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Link to Guidelines – New Office 365 Video Feature

By Drew Madelung
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Apr 22, 2016
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General, Office 365, Release

A small feature was released in Office 365 Video that allows the Video Portal Admin the ability to add links to guidelines, help documents, or other information directly on the video portal itself. The primary use case for this is to grant the ability to provide easy access to IT help documentation and guidelines as it relates to Office 365 Video. The new guidelines section has the ability to add 2 links to different pages.

The Video Portal landing page
The Video upload page

Examples of guidelines that you could link to here could be:

Who are the current channel owners who can upload videos
What are the agreed upon company standards for types of videos that can be uploaded
What are the penalties if you don’t follow the guidelines
What are the technical upload limitations
Who to contact if there are issues
Or even a video explaining all of this!

The guideline links could be links to anything from an office document to a SharePoint page you created to an external website. When the guideline buttons are clicked they link will always be opened in a new tab.

Here are the steps to setup the guidelines and what it looks like in the end…

1) Navigate to your Office 365 Video Portal landing page by clicking on the the Video icon through the app launcher

2016-04-22 10_34_40-Settings

2) Click Portal Settings in the video portal ribbon

2016-04-22 10_37_29-Settings

3) Click Link to guidelines in the left navigation

2016-04-22 10_38_31-Settings

4) Enter the links to the guidelines that you want to have available and click Save. The “Video guidelines” link will be on the home page while the “Upload guidelines” link will be on the upload page.

2016-04-22 10_46_22-Settings

5) Navigate back to your home page and check out your new link

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6) Click on the Upload button see your other guideline link

2016-04-22 11_06_41-Settings

This is just one of the great new features that keep rolling out from the Office 365 Video team!

SharePoint Server 2016 Goes RTM

By Drew Madelung
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Mar 14, 2016
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Release, SharePoint

sp2016rc

After multiple previews of SharePoint Server 2016 being available for the public to test and learn, the RTM (Release to Manufacturing) version of SharePoint Server 2016 is now available to download. Today also announced general availability of the Cloud Hybrid Search solution for SharePoint. General availability of SharePoint Server 2016 will be occurring in May.

The product key for a trial of RTM can be same as the product key provided for Beta 2:

NQGJR-63HC8-XCRQH-MYVCH-3J3QR

Here are the detailed links:

Mandatory Anonymous Link Expiration in Office 365

By Drew Madelung
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Feb 01, 2016
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Office 365, PowerShell, Release, Security

Microsoft recently released a new feature in Office 365 which allows a mandatory expiration length to be set at the tenant level. This will affect sharing documents through SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. This feature began rolling out mid-January to tenants and will start with First Release tenants.

This feature will allow better security for your organization. This feature will affect ALL anonymous links created in your tenant. End users will be required to created links that match or are shorter than the day value provided. This feature it administered using SharePoint Online Management Shell. On all current and new tenants there is no default value for anonymous link expiration. The new parameter is RequireAnonymousLinksExpireInDays. This is a parameter of the Set-SPOTenant cmdlet

As an example, this will set expiry for 30 days:
- Set-SPOTenant –RequireAnonymousLinksExpireInDays 30

The default experience will allow end users to set expiration values on a document when they use the “Get a link” option. By default, a document can be set to any day value and also never. It also includes a handy drop down with 1, 30, or 60 day options. Allowing a link never to expire can be a large security hole for you company. This is what the default experience looks like:

Steps to configure mandatory anonymous link expiration

Important Info:

The latest version of SharePoint Online Management Shell (16.9.4915.1200) is needed to use this parameter.
The value for –RequireAnonymousLinksExpireInDays must not be greater than 730 days (2 years)
To reset the parameter back to default, use the value of 0
If a link is already created, the mandatory expiration will not be applied to it

Connect to your SharePoint Online tenant using SharePoint Online Management Shell
Run the Set-SPOTenant command with the –RequireAnonymousLinksExpireInDay and the day value
Now when someone gets either a View or Edit link it will be defaulted with an expiration date
If a user tries to change the link expiration date they will receive an error stated “Your organization’s policy doesn’t allow links to stay active for more than XX days.”

SharePoint Server 2016 Release Candidate

By Drew Madelung
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Jan 25, 2016
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Release, SharePoint

sp2016rc

Microsoft has released its latest public release of SharePoint Server 2016 as a Release Candidate. This is the next update after the SharePoint Server 2016 Beta 2. This release is “mostly feature complete.” That means that we should not expect to see any major changes prior to the General Availability release this year. I wanted to write this post to highlight a few key areas for this release.

The SharePoint Server 2016 RC is an UPDATE to SharePoint Server 2016 Beta 2. So if you have Beta 2 installed this should be installed just like another SharePoint update with psconfig being ran after the update is installed.
InfoPath 2013 and SharePoint Designer 2013 will continue to be the last version of these products and follow the support life cycle of SharePoint Server 2016 through 2026

Here are the handy links!