Edge browser now supports Drag and Drop and Export to Excel in SharePoint Document Libraries

When Edge browser was released with Windows 10, it came with few limitations when working with SharePoint. The limitations are listed in the KB article https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3083635 and the suggested work around was to use Internet Explorer. With the second publish release of Edge Browser that came with November 2015 Windows 10 update (version 25.10586) , Drag and drop of documents and Export to Excel are supported for SharePoint document libraries.

New document library experience coming to SharePoint Online

A new experience for document libraries is coming to SharePoint online and is being rolled out to first release customers. The new experience has some really cool options which I have listed in this blog

New UI

The new UI for document libraries is clean without ribbons.

Information Pane

Clicking the information icon at the top right displays the information panel which list the recent activities that happened on the document library.

The information panel for a selected document displays the preview of the document, the document properties, recent activities and Sharing information.

Modify View

Columns can be easily added or removed to the current view by clicking the ellipses at the right and selecting the columns required for the view

Grid View

Documents can now be arranged in grid view which shows a smart preview of documents.

Pinning Documents

Documents can now be pinned so that they are always displayed above the document list.

PNP Responsive UI Package for On-Premise SharePoint 2013 and 2016

Last month the SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP) group released the Responsive UI Package for SharePoint, a solution that makes SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2016 sites more responsive in tablets and mobile phones.  The solution uses JavaScript embed pattern to embed the styles and scripts to the site without making changes to master pages.

Installing the Responsive UI Package

1.      Before installing the Responsive UI Package, the below prerequisites have to be setup

a.      SharePoint 2016 or SharePoint 2013 with SP1 and April 2015 CU

b.      Download and install Office 365 Dev PNP commands from GitHub

2.      Download the Responsive UI Package zip file from GitHub and unzip them in a folder on SharePoint server

3.      Open PowerShell and navigate to the folder where the Responsive UI package files are unzipped.

4.      Then execute the Enable-SPResponsiveUI cmdlet against the site collection which you want to be responsive. The command takes 3 parameters

a.       TargetSiteUrl -  The URL of the Site Collection, where the Responsive UI will be enabled. for example: http://mysharepointintranet.com/sites/Site1

b.      InfrastructureSiteUrl - Is an optional parameter, which specifies the URL of Site Collection, where the JavaScript and CSS files used by Responsive UI solution will be uploaded.

c.       Credentials – Is the user credentials that will be used to authenticate against both the target Site Collection and infrastructure Site Collection and should be the credentials of a user with Site Collection Administrator rights. If the parameter isn’t provided PowerShell will prompt for credentials.

Example syntax: Enable-SPResponsiveUI.ps1 -TargetSiteUrl "https://mysharepointintranet.com/sites/site1"

5.      Executing  Enable-SPResponsiveUI cmdlet  will install the Responsive Package to the target site and if successful will display Responsive UI application succeeded in green font.

6.      The responsive UI Supports 3 rendering modes, desktop, tablet and smart phone. Below screenshots shows how the default SharePoint 2016 UI renders in these modes after Responsive UI Package is installed for a site collection.

Desktop Rendering

Tablet Rendering

Mobile Rendering

7.      To deactivate the Responsive UI, execute the Disable-SPResponsiveUI cmdlet by passing TargetSiteURL and Credentials parameters.