Trying to understand SharePoint - and SharePoint frustrations

As I mentioned in my previous post, we're looking to migrate some of our employee intranet website to Microsoft SharePoint Online. 

I'm going to document my progress (and also my frustrations!) in this blog. 

Primarily, the intention is not to criticise - but is instead to check my understanding of how it works. If I've misunderstood something, or missed a configuration option - please comment below.

Document libraries

You seem to be unable to configure a document library to default to download a copy of a document - it always tries to open it in the browser.  

I found a way of configuring a Document Library to instead open a document in the desktop app.  However, this only works when you click on the file from within the Document Library.  If you have the file linked from elsewhere (e.g. in the "Highlighted content" webpart) it reverts back to the default behaviour.

If you have edit rights over the Document Library, it opens documents in edit mode.  There seems to be no option to say "when I follow a link to documents here, just download a copy"?  This default behaviour would probably be fine in a "Team" site - but its not what you're looking for in a "Communication" site.  Perhaps I've missed an option somewhere?

I found a way to "hack" the Url for a document to force it to download (by adding &download=1 to the end). This works in a scenario where you want to add a hyperlink to a rich text block, or call to action - but you shouldn't have to resort to this.

Note: this hack doesn't work for Microsoft Edge, so can't be used.  An alternative option, is to visit the document library, choose the option to "Download" a file - and then when downloaded, choose the option to "Copy download link".

Geocoding in SharePoint Lists

I needed to build a list of recommended hotels, and thought it would be good to add a field to store the location (where you input an address, which SharePoint dynamically breaks down in to fields for City, State, Country, Coordinates etc.).

The data source for this is presumably Bing Maps ...

Searching for addresses, and the results that are returned, seems to be very much a hit and miss experience - and often inconsistent.  

For example, the country field.  I started adding some Australian hotels - some were identified as "Australia" others as "AU".  This isn't great if you want to give the user to option to filter by country - as half your Australian addresses will be filed under "Australia", and the other half "AU".  The same happens when adding UK address.  Some were attributed as "GB", others as "United Kingdom".

Within the UK - sometimes the State field defaulted to the nation (England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland).  However, for other addresses in England, I instead get the county (and even that isn't consistent - I had three addresses in the city of Bath - one was labelled "Bath Avon", another "Bath Avon and North East Somerset", and the third as "Bas").

As another example of inconsistent data - some addresses yield a set of coordinates, but other's don't.

There seems to be no way to manually correct errors like this by overriding the dynamic field value.

This could be a great feature - if it worked better.  In its current state, it's more or less unusable.  I tried to do a Google Search for this, because I was sure that many other users would be complaining - but I couldn't find anything.  Which makes me wonder if nobody is using it?  Either that, or I've just been very unlucky with the addresses I've been trying to add to the list.

Lack of layout flexibility

I appreciate that actually SharePoint has improved in this respect over the years - but in many ways, the built in webparts are missing some flexibility in layout.  

Using as an example, the Hero webpart you can place full width on a site homepage.  It supports just 5 layout options.  What about if I want 8 equally sized tiles? (rather than one large tile to the left, and 4 smaller ones to the right). Whatever you choose, the Hero component tends to take up the whole of the browser window, unless you scroll past it - which is quite limiting on all but the most visual of sites.  It seems you can only choose a static image as the background for a hero tile, and not something more visually engaging - such as a looped video clip.

You can add a vertical column of content that runs to the right of the page - but not to the full-width. Hence if placed beneath a full-width hero banner, it looks odd on larger screen sizes.

Many of the built in webparts (e.g. the call to action webpart) lack a user-friendly "link picker" to help an end-user identify and link to an asset within their site.  You simply have to copy/paste the Url.  

Thankfully, it looks like its pretty easy to build your own webparts - which I hope may allow us to overcome this lack of flexibility, and to introduce some of own designs/layouts.  

Bugs and problems

Navigation links have a random "/" added to the end of them

You can edit the navigation which appears at the top of your site, but if you try to add a link with a querystring or hash, it adds a random "/" to the end of it.

For example, /sites/mysite#help-section becomes /sites/mysite#help-section/, or /sites/mysite?query=string becomes /sites/mysite?query=string/  If this was your own application, you'd say "whoops, sorry - let me push out a new build to fix that".  But, there are StackOverflow posts from 18 months ago documenting this "known issue". 

Work around

The homepage of you SharePoint site is actually called home.aspx.  If you use this in the link with the hash or querystring, then SharePoint doesn't add the trailing slash.  For example, /sites/mysite/home.aspx#help-section works fine.

Lack of multi-tenant support

My organisation, because of its structure and customer base, has more than one O365/AAD tenant. However, we need a global SharePoint instance, to manage collaboration and communication with all users.  Health and safety information, global policies, corporate news, marketing material, request forms etc.  

It seems that users from outside the main tenant, can only access SharePoint as guest users - which can be quite limiting.  In an ideal World, you should be able to run a single SharePoint Online instance and grant access to multiple tenants. Ideally, an employee sat within a regional tenant, should be able to access their own SharePoint, and our global SharePoint, with the same rights/visibility.  Perhaps this is on the roadmap?  I would imagine we're not the only business who would like this functionality.

One option I've heard, is to give everyone two accounts. But this is (a) expensive, and (b) having to switch between accounts is a great way to dissuade people from accessing your service.

Examples of some serious guest user limitations I've come across so far - unless my understanding is wrong, or our IT team have configured our tenant sharing settings in a particular way? -

• Guests can't be a site owner
• Guests can't access a form, unless its marked as a public (which means no file uploads or automatic identification/attribution of the user who filled the form).
• Be referenced in the "Person or group" column type in a SharePoint list
• Be identified as a contact in the "Person" webpart

This is fairly limiting - I'd love to hear any workarounds that other organisations with a similar structure to ours have put in place to solve these issues. If you have any feedback, please comment below.