Roadmap Updates for SharePoint

Recently, Microsoft has announced a bunch of updates, mostly for SharePoint. You can find most of theses announcements on the M365 Roadmap:

FEATURE	ROLLOUT START DATE	URL
Microsoft Teams: Reporting access and updated policy settings for Webinars in the Teams Admin Center	June 2023
Microsoft Stream: new webpart	July 2023	Enhanced Video in M365
SharePoint: News in Outlook	July 2023	SharePoint in the AI Era
SharePoint: Page sharing	July 2023	SharePoint in the AI Era
SharePoint: Video Pages	August 2023	Enhanced Video in M365
SharePoint: New SharePoint Start	September 2023	SharePoint in the AI Era
SharePoint: Advanced editing in Image web part	July 2023	SharePoint in the AI Era
SharePoint: Content Pane for SharePoint Pages and News.	October 2023	SharePoint in the AI Era
SharePoint: Centrally manage branding for your organization	December 2023	SharePoint in the AI Era
SharePoint: Copilot in SharePoint	November 2023	SharePoint in the AI Era
Microsoft SharePoint: Resource Specific Consent	December 2023
Microsoft SharePoint: Application Site Creation without Sites.FullControl.All	December 2023
SharePoint Pages: Design Ideas	January 2024	SharePoint in the AI Era
SharePoint: Collaborate on SharePoint pages and news with co-authoring	March 2024	SharePoint in the AI Era
OneDrive: Access Lists, Forms, Sway & PowerBI content in OneDrive Web	July 2023

As well as the updates in the table, you can find more information in the following URLs:

New era in content management and security in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams – Microsoft Community Hub

Enhanced Video in Microsoft 365 – Microsoft Community Hub

Microsoft Lists: Easier, Better, Faster, Stronger – Microsoft Community Hub

Experience the New OneDrive: Fast, Organized, and Personalized – Microsoft Community Hub

SharePoint in the AI Era: Introducing Copilot in SharePoint & 10 more innovations for creators – Microsoft Community Hub

Introducing Copilot in SharePoint and new OneDrive experiences | Microsoft 365 Blog

Have fun!

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SharePoint Online: Not possible to add guest users

While I was doing a implementation in a customer, I faced a weird thing, I created a new Site Collection, and when I was trying to invite people that I had in the B2B tenant, I was not able to find them.

If I tried with an internal users, I was able to find them, so I was sure that the problem was with the external users.

The first thing that I checked, was the properties of the SC to be sure that I can invite external users, and of course I checked this parameter at tenant level, was with no luck.

So, I started to check commands in Docs, and I found a command very interesting: ShowpeoplepickerSuggestionForGuestUsers

So I decided to give it a shot:

Once executed the last command, I was able to find guest users

Mistery solved!!

Copy and Move in O365

When we were having all our files in SHarePoint and OneDrive onPremises it was a nightmare to copy and move files between Document Libraries, sites, etc.. but fortunately this have been changed and new features have been introduces to bypass this.

The following table lists the behaviour of the Copy/Move functionality in OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online and of course Teams and other services associated:

 

Action	Behavior	Notes
Move File(s)	Moves the selected file(s) to the designated target container Retains metadata Retains sharing	Does not overwrite if filename exists, reports back error
Move Folder(s)	Moves the selected folder(s) to the designated target container Recreates a new copy of the folder Retains sharing	Does not overwrite if filename exists, reports back error
Copy File(s)	Copies the selected file(s) to the designated target container Recreates a new copy of the file(s) with new metadata Does not retain sharing	Does not overwrite if filename exists, reports back error
Copy Folder(s)	Copies the selected folder(s) to the designated target container Recreates a new copy of the folder with new metadata Does not retain sharing	Does not overwrite if filename exists, reports back error

As you can see i the table, If one or many of the files already exist at the target, they are not overwritten, not even with a new name or new version. You will instead get a note on this and the result

SharePoint Online: Disable Classic Pages Creation

At this point even though we have a new modern page, Site contributors can still create pages based on classic model like Web Part page and wiki pages. Let’s see how can we disable the same.

Go to Library Settings of Site Pages

 

Click on “Change new button order and default content type”

Deselect the check boxes next to Wiki Page and Web Part Page and click OK.

And that’s it. Now if any site contributor goes to create a new page in the Site Pages library, he/she will not see the options to create web part page or wiki page.

And that’s it. Your entire site now is the modern site and completely responsive 🙂

Get a list of O365 groups

The inclusion of O365 groups is great, it enables users to share documents, planner, calendar. Also taking into account that everyone is able to create a group.

However the problem starts when a user ask for the group url of the site collection, at first glance, you will thinlk to go to the SharePoint Admin Center and search for the site collection, and then you realize, that this site collection that has been created by groups, simply does not exist.

So what we can do? A simply approach will be use a Search Results Web Part in SharePoint Online to show those Site Collections, so let’s use it 🙂

So by doing this, we will be able to show all the groups that has been created in O365 and also taking into account that the security trimming will be respected.

The only drawback to this solution will be that the private groups won’t be listed in the search results. Also to improve this query, will be great to be able to show the Yammer groups or other locations where we store the documents.

On-Premises Gateway

We are living in a digital transformation to O365, but by the time we are doing this, our customers still need to connect their On-Premises data like SharePoint or SQL to Office 365 applications (PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, Logic Apps, Power BI).

For that reason, Microsoft has introduced on-premises data gateway for providing a quick and secure connection between on premise data and Office 365 apps.

We must keep in mind that there are two different types of gateways, one of them is On-Premises and the other gateway, is the personal gateway, which only allows to connect to PowerBI and can be used as an individual without any administrator configuration.

In the following image, we can see the differences between the personal gateway and the On-Premises gateway:

Moreover, the current supported On-Premises applications are SharePoint 2016 and SQL 2016, as you can see in the diagram below, there are multiple O365 connections to On-Premises services:

The installation process is straightforward, and only is needed a server with the following requirement to use the gateway:

Hardware Requirements:

Hardware Requirements	Value
CPU	8 Cores
RAM	8 GB

Software Requirements:

Software Requirements	Value
.NET Framework	Version – 4.5
Operating System	Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2, or later

If you require more info about the gateway, you can follow the links:

https://flow.microsoft.com/es-es/blog/on-premises-data-gateway/

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/es-es/documentation/powerbi-gateway-onprem/

https://docs.microsoft.com/es-es/azure/analysis-services/analysis-services-gateway

What happens when external sharing is enabled?

Imagine that you’re in a project where external collaboration is needed, but first, you want to know what exactly happens when a document, site or whatever is shared with external users (users from other company, let’s say).

Firstly, someone has to send an invitation to this external user to collaborate. You have many options to select, to requiere wether user sign in or not

Secondly, the invitation arrives to the user, and he has to accept it.

Take into account that these kind of invitations remains in the request list in the site, so any admin could reject the invitation in the meantime.

Once the user, has accepted the invitationhe could access to the site with the permissions given (full control, contribute, etc…). For example, if you share a document with an external user with the permission “Full Control”, an entry is created in the “Team Site Owners” inside the site. So, you can revoke the acess by removing the user from the Owners group.

that’s all! Next day I will cover what happens with other things!

Cheers!

File Shares as Content Source in SharePoint 2013 On Premises

Hi all!

Another quick post about file shares and SharePoint:

1. Identify your crawl account, because this account will be used to index the file share (unless specified differently with a crawl rule), so it is necessary to have read access to the file share to this account
2. If crawled files in file share system contain metadata, this will be used by the search refiners in SharePoint
3. Security trimming is respected, so when end users search the document in the search site, it will be displayed according to the permissions given on the files and folders.
4. Only metadata of the documents will be stored in SharePoint, not the documents
5. It is not possible to get a preview from Office documents that are stored in File Shares, to get a preview, you’ll need to use third party tools.

That’s all!

Disable Mobile view

In case you need to disable the mobile view in all your SharePoint Sites, the following code can be used:

$sites = get-spwebapplication http://mss2013be | Get-spsite -limit ALL
foreach ($site in $sites) {
foreach ($web in $site.AllWebs) {

Disable-SPFeature -identity d95c97f3-e528-4da2-ae9f-32b3535fbb59 -URL $Web.URL -Force -Confirm:$false
write-host "Feature desactivada en el sitio: $($Web.Url)"
}
}

A similar code can be used for SharePoint Online, in this case will change the way how you connect to SPO and how you deactivate the feature from SPO, in this case the command is: Disable-SPOFeature

Enjoy!

How to hide the Timeline in Task List

Hi! Do you need to hide the timeline in your task list? Then this is your post 🙂

As you will know, by default you have the following view of the Task list:

But, if I want to remove the timeline, what I have to do? Pretty simple…

 

• Go to the Task List, Click on List Tab and then click on “Modify View” button from the ribbon.
• In the Edit view page, scroll down and expand the ‘Style’ section.
• Under the Style selection, Uncheck the checkbox ‘Show timeline above the view’

And then… click ok to save changes, the result will be like the following:

Hope that helps!!