SharePoint Online

Microsoft is significantly increasing the amount of storage for SharePoint Online which may allow you to save a few dollars each month.

Office 365 Groups are the reason why many SharePoint Online sites appear in tenants. If you’re on the Pacific coast of the U.S., the regional settings are OK. But anyone else in the rest of the world who uses the SharePoint browser interface will see times and dates in that instead of the local format. You can change the regional settings for a site, and now you can make sure that new sites have the right settings.

Microsoft Flow integration in SharePoint Online provides a very simple way to model common collaboration scenarios, such as send an OnDemand notification when a specific document has been uploaded to a document library or a list item has been created in a list. In this article I will show you how to create a simple Flow to send an OnDemand notification when a document is selected in a document library.

PowerShell is a critical skill for Office 365 tenant administrators. A knowledge of PowerShell allows you to fix things that Microsoft leaves undone in apps like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams. Sure, black holes exist for PowerShell (like Planner) and it is slow to process thousands of objects, but there’s nothing like a little script for getting things done.

Since Office 365 appeared in 2011, Microsoft’s collaboration story has varied according to whatever technology is available. Originally based on Exchange and SharePoint, it’s gone through Yammer, Office 365 Groups, and now Teams. You’d be forgiven for being confused by the frequent changes in the strategy du jour. And now we have inner and outer loops to consider, at least according to Microsoft’s favorite collaboration slide. Here’s my take.

Owners of Office 365 Groups can delete groups if they want. Some don’t like this as it means that SharePoint site collections, teams, and plans are removed. The simple membership model used by Office 365 Groups is the cause, and while you cannot stop owners deleting their groups, you can take action to detect and recover deleted groups if necessary.

GDPR is coming and Office 365 tenants need to be prepared to deal with topics like data spillage and the right to be forgotten. It’s easy to see how to remove someone’s PII from Exchange mailboxes and SharePoint Online, but you might have a bigger challenge dealing with offline data in PSTs and OneDrive-synchronized folders. More to ponder…

Now that so many apps (like Teams) create Office 365 Groups, it’s logical that some of the groups will serve their purpose and then need to be archived. Office 365 offers no way to do this, but conceptually it’s a reasonably easy task and something that PowerShell handles with aplomb.

Teams is one of Microsoft’s hubs for teamwork within Office 365. People work with documents all the time and the documents are in SharePoint Online libraries. However, Teams imposes its own view of documents and omits some of the functionality available through the SharePoint browser interface. This doesn’t seem to matter very much, except in the case of data governance.

Office 365 Groups (and Teams) can quickly become obsolete, but administrators need some help to find the underused groups. PowerShell comes to the rescue through a mixture of checks against the group mailbox, Office 365 audit log, and Teams compliance records. A nice HTML report is the result – and isn’t that always welcome.