SharePoint Online (SPO) is the Microsoft 365 document management system. Its service is consumed by other applications like Teams, OneDrive for Business, and Planner.
Sometimes it is difficult to understand exactly who has access to a document in a SharePoint Online site. The Manage Access option helps you understand who has access through group membership and sharing links. And if you need to adjust a sharing link, you can do it quickly and easily.
Have you ever wondered how Microsoft secures SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business data? Well, a recent article explains it all, and it is fascinating reading. Chunks and keys and blobs and encryption. A must-read article for anyone interested in SharePoint security.
Microsoft is changing how the removal of an Office 365 retention policy affects the data held in the SharePoint Online Preservation Hold Library. Instead of an immediate purge, data will be kept for a period to allow administrators to recover it. Sounds like a good idea and it should help people rescue a situation when someone removes a retention policy in error. That is, if they notice that the policy is no longer in effect for a site.
Microsoft says that the migration of Yammer storage for new files in SharePoint will restart in June and finish worldwide by the end of July. That’s great, but the migration of existing files is a manual process that can only be described as tiresome and error-prone. But it adds to the allure of Yammer and increases its prestige in the ranks of Office 365 apps. Or maybe not.
Microsoft has refreshed the Files channel tab to expose more functionality for Teams users when working with SharePoint Online document libraries.Office 365 commercial tenants should see the new UI in June 2019. The new Files channel tab is almost at feature parity with the functionality available through the SharePoint browser UI, but it still lacks the ability to expose and edit document properties.
Two Office 365 Message Center notifications bring news about an increase in the number of participants for a Teams group chat to 100 and improvements in shareable links for files. Moving the limit from 50 to 100 for a group chat makes these conversations more flexible. Adding permissions to the sharing links used by Teams gives users more control over how they share information with others.
One of the great things about Teams is the way that it orchestrates Office 365 resources like SharePoint Online sites. The downside is that a tenant’s valuable SharePoint storage quota might be absorbed by a profusion of Teams. To offset the problem, you can apply lower limits to sites belonging to Teams and the best approach is to use PowerShell for the job.
The modern SharePoint Admin Center introduces the ability to rename the URLs for SharePoint site names. This responds to a longstanding customer request and makes it possible for site names to reflect what users see elsewhere in Office 365 groups or Teams. It’s a small but welcome change in the fit and finish category.
Microsoft has released the GA version of the Azure Information Protection client, which reads information about Office 365 sensitivity labels and policies from the Security and Compliance Center. It’s one more step along the path to making it easy for Office 365 tenants to protect their data. Work still has to be done, but at least we can see light at the end of the encryption tunnel.
Sometimes Office 365 can be infuriating. My latest tribulation came in the form of missing retention labels, which disappeared from SharePoint Online without any reason for two weeks. Some labels returned due to auto-label policies, but any applied to documents manually had a vacation somewhere in the bowels of the services. It wasn’t a good experience.
The tabs in a Teams channel can be associated with many different forms of data. When you delete a channel, you only remove the conversations for that channel. Any other data is left intact, including files in the folder in the SharePoint site used by the team. To fully clean up a deleted channel, you must therefore check what tabs exist and what data is accessed through those tabs.
Every Office 365 group (and team) has a SharePoint site. But how to find the URLs of all the sites used by teams in a tenant. One PowerShell answer came from Syskit, but it’s an old technique and we can do better now by fetching a list of teams in the tenant and then retrieving the URL for each team-enabled group.
A new feature makes it easier for Office 365 users to share documents in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business libraries with LinkedIn first-degree contacts. The LinkedIn folks are now included in the suggested people list. It’s much easier to pick someone from a list than to look for their email address (which might be out of date). Before you can share with LinkedIn, your Office 365 tenant and user account must be configured to support the connection.
If you’re interested in deploying backups for SharePoint Online, you might be doing so to prevent data loss through accidental user deletion. However, Office 365 retention labels and policies can help prevent accidental deletion too. And the best thing is that retention policies and labels are part of Office 365 E3, so you don’t have to pay more to get protection.
Microsoft announced that the Office 365 E3 and E5 plans will receive new Information Protection licenses. They’re preparing for the introduction of sensitivity labels and the increased use of encryption to protect access to content in Office 365 apps like SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams. You don’t have to do anything to prepare for the new licenses, but it’s nice to know what they are and how the licenses are used.
SharePoint Online supports the ability to create and publish a news digest from news items published on a site (or sites associated with a hub site). It’s a great way to spread information within an Office 365 tenant.
It’s easy to be fearful when companies move work to the cloud. But the simple fact is that there’s more work than ever before to do to master all of Office 365. Just go looking!
A recent update means that you can now apply column formatting for SharePoint Online lists and document libraries without the need to write JSON code.
The Save for Later feature gives SharePoint Online users a way to mark documents and news items so that they can easily follow up and read the full content of those items.
Making it easy to protect Office 365 content with encryption is great, but it has some downsides too. One of the obvious problems that we have is that encrypted documents in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business libraries can’t be found unless their metadata holds the search phrase.
The Microsoft-Adobe initiative to support Azure Information Protection for PDF files has reached general availability. Things look good and the issues encountered in the preview are removed. You can store protected PDFs inside Office 365, but be prepared to download the files to be able to view them.
Knowing how retention policies process Office 365 data can be hard to understand, especially if multiple policies are involved. Office 365 doesn’t give a global view of how retention policies affect workloads, but here’s how to use PowerShell to find out what policies process the sites in a tenant.
Some recent questions in the Microsoft Technical Community show confusion about the email addresses used by Office 365 Groups and Teams. Here’s our attempt to clarify.
Embedding external content in modern SharePoint Online (SPO) pages is a really easy task using Microsoft’s out of the box Embed webpart. In the WebPart settings panel we can add the external content URL (such as a YouTube video) or by using the standard <iFrame> HTML tag: In the event we want to add a …
Read More “How to Embed External Content in Modern SharePoint Online Pages”
Rights management and encryption are likely to be a much more common Office 365 feature in the future. Sensitivity labels makes protection easy for users to apply through Office apps. The downside is that protection makes content harder to access for some Office 365 and ISV functionality.
Not everyone likes writing JSON files, so when the time comes to customize a site design or site script for SharePoint Online, it’s a relief to find that a visual tool is available for the job.
Backup vendors say you should definitely use their products to protect your valuable Microsoft 365 data. Backup products can do a good job, but the nature of Microsoft 365 creates many challenges at a technical level. A lack of APIs is the most fundamental issue, but the connected nature of Microsoft 365 apps is another.
How many guest users does your Office 365 tenant have? And how many of those accounts are actually used? Given that many Office 365 applications now generate guest user accounts to facilitate external access to content, managing these accounts is a growing concern.
In the same way Microsoft is introducing a new modern search experience in modern SharePoint Online (SPO) sites, the same strategy is being applied to search in Office 365. In this article we take a look at the modern search features you can find in Office 365. This article was published on Petri.com on September 27, 2018. …
A Petri.com article explains how to publish news items generated in SharePoint Online sites to Teams channels. It’s the way to spread those important announcements as widely as possible.
A very common question when discussing modern SharePoint is why Microsoft has not modernized the creation of subsites to give Office 365 tenants the ability not only to create a modern site, but also to create modern subsites. Fortunately, Microsoft has finally released a modern subsite template to allow any organization still using subsites to …
Office 365 tenant administrators can use different ways to access user data. Shouldn’t you have a policy to govern that access?
An update coming soon to the SharePoint Online Admin Center means that administrators will be able to manage Office 365 Groups. Given the importance of Office 365 Groups to SharePoint, it’s a good change.
Microsoft says that they will soon send email to users when Office 365 detects a higher than normal number of file deletions in SharePoint Online sites and OneDrive for Business accounts. There’s no real detail provided as to what counts as a high volume or why Microsoft is sending the notifications.
As announced in this post in the Microsoft Tech Community, the ability to add a new Office 365 Group to an existing SharePoint Online (SPO) site is finally available to Office 365. You will be able to connect existing classic SPO sites to new Office 365 Groups by means of two possible mechanisms: PowerShell (first …
Read More “Adding a New Microsoft 365 Group to an Existing (Classic) SharePoint Online Site”
Search in SharePoint Online (SPO) is an area that we will see change in the future. Indeed, you might have already seen some of the new search experiences in your modern SPO sites
The security company Avanan says that 10% of Office 365 users are affected by “PhishPoint.” That estimate seems pretty high to me.
SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business sites will soon boast 100 minimum versions, which they need to power features like AutoSave and OneDrive Restore. But if you work for an organization that doesn’t want to use so many versions for files, you can update your SharePoint tenant configuration to disable minimum versioning. That is, provided you do so by September 30, 2018.