Braque 3 Product Release Notes, Feb. 8, 2017

This week’s release brings us Braque 3, brought to your LiveTiles experience sooner than later due to popular demand. There are quite a few major new features, including the much-requested ability to make LiveTiles page content searchable. So without further ado, we present to you the below new features, improvements and bug fixes.

Note: The next release will be on March 1^st, in three weeks’ time.

New features

Make page content searchable – (add indexable content search on all pages)

Previously, on LiveTiles Design pages, content was unable to be indexed and would not show up in the SharePoint search. With this release, we are adding in indexing onto all of our pages for the image, content and text tiles.

LiveTiles Pages being found via SharePoint Search

There are two scenarios whereby Text tile’s content (using both the current Text tile as well as the new Content tile) will be captured for indexing by a SharePoint search:

1. SharePoint Publishing Feature is turned on in the site collection

In this scenario, the LiveTiles page will be saved using SharePoint’s Article Page content type.

This content type provides some fundamental content page related data columns without requiring any content type customization.

The content contained with all Text tiles on the page is written to Page Content column which is a Publishing HTML field type and as such is indexed natively by SharePoint.

(Worth noting that this is the same behavior on how the classic SharePoint publishing pages work).

The first 200 characters of the text content is added to the Byline column. This is used by the News List tile when it is configured to use pages as its source of items. We also capture the first image into the picture column for the same reason.

Note: if you save the page to Site Pages library rather than Pages the Article content type will be associated into the library.

2. SharePoint Publishing Feature is not turned on in the site collection

In this scenario, the Article Page content type is not available. Instead, the page will use the default Wiki page content type in Site Pages as it currently does. However, the update will add the text content from the page to the Wiki Content column which is natively indexed.

Note: In this scenario, the content type does not have Byline or Picture columns so the integration to the News List tile will not be as seamless. However, you can make this available by extending the Wiki Page content type with two custom columns: LTArticleByline (of type Single Line of Text) and LTPublishingPageImage (of type Image with Publishing). If they are found to exist, the page save will use them. Please refer to this KB article for more details.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Getting the changes will require page re-saves, as it is the save action that will trigger the content type and columns to be used.

As this uses SharePoint standard indexing and search, content on the pages will not be instantly searchable from your pages on save. This is due to the search updating periodically and may take up to 20 minutes (subject to your search indexing configuration).

For more information on this feature please visit the Knowledge Base here.

Rich Content Tile

This week, we are introducing the Rich Content tile. This tile functions similarly to modern content platforms such as Medium. A minimal, contextual, inline toolbar simplifies authoring while also providing for inline insertion of images and videos (note: image and video insertion is only available for responsive pages due to how fixed width pages position tiles).

In order to start editing the page, you will either be able to click on the pencil icon on the settings bar while the tile is selected, or be able to just hit enter to start typing away. You will be able to edit the text by selecting it, which will have a medium style editor appear next to the selected text.

The Content tile

In addition, on the responsive canvas, when entering a new paragraph you will have the option to add a video or image to the content. Doing so will add either an image or video tile to your page and will split the rich content into two separate tiles surrounding the image/video tile.

To leave editing the tile, you will be able to either click outside the tile or press the escape key.

Note: This tile currently does not work in IE10. For best results, we recommend using Chrome or Firefox.

There are some issues currently surrounding the edge browser when using this tile in regards to text and picture selection. To get around this, you will need to double click or click and hold for a second, otherwise, you will exit edit mode. We are currently working on a fix for this.

Content page type

This week, we are adding a new template style to the product to take advantage of the Rich Content tile.

Example content page

This new page template starts the page off with a full page row, populated by a Rich Content tile ready for you to start typing in a pre-populated row. This will allow you to be able to start typing straight away, to quickly deploy content pages quickly. This, in combination with the changes to the News List and Announcement tiles, will allow you to be able to deploy LiveTiles pages as your announcement items.

Note: This page type will not work in IE10. For best results, please use Chrome or Firefox.

There are some issues currently surrounding the Edge browser when using this page type in regards to text and picture selection. To get around this, you will need to double click or click and hold for a second, otherwise, you will exit edit mode. We are currently working on a fix for this.

Usability improvements

Bug fixes