Overcome JSON column formatting limitation that it does not support Rich Text Multiline

Inspired by the visualization of Microsoft 365 roadmap, I want to achieve similar for collecting and communicating the architecture vision and refined roadmap of our ART (Agile Release Train). As the purpose is mainly about communicating, I decide to just leverage a SharePoint list for it, no need to administrate in a planning tool (eg Jira Align). In the information architecture I add a column per aspect of the architectural roadmap topics: title, description, theme, year of delivery. And for the roadmap refinement a column per year in which to enumerate the steps I foresee in that year. The steps collected in a bulleted list, thus the column must be of type Multiline / Rich Text.

However, this decision results in a visualization challenge. Standard, SharePoint truncates in ListView the value of multiline columns to 4; and the roadmap does not display in entirety. List View / JSON formatting is not helpful to resolve: 1) ColumnFormatting does not support Multiline / Rich Text, and I don’t want to reduce to plain text ("It is NOT recommended to use Rich text fields in your formats"); 2) RowFormatting requires to specify the formatting for full view, while I am satisfied with the standard formatting of all other columns.

As pragmatic resolution I decided to revert to old-skool approach of DOM formatting. In Modern SharePoint you cannot directly inject a custom style, but via Modern Script Editor this is easily possible: [[Code]].

A risk of this approach is that Microsoft might change the standard formatting of list views: you cannot rely on DOM of standard SharePoint controls as “an interface contract”. But I can accept that risk: in unlikely case that Microsoft would make “breaking change”, all what would happen is that our roadmap visualization reduces to showing the multiline columns again truncated.

Winner of SAP Microsoft Unite Partner Connection Customer Impact and Value Award with VIEW solution

I am very proud that The Next View has won the 2014 edition of the SAP Microsoft Unite Partner Connection Award for Customer Impact and Value with our VIEW solution!!

VIEW stands for Virtual Integrated Enterprise Workplace. For us, the VIEW concept is not new, I for instance already defined and published on this blog parts of the Conceptual Solution Architecture back in 2009. But it is only up to now with the advent of the modern integration technologies SAP NetWeaver Gateway, Duet Enterprise, Gateway for Microsoft (GWM), plus the availability of standard functional products from our partner Cordis Solutions, that we are enabled to actually realize the VIEW concept in a cost-effective manner.

So, what does VIEW stand for? VIEW is a new operating concept in which the central concept is that of an employee-centric mindset. In VIEW, we strive to optimally enable organization’s employees to perform their daily work-related activities. In current reality, this work execution often means that one must operate in (and switch to) multiple applications and systems, monitor multiple tasklists in different environments (SAP, SharePoint, Oracle, Outlook, ...), remember login credentials of the diverse systems. With VIEW, we relieve the employees from all this ‘IT landscape’ hashle. Instead that the employees must explicit go to all the different applications, in VIEW we collect all the work execution in a central place: the VIEW landing page.

And this VIEW landing page has multiple appearances: desktop and mobile, to fit in with the nowadays reality that employees are [willing to be] always connected to the business systems, to at minimum monitor and act on urgent matters.

Although the VIEW concept does not mandates this, the typical platform for the desktop appearance is SharePoint; as this is in majority of the organizations the declared [by Information Management, Enterprise Architecture] business webplatform. The VIEW landing page is merely added as new employee business application within the already present SharePoint-based intranet.

Also for the mobile appearance, SharePoint can be the platform [certainly SharePoint 2013 has made some big steps on enabling us to provide a proper mobile appearance, a.o. taking into account the diversity in mobile devices]. But the mobile landing page can also be hosted outside SharePoint, e.g. via SAP Mobile Platform [SMP], an hybrid App [HTML5/CSS/PhoneGap], and other alternatives. Again, the VIEW concept does not put strict restrictions on this.

If you want to learn more about the VIEW solution, check out the SAP Microsoft Unite Partner Collection solution brief.