A very common thing I see when working with many businesses implementing collaboration solutions in Office 365, is their rigid desire to implement customisations via code to SharePoint immediately.

Many have a pre-conceived idea of what they believe an ‘intranet’ should be and operate. Thus, they want to force SharePoint to fit that model. The only way to achieve this typically is to use custom code on the site. They want lots of changes made to not only the look and feel but also the functionality prior to implementing it across the business.

I warn them strongly, that the more you customise with code the more it is likely to break and the more issues you will have down the track. A much better option, at least to start with, is to go with what Microsoft provides you out of the box. Only once you have exhausted all in the out of box options, then look at custom code. Then and only then, and when you do be prepared to continually maintain it.

As further evidence for this stance, if you take a look at this video from the recent Microsoft 2018 Ignite from 47:03

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhYHdYn5jdQ&t=2928s

and listen to what Tracey Haun, Director, IT Collaboration and Privacy from Dupont says:

When we set up SharePoint we were so proud of ourselves for only customizing less than 5% of the environment and that less than 5% customization has come back to bite us time and time again. Every time we upgrade, every time we migrate we have to deal with these customizations. I just want to say that we were so rigid in the way that we in way we wanted to — and this is specifically around our records management and the way we classify the security classification of our sites, we were so rigid and so set in our ways on how we wanted to do that. So I highly recommend, if you are just getting started, go with the industry standard. Don’t force your business model into SharePoint. Let the it adapt to the Microsoft way.

Thus, if you want to make major changes to the way SharePoint Online works out of the box you firstly need to find a developer who is specifically experienced with SharePoint Online. Even after the job is complete, you are going to need to have someone on tap to maintain that code, because sooner or later it will break. Why? Because Microsoft makes changes and improvements to the underlying SharePoint base that will affect the code.

When that happens, and you won’t know when it will, the more you have used custom code the more catastrophic the failure of your site is going to be. If the site has become a critical part of your business, then it means that system will be down until a developer can be found to rectify the problems. That could be quite a while.

Putting your business in that situation, to me, is increasing your risk which is not something you want to do. Going with what Microsoft give you out of the box may not be “exactly” what you want but it is going to keep on working as SharePoint is updated, unlike custom code.

Of late, Microsoft has added many improvements to SharePoint and collaboration in Office 365, that really make me question why you would want custom code at all? Is it really worth the risk and costs involved?

So my STRONGEST advice when it comes to SharePoint is to use what you are given out of the box to it’s fullest. After that, if you still want changes, make sure you FULLY understand the indications and increased risk this places your business under.

I’m sure people would love desktop applications like Excel to do more but they generally don’t go making wholesale customisations via code. They tend to work with what they are given out of the box. So too, it should be with SharePoint.

Many people don’t seem to appreciate that most SharePoint sites in Office 365 are configured for sharing outside the organisation by default. This is designed to allow external parties to more easily access common content.

This means that generally, by default, users of those SharePoint sites (which includes Microsoft Teams) are going to be able to share links to that information. You can obviously disable this if you want, but generally, by default, sharing is enabled.

An easy way to see what the sharing status of your sites is current set to is to run the following PowerShell command after connecting to SharePoint Online:

get-sposite | Select-object url,sharingcapability

This will show you the one of following results:

Disabled – external user sharing (share by email) and guest link sharing both disabled

ExternalUserSharingOnly – external user sharing (share by email) enabled, but guest link sharing disabled

ExistingExternalUserSharingOnly – (DEFAULT) Allow sharing only with external users that already exist in organisation’s directory

ExternalUserAndGuestSharing – external user sharing (share by email) and guest link sharing both enabled

Best practice with the structure in SharePoint is to keep things as flat as possible. This typically means avoiding multi level folders within Document Libraries because doing so reduces the visibility of information and make it hard for people to find information if they don’t understand the folder structure it lives in.

However, best practices is not what always happens I appreciate. So is there any easy way to see all in the file in a structure with a SharePoint Document Library? There certainly is and it requires working with Views.

The recommended starting point is to navigate to the Document Library in question and then in the top right select the All Documents button. This should display a menu like shown above.

Select the Save view as option to create a duplicate of the way the Document Library is currently being displayed.

For this example, I’m looking for Visio files in my folder structure so I’ll call this new view Visio as shown above.

You should now see that the menu option on the right now show an item called Visio as shown, with a check to the left. This indicates that we are viewing the Document Library with a View called ‘Visio’.

Because the ‘Visio’ view is simply a copy of the default All Documents view, we now want to go in and customise what is displayed with this View. To do this, select the Edit current view option from the menu as shown above.

You are now taken into an area where you can customise all sorts of aspects of the current View.

If you now scroll down to the bottom of all these options, you will find one called Folders, which you should expand as shown above. There you will find an option, Show all items without folders, which you need to select.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and select Save to update your preferences.

You should no be returned to the list and you should no longer see any folders but every file in the structure shown together as shown above.

With this new list of just documents, you can select the Type column (first from the left) and from the menu that appears the Filter by option as shown above.

On the right hand side a filter menu will appear as shown above. Here, select Visio and then the Apply button.

You should now only see Visio files as shown above.

This has achieved our aim but, all the filtering options are temporary. If we return to this Document Library later we’ll again see a full list of files. If we want our new View to continue to show just Visio files we’ll need to go in a edit the View again and make some changes.

Once we are again editing the Visio view we can locate the Filter section and set conditions for what we want to see. Here, I’m adding filtering on the Type column in that I only want to see VDW or VSD file types.

Again, make sure you Save you changes before exciting the editing options.

Now, every time I go to that Document Library and select the Visio vie win the top right I will see my filtered list of all Visio files in that structure. If you want to make this new filter View the default, just go back to editing the View and select that option. Easy.

SharePoint views therefore allow to easily view your Document Libraries the traditional way with folders or roll up to single ‘non-folder’ View.