Aura: My SharePoint Hackathon Entry and the Best Excuse I Ever Had - Part 2

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 never supposed to be just another place to store information. It was meant to be a guided experience that helps people move from a question to confident action.

By the time I started building, I had a clear enough direction to make decisions quickly and keep the whole thing cohesive.

The name came from my husband

I want to give credit where it is due: my team partner Bryan came up with the name Aura.

The second he said it, I knew it was right. But I also wanted it to mean something beyond just sounding good, so I took it back to Copilot and worked through a backronym that tied the name directly to what the hub is meant to do:

Ask. Understand. Resolve. Act.

That gave me more than a name. It gave me a framework. The experience ended up following that same logic, which helped the whole site feel more intentional from the start.

The design direction: Mid-Century Modern, but make it SharePoint

For the visual direction, I chose a Mid-Century Modern aesthetic. It felt like the right fit for Aura: clean, intentional, and structured without feeling stiff.

I wanted the site to feel more designed than a standard SharePoint page, but still fully buildable with out-of-the-box components. Mid-Century Modern gave me a style that added personality without getting in the way of the experience.

I did some of the early concept work with AI, and Bryan helped turn that direction into something cohesive.

Flexible sections, faux dividers, and a little creative trickery

The homepage is built entirely with out-of-the-box web parts inside flexible sections. No custom code. No custom web parts. No developer magic.

One of my favorite parts of the page is also one of the simplest. The faux divider effect is not some advanced design treatment. It is just an image placed inside a flexible section.

To create it, I used the orbit image as style grounding when prompting for the divider graphic. That helped keep the new image visually consistent with the rest of the page so it felt like part of the same design system instead of a random extra element.

The image itself is simple: two color fields divided by a soft curved line. But once it is placed in the section, it changes how the whole page feels. It adds movement and makes the transitions between sections feel intentional.

Inside those sections, I used a mix of text, Quick Links, and Image web parts to build out the four paths. The large visual elements do a lot of the work in guiding the eye, while the web parts do the actual job of navigation and structure.

That is exactly what I mean when I say this is buildable. It does not require advanced technical skill. It requires a little creativity and a willingness to think differently about what the tools can do.

Here is an example of the kind of prompt I used to generate the divider image:

Using this orbit-style image as visual grounding, create a wide abstract background image for a SharePoint flexible section. Keep the same overall design language and mood, but simplify it into a clean divider-style graphic with two complementary color areas separated by a smooth organic curved line. Minimal, polished, and modern. No text, no objects, no people. Landscape orientation, suitable for a professional knowledge hub homepage.

That was the trick that helped the page feel cohesive instead of looking like a collection of unrelated parts.

The sample content had to feel real

For the knowledge article pages, I needed realistic sample content that would actually demonstrate how the hub works. I did not want placeholder filler. I wanted content that felt believable and useful enough to support the experience.

So I used Copilot to help draft the markdown for those articles.

I directed the structure, the topics, and the tone. Copilot helped accelerate the drafting. The result was a set of knowledge articles that felt like something an organization might actually publish instead of mock content sitting in a library for decoration.

That combination of human direction and AI-assisted drafting is also a pretty good model for how organizations should think about knowledge creation going forward. The value is not in having AI do all the thinking. The value is in using it to help turn a good structure and clear intent into something usable faster.

AI in SharePoint and autofill: the part I was most excited to build

This is where the metadata strategy and the AI features really come together.

I used AI in SharePoint to create all of my library views - the views that the home page quick links and icons point to. With the right prompts, I had multiple views for multiple libraries in no time. 

I configured AI autofill on the knowledge library for two fields.

The first is a Summary field that generates a plain-language description of each document. That helps users understand what they are looking at without opening the file, and it gives Copilot better context when retrieving content.

The second is an AI Reliability Rating tied to the last published date. The idea is simple: fresher content gets a stronger reliability signal. That gives both users and AI experiences a better way to prioritize content that is more likely to be current and trustworthy.

What I like about this approach is that it creates a lightweight freshness indicator without depending on someone to manually maintain a field. Which means, in the real world, it actually has a chance of being used consistently.

That combination of a human-readable summary and a freshness signal is something I have wanted to build for a long time. Getting to do it with AI autofill instead of a manual process made it feel like the tools finally caught up with the strategy.

What I really wanted Aura to prove

More than anything, I wanted Aura to show that SharePoint can be more than a place where information goes to sit quietly in folders until someone needs it.

It can guide. It can teach. It can reduce friction. It can help people move from a question to an answer and then from an answer to action.

And it can do that with relative ease and some foundational SharePoint knowledge if you are willing to think carefully about structure, design, metadata, and user intent.

That is the part I hope people do not miss. Yes, the look matters. Yes, the AI pieces matter. But the real story is that the experience was planned. The visuals, the page layout, the article structure, and the metadata model were all working toward the same goal.

That is what makes it feel cohesive.

The takeaway

Aura came together through a clear concept, a great name from Bryan, AI-assisted design exploration, creative use of out-of-the-box SharePoint web parts, and a metadata model I like to build.

But the part that matters most to me is not any one feature on its own.

It is how the pieces work together.

Aura felt successful because the structure, the visuals, the content, and the metadata were all working toward the same goal: helping people move from a question to confident action.

For me, that is what made the project feel worth building. SharePoint can be practical, beautiful, structured, and genuinely helpful all at once when you build with intention.