Social Squared SPFx – Installing Social Squared to SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams

In this article, you will learn how to install Social Squared into your SharePoint Online tenant to use it within SharePoint and Teams. This normally only takes a few minutes.

Steps to install the Social Squared Client Side Web Part

To install Social Squared into your SharePoint Online Tenant, you will need to be at least a SharePoint Administrator, and also a Site Collection Admin of the tenant App Catalog site. To approve the Microsoft Graph API permissions, you will need to be a Global Admin or an Application Admin. Please follow these steps:

1. Download the Lightning Tools Social Squared Files.
   • If you wish to evaluate Social Squared free for 30 days, please download Social Squared by completing the following online form here. (Note: you will receive an email from Lightning Tools with the direct download link in the email). In the downloaded trial zip folder, there are separate folders related to the different versions of SharePoint. The client-side web part is available for SharePoint 2019/SE, GCC, Teams, and SharePoint Online. The following instructions are for SharePoint Online and Teams; SharePoint server installation instructions are in a separate article.
   • If you are an existing customer, you can download Social Squared for SharePoint Online and Teams from our Download Center here.
2. Extract the downloaded zip folder to an appropriate location on a PC.
3. Meanwhile, open a browser and navigate to your App Catalog from your SharePoint Admin Center. This can be found under More Features in the left navigation, then Open the Apps tile. If this is the first time an app has been added in your environment, the App Catalog site collection will be automatically provisioned at this point. If your organization is using the “classic” App Catalog interface, please see this section.
4. In the modern App Catalog interface, click Upload and then browse to the extracted folder. Select the social-squared.sppkg file. NOTE: If you have purchased (or wish to evaluate) the AI version of Social Squared, then select the social-squared-4.0.0.0-ChatGPT.sppkg file instead (the release number may vary).

5. The Enable App panel will open on the right side. It will give you some information about the app, and allow you to choose how you wish to deploy the app (its availability). We recommend the default setting: Enable this app and add it to all sites. This will make Social Squared available to add as a web part to any site in your tenant. By default, the box is also ticked to Add to Teams, which you can choose to do now if you wish, or you can add it to Teams later if you’re unsure at this point. The other option (Only enable this app) will enable the app in the App Catalog, but if someone wishes to use Social Squared on a site, they will need to use SharePoint’s Add an App feature on that site, to add Social Squared there. In either case, click the Enable App button.

6. Next, a panel will appear that says “Approve access so this app works as designed”. This is because Social Squared takes advantage of a number of Microsoft Graph entities, and approval must be given by a Global or Application Admin to allow Social Squared to make requests to the Microsoft Graph. If you are a Global Admin, click Go to API access page. Otherwise, a Global Admin can come back and do the approvals later via the API access link on the left menu of the App Catalog.

7. This will take you to the API Access page, which normally takes a moment to load. You should eventually see a number of Pending permission requests by Social Squared. Note that you may see different requests than shown below, either because some of these permissions have already been approved, or because there have been changes to Social Squared since the time this article was written. You can view a current list of Social Squared API requests in this Knowledge Base article. The article also describes the purpose of each request; you may find that some are not necessary to approve if you don’t plan to use the relevant feature. For example, a number of the permissions are related to Teams, so if you do not plan to use Social Squared in Teams, you do not need to approve those permission requests.

8. Approve the appropriate Pending requests one by one; it’s not possible to approve them in bulk.

9. If you did not add Social Squared to Teams in Step 5 above, then you can do it later by selecting the Lightning Tolls Social Squared app in the App Catalog, and clicking Add to Teams. You will need to be at least a Teams Admin to perform this action, and your Teams environment must be configured to allow third-party apps.

You can now proceed to add Social Squared to a SharePoint site or to Microsoft Teams.

Installation using the Classic App Catalog interface

1. Within the AppCatalog site, open the Apps for SharePoint library from the left navigation pane.
2. Drag and drop the social-squared.sppkg file into the Apps for SharePoint library.

3. You will be prompted as to whether you trust the social-squared-cswp-client-side-solution. If you wish to potentially use Social Squared on multiple sites or teams, please check the check box “Make this solution available to all sites in the organization” and click Deploy.

4. If you wish to use Social Squared within Microsoft Teams as well as in SharePoint Online, please select the social-squared-cswp-client-side-solution package, and choose Sync to Teams from the FILES ribbon.

5. Navigate to the SharePoint Admin Centre and open the API Access option under Advanced on the left pane. Select each pending API access request and choose Approve. You may need to contact your organisation’s administrator if you do not have the access to perform these actions.
6. Congratulations, you have now installed Social Squared!

Updated May 2023