We have demoed our intranet and our interpretation of a multilingual SharePoint intranet to various Swiss companies.
The overwhelmingly positive feedback from our demos inspired us to take the next step: open-sourcing some of our best intranet components.
True to our company’s long tradition
of giving back to the community and society, we want to give back to the Microsoft 365 community
. This decision marked the beginning of a new chapter, which we are excited to share with the community—thus, PuntoBello was born.
SharePoint Online as a CMS
SharePoint Online is a beautiful CMS (did you know I am a SharePoint enthusiast?). When you have already licensed Microsoft 365 products, you get SharePoint Online included, and there is absolutely no reason not to leverage the fantastic integration possibilities that SharePoint Online offers.
Still, there are some areas where you may want to add your own functionalities to SharePoint Online. That is where SPFx comes into play; it is the robust and mature framework for extending SharePoint Online. Basically, you can do everything with SPFx, but that doesn’t mean you should…
Our Approach
Microsoft has put a lot of energy and documentation into explaining SharePoint Online
and SPFx
.
Understanding how to extend SharePoint Online and minimize the impact of possible changes was at the heart of our strategy. After more than 2 years of being live, we can say that our approach was correct, with no downtime or breaking changes, despite Microsoft heavily updating SharePoint Online—which is what we expect from a modern SaaS service. We will publish further articles about our approach in the coming months.
Key Areas of Extensibility
We have developed components, among other things, in the following areas:
-
Multilinguality
SharePoint, particularly the publishing area, has excellent multilingual functionality. We have extended these functionalities in some parts to round out the SharePoint experience. You can find more information about one of our solutions Multilingual Document and also the open-source solution GitHub Multilingual document by “die Mobiliar” . -
News
News is at the heart of our company communication. We have enhanced the news publishing and presentation with a custom solution that will be available in the coming months. -
In-Page Navigation
To improve and facilitate the SharePoint experience, we will release a couple of solutions.
We will also showcase some solutions in other areas 🙂
PuntoBello Solutions
The solutions all come with the same set of functionalities that you can build on. We have focused on enabling you and your engineering/development team to install and use these components as frictionlessly as possible.
We have focused on the following aspects in our open-source solutions:
- Documentation: The solutions are well-documented.
- Configuration: All SPFx solutions can be configured with various parameters like font size, color settings, etc., at build-time. The solutions also come with a mini configuration framework where you can easily add your parameters.
- Installation & Deployment: The installation and deployment of the solutions have been documented and tested. You will find various ways to install & deploy the solutions based on your requirements.