Windows Explorer and modern SharePoint interface

One of abilities that I thought Microsoft had removed from the new or ‘modern’ SharePoint interface was the ability to open a document library using the Windows Explorer file manager. Turns out that feature is still available as you can see from the above image.

You’ll find View in File Explorer option in the top right of a Document Library under the All Documents option. However, as with the previous Open in Explorer option, it is only available if you are using Internet Explorer. The reason it doesn’t appear in other browsers is because it uses an Active X control.

When you select the option a new tab will open in a browser and you’ll see the ‘classic’ interface.

A few moments later the Document Library will open in Windows Explorer as you can see above. You can now drag and drop files directly into the library using Windows Explorer as you could previously.

So the ‘trick’ to opening a Document Library with Windows Explorer using the new SharePoint interface is to once again use Internet Explorer and then select View in File Explorer from the All Documents option in the top right of the library.

Answering common questions with Office 365 Part 3

This is the third article in a series of typical customers questions around Office 365. These questions were part of presentation I did with two other resellers at the Australian Microsoft Partner Conference in 2016. You’ll find the first part of the series here:

Answering common questions with Office 365 Part 1

Answering common questions with Office 365 Part 2

The question for this article is:

My team has to manage a lot of documents for a lot of clients and we have trouble working effectively with this information when you also combine it with data from email and other sources. How can Office 365 be used to allow my business to be more effective with the information we are producing?

There are so many ways that this question can be answered with Office 365. Consider the following as simply an overview of what is possible.

The most important thing to appreciate about Office 365 is that all the information you put in there is searchable. The results from any search are ‘security trimmed’. That means you only see results that you have access to view.

For most users Delve provides a single pane of glass across nearly all of your Office 365 services.

How can I find people and information in Office Delve?

I have written articles about the importance of Delve but this one probably sums up things best:

Delve should be the centre of your Office 365 universe

Delve is available across all Office 365 suites and if you haven’t as yet looked at it then start here:

Introducing Office Delve

What is Office Delve?

How does Office Delve know what is relevant to me?

Also importantly, you can get Delve on your mobile devices:

Introducing Office Delve Mobile Apps

as well as you Windows 10 desktop:

Delve on Windows 10 app

Most Office 365 users also get a personal location called OneDrive for Business in which they can store all their documents.

What is OneDrive for Business?

They will get around 1TB of space into which they can store and share their personal files. This means they can move information stored on their local desktop, PC, USB drives, etc into a secure location that only they have access to and that they can share from with others, inside and outside the organisation if they want. It is important to note that OneDrive for Business is not designed as a file server replacement, it is designed for personal use. SharePoint Team Sites and Office 365 Groups are more the locations for information that needs to be shared with a teams of people.

There are many other products that do personal file sharing but here’s an overview of why OneDrive for Business is a superior technology.

Why OneDrive for Business

Given that Office 365 is much more than just emails and file storage I’d recommend you review my article:

Where to put data in Office 365?

to give you a better idea of what all the options are.

Now I mentioned Office 365 Groups as another location in which you can save your information. Office 365 Groups is great if you simply need an email distribution and single place to store common files. For a better idea of what Office 365 Groups are all about have a look at:

Office 365 groups: A quick tour of new user and admin experiences

If you then needs to add tasks to your collaboration you should have a look at Office 365 Planner:

Get started quickly with Microsoft Planner

However, if your needs exceed the functionality of both Office 365 Groups and Planner then it is time to consider SharePoint Team Sites for a fully blown ‘intranet’ style experience.

What is SharePoint

Getting started with SharePoint

Remember, that everything you put into a SharePoint Team Site is searchable, including the text inside documents. Team Sites allow you to create a hierarchical structure much like a file server but add in collaboration features like calendars, wikis, lists, etc.

You can get more functionality by using ‘metadata’ to tag your information to make it easier for your users to filter and sort.

Create managed metadata column

Set up metadata navigation for a list or library

The great thing is that you can customise your metadata to exactly suit your needs.

Another service available to Enterprise Office 365 Plans is a private video portal called Office 365 Video. In here you can place and share videos with your team. This is a great place for training resources as well as recordings from Skype for Business.

Meet Office 365 video

Manage your Office 365 video portal

You can also embed these videos directly into your SharePoint Team Site quickly and easily.

Another member of the Microsoft Cloud family is CRM. This allows you to manage contacts, sales, etc. but will soon also allow you to manage your financials thanks to the recently announced Dynamics 365.

Dynamics 365

Turning business process into business advantage for organizations everywhere

The big advantage these additional Microsoft Cloud products provide is the fact that access is governed by the same login users have for Office 365. This provides greater integration and management that few other services can match.

Another location that your team can collaborate together is in Yammer. Yammer provides an enterprise social network to share information publically which has so many benefits to the business. I’ve outlined many of these here:

The Business of Yammer

Don’t forget also that many Office 365 suites provide your users with the latest Office desktop software on their PC’s, Macs and mobile devices. They get at least 5 installation on each platform to ensure that everyone has the same version of the software. As an Office 365 subscriber you receive continuing free upgrades to this software automatically so you don’t need to worry whether everyone has the ‘latest’. They will.

Finally, Office 365 is also going to provide you the ability to automate your business process and information via a number of different tools such as:

Microsoft Flow

Microsoft Powerapps

SharePoint Workflows

In summary, Office 365 gives a lot of ways to manage and work more effectively with your information. It also provides you with the opportunity to improve the way you work today, become more effective and save time. It really is a single platform dedicated to better information management, accessed via a single login that is always constantly evolving and improving. In short, Office 365 is more than email and file storage, it is a full suite of productivity services to help your business better manage your information.

Watch out for the answers to more common questions with Office 365 coming soon.

Missing web parts if you don’t enable scripting

To embed a Yammer feed into a SharePoint Team Site you need to use a Script Editor Web Part as I have detailed previously here:

Inserting a Yammer Feed into SharePoint

However, as you can see by the above screen shot, when I attempted to do this recently the Script Editor Web Part was not evident. Strange, I thought.

The above image shows the difference and the Script Editor Web Part being available. What was the difference? Why did it appear in one tenant but not in another?

At first, I thought it had something to do with the licensing for the user I was logged in as. However, it turns out that the issue was that scripting hadn’t been enabled for Team Sites in the SharePoint Admin center.

I have previously detailed how missing Web Galleries are also due to scripting not being enabled. My previous post on this as well as how to enable scripting with SharePoint Online is here:

SharePoint Online missing Web Designer Galleries

So it turns out that disabled scripting in SharePoint Online also disables some web parts (the Script Editor Web Part being one). Therefore, it is probably good practice to always ensure that scripting is enable in the SharePoint Admin Center before you start building your Team Site.

Office 365 Collaboration, Skype and Backup

Office 365 Collaboration—Robert Crane Docs.com

https://docs.com/d/embed/D25192961-2267-4946-0970-001023757425%7eMd4186d87-61d5-259a-4d26-00a8bd86cfff

The opportunities with Skype for Business—Robert Crane Docs.com

https://docs.com/d/embed/D25192961-2098-0759-5380-001420694364%7eMd4186d87-61d5-259a-4d26-00a8bd86cfff

Office 365 Backup options—Robert Crane Docs.com

https://docs.com/d/embed/D25192961-1989-0156-9410-001012602264%7eMd4186d87-61d5-259a-4d26-00a8bd86cfff

Here are some recent presentations I gave around Office 365:

Collaboration

Skype for Business

and

Backup

In essence they all point to the opportunity Office 365 provides IT resellers to go out and build services on stuff other than email migrations.

In short, if you are not adding value then your days are numbers. And simply moving data from one location to another and doing nothing else is not adding value!

Enabling DLP for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business

DLP or Data Loss Prevention is a way inside Office 365 (E3 suites or above) that you can protect data from leaving the organisation. You can use DLP to protect not only email attachments but also files in SharePoint Online Team Sites and user’s OneDrive for Business.

Office 365 provides a number of standard templates for protecting standard information, such as credit card information as detailed here, but you can also customise the DLP policies to protect any custom data you wish.

The first step in using DLP is to set up and enforce the policies you wish to use. To do this you’ll need to login to the Office 365 portal as an administrator with the appropriate rights. You’ll then need to navigate to the tenant Admin area. From the menu on the left hand side of the screen expand the Admin centers option. From the options that appear select the Security & Compliance item.

From the Security and Compliance console select Security policies on the left. From the options that then appear below this select Data loss prevention. If this menu item doesn’t appear then you current don’t have an Office 365 plan that supports DLP.

On the right hand side you will probably see that the list is empty. Select the Plus icon to create a new policy.

You can select from a number of templated policies if you wish but in this case select Custom and then the Next button.

You now need to select the areas in which this policy will apply. You can specify unique locations but for this example we’ll simply select all locations and then continue.

At the next screen select the Plus icon to set the rules for which you wish to test.

In the new window that appears select the Add condition button.

From the pull down menu that appears select Content containing sensitive information.

Select the Plus icon that appears to enter the actual rules.

Scroll down the list that appears and select Credit Card Number. You can select other items here but in this case all we want this example DLP rule to test for is credit card numbers.

Select OK to continue.

You should now see the entry appear in the list as shown above. You can edit this entry if you wish by selecting it and then pressing the Pencil icon (edit).

Select the Actions item from the menu on the left.

Select the Add actions button on the right.

In this example, select Block the content. This will prevent anything that matches this rule from being shared.

You should now see the blocking Action listed as shown above.

Select the Incident report option from the menu on the left. Enter the details if you wish to receive a report of any actions on this policy.

Select General from the menu on the left. Give this set of rules a name and save them.

You should now see the rules listing appear as shown above in the DLP policy you just created. You can create as many of these rules inside a single policy as you wish. However, best practice is always to keep it simple.

Give the DLP policy and name and select the option to Turn on the policy.

Select the Create to complete the policy creation process.

You should now see the policy listed in the DLP area as shown above. You should also see that the Status is set to On.

The DLP policy will not come into effect immediately. It will take a little while (15 – 30 minutes typically in my experience) to roll out through your tenant.

To test the policy, create a document in your OneDrive for Business that contains credit card numbers as shown above. The numbers used here are verified public ‘test’ card numbers.

Now create a public View link that requires no sign-in as shown above. This should allow anyone who clicks on that link direct access to the file without the need of a login or password.

When the DLP policy is active anyone trying to access that link will have the content blocked as shown above. This confirms that teh DLP policy is working as expected.

If you also elected to get alerts you should fine one in your inbox as shown above.

Thus, DLP is a way to protect your Office 365 information by examining the contents against a set of rules that you create. It can examine both email and file data then take actions which you determine.

DLP is part of the E3 or better suite in Office 365.

SharePoint Online Storage increased to 25TB!

This item was in a recent blog post from Microsoft:

New site collection limit

As more and more teams embrace the breadth of capabilities offered in SharePoint Online grows across team sites, Office 365 Video and portal sites, their content storage requirements are growing. To address this, we will increase the SharePoint Online site collection storage limit in the coming weeks from 1 TB to 25 TB. This increased limit will be immediately reflected in the official SharePoint Online boundaries and limits article.

which you’ll find here:

https://blogs.office.com/2016/08/31/new-capabilities-in-sharepoint-online-team-sites-including-integration-with-office-365-groups/

which also details the continued integration between Office 365 Groups and Team Sites.

This storage increase is BIG news for SharePoint Team Sites and is really great pro-active move by Microsoft as it places more and more focus on SharePoint and Groups in Office 365. It is clear (as well as in my experience) that more and more businesses are moving the the traditional on-premises data to SharePoint. To ease adoption and encourage people to use SharePoint more then the space for Team Sites must increase.

For a long time we were locked into a SharePoint Team Site storage capacity of 10GB. That jumped to 1TB about 6 months about and now we are going to soon see 25TB! All of that increase in space is provided free if you are an Office 365 customer. Again, the benefits of a cloud subscription model.

**** Correction Start ****

If you actually look at the SharePoint Online limits page (as I should have) you see this:

From – https://support.office.com/en-us/article/SharePoint-Online-software-boundaries-and-limits-8f34ff47-b749-408b-abc0-b605e1f6d498

So it appears that you don’t automatically get 25TB of storage you do however get the ability to scale a single Site Collection to 25TB which you couldn’t before.

That said, I can see the day in the not to distant future where certain plans will get 25TB storage starting storage. Clearly, you can’t offer that until the limits are raised as they have done now.

**** Correction End ****

I’m expecting even more ground breaking announcements around Office 365 and Azure very soon as the Microsoft Ignite conference approaches. But for now, if 1TB of Team Site storage felt a little limiting, now you have 25TG. Thanks Microsoft.

The podcast shoe is on the other foot

Normally, it’s me asking the questions but recently I was a guest on Lisa Hendrickson’s podcast – Call that Girl’s Office 365 show. As you can see the show also includes video and is published to YouTube. Yes, I know I really have a face only for a podcast but hey, I was only the guest this time.

Lisa and I talked about SharePoint and collaboration in Office 365 and the struggles people have in coming to grips with the product.

Hopefully, I was able to pass along some helpful information for listeners and encourage anyone with further questions to hit me up via email (director@ciaops.com). I thank Lisa for the opportunity to be on her show and look forward to maybe doing another in the future.

A basic SharePoint Online framework structure

Getting the ball rolling with SharePoint Online is intimidating when it comes to using SharePoint Online for the very first time. Many get bogged down in being overly concerned about getting things ‘perfect’ before commencing. Here’s a few tips for you to get the ball rolling with SharePoint Online.

Firstly, the primary goal for any business when it comes to SharePoint Online is adoption! That is actually getting people to use it. This is far and away going to be your biggest challenge because most users will resist the change from files, folders and drive letters. Thus, the sooner you get them using SharePoint Online the better. Also, the easier you make it for them to start using SharePoint Online the better. This means keeping it simple and familiar to start with.

With this in mind, my suggestion is that you create a total of three document libraries in the root site of your default SharePoint Online Team Site. You then create three subsites below the root site than each contain three document libraries. This then gives you a total of 12 locations into which you can copy files.

With this structure in mind you obviously need to name each item as it is created. Here is where you need to make an important decision about the structure of SharePoint that can’t easily be reversed once it is made, so make sure you give it ample consideration before proceeding.

You need to basically decide whether SharePoint Online will be structured by function or location. If you decide by function the subsites will probably be called something like Admin, Finance, HR, etc. However, if it is by location then the subsite would be called something like Sydney, Paris, London, New York, etc.

Once you have the subsites named and created you would then create the three document libraries inside each. These will typically match existing folders on a file server to make it easier for user to identify with (i.e. make the Document Library names the same as existing server folder names). It is possible to change the naming at this point and start afresh but remember, we are looking to maximise adoption which will mean taking the long way round to achieving the end goal. Sub sites and Document Libraries in SharePoint Online can easily be re-named or relocated anytime down the track. Yoru guiding aim should be to reduce the friction of adoption.

So let’s say that you have decided to structure SharePoint Online by function and called the first subsite ‘Admin’. Inside this you’d probably have Document Libraries called Policies, Procedures and Templates for example. Yes, you can create more locations but again start off simple. Even if you have to leave some folders on premises, keep it simple and obvious for users.

So now you have a 2 tier structure in place with 12 locations into which you can put files. These 12 locations also typically map to existing locations on your file server. With this in place I show the customer how to copy one set of files across into the first location. I then have them do the process while I watch and advise, into the second location. Finally, I allow them to copy files into the third location without any feedback from me. At that point they have the knowledge to complete the rest of the location transfers without my help. I also have the confidence to leave them to their own devices and to accomplish this initial date relocation.

A few days later when I check back in with the customer, I usually find they are happily using SharePoint but want to now do more customisations, add more locations for storage, start flattening their existing folder structure by using metadata and so on. Yippee! Achievement unlocked! Initial adoption commenced success. Next?

In summary therefore, the big take aways I’ll give from this are:

1. Keep it really simple to start with.

2. Focus on adoption and getting EVERYONE to use SharePoint above anything else initially.

3. Base your SharePoint structure on either function or location.

Using SharePoint Online is always a journey never a destination. Business needs are constantly changing, so remain flexible and be comfortable with the need to change. However, ensure you have an appropriate adoption strategy based on how your users actually operate not on how you ‘think’ they’ll operate. If you don’t, then you’ll always be wrong and SharePoint Online adoption will always be a struggle. With appropriate planning and a systematic approach, that should never be the case!