Tiles modern UI

Back in SharePoint 2013 Microsoft introduced "Promoted links" a feature which enabled users to create tiles quick and easy without any custom code. Since then I've seen Promoted links being used a lot of ways, some better than others. However creating tiles with an image in the background was always a nasty thing to do. People would use the weirdest images as background to indicate what it was, totally not user friendly. Especially the choice of the color was very "weird" you would have tiles with all sort of colors and images (see image below as an example). Promoted links always had one big problem; Scaling! It's not responsive in a way you would want to have it.

Afbeeldingsresultaat voor promoted links sharepoint 2013

Since Microsoft introduced Modern UI they have also introduced the webpart "tiles". Tiles enables the user to create custom tiles within their SharePoint site, quick and easy.


Cool features of the Tiles webpart.
  1. Tiles are responsive! They resize when the screen gets smaller
  2. (Only!) UI Fabric icon can be used (https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric#/styles/icons) (this minimizes the amount of ugly images as background and the need to explain that images have to be transparent etc.)
  3. They inherit the color of the site, this could be a negative part you can't change the color of the tile. In the old promoted links webpart the tiles were always blue. In the new tiles webpart the color changes with the theme of the site.
Adding new tiles is much easier than before, because you don't need to upload the images to site assets and then link to them from the promoted links library. Adding new tiles will be much easier for business users helping them adopt the platform much easier. 

Creating new tiles:
  1. Go to the Fabric Icon overview (https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric#/styles/icons)
  2. Copy the name of the Icon
  3. Create a new tile by adding the webpart "Tiles" to a Modern UI site
  4. In the column "UI Fabric Icon Name" paste the name of the Icon
  5. Fill in the other columns, click save your all good to go

Conclusion

The tiles webpart for the Modern sites are a great upgrade from the old promoted links list. It helps users creating new tiles much quicker and less "dirty". Being able to only use the UI Fabric Icons can be a little bit of a limit for some but they list of Icons is very big so you should be able to find one that fits your purpose. All in all a great upgrade from the old version. 

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