Yet another unannounced change in Office 365? App Launcher?

 

Update… it was announced! See here: http://blogs.office.com/2014/10/16/organize-office-365-new-app-launcher-2/   For me, it was unannounced. I missed the blog article. There was no mention of the change in the Office 365 Admin Center "Message Center". It just showed up in one of my subscriptions. Turns out it is also "mentioned" in the Office 365 Roadmap site, but with no links or any idea where it might show up in O365. And… I have "opted into First Release" and did not see it back in October. It just showed up this week.

If you are using O365 then you should proactively notify/warn/train your users before this just appears in your site.

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Yet Another Change…

The navigation bar across the top of SharePoint 2013 is called the Suite Bar. What does yours look like? I'm getting different results from different subscriptions.

Mine used to look like this:

Now it looks like this in one subscription:

The nine little squares on the left is a new button:

So far:

• I have not found where this was announced. Just found this: http://blogs.office.com/2014/10/16/organize-office-365-new-app-launcher-2/
• If I can turn it on or off.
• If it is just for some types of subscriptions or all subscriptions.
  

Now all of my training materials, cheat sheets and book screen captures are all out of date!

Office 365 has been, and I guess will always be, a moving target. Ready… Fire… Aim…

 

Is it better?

• Except for the Sites link, everything else now requires at least one more click.
• The Admin menu is now missing. While there is a button marked "Admin", it just takes me to the Portal site. If I need to got the SharePoint, Lync or Exchange admin pages I now have to go to the Admin Center page first and then click "SharePoint", "Lync" or "Exchange".
• So for me, no.

 

What should I call this?

As a trainer I have to document steps, and tell people where to click. This button does not even have a mouse-over tip to explain it's purpose.

Using the F12 tools I found this HTML:

<button class="o365cs-nav-item o365cs-nav-button o365cs-navMenuButton ms-bgc-tdr-h o365button ms-bgc-tp"
id="O365_MainLink_NavMenu" role="menuitem" 
aria-label="Open the app launcher to access your Office 365 apps" type="button">

So I guess we can call it the "Main Link Nav Menu" or may be the "App Launcher button". Your guess is as good as mine.

Here is looks like it is called App Launcher.

 

What about your customizations?

Depends on how they were done. From here it sounds like your custom logo will be moved to the center of the Suite Bar.

 

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Cincinnati SPUG–Thursday November 20th!

 

Cincinnati SharePoint User Group Meeting (different date for November!)

Please register here: http://www.meetup.com/TechLife-Cincinnati/events/218788788/

Speaker: Michelle Caldwell   

Title:   Designing a Plan for Sustained User Adoption

Organizational change management is one of the most overlooked and under-planned parts of many SharePoint implementations. You simply cannot afford to ignore the importance of this topic. Successful organizational change management is a critical component to ensuring the success of any SharePoint initiative.

In this class, we will discuss field-proven tactics to help your users make sense of the change that your SharePoint solution will inevitably bring into their daily work lives. You will learn a user adoption framework and some factors you should consider when planning your next SharePoint initiative. We will challenge the mindset that adoption can be driven, and embrace the concept of designing change for long-term sustainable cultural acceptance.

By attending this class, you will be able to:

Design your own organizational change-management strategy Understand how to foster user adoption Understand how to engage and build solution champions Build a communication plan Apply field-tested strategies in your organization​   Bio:

Michelle is a SharePoint Solutions Architect and Director of Collaboration at Avanade. She has over 16 years of experience delivering business solutions to diverse organizations. For the past nine years, she has focused on delivering enterprise SharePoint solutions across multiple industries while leading teams that have won outstanding achievements in Web Development. She is a founding member and President of the Columbus, Ohio SharePoint User Group (BuckeyeSPUG) and actively shares her real-world experience through her blog www.shellecaldwell.com and conferences across North America. She also sits on the board of two Columbus, Ohio non-profits in support of her local technology community.​

 

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C# Compare Arrays

 

Sometimes we get so focused on the advanced features of .NET that we (or at least I) forget the basics. The basic in this case is checking to see if two arrays are equal.

int[] a = { 1, 7, 4, 6, 2, 8, 2, 8, 4, 6, 2 };
int[] b = { 1, 7, 4, 6, 2, 8, 2, 8, 4, 6, 2 };
if (b == a) 
  { Console.WriteLine("a Equals b!"); } 
  else 
  { Console.WriteLine("a NOT Equals b!"); }

The above always returns "a NOT Equals b!".  Yes, I knew that if (a == b) (same as a.Equals(b)) will not work as arrays are objects and "a == b" is testing reference equality, i.e. to see if they are the same object. But I also figured that as .NET has a built in class or method for everything you can think of, there had to be one to do an array comparison. Turns out there is, .SequenceEqual., which is part of LINQ.

if (b.SequenceEqual(a))
  { Console.WriteLine("a SequenceEqual b!"); } 
  else 
  { Console.WriteLine("a NOT SequenceEqual b!"); }

The above works great, but as LINQ is wrapper for other code, there must be some overhead, and it turns out there's a lot! I wrote a quick and dirty CompareArrays method and did a comparison of performance between my crude code and the LINQ SequenceEqual. Here's the results:

The manual code was around five times faster! BUT, it took a whole lot longer to write. Unless you are writing games or intense code, developer efficiency and code readability leans towards the LINQ SequenceEqual solution.

Here's the code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            int[] a = { 1, 7, 4, 6, 2, 8, 2, 8, 4, 6, 2 };
            int[] b = { 1, 7, 4, 6, 2, 8, 2, 8, 4, 6, 2 };

            DateTime d1 = DateTime.Now;
            for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++)
            {
                b.SequenceEqual(a);
            }

            DateTime d2 = DateTime.Now;
            for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++)
            {
                CompareArrays(a, b);
            }

            DateTime d3 = DateTime.Now;
            Console.Write("Time for SequenceEqual:    ");
            Console.WriteLine(d2 - d1);
            Console.Write("Time for my CompareArrays: ");
            Console.WriteLine(d3 - d2);

            Console.ReadLine();
        }

        static bool CompareArrays(int[] a, int[] b)
        {
            if (a.Length != b.Length) { return false; }
            for (int i = 0; i < a.Length; i++)
            {
                if (a[i] != b[i]) { return false; }

            }
            return true;

        }

    }
}

 

When I get really bored I convert CompareArrays into generics…

 

Hey! Look! I wrote about something other than SharePoint or PowerShell!

 

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.NET 2015–Open Source? Mac? Linux?

 

Got to take a look at this… (nuff said)

Announcing .NET 2015 - .NET as Open Source, .NET on Mac and Linux, and Visual Studio Community

 

Visual Studio Community edition. Free!   ("This is not Express. This is basically Pro.")

http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs#DownloadFamilies_2

"This edition of Visual Studio is available at no cost for non-enterprise application development."

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Interesting stuff coming!

 

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