Creating a SharePoint Online site collection

After recently showing you how to delete a SharePoint Online site collection via the web console and PowerShell the next step is obviously to show you how to create a new site collection.

Via the Web console

Login to the Office 365 web console as an administrator. Then in the top right select the Admin menu option and SharePoint from the menu that appears.

This will take you to the SharePoint admin center as shown above. This will show you all the site collections you currently have. The SharePoint admin center is only available if you have a M or E plan. It is unfortunately not available if you have an Office 365 Small Business plan.

From the Ribbon Menu across the top of the page select New then Private Site Collection from the menu that appears.

This will open a new dialog window as shown above. Enter the following for your new site:

Title – What name will appear across the top of the home page.

Web Site Address – The URL suffix you want to use when navigating to the site. best practice is to keep this as short as possible and devoid of special characters.

Template Selection:

– Language – as required

– Select a template – select from the options available along the tabs across the top. In most cases you will simply select Team Site under the Collaboration tab but you can select whatever template you wish including ones you have created yourself previously.

Scroll down for more options.

Adjust the Time Zone and set the site collection Administrator. Next set the amount of storage (in MB) you wish the new site to have in Storage Quota as well as the Server Resource Quota value.

When complete, press the OK button to create the new site collection.

You should now see in the top right corner of the screen a message letting your know that the site is being created as shown above.

You should also see the URL of the new site collection appear in the list with a green spinning animation at the end indicating that it is current being created.

Once the creation process is complete you will see the NEW icon displayed next to the hyperlinked URL.

You should now be able to navigate to the URL of the site as the site collection administrator you configured earlier. Don’t forget you may need to configure other users access to this new site if required.

Via PowerShell

You’ll need to connect to Office 365 PowerShell and SharePoint Online via PowerShell firstly.

Run the command:

get-spowebtemplate

to get a list of all the site templates that are available within your tenant.

Here we are going to use the Team Site template whose name is STS#0

Run the command:

new-sposite –url https://<tenant-name> –owner <site collection admin email> –storagequota <size in MB> –resourcequota <server resources> –title “<site name>” –template <template>

In this case

new-sposite –url https://ciaops365.sharepoint.com/sites/demo2 –owner admin@ciaops365.com –storagequota 5000 –resourcequota 30 –title “Demo2” –template STS#0

The PowerShell window will now pause until the site creation is complete. If you now look in the SharePoint admin center via the web console (refreshing the browser may be required), you should see the site being created as shown above.

After a few moments the site will be created as before and the PowerShell window will return to a prompt.

You can force the PowerShell script to return to the command prompt without waiting until the site collection is created by using the:

-nowait

at the end of the creation line.

So there are the two methods of creating a new SharePoint Online site collection in M and E plans using both the web console and PowerShell.

Deactivating an Office Pro Plus license

One of the big benefits of using an Office 365 subscription that includes Office Pro Plus is that you can install the Microsoft Office Desktop software on up to 5 devices, Macs or PCs.

This means you get the latest version of Office on your desktop, delivered typically via ‘click-to-run’ so it is always up to date.

So here we are using Outlook from Office Pro Plus via Office 365 on a desktop, with everything operating as expected.

One of the other great features that you may not know about is that if you return to the location in your web console where you actually installed the Office Pro Plus software from you can see all the machines that it is currently active on. This makes it easy to track how many installations you have implemented.

You may also notice in the list on the right you have the ability to Deactivate any instance. So what happens when you do this?

When you select the deactivate link you’ll be prompted to confirm that you do indeed want to deactivate this instance. You’ll be warned that the product on that desktop will go into ‘reduced functionality mode’. It won’t be uninstalled but you won’t be able to do things like save documents.

Select Yes to proceed.

You should then see a message indicating that the instance has been deactivated and it should no longer appear on the list of activated instances in the Office 365 console.

But what happens on the actual machine you have deactivated? Well, a certain amount of time later (not immediately) but within 12-24 hours, then time you go to use an Office application on that desktop you will receive the above message indicating that the product is deactivated.

If you wish to use the product again will all the features enabled you will need to sign to your Office 365 account or enter a product key.

if you instead cancel the dialog and proceed to use the Office application you will see a red activation banner across the top.

In any Office application you attempt to use. You will notice that all the Office applications now operate in ‘reduced functionality mode’ but they still operate and you can regain the full functionality by simply licensing them again.

The same thing will occur if the user account is deleted in Office 365 or the license from Office Pro Plus is removed for that user. This allows an Office 365 administrator to control exactly who is licensed for Office on the desktop from their tenant.

Changes to the Office 365 P and M plans

Microsoft has release a blog post:

http://blogs.office.com/2014/07/09/evolving-office-365-plans-for-small-and-midsized-businesses/

That details some significant changes to the P and M plans. Basically they are being replaced by 3 simpler plans:

Office 365 Business – The full Office applications – Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Publisher, with 1TB of OneDrive for Business cloud storage to access, edit and share your documents across your Windows PC, Mac, iPad, Windows tablet and smartphone.
Office 365 Business Essentials – The core cloud services for running your business – business class email and calendaring, Office Online, online meetings, IM, video conferencing, cloud storage and file sharing and much more.
Office 365 Business Premium – Get everything from both the Office 365 Business and Business Essentials plans.

You can read the details in the post but here are my initial thoughts on what I have read:

– It is going to greatly simplify the options for businesses. Effectively now one plan with desktop Office, another with cloud services and the third with a combination of both.

– Effectively no more seat limitations. Experience indicates that customers initially select the cheapest current plan and get stuck with a 25 user hard limit as they grow. No more. These plans scale to 300 users.

– A smoother way to upgrade plans. It seems that moving from any of these three new plans to existing Enterprise plans will not be the rip and replace we see now if you need to upgrade from P to M or E.

– The ability to add other plans like Project, Visio,, etc that you used to be only able to add to Enterprise plans.

– Yammer will be available with any plan that includes cloud services (i.e. not the entry Business plan). This highlights Microsoft’s continuing focus on Yammer as an important tool for its cloud services. So, if you are not into Yammer yet you should be.

– AD federation with all plans. This to me indicates that Microsoft is focusing more on identity management and on premise integration. This is good because it is a point of differentiation for their service.

– The new plans are going to be cheaper than the existing plans. This will always be the trend with cloud services but it is good to see that you are effectively getting more features for less money.

– OneDrive for Business is become are much more important part of Microsoft’s plan going forward. It is really the way to bring SMB’s easily to the cloud. The plain Business offering gives them OneDrive with 1TB and Office on their desktop and devices. From there it is an easy step up to add more cloud services. Less friction, lower barrier to entry means an easier transition. However, what it does mean for many is that they need to learn more about what OneDrive can offer and how to manage and maintain the product.

– The only down side I see is that during the transition there will be some confusion around how the migration will happen, how to get the new features, when the new features will become available, etc. That is part of technology and has been the case before with Office 365. However, the end result is that it will be dimplier which is a great result. For people selling and supporting Office 365 it means a little more work to understand all this.

So in conclusion after digesting all this and reflecting on it a bit I believe this is a very positive move for the product and bring it more into line with what people have been asking for (and who says Microsoft doesn’t listen?). I also think that it unlocks a huge amount of more features and abilities for SMBs who are currently on P and M plans that they eventually find limiting.

It is still early days for all this change but in short I like what I see and acknowledge the fact that Microsoft is will to make these major changes to the product offerings and that it is announcing these early in the piece. I’m sure I’ll have more to say as time goes along and we get more details but it is all very positive.

Deleting an Office 365 Site Collection using PowerShell

In the last post I showed you how to remove a complete Office 365 SharePoint Online site collection via the web interface. Now I’ll show you to do it with PowerShell.

This time I want to remove a site collection whose URL is https://ciaops365.sharepoint.com/sites/bootcamp. You can see that it appears in the list of sites in the web interface.

You’ll need to connect to Office 365 PowerShell and SharePoint Online via PowerShell firstly.

Then you need to run the following command:

remove-sposite –identity –nowait

thus in my case:

remove-sposite –identity https://ciaops365.sharepoint.com/sites/bootcamp –nowait

You’ll then be prompted to confirm the deletion. Press Y to delete the site and send it to the recycle bin.

If you refresh the page with the list of site collections the deleted site collection no longer appears.

If you now got to the sites collection recycle bin you will see both sites that have been deleted. One via the web interface and the one just now via PowerShell.

PowerShell provides you an ability that the web interface doesn’t. You can delete the site from the recycle bin and remove it completely.

To do that you need to run the command:

remove-spodeletedsite –identity

thus in my case:

remove-spodeletedsite –identity https://ciaops365.sharepoint.com/sites/bootcamp

You need to confirm the permanent removal by pressing Y.

If you refresh the web page displaying the site collection recycle bin you will see that the site has been removed completely.

Since I don’t need the other site I deleted previously using the web interface I will use PowerShell again to remove it permanently.

If we check the site collection recycle bin in the web interface there are no more site collections in the recycle bin as expected.

PowerShell provides you with more options when it comes to managing Office 365 and that is why you should be using it if you aren’t already!

Deleting an Office 365 site collection

There comes a time in the life of every Office 365 tenant where you need to do some house cleaning. In this case we are going to delete whole SharePoint Online Site Collection.

This means all the sites, apps, sub site, web parts, everything is going to be deleted. Note, I’ll be showing you how to do this for an M and E plans. The P or Small Business Plans only have a single private site collection and in most cases you probably don’t want to delete that! However, given the flexibility of both M and E plans to create multiple private Site Collections it means that you may need to clean house now and again.

You’ll need to be an Office 365 administrator to do this and for this post we’ll do our deleting via the web console. Login to the Office 365 portal and select the Admin option in the top right of the window and then SharePoint from the drop down menu that appears.

This will take you to the SharePoint Admin Center as shown above where you can see a list of all your Site Collections.

From the list of Site Collections place a check to the left of the one you wish to delete. You should then find the Delete button is available on the Ribbon Menu at the top of the screen. Press the Delete button to remove the Site Collection.

You’ll receive the above warning asking you to confirm the deletion. You’ll see that the deleted Site Collection will remain in a Recycle Bin for 30 days allowing you to recover it if necessary. Beyond that it is gone for good.

Press the Delete button to proceed.

In the top right of the window you will see the message about the Site Collection being deleted and then a message when the process is complete.

The Site Collection will no longer appear the the list in the SharePoint Admin Center.

But if you now go to the Recycle Bin via the Ribbon Menu it should appear as you see above. You can from there recover it for up to 30 days if desired.

Getting Started with SharePoint Designer in Office 365

I get a lot of questions about workflows and SharePoint Designer. You will see that I did a series of blog posts on that topic:

Creating a SharePoint Workflow

You’ve read the blog posts now see the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw-P-4YR6dw

Hopefully, all these will show you how easy it is to get into workflows for SharePoint Online.

As with most areas with technology, the rabbit hole goes as deep as you want it. SharePoint Designer is a very, very powerful tool that can create some really amazing things when it comes to workflows and SharePoint site design. Best of all SharePoint Designer is free.

So if you have been meaning to get your feet wet with automation in SharePoint Online, hopefully all this material will get you off the blocks to a flying start.

My Lync for Mac returns

A while back the version of Lync I had installed on my Macbook started prompting to verify certificates and then wouldn’t connect to Office 365. I fiddled around a bit but couldn’t get it to work so I put it on the too hard pile for the time being.

Eventually got back to it and low and behold, once I apply this update:

Update 2963369 for Lync for Mac 2011 14.0.9

That was recently released it all works as you can see above.

Now all we need is a OneDrive for Business Mac desktop sync app (which I don’t think is far away).