and probably meet on a regular basis, so you need to discuss what colours and labels and sorting principles to use for different folders, so that everyone understands what the folders are about. If there is a lot of employee turnover, you could add instructions about the use of colour.  

SharePoint sites from Teams 

In general, this works like SharePoint collaboration sites with a few gotchas, e.g. you can not change the colour of the General folder, and in some views the colours will not be shown. Please see Greg’s post!
As with the stand-alone SharePoint site, you will want to discuss with your Team members which labels and colours you would like to use.  

SharePoint communication sites

As these have a large and generally unknown audience, this is more of an “information sending” site. It will be more difficult to use meaningful colours, as they may not be obvious to your diverse and dispersed employees. Some explanation may be needed. 
On the other hand, I do not think many employees will go into your folder structure. I expect they will mostly access documents through Search and links in News items and on pages.  

Still, there are few things you can do to make things easier:

You could use one colour per document library, so people know in which library they are, e.g. the Finance, HR or Communications library.  

If you have one library for all departments, you can use one colour per folder for each department.   

A coloured folder for each department publishing on the intranet.

It makes sense to agree on the distribution of colours over the departments in order to be as consistent as possible within your organization. So, all folders containing public Finance documents could be green, all folders containing public HR documents could be red, etc.  

Even if it may not be relevant to the entire audience, it can be useful for editors – so your HR officers know they have to upload in red folders. 

You can also give all folders in all public SharePoint sites your corporate colour, if available. (At his moment, you are limited to the 16 colours shown, so SaraLee’s red would be an option, but AkzoNobel’s dark blue would not.) That way people will know they are looking at corporate information. 
Does anyone know if you can create folders with another default colour than the yellow? I could not find that information.

Imaginary library for the Sara Lee intranet – every folder is created in the corporate colour by default.
(Please note I don’t know if this can be done at all, and Sara Lee as a company no longer exists)

So, it may be small and trivial feature for some, but it can help people knowing where they are, as long as you use it with some caution.  

A few more things to know:

Colour is not metadata so you cannot search, sort or filter on colour. So if you want all folders of a similar colour to be together, you may need to add letters, numbers or a prefix to the labels to get them together.  

There is no bulk-changing available for folder colours. So in case you want to change colour for multiple folders to the same colour, you have to do it one-by-one.

You can not make bulk edits for the colour.

Unfortunately, you cannot change the colour of a document library. Those libraries will always have that yellow/brown colour. It would be nice if you could change that, too!

Are you using this?

Are you using coloured folders right now, and if yes, how? Please let me know in the comments! Much has been written about it, but I am curious to know how much it is being used.

There’s a new font in town

You may have heard, read or noticed that there is a new Microsoft default typeface called Aptos. As I have an interest in typography, I thought it might be nice to write something in the different Microsoft fonts used over the years, to show you how the different types look in writing. As I can not use different fonts on this platform, I am embedding a PDF created out of a Microsoft Word document. (Which was very frustrating with all the images that mess up the layout)

If you can not see the embedded document, please view it in a PC browser or watch it here: This is Aptos!.pdf

Here goes:

Download

So, after this trip to memory lane, I have set my defaults to…Arial. I like that one most. Please be aware you can only change the default fonts in

• Outlook (web and desktop)
• Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote desktop (NOT in web, although you can change it per document)

It was interesting to notice that the option to change the default font is in various places across the 365 suite. 😁 How tiring!

Update April 2024:
I just came across an article advocating the use of Aptos in your resumé as it shows you are up-to-date. So I guess using Arial shows that I am outdated. 😉

What do you think about the new type?

A test of character(s) in SharePoint News Description

The other day I received a comment on my post about the Description field. The writer wanted to know how many characters of the Description you can expect to be visible on the web part in their specific page layout. To be honest, I have no clue so I thought I’d do some tests so you do not have to!

Test set-up

a. Texts

For testing purposes, I am using this text of 270 characters:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz2abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz3
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz4abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz5abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz6 abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz7abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz8abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz9 abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0

These are portions of 27 characters. The last number shown will show quickly approximately how many characters are displayed and if there is a difference between various web part and page layouts. 
The full Description (255 characters) will show the 9 and the letter l (from Letitia) as the last letter.
I will repeat this for the longest and shortest Description with 26 i’s and 26 w’s plus the number, as I expect the i is the narrowest and the w the widest letter, and it may make a difference. I found this when doing a similar test for the site navigation.

I also thought about varying typeface and font, but the Description text is a system text so a different typeface or font will make no difference, unless you have a custom font set up in your tenant.

b. Page layout

I have used one and the same page with the same News web part, and changed the Section and Web Part layouts for the experiments.

There are 5 options for the Section layout, but I will use 4 (one, two three columns and the one-third right) as these have all different widths.

There are 6 options to display the News web part, but as the Hub News, Carousel and Tiles do not show the Description (check out my post about the Carousel), I will only test with Top Story, List and Side-by-side.

I will first test with Author, Views and Publish date visible, and then remove this info for the items with the longest and shortest description.

The first experiments are done with this ON, later I will test with these OFF

c. Computer and screen settings

My browser is Edge, zoom 100%. I have a small Edge side bar to the right.

My computer settings are: Scale 125 % and Display resolution 1920 x 1080

Now, there are lots of screenshots to wade through, so if you are impatient, please jump to the Conclusions and Recommendations.

Results

1. One column

Top story: 73 characters

Top story

List: 111

List layout, here the Description text is much longer

Side-by-side: 51

Side-by-side, there is less space than in the List or Top Story so fewer characters are visible

2. Two columns

Top story: 33

Top Story

List: 51

The List option has less space, so fewer characters than in the single column

Side-by-side: 51

Side-by-side behaves the same as the List in this setup

3. Three columns

Top Story: 46. This is more than with the two columns but please notice that the Description is now below the image, instead of to the right.

Top Story. Please note the text is now under the image instead of next to it.

List: 31

List – quite narrow so only a small part of the Description is visible

Side-by-side: 31

Side-by-side-just like the List

4. One-third right

I have added the News web part to the left hand column.
Top Story: 47

Top Story

List: 60

List

Side by side: 81

Side-by-side shows more characters than the List in this layout, as the image is smaller

Well, that is interesting!

5. Hiding the Author, Publishing date and Views in the web part

I have the Author, Publishing date and number of views visible in the above experiments. So, as the next step, let’s take the two extremes and see what happens if I hide those options.

One column – List (111 characters shown in the first experiment): 255 characters. That is the full Description.

One column with List view, and no publishing details, shows the full Description

Three columns – List: (was 31): Now 96 characters

Three columns – List view now shows more characters than with publishing details.

So, that does make a difference! Assuming you want to show as much of the Description as possible, you may think whether removing the publishing info is an option. (Please note making one of these visible has the same effect as making two or all visible – it means fewer characters of the Description text)

6. Which letters does your Description text contain?

I also expect that you will see more or fewer characters depending on your actual text. I have been testing with the alphabet, that is an equal distribution of letters. Let’s see what happens if we repeat the extremes with Description text containing only i’s (narrow) or w’s (wide).

One column – List:

The Description with w’s has fewer characters than the alphabet one, and much fewer than the one with i’s:

w: 77

i: 219

alphabet: 111

One column, List view, there is a big difference in number of characters shown

Three columns – List:

Similar as above, w < alphabet < i

w: 21

i: 64

alphabet: 31

And also in the Three columns – List view the differences are obvious

Interestingly, it appears that the actual letters in your text determine how many you will see in the Description!

Conclusions

• Although the Description text in SharePoint News can contain 255 characters, you will rarely see the full text on your News web part
• The influencing factors appear to be: Column width, Web part layout, visibility of publishing details, actual words used
• Different Section layouts, meaning differences in column width, affect the number of Characters shown
• Different News web part layouts show a different amount of Description text
• In smaller column widths, the List layout behaves similar to the Side-by-side layout
• Displaying the publishing details, such as Author, Date and Views, goes at the expense of the number of Description text characters
• The actual letters you use will influence the number of characters shown, with wide letters (such as m and w) showing fewer characters than narrow letters (such as i and l)
• From earlier tests I also know that making your window smaller, or increase the zoom of your browser, will result in fewer characters
• The available space in the column appears to be the driving factor, not a number of characters. We have seen that before in my tests with the Site Navigation, but also when checking the number of characters in the title of a News post

Recommendations

Relax!

My first recommendation would be to relax, as there are many factors influencing this behaviour and there is not that much you can do. And when your readers use a 150% zoom in their browser or check their News mainly from their smartphone, it is completely out of your control.

But there are a few things you can do to make sure your readers see as much from your carefully crafted Description as possible:

• Use the One-column layout, with the List view, and remove the publishing details if that works for your purpose
• Keep descriptions as short as possible. Your readers will be grateful if they have to read less anyway
• Use front-loading, i.e. make sure that the most important words are in the beginning of your title
• Do not use your company name if it is not essential
  I often see the company name in front of everything, but News is for your own audience mostly.
  

Do you have any other tips?


Photo by zai23.guitars399789 on Vecteezy.com

Writing SharePoint news posts (our way)

A few months ago I helped create and introduce a SharePoint intranet for “my” health care organization. The majority of the new intranet consists of SharePoint Pages and News, default functionality. As this provides our publishers with tons of options for layout, colour schemes, styles, fonts and what not, we had to take a few measures to keep a somewhat consistent look-and-feel.
Additionally, many publishers wanted some guidelines as they were a tad overwhelmed with choice.

I mentioned before that our Communications function is not too fanatical in enforcing the corporate style guide on people – everyone can select their own Office365 theme, for instance. But some consistency is needed, of course.

What a difference with my (multinational) employer before! There we spent the majority of our intranet redevelopment budget on creating a complicated News setup, which was at that time not available in SharePoint, with fixed page templates and colour schemes, fonts, whitespace and what not.
Did I ever tell you that, after launch of this beast, the team attended a SharePoint conference and learned that Microsoft would be introducing SharePoint News? Out of the box? FOR FREE?
You can imagine what we felt when we heard that 🙂

Please find below an overview of our attempts to keep things consistent. Feel free to translate these to your own organization or clients, and please let me know if you use any other guidelines for this purpose.

1. Structure what can be structured

• All “formal organizational units” have their own site for publishing pages and news posts.
  Although I know you should not structure your intranet according to the organizational setup, there were hardly any other ways to structure it by without running into other issues, such as ownership. Trust me, we tried 🙂
• All organizational sites are grouped into one Hub site.
  This allows for one navigation and colour scheme, and roll-up of news.
• All hub sites have the Blue theme.
  This matches best with our style guide. I offered to change the main blue colour into the actual style guide colour, but that was not necessary.
  

The standard Blue theme matched well

• Every hub site has the same site icon.
  This way it is always clear if a site belongs to the intranet.
• The news web parts on all sites are configured to display title, summary and date only.
  Adding too many data provides a cluttered look. It also uses a little more vertical space.
  

Left colum: with author, date and views, right column: date only.

• Headers are compact, footers simple.

2. Provide guidelines for what is flexible

As we use the standard functionality, we had to create some guidelines for writing and design to try and keep the pages and posts consistent and in line with our standards, and to limit the options for publishers. Those guidelines were brought up in training sessions for all potential publishers (and whoever was interested), and are available as reference material.

• Use a short and catchy title, one line max.
  The title shows what interesting information your text contains, attracts attention, is informative, distinctive and piques curiousity. There are internal trainings for writing catchy titles!
• Use active text.
  Do not use verbs such as ‘will’, ‘can’, ‘be’, ‘may’, or ‘become’.
• Do not underline your text.
  Readers may think it is a hyperlink.
• Avoid abbreviations where possible.
  If you must use one, first write it out completely and add the abbreviation behind it in parentheses. For example: “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)”
• When you add a document, give the document a clear title, without date or version.
  The date and other information can be viewed from the document library it lives in. And in case you need to edit the information, you do not need to edit the title.
• Keep your page or news item as short as possible.
  When you really need a long text, please break up your text with headings and use anchors to allow the reader to jump to the desired part immediately.
• Use capitals sparingly.
  There is a paragraph in the style guide for the use of capitals. (I am a Big Fan of Capitals, but the style guide is not :))
• Use “One column” or the “One-third right” layout for news posts
  The first one suits straightforward posts, the other is better when you want to add a photo, button, etc.
  For static pages, publishers can use another layout.
  

The preferred page layout for news when you want more than just text

• Use our “Image bank” (Organizational assets) or Stock Images for images where possible.
  The photo’s in the image bank are suitable for the organization, and, like the Stock Images, have no copyright issues.
• When using an introduction text, use standard size, bold, black or “theme dark alternate” blue.
  That blue is well readable and matches best with our corporate colours.
  

The preferred blue colour

• For headings, use standard size bold, standard size italics OR heading 2 or 3.
  You can use black or “theme dark alternate” blue, as long as you use the same colour of the introduction text.
• Add the Publish date on your news posts.
  By default this is off, so this is easy to forget. Perhaps a new page template may help. If anyone knows how to turn this on by default, please let me know!

Show the published date is off by default. 😦

• Enable comments for news and short-time pages.
  This allows for discussion within the organization.
  You can disable comments for static pages.

Comments are on by default

You probably recognize some of these as standard writing guidelines, but it never hurts to repeat, as not all publishers are experienced writers.

Please note publishers can deviate from these guidelines, e.g. if they have a post or page about a special topic that needs to stand out.

What have we missed? What do you use?

Please let me know which other guidelines you are using to make your vanilla SharePoint news a little consistent.

Intranet promotion video’s #12

The latest choice of intranet and digital workplace launch videos!

I recently searched on YouTube, but nice videos are hard to find there. There are many school projects (“what is the difference between internet and intranet?”), recorded meetings, game videos and commercial videos for intranet platforms. Vimeo is apparently more of a catalogue for video creators, and has tons more of the video type I am looking for.

However, please be aware that recently upladed videos on Vimeo need to be “rated” and this will give you a warning. Creating a (free) Vimeo account and logging in solves that issue, so in case you do not see a preview, please make sure to log in!

We have a lot of “people” video’s today!

1. Another intranet with a person name: Lucy

I always like videos with the name of a person. In my most recent overview, there was an intranet called Charlie, named after the founder. This one, for a health care service center based in the Dominican Republic, is called Lucy and that stands for “Linking Us ContinuouslY”.

The VP of Human Resources and the local Marketing Manager show News, training courses, colleagues, work procedures, well, everything you need to make your work life easier.

Uploaded February 2022.

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2. Intranet for electricity supplier (in Spanish)

This is an older intranet, you can see it from the design but also from the date of the week menu 🙂

This electricity company from Peru has a homepage with a news carousel. It also has a Photo gallery, Calendar, HR information etc. Strangely enough, the buttons open small popups, and they appear to lead to pdf’s. Hmm.

Uploaded March 2022.

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3. Personal welcome to the intranet for temps

I quite like this idea. When you start temporary work for this Australian recruiter, you will get this “personal” welcome video and introduction to the intranet from the General Manager and Founder herself. She explains the importance of the platform, what you can expect, and invites new “hires” to give feedback.

Uploaded February 2022.

https://vimeo.com/680360399

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4. Another intranet called Connect!

You may remember that I used to work for an organization which named its new intranet “Connect”. Since then I have seen a ton of intranets with that name. Perhaps I should dedicate a post to intranets called Connect! 🙂
This one is for a stairlift company which was founded in the Netherlands, apparently. It is now an international organization. The VP Commercial introduces the new intranet and invites everyone to participate and share their stories. Because “the more you put into it, the more you get out”. This is interesting, as most organizations who did an intranet relaunch boasted that they removed tons of old content clutter and are only relaunching with the bare minimum of necessary information.

Uploaded March 2022.

https://vimeo.com/684642122

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5. Intranet for a beauty and cosmetics company (in Portuguese)

This intranet, for a Brazilian beauty and cosmetics organization (not sure if it is cosmetic surgery or mainly injectables and fillers – is there a word for that?) looks just as beautiful as their website and their models. 🙂 Nice purple colour, nice icons, large photographs, modern look & feel. It has all the things you expect from an intranet – news, pictures, calendar, social network, and a mobile app.

Uploaded March 2022.

That was it for this time, folks!

Image by Gabriela Palai via Pexels

Stay true to your Form

In my most recent post I showed what happened when you make a change in one of the answer options in a choice question in Forms. That case was based on a real-life scenario.

You will know by now that these things trigger my curiosity, so I decided to find out what happens to other question types when you change them halfway?

I thought about question types that can be changed significantly and came up with Text, Rating, Ranking and Likert.
So I started out with this questionnaire:

The survey start – 4 changeable questions

And after entering 10 responses randomly, this was the first result:

Results 1

With a score of 4.20 this must be a good blog post! 🙂

Then I made the first set of changes:

• In the Text question, I changed from short text to long answer
• In the Rating question, I changed the 5 stars to 5 numbers
• In the Ranking question, I replaced “Darts” with “Figure-skating”
• In the Likert question, I changed “Forms” to “Visio”

Again, I added 5 random responses, and ended up with these results:

Results 2

Results after the first change

You only see the last 3 responses for the Text question, the answers appear a bit more wordy. The word cloud is a bit fuller, but that’s it.

Exchanging stars in the Rating question does not make much difference, you get a number rather than stars, but that is not significantly different.

For the Ranking, the change is rather more alarming as the results for Darts are replaced by those for Figure skating, and the name Darts completely disappears. I had expected that the results would be separated, and that Darts would be called “Other”, like with the choice options, but apparently not.

For the Likert question, again all votes for Forms are now turned into votes for Visio, and the word Visio has disappeared, there’s no “Other” like in the choice question.

So, it was time to make some more changes:

• In the Text question, I changed to a Number
• In the Rating question, I changed the 5 numbers to 10 numbers
• In the Ranking question, I added “Cycling” as an option
• In the Likert question, I added an option “N.A. or don’t know”

And when I had added 5 responses, the results looked like this:

Results 3

Results after the second change

The Text question now shows the last 3 numbers PLUS the old word cloud. Most confusing!

For the Rating question, the average was 4.9. I had made several entries in the 6-10 region, but as there were at least15 entries with a lower number, the average had not increased that much.
But…when you have a 5-point scale and score a 4.2 (as in the second result) you are doing very well. If you have a 10-point scale, 4.9 is pretty low.

For the Ranking question, the new sports gets added to the results. There’s only 5 responses for this option, which skews the results. 20% firsts for this sport is not as many as 20% for the sports that have been there for the entire ride. 🙂

For the Likert question, a change of colour may confuse you. The “Yes” option was blue, but has turned to grey. This makes perfect sense from a visual design perspective, but is a bit confusing otherwise. Again, as with the Ranking, there’s only max. 5 responses of “N.A. or don’t know” possible, compared to max. 20 for the other options, so this will skew results.

I also looked at the Excel.

The detailed results in Excel

The Text results are a mess. Yes, you could score all answers as a number, but then you might have as well sent an email or interviewed everyone.

You see that the first 15 Rating scale answers are not multiplied by 2 after moving from a 5-point scale to a 10-point scale. This will result in a much lower score than you would have had if you had started out with a 10-point scale straight away. This will lead to the wrong conclusion: that people do not like this blog topic, while in fact they do!

For the Ranking, you see that the word “Darts” no longer appears in the responses, it gets overwritten after the change. So that darts fan is now suddenly a lover of figure skating. 🤦‍♂️ It also means that cycling fans will hardly ever be in the majority as that option was added quite late in the process.

For the Likert question, the results between the options are not comparable. Everyone who thought they were answering a question about Forms, have now answered the question for Visio. And “N.A. or Don’t know” may have scored differently when the option had been there throughout the survey.

I could have made more changes, but I trust you will get the gist.

Conclusions

1. Mid-survey changes are technically very easy to do.
2. Mid-survey changes are not visible as they are not logged (not even in the Excel file). This will make it very hard to interpret the results. It will even be difficult for the owner, as they do not know at exactly which moment between entries the change has been made (except when adding an extra option).
3. The good news is, that for Rating scale and Likert questions you can easily correct a typo. In the Choice question types even that creates a new option, as we have seen before.
4. Mid-survey changes can create havoc in the results. In fact, you are changing the rules in the middle of the game. Results become incomparable or and conclusions may be completely incorrect (such as changing Rating from a 5- to a 10-point scale).
5. You may want to check the Excel for the exact results, but that does not help when drawing conclusions. Are you sure that someone who likes to watch Formula 1, would have the same preference when (s)he would have had the option to select Cycling?

This will not come as a surprise, of course. I only hope I have made things more clear by having shown what happens exactly when you make a change. It is tempting as it may look like a small and easy change, but it can have unpleasant consequences.

As mentioned in my earlier post, I would rather suggest that before launching your survey, you

• discuss the setup of your survey with your colleagues – e.g. which sports do they want included in the answer options?
• ask one or more colleagues to complete the survey to see if they understand your questions and the answer options are logical, complete and spelled correctly
• remove all test entries or copy your survey before it goes live
• resist any push to make changes when the survey is running, even if it comes from higher management. Show them this blog when they insist. 🙂

Do you have any experiences with making mid-survey changes?