Options considered for extending Stream Live Events with live chat/questions capability

With the recent GA of Stream Live Events, Microsoft delivers a low-entry option to easily setup company-internal webcasts. All you need in addition are on the webcast producing side: 1) recording equipment - camera + audio, and 2) an encoder solution to transmit the recording inputs into the Live Events endpoint. The camera + audio options vary from the onboard webcam + microphone of a laptop, USB-based externals, upto high-end studio-quality equipment. For Stream Live Events handling the sophistication on the producing input side does not make a difference, the inputted RTMP(S) signal is from input endpoint processed the same. Whether an organization also needs some additionals on the consumption side depends on the audience side plus the internal network capacity. Watching a Live Event instantiates an individual / unicast stream per event viewer. Under assumption that the company network is sufficient scaled for nowaday cloud solutions usage, it is feasile to simultanuous watch a 'LIVE' Stream event per network location upto a maximum of few hundreds. In case of bigger audience, Microsoft states that it is needed to reduce the network load via a video distribution approach through a SDN/eSDN solution.

In its first released version, Stream Live Events capabilities are focussed on the core streaming + playing aspects. Business demands on a webcast typical go beyond that. The biggest additional demand is for interaction between the webcast audience and the presenter. Thus a chat window in which individual attendees can submit their questions, and that the presenter can follow + respond on. It is on the roadmap of Stream Live Events to deliver this (note: Stream recent delivered 'quizzes/ polls' capability, but this is targetted at inserting in already recorded videos for a.o. training purposes; not for dynamic interaction with live streaming), but not out-of-the-box delivered nowadays. However, with Office 365 as underlying platform you have as event developer a feature-rich toolbox at hand in which you can deliver yourself a webcast experience in which viewers have the live stream and chatbox combined, via no-code or low-code approaches. The hosting platform of such landingspage is naturally SharePoint Online....; as every created Stream Group is effectively an Office 365 Group, it has an own SharePoint Modern Team Site provisioned. The persons authorized to this site is the same audience that are permitted to join the scheduled Live Event. Create in this site a new page to function as the webcast entrance, and select the '2:1 columns' layout. In the left column embed the Stream Live Event instance - one gets this from Stream via 'Share' and then pick the 'Embed' option. With this setup, all left is to extend with chatbox / questions input control. There you have multiple options. One is to utilize the rich capabilities of Yammer, and embed a Yammer channel on the page. This gives you immediate a 'chat-like' experience, in which one can enter questions, semi-live follow the inputs / chats of others, respond on inputs of others. This immediate visibility of all the responses of ones peers may be unwanted, e.g. due potential sensitivity. In that case an alternative setup is to capture the inputs in a SharePoint list in the site, and only grant the webcast facilitators the authorization to view all received inputs. The webcast attendees submit their questions and feedback via an input form embedded on the SharePoint page. For this on sublevel again multiple alternatives are available. You can embed the out-of-the-box NewForm of the list; customize the NewForm via PowerApps; a MS Forms instance that via MS Flow sends the input to SharePoint List; or build a custom control via SPFx or even as a chatbot via Azure Bot Service. Of these options all except for the latter 2 are no/low-code 'mash-up' compositions, that deliver on the needed job. The decision-weighing between them is mostly on the user-experience and branding, see screen impressions of the various options.

Execute 'Site information' (logo, privacy settings) on "Modern" team site requires to be Office 365 Group owner

Site information option in Modern team sites is the way to change the site logo and/or the privacy settings. This menu option + application popup dialog is available for accounts that are Site Collection Administrator (SCA). However, this is not enough. As "only" SCA I get the error "Problem uploading your picture. Please try again later." (see also uservoice on this: "Bug? Uploading team logo does not always work"). It appears that one needs to be an owner of the Office 365 Group that is connected to the Modern team site, then one can successfully change e.g. the site logo. Cause of this behavior is that "SharePoint Online team sites that are connected to an Office 365 group use the same logo as the Office 365 group to which they are connected. When you change the logo for your SharePoint group-connected team site, the logo for the corresponding Office 365 group will change also." (Manage your SharePoint site settings)

Inject dynamic-filtering into classic-mode ListView

Earlier in my SharePoint "life", I delivered a capability in which a COTS application UI with an ASP.NET GridView, was on-the-fly augmented with dynamic filtering by utilizing list.js library: On-the-fly add client-side filtering and sorting to GridView. On occasion I refer to this as an showcase of how with simple means, a richer user experience can be delivered in SharePoint context. Last week I showed this again, and also this business user was charmed by it. But he asked to have it applied to a standard SharePoint ListView, in particular one in datasheet/quick-edit layout. I took on this challenge, and with successful result.

Screenshots to visualize the effect:

The capability itself is delivered as generic utility and deployed via private CDN. To activate on a list-view page, one merely needs to include reference to the EnrichListView.js library via a ScriptEditor webpart.

Beware Column Formatting with JSON requires the New Experience

Column Formatting with JSON is a nice approach, with relative low knowledge hurdle, to customize the rendering result of a column. However, be aware that it only works in the New / Modern Experience; for Lists that are in the Classic Experience the Column Formatting is ignored / not applied.