Creating custom default templates in SharePoint Online

Many people think that the only way to get documents into SharePoint Online is to upload them. Not so. You can actually create a new document directly in the Document Library.

The most common way to do this is to select the New button just under the library name as shown above.

This will then display a menu like you see above that allows you to create a range of Office documents as well as a new folder.

If you select any of these, you will simply be taken to a new blank Office document as you see above.

Another method of creating a new document is to open the Ribbon Menu by selecting the Files tab at the top of the page and then selecting the arrow under the New Document button at the left as shown above.

You will then typically see a single option New Document as shown above.

If you select this you will be prompted to open you desktop Office application and when you do you will see a blank document again as shown above.

If you instead want to have your own document templates displayed in a Document Library you can do that a number of ways.

If you simply want to edit the New Document template that you see from the Files tab you need to use SharePoint to edit this.

You will firstly need to select the Library tab in the top left (just to the right of the Files tab just shown). On the very right hand side of the Ribbon Menu that is now displayed locate and select the Library Settings icon.

Select the Advanced settings option under the General Settings column.

The second field now display shows you the template URL.

You will also see an option to Edit Template, which will launch the Office program on your desktop and allows to make any changes desired.

If you try and change the URL of the template to some other location in SharePoint you’ll be greeted with the above message basically telling you that this is not possible. So all you can really do here is edit the existing template.

There is however a further option that provides much more flexibility and that is using Content Types.

You firstly need to create the Office document you want to use as templates. Best practice is to save these in dedicated Office template formats.

Next you need to go to the SharePoint Online Site Collection you want these new templates added to and select the Cog in the top right corner and then Site Settings from the menu that appears.

Select the Site content types option from under the Web Designer Galleries section.

You should then see all the default Site Content Types list as shown above. For more information on Content Types in SharePoint see:

Introduction to Content Types

Select the New option at the top of the page.

Best practice is to create a new content type for each document template you want to use. It is also good practice to create a new Content Type Group to make it easier to identify the custom items that have been added.

Because Content Types are hierarchical you should select the option for Document Content Type as the parent content type to inherit from. You should select Document as the Parent content type in the field below.

As suggested you should also create new Content Type Group for new items you add.

When all these items are complete select OK.

You should then see a summary of the new Content Type as shown above. Select the Advanced settings option.

In the Document Template area at the top of the page you can select the file to be used. Best practice would be to locate this in another Document Library that everyone has read access to so you can change it easily. However, in this case we’ll select to upload the template files we previously created.

Once these options have been selected, update the Content Type by selecting the OK button.

Repeat the same process for every template file you want to use. The only different with subsequent files is that you will add them to the new Content Type Group you created with the first template.

If you now look at the list of content types in your Site Collection and use the Show Group filter option on the left to only display the new Content Type Group you created, you should see the Content Types you just created (here one for Word, Excel and PowerPoint).

You now need to go to each Document Library in your Site Collection where you would like these new templates to be available and then select Library Settings.

You then need to select Advanced Settings again.

At the top of the page you need to select Yes to Allow management of content types and save this change.

Now in the Settings for the Document Library you should see an additional section called Content Types as shown above. In there you will find one existing Content Type on which this library is based.

Select the option Add from existing content types.

Select the new Content Type Group name you created at the top of the page. This should filter the total list of Content Types down to the new ones you just created (this is ability to filter is why creating new Content Type Groups is best practice).

Add the new Content Types from the box on the left to the right and save the changes by clicking OK.

Back in the Setting for the library you should see that you Content Types are now listed as shown above.

Now select the link Change new button order and default content type.

Best practice is generally not to delete the default Content Type but just hide it.

Save your settings when complete.

If you now select the New button in the library you should only see the your template files and the New Folder option.

Likewise, if you also select the arrow under the New Document button you will again only see your new file templates.

If you then select one of these options, you’ll be prompted to download the Office document, which will open in the desktop version of the application and allow you to create a new document based from this template.

If you wish to remove the option New Folder in the list, return to the Advanced Settings in Library Settings and locate the Folders item and set this to No.

If you again return to the library and select the New button you will see that the New Folder item no longer appears.

Site Content Types are the best way to customise injecting your own default documents into libraries in SharePoint. They take a bit longer to set up but once they are they are easy to use anywhere within the site.

They also provide the bonus of when you update the actual file used as the template it will give you the option to update everywhere where that template is being used throughout your Site Collection. Content Types have a lot more functionality but that is for a future post.

Hopefully this show you firstly how to create your own custom library templates but also how powerful SharePoint is when it comes to managing content.

Using a template to migrate a SharePoint library

In a recent post I showed how to:

Create a template from a Document Library

In the above video I take that one step further and show you how to import this template into a completely different site collection. This could also be in a separate unique Office 365 tenant if desired.

The process is basically to create a template, including the content if desired, from the source library. You then download the template that this creates and upload to the destination Site Template Gallery. Once there you can create a new library based on this template. When you create the new library it should also contain the content from the source location if you selected that initially.

This is a quick way to not only copy the structure of a library from one location to another, also potentially the content.

Create a template from a Document Library

This tutorial shows you how to take an existing Document Library in SharePoint and create a template. You can then use that template to create additional Document Libraries. This is much like you would use template for Word.

You’ll see how to create a template based on just the structure or one that also includes the contents of the list. Including the structure in a template is a quick and easy way to migrate data in SharePoint as well across SharePoint locations.

Delve should be the center of your Office 365 universe

How do you get Delve?

Delve is currently only available to Office 365 subscribers. Delve is included with all Office 365 suites that include SharePoint Online (Business Essentials, Business Premium, E1, E3 and E4). Users who are assigned a SharePoint Online license as part of the suite will also get Delve.

What is Delve?

Under the covers of Office 365 is something called Officegraph. It monitors interactions between people and the information they use. It then applies machine learning to these interactions in order to determine what is most relevant.

One of the ways that the results of this machine learning is surfaced to Office 365 users is via Delve (Clutter is another place). As you can see from the above video, Delve is simply another location users can navigate to in Office 365 from their App Launcher.

When a user navigates to Delve they are presented with information from Office 365 that is most relevant to them at that moment. This means they could see documents from Team Sites or OneDrive. They could see emails or conversations in Yammer or content from Skype for Business.

Delve does not change or negate permissions in Office 365, a user can only see in Delve what they can see elsewhere in Office 365. If they don’t have access to it elsewhere, Delve will not show it to them.

The more important the information that the machine learning in Officegraph determines something is, the higher it will rank in a users Delve.

Why use Delve?

If you think about the way most people work in a business these days, firstly, they dive into their emails, then they may jump across and access some files. Maybe they then have a phone or Skype call with some instant messaging thrown in. Then maybe they go out to a social network to catch up on what’s happening. They then of course repeat this process over and over again during their day.

Delve alleviates a lot of this service switching by providing a single ‘pane of glass’ at which a user can get an overview across all their information locations arranged in a manner that is most relevant to them. This means that documents they have recently been working appear at the top of the list in Delve.

From Delve, users can then simply select the information they want and be taken directly to that location where ever it is in Office 365. So let’s say that you are working on a document and you save it somewhere quickly to get on with other tasks. When you want to come back to that document later you may have forgotten exactly where you saved it. Was it in OneDrive? Maybe this Team Site? No. Maybe that Team Site? Now, what did I call it again so I can search for it? By using Delve instead, you’ll see that document listed near the top of your feed and by selecting it you’ll be taken directly to that location.

Inside a business it is important to remember that we do not work in isolation. We are generally part of many teams, large and small as well as many interactions. We therefore also need to collaborate with others, share information and gain insight from understanding what others in the business are working on. Once again, Delve provides benefits because it allows you to not only see what information is most relevant to you but also what information is relevant to others in your team. In essence, if you select a colleague in your Delve you’ll see their Delve (again remembering Delve respects security and permissions).

So if I login as a user and navigate to Delve I see something like that shown above, which is information about Me.

But if now select someone else under People menu on the left hand side you’ll that I see their Delve activity feed which is different to mine.

If I now select their Profile instead of their Activity I get information about them as shown above. On this page are direct links to their email address, phone and chat.

If you look closely at a Delve card you see that it has information about the user at the top of the card, which you can select, that will take you to their profile. If you click on document in the middle of the card, a new tab in browser will open and you’ll be taken directly to the location for that document wherever it is in Office 365.

At the bottom of the card you’ll see the location of the document (here in a SharePoint Team Site called Demo) as well as links to collaborate further on this document via email, or share it with others (like you do in SharePoint but here directly from Delve).

However, what I believe is a better way to share documents to gain feedback is via document conversations in Yammer. This occurs when you select the Yammer icon below the document. When you do this a pane will slide out from the right hand side of the window and you’ll we prompted to post a link to the document in Yammer as well as see any existing conversations around this document already in Yammer as shown above. This document conversation feature used to be part of SharePoint Online directly but has been deprecated as I indicated in a previous post here:

Document conversations deprecated

The final option available when it comes to sharing are Delve Boards.

Delve Boards basically allow you to ‘pin’ information from Delve to an ‘interest’ or topic. Imagine that your business is doing a project, you could create Delve Board with the project name and then ‘pin’ information to it

When you create a board and add something to it you are sharing that across your organisation so that everyone (with suitable permissions of course) can view what is on the board and pin their own stuff to it.

You will see, just under the board name you can elect to Follow/Unfollow the board as well as send a link to the board via email.

Why is Delve important?

The more that I see of Delve and the more I understand the direction Microsoft is taking with Office 365 the more important I believe Delve is to every business using Office 365. It’s ability to function as a ‘single pane’ of glass across all your content. It’s ability to show you what is most important to you, along with the ability to access and share information directly from there points to the direction your business should be heading with Office 365 I believe.

Yes, it is probably a very different way of working from the way you currently do BUT I am very confident that using it would provide major productivity benefits across any business if utilised appropriately. Remember, you don’t have to abandon the way you do things now to use Delve, you can start using it today and then judge for yourself, which is exactly what I’d encourage you to do. Try and see before making any judgement.

Too many times we become locked into a routine, into a comfortable way of doing things for purely emotional reasons. After we embrace something new that really works we wonder why we didn’t do it sooner. I think this is very much the case with Delve base on my interactions with resellers and users (more resellers tho’).

The common mentality is, because I don’t understand it I won’t use it, whereas a true business mentality should be let me see if this can provide me business benefit. Yes, Delve is a different way of going about your work but just because its different doesn’t mean it is worse, in fact I’d pretty much wager that it will make things better. A lot better.

Can I disable Delve?

Each user can disable Delve if they so desire. The do this by navigating to Delve and selecting the Cog in the top right corner. From the menu that appears they then select Sharing Activity.

They will then be given the option as shown above to disable Delve.

If you want to disable Delve across you whole organisation you’ll need to login as an administrator and visit the SharePoint admin center. There under Settings you find the above option for Officegraph which when disallowed will also disable Delve.

Conclusion

I certainly see Delve becoming more and more the center of the Office 365 universe. It will be the central place to access all your information. It will be the place to stay up to date with what’s happening across you whole organisation. It will be the place you go to share information with people inside and outside your business. And that is just for starters.

in short, it will make you and your business more productive and that’s why you should start using it today, because from what I have seen of the roadmap for Delve and Office 365 it is only going to get better and more powerful. (see Hey, workaholics: Microsoft Delve will track your ‘work life balance as an example of what’s coming).

References

What is Office Delve?

Office Delve for Office 365 admins

Are my document safe in Office Delve?

Document conversations deprecated

It was disappointing to learn today that Microsoft has decided to deprecate the document conversations feature linking SharePoint Online and Yammer.

Just over a year ago I wrote how this new features had been enabled:

Yammer integration has arrived

and how excited I was to see social being integrated into traditional file storage. But according to this blog post from Microsoft:

https://blogs.office.com/2015/07/16/document-collaboration-in-yammer-just-got-better-with-office-online/

at the bottom amongst the questions is this.

Previously, we announced the release of document conversations, which embeds Yammer conversations inside files stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online. However, we’ve seen very low engagement with this feature in its current implementation. Today’s announced Office Online integration brings document collaboration into Yammer. We believe giving teams the ability to work on files in the context of their existing Yammer groups and conversations provides a more engaging and relevant experience. As such, with this latest release of document collaboration using Office Online inside Yammer, we are rolling back the current implementation of the document conversation feature, but will continue to explore other ways for users to start new Yammer conversations from files.

Interestingly, these new features they speak of seem to only apply to:

First, the document preview and edit experience for files uploaded into Yammer are now powered by Office Online.

To my mind that is creating another silo in which information will reside as Yammer documents are different from SharePoint Online documents. Unfortunately, as I understand it, Yammer documents don’t have the same functionality as SharePoint document when it comes to things like workflows, check in / check out, approvals, etc. at this point in time.

It seemed to me that the old way of having documents hosted in a single location like SharePoint and then having Yammer conversations around these document made a lot more sense. The new changes seem to me to be encouraging people to continue to put files in different locations and in turn cause more confusion and frustration about where the ‘single point of truth’ actually lies.

However, I do see something very positive when I read further through the blog post from Microsoft:

The recently announced Yammer integration with Delve and the Office 365 Video Portal, which enables users to have inline Yammer conversations and share content to Yammer, will also remain available.

Unfortunately, this is buried at the end of the post. What in essence it says is that you should be using document conversations from Delve and not from SharePoint Online. This makes a lot of sense as Microsoft is pushing Delve as the single pane of glass across all your information repositories. I’ll be doing a post about the growing importance of Delve soon, so stay tuned.

I have championed the fact that Office 365 users need to start making Delve the central part of their Office 365 experience for two reasons. Firstly, it makes your more productive and secondly this is the direction Microsoft is moving with Office 365.

If anything, this change in document conversations indicates that poorly utilise features will be deprecated (which Microsoft will do more rapidly since it can monitor the metrics so much easier) and secondly that Delve is becoming the most important piece of Office 365!

Auto managed SharePoint storage

When you look at your site collections in SharePoint Online you’ll probably see something like this:

In the first two columns after the site collection you’ll find the Storage used and Storage limit like so:

This means the Storage limit has to be managed manually which can be a hassle as site collection usage grows.

You can however go into the SharePoint admin settings and change the storage from Manual to Automatic as shown above.

Once switched to Automatic you won’t see the Storage Limit or Percent Used columns any more as seen above. Required storage will now pull automatically from your total available SharePoint Online pooled storage for all of the site collections you have. Your sites will therefore use only exactly what they need from the total pool available up to the limit of 1TB per site collection or what is available in overall pooled storage for your tenant.

New SharePoint Online tenants will now be set to Automatic by default for storage management, while existing tenants will remain set to Manual. Unless you have a requirement to set limits per site collection, best practice is probably to change the setting to Automatic and avoid the hassle of having to tweak the storage settings for your SharePoint Online site collections. Set once and forget sounds good to me.

Office 365 Saturday–Sydney

I have been lucky enough to be selected to speak at the Office 365 Saturday event in Sydney this weekend, the 13th June. My session is on the ‘Business of Yammer’ but I am also looking forward to a full day of Office 365 topics presented by some very knowledgeable people in the SharePoint and Office 365 space.

One of the sessions I am really keen to see is the one on PowerBI. So if you are interesting in attending you can register at:

http://www.o365saturdayaustralia.com/Pages/Sydney.aspx

O365 Saturday Sydney kicks off registrations at 8:30am on 13th June at Cliftons – 13/60 Margaret Street, Sydney NSW, 2000.

The whole day is free and great opportunity to do some networking and get those burning Office 365 questions answered. If you are planning on attending let me know and we can perhaps catch up.

I hope to see you there.

SharePoint Online Backups

I get lots of questions about how/if data is backed up with SharePoint Online. Remember, that SharePoint Online is composed of two items , Team Sites and OneDrive for Business. Both of these are SharePoint, OneDrive for Business is simply a very limited set of standard Team Site features, but it is STILL IS SharePoint.

As I say over and over and over again, SharePoint is a collaboration system not just a file share. It is very different from a traditional network share. Thus, the way that data is stored is very different to start out with.

Firstly, all of SharePoint’s data is stored in a database. Calendars, contacts, lists AND flies are all stored inside a database because they are objects. This means that when you upload a file to SharePoint Online it is wrapped inside an object that contains additional information not just the file. This information could be meta data, workflows, previous versions and more.

When a user deletes something from SharePoint Online it will generally be sent to their recycle bin. They can recover it from here themselves currently for a period of 93 days.

If in that 93 days the file is deleted from the users recycle bin it is moved to an administrator recycle bin for the remainder of those 93 days.

Points to remember with the recycle bin:

– Deleted items can be recovered up to 93 days after deletion

– Items in the users recycle bin count against the storage quote for that site. Items in the administrators recycle bin don’t count against the storage quota for the site.

– The administrator recycle bin can only be accessed by a Site Collection Administrator.

For more information about various recycle bins and how to recover see:

Manage the Recycle Bin of a SharePoint Online site collection

Document Libraries, i.e. where files are stored in SharePoint, have version history enabled by default and set to save 500 versions of a file. Each time a file is changed and save a new copy is retained. This versioning can be edited and disabled if required and also counts against your storage site quota.

For more on versioning see:

How does versioning work in a list or library?

Apart from that SharePoint Online

– Is backed up every 12 hours and kept for 14 days

– The only recovery option is a full site collection restore

– To perform a site collection restore you must contact technical support

– The restore location is the same as the source, so you will loose all data that is currently hosted there.

Further details are contained in this blog post:

Restore options in SharePoint Online

If none of these options are adequate then there are third party backup providers like:

Leaphq

and

CloudFinder

and others that can provide an alternate method of backing up SharePoint data.

With all SharePoint Online backup option, you need to understand that some allow recovery of any items (i.e. appointment, list item, contact, file etc) while some just allow recovery of files.

In my experience, with document library versioning now enabled by default and presence of a recycle bin, there is generally no need for a third party tool, however they are available if your needs are not adequately covered by the tolls built into SharePoint.