Custom Learning for Office 365 Setup and walkthrough

From a recent MSCUG user group session i hosted a colleague Grace Picking spoke around the Custom Learning Portal for Office 365 so i thought id look into this more as it seems a great resource for adoption and learning for Office 365.

From setup it was super easy and makes setting and populating and learning / training portal really easy and quick. Filled with Office 365 content to start with and then you can edit, customise and add new content i think its great !

Below is my walkthrough of Microsoft Docs for setup. Hope its useful.

I started here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_provision

Prereqs

So i check the prereqs as listed below and i have administrator persmissons on my tenant but not a tenant app catalog so i need this first.

Prerequisites

To successfully set up Custom Learning with the Provisioning Service, the person doing the provisioning must meet the following pre-requisites:

The person provisioning Custom Learning must be a Tenant Administrator of the tenant where Custom Learning will be provisioned.
A tenant App Catalog must be available within the Apps option of the SharePoint Admin Center. If your organization does not have an SharePoint tenant App catalog, refer to the SharePoint Online documentation to create one.
The person provisioning Custom Learning must be a Site Collection Owner of the Tenant App Catalog. If the person provisioning Custom Learning is not a Site Collection Owner of the App Catalog complete these instructions and continue.

Tenant App catalog

I visited https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/use-app-catalog and followed the steps to deploy this.

From SharePoint Admin centre (Classic) i went Apps and then app catalog

seems i dont have an app catalog so i need to create one.

i select “Create a new app catalog site” and then click OK

I Entered a Title, Web Site address and selected an administrator and click OK.

This seems to take a little time to create so i checked site collections and i see it being created

After a couple of minutes i see

i clicked the site collection link and that gave the me URL i clicked the URL and im in

i was unsure on next steps so i went to create the custom learning site and we will see if that correct.

I go to here and follow the steps https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_provision

Im using SharePoint Online deployment option http://provisioning.sharepointpnp.com/

Click sign in

steps said to clear the Consent on behalf of your org which i was surprised so ill confirm this. For the moment i checked the box just in case.

scroll down and select solutions tab

Select Custom Learning for Office 365

click Add to your tenant

I was prompted again so i checked and accepted (need to confirm)

Complete provisioning information

Notification email and set a custom URL – Make it nice and easy to remember

Click provision

Click Confirm

Ill wait for the email and grab a coffee it says can take 15mins.

Was under 15 minutes and i got my email notification

Lets check it out

and heres it is

validating setup and initialise customconfig list you have to go to a different url for me it was

https://m365x370736.sharepoint.com/sites/LearnOffice365/sitepages/customlearningadmin.aspx

dependent on the url it will be different follow

<YOUR-SITE-COLLECTION-URL>sites/<YOUR-SITE-NAME>/SitePages/CustomLearningAdmin.aspx

I followed the deployment steps and next it takes me to adding owners so i think we will jump back to the admin page but at least we can access it.

Add Owners to the Site is recommended

From the SharePoint site you go to the cog top right

Site permissions

advanced permissions settings

Click on owners

Click Share

It says next steps if default content so let go

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_exploresite

back to the home page and click Office 365 Learning and you can see all the default content

ill dive into Teams for example here is a playlist

this was a great url i found to explain the structure https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_whereiswebpart

“For each page, the Web part is configured differently to show the categories, subcategories, playlists or asset designed to support the intent of the page”

You get by default

Start-with-Six-Simple-Steps.aspx
Recommended-Playlists.aspx
Get-started with-Office 365.aspx
Get-started-with-Microsoft-Teams.aspx
Get-started-with-OneDrive.aspx
Get-started-with-SPO.aspx

Next lets customise the Learning Experience

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_overview

nice diagram on how custom content if fed into it

first off check permissions

The link i followed took me back to learning about custom learning page so i got a bit lost so headed over to learn about the custom learning administrator page

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_accessadmin

to access Admin i found if you have permisson under home

to show and hide from product select the product and click the eye (Show)

ill just show Teams Quick Start

i needed to refresh the page to show updated list

can hide a complete category as well

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_hideshowsub

No Teams (We never want that so lets get it back Winking smile )

Show hide playlists in the same way

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_hideshowplaylists

Show and hide technologies from technology tab – same way using the Eye

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_hideshowtech

Create SharePoint pages for Custom Playlists

This looks great we can create custom playlist with custom content

One of the unique features of Custom Learning is the ability to create playlists that are assembled from assets from Microsoft and from SharePoint assets that you create. In this example, we’ll create a SharePoint page in advance of creating a playlist. The ability to build playlists from SharePoint pages offers a variety of opportunities to build pages using the Web parts available from Microsoft or your organization. For example, a playlist can include a SharePoint page with embedded videos from YouTube, or a form built from Office 365 Forms, or an embedded Power BI report. In this example, we’ll show you how to build a page with the Embed web part and the Text web part.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_createnewpage

on the site click the Gear (Cog) icon and add page

i added a title

click the + on the left hand side

select TWO columns

left side click embed

right side click Add select text

For this example im following the steps to grab a video from YouTube.

Steps are here

Add a video and text from YouTube

In your browser, go to YouTube. For this example, search for “What is Office 365 – Microsoft’s best productivity apps”.
Click the video to play it, then pause it, then right-click on it.
Click Copy embed code, then return to the SharePoint page.
Click Add embed code in the Embed web part, and then add the code from the YouTube video.
Return to the YouTube page and copy the Description text for the video.
Return to the SharePoint page, select the Text web part, then copy the text from the YouTube video.
Select the Edit web part icon in the Title area of the SharePoint page, and then name the page “Custom Playlist Introduction”.
For Layout, select Plain, then close Title Region properties pane. The page should now look something like the following.

update title and title display as well which was nice

Then publish

make note of the url as you need it to when you create custom playlist and assign an asset.

Custom Playlist now

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_createnewplaylist

Fill in

Save detail

there my custom

now we need to Add Assets to a Custom Playlist

Add Assets to a Custom Playlist

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_addassets

Entered title and select Enter URL

wish i remember that URL of the custom page earlier

Complete form and save

and there we go step 1

Let check it out

Office 365 training > First Days

Custom Playlist starter kit

There my page with the Youtube video

Create Sub Category

Same method but clicking add on Add new subcategory

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_createnewcat

Add Edit Custom Learning Web Part

Custom Learning gives you the flexibility to add the Custom Learning Web part to a SharePoint page, and then filter the contents of the Web part to meet the learning objectives for the page. For example, you could create a “Make the Switch to OneDrive” page, then add the Web part and configure it to show custom OneDrive migration playlists created especially for your organization.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_addwebpart

Gear icon top right > New Page

Then click + left hand side for sections > one column

select custom learning for office 365 web part

Click edit web part

Add a title and publish

Choose filter and click apply

Link to Custom Learning content

With Custom Learning, there are two ways to link to content:

Link to the page that host the Web part filtered for the content you want to display.
Link directly to an instance of the Web part

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_linking

I wont go into this but follow the info on the link to edit the home pages and copy links from pages.

FAQ’s

Only available in English currently

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/faq

Partner FAQ’s

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_partner

The Custom Learning site template and content solution is hosted in the open-source SharePoint Patterns and Practices GitHub repository. However, the repository is locked down for only Microsoft submissions at this point. We plan to support partner contributions to both the template and the content store in the future, once we establish an appropriate oversight and compliance plan.

Troubleshooting

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/customlearning/custom_troubleshooting

PDF Copy of Microsoft Docs for offline reading