SharePoint Liz

Aura Part Two: How I Actually Built It Part One was about the why behind Aura, this one is about the how. Some of these details were originally supposed to make it into Part One, but last week was a bit of a blur and apparently I edited them straight into the void. So Part Two has the missing pieces, plus a few more. And before I get into the details, I want to say something that really matters to me: everything in Aura is buildable. By you. Right now. With what you already have. You need a plan, some creativity, and a willingness to push the tools a little further than you normally would. That was the whole point. Start with the experience, not the page Before I touched SharePoint, I spent time thinking through what I wanted the experience to do, what it should feel like, what problems it needed to solve, and how the pieces should fit together. That planning mattered more than any individual feature. It helped me stay clear on the point of the site from the beginning. This was n...

Honestly? The hackathon came at the right time. I spend a lot of my days doing the work that makes SharePoint function for organizations. Metadata strategy, information architecture, governance, the stuff that is not always flashy but makes everything else possible. It is work I love, but it lives mostly in the practical lane. Client needs, timelines, what is realistic, and so on. The hackathon gave me an opportunity to get out of that lane for a little while. So I took the things I do every day and asked a different question. Not "what does this client need" but "what could this actually become?" That question is where Aura came from. What I built Aura is an AI-ready SharePoint knowledge hub built around user intent rather than content categories. Instead of the usual "here is a library, good luck" approach that a lot SharePoint sites end up becoming, Aura guides users through four paths: Ask, Understand, Resolve, and Act. You land on the site knowi...