Ideas & Challenges
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      Beautifying Your SharePoint Launch Page

      Explore quick links, countdowns , and other fun stuff 🚀

      Overview

      Does your SharePoint page look way too basic?
      The edison365 Ideas app is hosted on your SP landing page. If you maneuver to Site Contents (left navigation pane or in the Settings cog in the top right) you can see the app in the list:
      To improve the user experience we recommend embedding this app link on the Home page of the site. Along with this, you can add other widgets to the page to provide a place for resources and other bits of helpful information.

      Create an App Launcher

      Currently the app link is in the Site Contents of the SP site. We want to copy this link and move it to the home page under an icon, so it's easy and friendly for users to launch.


      Here's me running through this process:

      1. Open Site Contents

      2. Navigate to the app

      3. Hold shift and right click on the app > choose Copy Link Address

      4. Go back to the Home page and select Edit 

      5. Add an image widget (in my case the ideas icon, let us know if you want this icon file!)

      6. Select the image

      7. Click the pencil icon to edit > paste in the URL you copied into the Link field

      8. Click the small X icon to close out of the Image editing menu (there's no save button)
      9. Click Republish to save your changes and update the page
      10. Click the Ideas Icon to launch the app

      This gif shows Steps 6-10. Now that the image has the app link embedded, when users click on it they automatically launch the app!

      More Widgets!

      SharePoint provides many different options for designing your Home page.

      In the example above you can see a few options:
      • A countdown timer to allow gentle reminders for deadlines
      • Embedded PDF report
        • In this case to highlight our Power BI Report functionality, but you can embed any type of file that might be relevant to users
      • A video file
        • For this trial example we're highlighting Rob's How To video on triaging ideas
      • Another favorite is the Quick Links widget which gives easy access to resources
        • Using the Help Center as an example you can arrange links however you want and even add custom icons or display in different ways like so:
          • Tiles
          • List
      • You can see the full list of available web parts here: Using web parts on SharePoint pages
      There are endless opportunities for customization, so start small and build on what you have as your needs change and grow! Soon enough you'll have a dynamic and inviting home page.