After you have created you public Office 365 SharePoint website, you want to customize it but surprise. If you click site actions there are only few options available (I wonder if this is an error or by design).

The goal: Transformation of this Standard Office 365 SharePoint Website into a Full Working SharePoint Publishing Site. By the way I’m using Office 365 E3 Plan which has the Publishing Infrastructure Feature.

So let’s start. First step: Activation of the Publishing Infrastructure at the Site Collection Level. Even if there is no Site Settings option in the menu you can still access this area by type the URL directly:

http://public-address/_layouts/settings.aspx

You will be redirected to the Site Settings page. From here please open Site collection features (below Site Collection Administration Section) and activate the Publishing Infrastructure Feature.

It is a little bit strange but you have to add it as a new domain (after you have completed the initial domain setup) to your Office 365 Instance. This domain will actually be:

www-or-some-other-name.your-already-registered-domain.com

First of all please log in on the Office 365 Home Portal. Click the Domain link which is located under the Management section and then Add new domain link.

Now please specify your domain, check it and then click Next.

Some time ago I wrote a blog post which described how to add a Twitter feed in SharePoint 2010.

Using the same web part – XML Viewer Web Part it is possible to add Yahoo Weather forecast feed in SharePoint too.

For example the Helsinki weather forecast feed returns the following data:

The web address of the RSS feed is:

http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?w=565346&u=c

You might have this requirement in the following scenario: your master page needs to display dynamic information (for example Calendar Web Part, Weather Web Part or Twitter which both can be done with XML Viewer Web Part or dynamic HTML from a SharePoint List displayed with CQWB – Content Query Web Part).

This can be easily solved with SharePoint Designer. Please find bellow the full scenario described:

As a first step you need to create a new place holder within the Site’s Master Page. So, in SharePoint Designer open your Publishing Site Collection and then browse to the current master page.