SharePoint Modern list showing classic form only

 Another strange behaviour by SharePoint list recently required us to contact Microsoft support.

The list in question was created in a modern SharePoint Online site with default behaviour to show modern form. The list worked fine for a while.

And then suddenly it started showing the classic forms when creating or editing the list items instead of the modern forms.

Modern form:

Classic form:

First settings we checked was in the -> List Settings -> Advanced Settings to see if the list has reverted to Classic setting. All the settings were as expected. The settings were explicitly changed to 'New Experience' and default multiple times but it did not solve the problem.

Next thing to check was the -> List Settings -> Form Settings. Here it was noticed that the setting was default one, however it seemed that there was a PowerApps form published to the site at one time and then reverted to default form. Choosing the published powerapps form completely broke the list which basically indicated that it may be the cause of our ongoing issues.

Did contact MS support to help us revert the changes and as per them once the form is published, you can not revert this setting back. This later turned out to be incorrect as we showed MS on other lists that this is possible.

Next suggestion from support was to talk to PowerApps teams, which was a bit weird as this setting is in Microsoft.

While MS was trying to bounce our ticket back and forth between their engineers, we have tried to delete the PowerApps form (which was not recommended by MS), and IT WORKED. The list is now as good as new.

The link to delete the form is the last link in second option of the Form Settings.

Hope this helps and saves your time !!

Creating Modern Pages in Classic SharePoint sites

The SharePoint estate in my organization still has a lot of content in Classic sites. Over past few years Microsoft has updated a lot of pages to modern look and feel. For example, the site content page or modern lists, all are available in the classic sites.

However the content pages created in classic site are still the same. This gives a very bad user experience as user can keep jumping back and forth between these templates.

Best option is to migrate all your content to a modern site. However it may not always be feasible to migrate everything as of now and I wanted to create few modern pages within the classic sites. 

First thing you should do to make this happen is to enable the site pages feature in the site. Before you try to do that, check if you have a site pages library in the site content. If its there, the feature may already be activated. If not, go to Site Settings -> Manage Site Features and select the Site pages feature as shown below:

Once this is done go back and check if you have Site Pages library

Here in the New Item menu, you can see an option to create a site page. When you click on create site page , it creates a page with modern look.

 

It may so happen that even though you have Site Pages in the new menu, you don't see any site page option. All the options available may be classic site page templates.

In such cases the work around is to create a page using this URL:

https://<yourtenant>/sites/Testsite/_layouts/15/createsitepage.aspx

This creates the page in Site pages library in the modern view.

Hope this article helps all the SharePoint developers stuck with a classic site :)

Office 365 Video Migration to Microsoft Streams

Microsoft has decided to replace its existing Office 365 Video tool with Microsoft Stream.

Stream is a new video sharing platform in office 365. Office 365 Video will retire in 2021 so companies have option to automatically move the video to Stream. Plan the move or let go of all the existing videos.



Good news is that the migration of videos is supported by Microsoft so you don't need to put a lot of effort in migrating or buy expensive tools.

However, you can always benefit from some planning.

Here are some of things you can do as part of this migration.

1. Clean your office 365 video channels by deleting any unwanted videos. Its a good opportunity to do away with those annoying videos which should not be part of your portal. You can get data of your videos using the script provided here. There preparation tool provided here gives you very good report which can be used for next few steps as well.
2. Communicate with channel owners and contributor. Help them understand what the new tool is and provide them user manuals if required
3. Microsoft Stream can be used to directly store teams recordings. Ensure that end users understand this if you are enabling this option
4. There are few features that have not been redeveloped in Microsoft Streams, identify and publish them
5. Create a policy of Microsoft Streams Usage
6. Communicate to about the dates and impact. New tools can be very difficult to adapt to for some users. You will need to clarify any such user concerns beforehand

Microsoft suggests that the old video links will be automatically redirected to new location. This has worked for me when I did migration, even where the video's were embedded to websites. 

Here are some of the settings you should think about before migration.

Since these settings are considerably different from Office 365 videos, you should make sure you cover possible impact to your user base.

Here is how the migration process runs:

1. On your Office365 video home page you can find a link for starting migration.
2. If you dont see it, you can directly go to https://web.microsoftstream.com/officemigration
3. On this page follow the steps as shown below.
4. Depending on the content size, this could take hours before the migration is complete.

You should review the list of potential issue at this point and test the migrated videos.

Once you have provided the date in the above screenshot, you will have video available on both the platform. This gives you time to review and fix any issue.

After the scheduled date, you will no longer be able to access Office365 video. All your video links will be redirected to MS Stream, however you can't access the video portal.

Also note that your channels in Video will become group in Stream so advise your users accordingly.

Hope this article helps you.