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O365

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.”

How to Promote Office 365 Video Search Results in SharePoint

By Drew Madelung
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Jan 16, 2016
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Office 365, Search, SharePoint

The Office 365 Video portal is a great solution for managing videos. It is much better than trying to host videos in a standard site collection in SharePoint Online. I don’t want to go into the Office 365 Video portal in this post but here are some great starting points.

After using the Office 365 Video portal both internally and with clients there was one area that I wanted to try to improve on, searching and finding. The majority of clients I work with have a standard intranet with many now being hosted in SharePoint Online. When I help with intranet builds I try to incorporate the search center as a key piece of functionality. In Office 365, this is a prebuilt site collection under the URL – https://domain.sharepoint.com/search.

With the search center, I try to include core metadata that can be used as refinement when possible. As the search center can be a central area for functionality I wanted to try to improve the usability of the current Videos vertical refiner with better incorporation of videos hosted in the Office 365 Video portal. Office 365 Videos are already returned in search results via this refiner but this will most likely also pull junk videos people have uploaded across SharePoint. So I was looking for a way to clean this up.

A simple solution to hide junk videos is to promote all videos that are hosted in the Office 365 Video portal above any other items being returned through the Videos search results through a query rule.

Here was our search center before…

Here is our search center after…

As you can see the videos that we want people to see are now front and center. I also added the Content Type refiner so people could pick other Content Types besides Cloud Video.

Steps to build the query rule

** As a reference I am building this query rule just on the Search site collection. This could be done at the tenant level as well. **

Navigate to your search center as someone who has site collection administration
- https://domain.sharepoint.com/search
Use the gear to go to Site Settings. Under Site Collection Administration click Search Query Rules
Click the Select a Result Source… drop down and select Local Video Results (System)
Click New Query Rule
Give it a name (i.e. Video Portal Promotion)
Under Query Conditions, click Remove Condition. We are selecting this because we want this to fire on all events.
Under Actions, click Change ranked results by changing the query
Under the Sorting tab, change the Sort by to be by Rank
On the same sorting tab, click Add dynamic ordering rule
Now we get to change the ranking. On the first drop down select Manual condition. In the manual condition, we only want to return videos from the O365 video portal. To do this we will filter by the ContentTypeID. There is a new content type called “Cloud Video” that is published with videos in the O365 video portal. The last section of the ContentTypeID is not consistent across channels (site collections) but the beginning string is. Here is the condition:
- ContentTypeId:0x010100F3754F12A9B6490D9622A01FE9D8F012*
Ensure the last drop down states Promote to top and then click OK and Save.
Sit back and look at your great new query rule
Now if you run a search your good videos will always be before your bad videos

The last step you could do is add the Content Type option as a refiner. This is done through editing the page and editing the refiner web part.

With videos being available in search and the power of Display Templates in SharePoint, this could be just the start of integrating videos back into your SharePoint sites and user experiences.

Display User Profile Picture in O365 using a Content Search Web Part

By Drew Madelung
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Oct 08, 2015
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Office 365, Search, SharePoint

If you have ever tried to display a user’s profile picture that is stored in their SharePoint Online user profile you will have noticed an issue. When you configure everything just right and log onto the page for the first time you wont see their picture. All you see is the wonderful grey box with a question mark like this:

This is a documented issue within SharePoint Online/O365. From Microsoft:

This issue occurs because the profile image is located on another site collection. You must authenticate with the site collection for the image to be displayed in the Content Search Web Part.

The workaround provided involves browsing to a MySite or OneDrive page within your tenant and then browse back to the page. Obviously this is not a great user experience. I was putting together an Employee Spotlight section on a client’s new portal’s landing page and this workaround was not acceptable. I did some digging through the internet and stumbled across some pieces to put together to solve this issue. The solution involved a new display template and update the pictureURL to point to a local source instead of the “My” site collection(s).

1. Make a copy of whatever display template you want to use and give it a new name. In this example I am using the Picture with 3 lines on the right. (Item_Picture3Lines.html)

2. Open the downloaded and renamed display template and update the Title.

3. Add a new managed property mapping for WorkEmail –> ‘Work Email'{Work Email}:’WorkEmail’

4. Scroll down to the line that holds the pictureURL variable. Before:

5. Replace the line –> var pictureURL = $getItemValue(ctx, “Picture URL”);

With the line –> var pictureURL = "/_layouts/15/userphoto.aspx?size=L&accountname=" + $htmlEncode(ctx.CurrentItem.WorkEmail);

-------------

Replace the line –> var pictureMarkup = Srch.ContentBySearch.getPictureMarkup(pictureURL, 100, 100, ctx.CurrentItem, “cbs-picture3LinesImg”, line1, pictureId);

With the line –> var pictureMarkup = “<img src='” + pictureURL + “‘ class=’cbs-picture3LinesImg’ alt='” + line1 + “‘ id='” + pictureId + “‘ onerror=’this.parentNode.innerHTML=Srch.ContentBySearch.getNoPictureMarkup(100);’ onload=’Srch.ContentBySearch.resizeImageToSquareLength(this, 100);’/>”;

After:

6. Save, upload, and PUBLISH your new display template.

7. Set your CSWP to use your new display template.

8. Refresh your page and look at some smiling faces!

Here is a helpful link to get started with configuring a content search web part in SharePoint.

*Note* If you are on a domain joined PC with a synchronized identity and ADFS this should not be an issue.

Microsoft Ignite & SharePoint/O365 – Outcomes

By Drew Madelung
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Jun 02, 2015
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Events

Well this blog post is coming in quite late as Microsoft Ignite was a little less than a month ago. But I believe in better late than never and there are some good topics that I wanted to follow up with. I was lucky enough to attend Ignite with a great group of folks from Concurrency and was also able to do some great networking to meet new folks in the SharePoint and O365 collaboration world. My initial reaction of Ignite was that it was a little overwhelming at times. Coming from the world of smaller SharePoint conferences having 20k+ people in a giant building with all different types of Microsoft technology led to some long walks and not many deep dive sessions. With the amount of announcements in the Office 365 and SharePoint Server 2016 space that were being discussed it was and still is a challenge to keep up with. Looking at the conference from a strictly SharePoint perspective it felt limited at times. Many of the primary SharePoint sessions were packed to the brim and had to be held in overflow areas. I think this directly spoke to the overwhelming usage that SharePoint has in the enterprise still. I am now very excited to attend the smaller SharePoint specific conferences such as SharePoint Fest and SPTechCon to dig deep into the new experiences. I have been trying to go through all of the videos on Channel 9 but there are so many good ones. If you want to download the videos and slides directly here is a link for instructions on how to do it.

In this post I will try to highlight what I believe to be the best sessions for collaboration around SharePoint and Office 365 and also review my pre-conference predictions.

My prediction outcomes

NextGen Portals

Ok we all knew they were already going to announce something but this still was an exciting topic. The new Knowledge Management portal currently called Codename “InfoPedia” was demonstrated. It was apparent that this portal was still in the early stages of development but their strategy to deploy a KM could be great. The new KM portal will consist of Boards, Articles and Microsites in which users are empowered to generate content quickly in a standardized and already styled way. This leads to a more organically and horizontal growing solution rather than a pre-determined hierarchical solution. Here a great post from Benjamin Niaulin about this topic.

Recommended sessions for this topic:

OneDrive for Business Sync Updates

Again we knew this coming but everything announced here was great news. I could write multiple blog posts on all of the new stuff they announced around this topic but here are the juicy highlights. The new OD4B sync client will use the current OneDrive protocol. There will be a unified sync client across OneDrive and OneDrive for Business platforms and the preview and RTM client will be available by end of year. Some other important things to note with the new client:

Selective sync (everyone have a round of applause for this one)
No more 20k file limit
Support for up to 10GB files
Blocking of unmanaged PCs
Includes PC and Mac

Recommended sessions for this topic:

Simplified Hybrid with SharePoint

I attended the SharePoint Hybrid pre-conference at Ignite and got to see first hand what is coming with hybrid in SharePoint and Office 365. Overall the strategy is clear to me that hybrid will be the new on-premises. There are features that will only be available in Office 365 and Microsoft’s strategy is not to bring you to the cloud but bring the cloud to you. This will allow enterprises to opt-in to hybrid on your own terms. This was very obvious in their hybrid strategy moving forward. Microsoft is trying to make they hybrid experience transparent. I won’t go deep into any of these strategies but if you want to discuss them just shoot me an email or a tweet. Their primary pillars are:

Hybrid Search
Hybrid OneDrive
Hybrid Extranet
Hybrid Team Sites
Cloud-drive Hybrid Picker
In the future with no further info yet…
- Hybrid taxonomy story
- Hybrid DLP
- Hybrid eDiscovery

Recommended sessions for this topic:

What I hoped to see

Future of Forms

Isn’t this everyone’s favorite SharePoint topic? I came in hoping to hear something about forms, or at least anything. With the incredible amount of announcements there was still nothing new on forms. The current state still exists in which InfoPath 2013 will continue to work in Office 365 and SharePoint Server 2016. The only time I heard forms being discussed in a session was during the MVP panel that I linked to above. The panel confirmed the current state and provided similar input to what I am currently telling my clients. If it is a small list form customization go ahead with InfoPath. If you have a larger and more long term forms requirement it is time to look at a 3rd party or custom development.

Future of SharePoint Workflow

There were not architectural changes announced during Ignite. With a total of 0 sessions and 0 discussions about workflow during Ignite I would tend to lean towards the thought that there will be no architectural changes. Workflow will continue to run on Workflow Foundation 4 as an external resource as it does today on-premises and in Office 365. Now there was some news that will affect workflow creators.

There will not be a SharePoint Designer 2016 but SharePoint Designer 2013 will continue to be supported.

I think this is an important step in the evolution of productivity in SharePoint and Office 365. Obviously SharePoint Designer was built with on-premises as its base. That much control is unnecessary in a cloud solution like Office 365. So on that side it makes sense to start bringing in limits. And of course anyone who has used SharePoint Designer heavily in the past knows it was a very buggy product that loved to crash. It is important to remember that we are over a year away from the release of SharePoint Server 2016 so there will be more news around this topic.

As far as workflow creation, I do believe that this is a step in the right direction and hope to see a browser based workflow creation experience. I will also use this time to plug my session at SPBiz that is directly related to SharePoint Designer workflows. This should be a great free online conference.

Future of Yammer

I was very wrong with my prediction here. I was leaning towards the thought that brand for “Yammer” itself would be going away. It was stated pretty loud and clear that this was not the case. There were multiple sessions around this solution including the Yammer Roadmap. Yammer is here to stay and will have a place in the Office 365 ecosystem. Each experience that comes with Office 365 does have its appropriate use cases. The challenge that we currently are and will continue to face is the confusion around when and where to use an experience. There was even a session around this topic titled How to Decide When to Use SharePoint and Yammer and Office 365 Groups and Outlook and Skype. Obviously if we had to have a major session on this topic there is confusion on what to do. I hope this vision continues to clear moving forward.

One item of note around Yammer and Office 365 is that the UI for Yammer is changing to align better with the rest of Office 365. If you are a part of the Office 365 Network (and if you’re reading my blog and are not, go join it now) you are already seeing these changes happening.

The Site Actions Menu in SharePoint Server 2016 not changing locations from the top right

I can confirm that it is staying in the right from the demos performed. No need for any panic from the community.

Anything else interesting?

I think the winner of most interesting topic during Ignite and so far after Ignite has been Office 365 Groups. Microsoft is putting a ton of time and effort into this collaboration experience. I believe that Office 365 Groups still need some help around the governance and control but they will be a go to solution in the future. Here is a link to a great blog post from Nik Patel that will go into a little more detail. Overall groups will be an experience that encompasses nearly all aspects of Office 365.

Recommended sessions for this topic:

Here are some other interesting topics and some sessions about each.

SharePoint Server 2016

Office 365 Security

Office 365 Migration API

Migration to SharePoint Online Best Practices and New API Investments

I look forward to the next Microsoft Ignite conference in 2016 coming back to Chicago on May 9-13. It will be interesting to look back on this post and see how different the landscape moves in just 1 year.