SharePoint Online (SPO) is the Microsoft 365 document management system. Its service is consumed by other applications like Teams, OneDrive for Business, and Planner.
SharePoint Online has a new block download file policy that stops users from downloading Teams meeting recordings. The policy applies to all sites and OneDrive for Business accounts in the tenant and is due to be part of the feature set covered by the Syntex-SharePoint Advanced Management license.
SharePoint Online is embracing Azure AD more closely by forcing new tenants to use the integration between the two Microsoft 365 components. In addition, site sharing will use the Azure AD invitation mechanism instead of SharePoint’s own code. The changes make a lot of sense and shouldn’t cause much disruption for tenants. It’s a good reminder to check the relevant policies that control external access via Azure B2B Collaboration.
The new SharePoint block download policy applies at the site level to stop users downloading files, even to work with them using the Office desktop apps. It also stops people printing and synchronizing files. In this article, we explain how to apply the policy with PowerShell, including how to apply the SharePoint block download policy to all sites assigned a certain sensitivity label.
Applying a default sensitivity label to a SharePoint Online document library is just one of the set of security and management and governance features requiring the new Syntex Advanced Management license. The new license is in preview so all the features that it covers might not be fully baked. Microsoft 365 customers might well ask if this is yet another example of Microsoft bundling features into a new paid-for add-on license. Of course it is. You don’t expect new functionality for free, do you?
SharePoint Online is a critical piece of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Its document management service is consumed by many apps like Teams, Yammer, and Planner. OneDrive for Business, the personal side of SharePoint Online, also contributes to SharePoint’s success with components like the synchronization client. Without SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 would be a very different offering and a worse platform to work with.
Microsoft has released the preview version of the Stream migration tool to move videos from Stream classic to Stream on SharePoint. The tool uses the same Mover technology as employed to migrate data from other repositories to SharePoint Online. Generally, it works well. The big decisions are all around what content to move and what can be left behind.
The Stream for SharePoint browser client includes the ability for people to record short (up to 15 minute) videos. The input comes from workstation cameras (including software cameras like Snap Camera) or the screen. Videos are stored in OneDrive for Business and can be updated and shared from there. The question we have is what role will Clipchamp play in the Microsoft 365 video playbook?
Document label mismatches happen when users create, upload, or update Office documents in SharePoint sites and give the documents a higher-priority sensitivity label than the one assigned to the site. When this happens, SharePoint Online creates a DocumentSensitivityMismatchDetected audit event. Unhappily, that event doesn’t tell us who caused the mismatch, but some work with PowerShell reveals all.
Microsoft is rolling out the public preview of the ability to set a default sensitivity label for SharePoint Online document libraries. This is likely to be a premium feature when it is generally available. For now, Office documents are supported, but Microsoft promises to support PDFs in the future.
There are many versions of PowerShell scripts to report SharePoint external users online. Most don’t handle team-connected sites, so we take the time to explain the oddities of the Get-SPOExternalUser cmdlet and create some data that we can report using the PSWriteHTML module. All in day’s work with Microsoft 365.
The new tenant admin Microsoft Graph API allows access to read and update SharePoint Online tenant settings. Although the API offers limited capabilities for now, it marks the start of Graph support for tenant settings that are currently managed through admin portals or PowerShell. It’s a welcome development.
Microsoft has improved the functionality of the Teams Files channel tab since its introduction. The most recent update adds SharePoint’s Grid View and Details pane, and the net effect is that the Files channel tab is now almost as functional as the SharePoint browser interface.
Microsoft’s work to create Stream on SharePoint continues unabated, and a handy spreadsheet is available to check features against Stream Classic. One thing’s for sure. Stream on SharePoint (or Stream 2.0) is very different to the Office 365 video portals that have gone before. It’s all about video management services and leveraging SharePoint storage now.
Teams likes to control the channel folders it creates in SharePoint Online, which is why it removes the Delete and Move to options from the folder menu. But once Teams removes a channel permanently, shouldn’t it allow the SharePoint folder to be removed?
Surprisingly, Microsoft has decided to retire the SharePoint Inside Look feature. This is where background processes extract three points from the text of Word documents and use them to help users understand the essence of the document. The text is also used in SharePoint sharing notifications. It’s a pity that the feature is going, but it’s English only and the resources needed to accommodate other languages might be too much for the predicted return.
An update for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business means that the Office desktop apps (Windows and macOS) will apply default sensitivity labels to documents that aren’t already labeled. This is a good change because it helps to close a gap for organizations that want to be sure that every document is labeled.
A new SharePoint Online setting allows tenants to switch the target for the Stream tile in the app launcher to the new Stream. The intention to is have users become accustomed to the features of the new GUI and the way that Stream can manage video content anywhere inside Microsoft 365. The downside is that migration from Classic Stream isn’t available yet. It’s coming, just like Christmas.
If you run a search in Office.com, Microsoft Search now includes Teams and Outlook messages in its results. This is similar to the capability exposed when Bing.com connects Microsoft Search to include work items in its results. Loop components are also available in search results.
A recent session at the Microsoft 365 conference offered some insight about the growth of SharePoint Online in both storage and sites. Adding 100 petabytes of storage monthly is a lot of data, but about a third of it could be consumed by Teams meeting recordings. And the 8 million sites created each month is large, but maybe not so big when you consider the reasons why Microsoft 365 tenants create sites. Teams, including private and shared channels, drives a lot of the growth in sites.
A new control in the SharePoint Online configuration is available to enable or disable Microsoft Loop components in Microsoft 365 apps, just in time for their introduction in OWA and Outlook for Windows. However, before we get all excited, there are some important issues with loop components when exported in eDiscovery search results that might make tenant administrators ponder. Just a tad…
A new sensitivity label setting is available (in preview) to control site sharing permissions for SharePoint Online sites. The new setting is an advanced setting, meaning that it can only be set using the PowerShell Set-Label cmdlet. It’s a welcome addition to the control sensitivity labels can exert over containers.
Sometimes useful features show up in a Microsoft 365 app long after they should have been there. This is the case of SharePoint Online’s document library dropdown menu, which is very helpful in navigating sites with multiple libraries. Unfortunately, not too many sites have multiple libraries because most are Teams-enabled and have a single library. Teams is another app where features show up after they should. The listing of the teams a user belongs to in the Teams admin center is a good example.
Microsoft is rolling out a new feature to allow users to move OneDrive shortcuts to shared or private folders. Although a nice upgrade, being able to move shortcuts is not the biggest OneDrive issue. What stops me using shortcuts is the clash between them and the OneDrive sync client. It seems like it should be an easy fix for Microsoft to apply, and when they do, I’ll happily move OneDrive shortcuts around.
A post by the Exchange development group tried to explain why mailboxes have SharePoint Online proxy addresses. It’s all down to the Microsoft 365 substrate, which needs the proxy addresses to ingest digital twins from SharePoint Online into Exchange Online for use by shared services like Microsoft Search. The upshot is that you can’t remove a mailbox permanently without some background processes kicking in to make sure that SharePoint is taken care of.
Microsoft has released a new set of over 1,800 fluent Teams emojis for use in chats and channel conversations. Soon you’ll be able to use Teams emojis as reactions in chats. Teams emojis are different from Windows emojis, but you can use the Windows emojis in channel names to highlight and emphasize the reason why the channel exists. All in all, the new emojis are a good thing and will be popular with many users.
An update to Microsoft Search means that search results available in SharePoint Online and Office.com now include Outlook and Teams messages. Microsoft has also updated Microsoft Search in Bing to include Outlook messages. All in all, these changes make Microsoft Search the go-to location when you need to find mailbox and Teams messages.
Microsoft Lists is now available in a preview for users with Microsoft Service Accounts (MSA). The preview is tagged as a lightweight version of the enterprise capabilities available in SharePoint Online. When generally available, we might see this as a premium consumer offering. In other news, an opinion says that Lists should replace Planner. I disagree, and say why.
SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business will soon gain the ability to apply default sensitivity labels to document libraries. The feature is currently in preview and requires some complicated PowerShell to configure, but Microsoft is working on the GUI and expects to make the capability generally available later this year.
A new tweak to the sharing link dialog used by OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, and other Microsoft 365 workloads block downloads of video and audio files by default. This is probably what you want to happen as, unlike Office documents, when you share a video or audio file, it’s likely to be final content ready to be consumed rather than being worked on.
When SharePoint users share information, Office 365 captures events in its audit log. By analyzing the events, we can build a picture of how people share information. The sad thing is that the audit events logged when someone extends the validity of a sharing link doesn’t contain as much information as you might like. Even so, we can still analyze the sharing events to build a picture of what happens in an Office 365 tenant.
The SharePoint Online expiring access policy controls how long external users can use a sharing link. You don’t have to use this policy, but it’s a good idea to configure it. And once the policy is active, users will see notices when their sharing links approach expiration. The process to renew (extend) sharing links is quick and easy. And if you want even more protection, consider combining this policy with sensitivity labels.
Teams meeting recordings can contain a lot of confidential information. It’s a quick and easy task to create a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy to stop people sharing these files externally, In this post, we show just how simple the required policy is, and just how effective it is at stopping external sharing.
The SharePoint Online admin center displays an insight card for the number of unlabeled sites in the tenant. For some reason, many of the labels assigned to Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams had not reached SharePoint. Some PowerShell does the job to fetch the sensitivity label information from Exchange Online and update sites with the missing label information.
To help you recover from the blizzard of Microsoft 365 information released at Fall Ignite 2021, here are some notes about features and functionality you might have missed. Like any list created by a conference (virtual) attendee, it reflects my interests and what I was looking for. Feel free to disagree on the importance of any or all of the topics discussed here… and suggest some of your own in the comments.
The site property bag is SharePoint Online’s way to allow tenants to add custom properties. This is useful if you want to add custom properties for search purposes, which is what you might need to do to use the new adaptive scopes for Microsoft 365 retention policies to find and process SharePoint sites. In this article, we explain how to add values to the site property bag, and how to make sure that you don’t leave sites in a position where custom scripting remains enabled.
Users attempting to delete SharePoint Online files assigned Microsoft 365 retention labels are blocked. That is, until a change arrives in November to make SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business behave in the same manner. It’s a good change because it avoid the scenario where users remove retention labels to delete files, which undermines the organization’s compliance strategy. Now, deleted items go into the preservation hold library and stay there until their retention period expires. My only complaint is that the control over the mechanism is not as simple as it should be, but that’s a small and relatively unimportant flaw in the overall scheme of things.
The preservation hold library is an important component of SharePoint Online retention processing. A change coming in November should simplify file handling and reduce the amount of storage taken up by retained files in the library. Basically, instead of storing multiple versions of a file, SharePoint Online will hold a single file containing all the updates. It seems like a good change to make. We’ll know more when it rolls out.
Microsoft has simplified Microsoft 365 administration by moving controls from the OneDrive for Business admin center into the SharePoint Online admin center. It’s a good step because the two workloads are really two sides of the same file and document management function within Microsoft 365. With many apps moving storage of their data to OneDrive for Business, its role is becoming increasingly important. Even so, OneDrive doesn’t deserve a dedicated management portal.
Adding the ability to search for spoken text in Teams meeting recordings is just one of the new features added after Microsoft moved storage for meeting recordings to OneDrive for Business. A new video viewer and support for 27 additional languages (some different variants of a base language) are also important developments. In this article, we explore how Exchange Online captures the text spoken in Teams meetings, how OneDrive for Business links the text with the video, and how Search can find spoken text from the transcripts.
The longstanding problem where the renaming of a Teams channel did not rename the folder in the SharePoint document library is being fixed. First flagged as an issue in 2016, this is one of the oldest bugs in Teams and it’s taken far too long for Microsoft to squash. The good news is that the fix will deploy in mid-September to close off the problem once and for all.