I am excited to share that I will be presenting at the next ShareGate Pass the Mic webinar. I have been working with and being a SharePoint administrator in some form since 2010. I have seen so many different environments over my years of consulting that I have a unique understanding of what can be done well and what has been done poorly. The world of a SharePoint administrator has evolved exponentially since moving to SharePoint Online. The toolbox and processes that you need and should follow are not the same as the past.
So what does a modern SharePoint administrator need to know?
Join me for SharePoint power hour on April 14th 2022 at 10:00 a.m. CST and get actionable advice on managing SharePoint in Microsoft 365for smooth day-to-day operations.
Plus, find out what changes are coming to SharePoint in 2022 and how they’ll impact you and your organization.
Bonus: Attend the live event and get a special surprise at the end of the webinar!
Things you will learn:
Why you need to understand SharePoint’s structure to manage your environment successfully
Important tips to administering SharePoint Online like a pro
Best practices for SharePoint provisioning and governance
How to reorganize and restructure your content for next-level collaboration
There is a constant release of new Microsoft cloud technologies and it is hard to keep up to date. There can be features that are released and the not widely seen or there could be questions about that feature that aren’t answered with the initial release. We want to try to close that gap of knowledge.
Vlad Catrinescu and myself, Drew Madelung, have begun putting together a webinar series where we will be targeting Microsoft modern workplace technologies and doing deep dives into specific feature releases. We want to bring experts from Microsoft and the community to share the details of what is being released and break down into the technology to really try to help everyone understand what the feature is meant to do, can do, and answer any outstanding questions.
Please join us and spread the word for these webinars. If you missed one, make sure you watch the recording! And if you have any suggestions for topics to deep dive into please let Vlad or myself know.
Upcoming Webinars
Previous Webinars
August 25th – Modern records management in a new world of remote work with Microsoft 365
In this webinar we were joined by special guests Roberto Yglesias and Tina Ying covering the latest news in Microsoft 365 records management. Records management in M365 has many new features and capabilities that we highlighted in this webinar. We also discussed real-world conversations on use cases of moving to modern records management in M365 and the challenges, opportunities, and overall guidance for this process.
August 3rd – Introducing Microsoft Lists – Your smart information tracking app in Microsoft 365
In this webinar, we jumped into the new functionality and features of the brand new solution called Microsoft Lists. We discussed what Lists can be used for, how to work with them, and details around the timing and availability of Lists along with demos of Lists themselves! With our special guest Mark Kashman who joined us this was a great overall webinar with a ton of questions.
July 7th – Enabling Sharing & Collaboration in OneDrive & SharePoint
In this webinar, we dived into sharing and discussing how it works, how it can be managed, and what’s new and upcoming in the world of sharing and collaboration in OneDrive and SharePoint. We were joined by Stephen Rice from Microsoft as we break down the details and background of sharing.
June 16 – Evolution of Office 365 Groups to Microsoft 365 Groups
In this webinar, we’ll were joined by Mike McLean from the Microsoft 365 Groups product team to discuss the evolution of Office 365 Groups to Microsoft 365 Groups. We reviewed the Office 365 Groups journey, and provided a behind-the-scenes look at the vision and strategy around the platform. Mike also shared details on improvements recently shipped that enhance how groups are managed across the Microsoft 365 suite and through Microsoft Graph.
May 20 – Review of the new experiences of managed metadata services (taxonomy and content types)
We were joined by product managers Sean Squires and Anupam Francis covering updates to the managed metadata service in Microsoft 365! In this webinar we talked about the updates coming to the managed metadata service. This includes experience updates to the term store, a new admin content type gallery, and improvements to managed metadata columns in lists and libraries. We will also talked about the new REST and Graph APIs supporting taxonomy updates.
May 26 – Enabling Sensitivity Labels for SharePoint Sites, Teams, Office 365 Groups and Office files
We were joined by Senior Program Manager Sanjoyan Mustafi for a free webinar covering Sensitivity Labels across Office 365! In this webinar we talked about the upcoming features around enabling more Office 365 workloads with sensitivity labels. This included new abilities to classify the containers of Office 365 Groups, Microsoft Teams, and SharePoint sites and the ability to enable sensitivity labels for Office files in SharePoint and OneDrive.
March 10th – Deep Dive into SharePoint Online Multilingual
We have turned the dial into a new century since the last big Microsoft event of 2019. We are now ready to look forward to 2020 and what the next big SharePoint Conference will bring.
SharePoint Conference 2020 is coming back to Vegas May 19 – 21 at the MGM Grand. If you are are working with the Microsoft 365 collaboration world of SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream & more than this is a great conference to find a way to get to. This is the biggest Microsoft collab specific conference every year with can’t miss sessions, learning opportunities and primarily networking with peers. There are 2 primary release timelines from Microsoft and that includes SPC in the spring and then Ignite in the fall. Register today as the sooner you do the more you save.
What can you expect at SPC20?
Sessions and Roadmaps
The primary reason we go to conferences is to learn about topics that interest us. SPC20 has a massive amount of great content lined up with amazing speakers from Microsoft and the community. This is one of the few conferences where there will be a plethora of Microsoft speakers talking about what’s coming. Some specific Microsoft sessions I am excited to attend include:
Don’t skip the expo hall. To often I see companies trying to build their own custom solution for a problem they have. After you walk the expo hall at SCP20 you can most likely find a partner or product that can help you faster if you build it yourself. Microsoft 365 is built to be built on and the partner ecosystem is incredibly strong. Partners are becoming more important in a cloud first world because it is nearly impossible to keep up with the change we have in Microsoft 365. Now picture building something custom and then trying to keep that up to date with all the changes you see every week in the roadmap and other solutions in Microsoft 365. Partners are built to help support you through those hurdles so you don’t have to.
Take the time to learn about what is out there to help you. Spend a lunch talking to each vendor about what they do. I have had conversations where I didn’t know this vendor existed and by the time I was done I personally wanted to partner with them because I heard the strength of the uses cases it solved. Also you may have a chance to win some pretty cool prizes.
Networking
It’s not just you. The community that is built around this ecosystem is hard to describe. It is open, engaging, educational, and fun. We are all peers at these conferences and there is no better time to enjoy a lunch, a hello in the hall, or some after session conversations about who you are and the work that you are doing. Having a network to go to and share knowledge with will motivate you and excite you to get back to your day to day work. I have attended a large amount of conferences and this is always my favorite part. I have built lasing friendships and connections that have helped me through my career through networking at conferences. Some tips for networking:
Introduce and ask questions to your fellow lunch mates
Go to the MS booth area and just listen for a period of time (this is one of my favorite things to do)
When in a session earlier, ask people sitting next to you where they work and what they do
Stay after the session to listen to questions asked to speakers even if you don’t have any
Ask speakers questions wherever you are, they will help
Enjoy at least 1 night at a vendor or MS event after hours
Engage in Twitter before, during, and after the conference – nearly every speaker is on Twitter
My sessions!
I’m honored to be speaking again at SharePoint Conference. This is always a fun one to speak at because of the size and excitement throughout the week. I will be presenting 2 sessions this year:
Everything you need to know about sharing files in OneDrive, SharePoint & Teams
Sharing files is a necessity within the intelligent workplace and it is powered by SharePoint. Being able to understand how sharing is brought together across Microsoft 365 will help you plan, manage, support, and effectively drive adoption of SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams.
In this session, you learn learn what you can do with modern sharing experiences, how they work under the covers before and after you share a file, and what management options are available to you. Getting content securely to the right people at the right time keeps a company moving.
You can’t spell SharePoint without ‘Share’!
How To Automate Your Modern SharePoint Site Provisioning Solution
I am presenting this session with the one and only Vlad Catrinescu
Creating modern SharePoint sites only takes a second but what if you want to customize or control that process? It can be a challenge to keep up with all the sites in an organization and can affect support and governance a SharePoint environment. In this session, we will learn how to use Microsoft’s latest tools such as Site Designs, Site Scripts, PnP Site Provisioning, PowerApps and Flow to create a full Site provisioning system with custom templates, custom branding and easy approval before creation.
With the announcement that Delve blogs will be retiring you may want to see what blogs exist in your tenant. Delve blogs create their own site collection but do not show up in the admin center or when you use the SharePoint PowerShell module and the Get-SPOSite cmdlet. Thankfully PnP Powershell does return this. I put together a PowerShell script to find blogs and put a report together including the number of posts.
First, install PnP PowerShell if you haven’t already. I recommend installing via the PowerShell gallery with the command:
Install-Module SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline
Here is a script to find and export the blog information using PnP Powershell. Ensure you fill in your own variables for your tenant and the file path.
try {
#variables -> enter your own domain and output path
$creds = Get-Credential
$tenantadmin = "https://domain-admin.sharepoint.com"
$outputfilepath = "c:\temp\delveblogexport.csv"
#connect to tenant to get blog sites
Connect-PnPOnline $tenantadmin -Credentials $creds
$sites = Get-PnPTenantSite -Template POINTPUBLISHINGPERSONAL#0
$resultsarray = @()
#loop through sites to get details for blog
foreach($s in $sites){
Connect-PnPOnline $s.Url -Credentials $creds
$list = Get-PnPList -Identity "Pages"
$pagecount = $list.ItemCount
$listlastmodified = $list.LastItemUserModifiedDate
$contributor = Get-PnPGroupMembers -Identity "Contributors" | select Email
#add to export object
$obj = New-Object PSObject
Add-Member -InputObject $obj -MemberType NoteProperty -Name DelveBlogUrl -Value $s.Url
Add-Member -InputObject $obj -MemberType NoteProperty -Name BlogPageCount -Value $pagecount
Add-Member -InputObject $obj -MemberType NoteProperty -Name LastModified -Value $listlastmodified
Add-Member -InputObject $obj -MemberType NoteProperty -Name Email -Value $contributor.Email
$resultsarray += $obj
$obj = $null
Disconnect-PnPOnline
}
#export results
$resultsarray | Export-Csv -Path $outputfilepath -NoTypeInformation
Write-Host "Complete" -ForegroundColor Green
}
catch
{
Write-Host $_.Exception.Message -ForegroundColor Red
}
The results will include the URL of the site, the page count, last modified, and the email of the blog site owner.
If you want other details per page you can go directly to the pages library to view by applying “pPg/Forms/AllItems.aspx” to the blog site url. As an example:
When you go to the pages library you can download the posts. They exist in a JSON blob. This may be a good way to extract blog posts before they are removed via Microsoft.
To view the posts you will still go through “portals/hub/personal/drew” path vs “portals/personal/drew”.
Another path to get some of this information is through the User Profiles that exist. Each user profile includes a link to their Delve blog. So if you get all existing user profiles you can find where that value is filled in. The best way to get this at scale is through SharePoint search. I put together a script to do this as well. I included batching logic on the results which will be needed in large tenants as the max search results is only 500.
try
{
#variables -> enter your own domain and output path
$creds = Get-Credential
$tenantadmin = "https://domain-admin.sharepoint.com"
$outputfilepath = "c:\temp\delvebloguserprofileexport.csv"
$returnproperties = @("PreferredName","AccountName","WorkEmail")
$sourceid = "B09A7990-05EA-4AF9-81EF-EDFAB16C4E31" #this is consistent across tenants
$maxresults = 100
$startrow = 0
#connect to tenant to search
Connect-PnPOnline $tenantadmin -Credentials $creds
$resultsarray = @()
Do{
#perform search query
$results = Submit-PnPSearchQuery -Query "*" -SourceId $sourceid -SelectProperties $returnproperties -StartRow $startrow -MaxResults $maxresults -SortList @{LastModifiedTime="Descending"}
$rowcount = $results.RowCount
#loop through results in row
foreach($res in $results.ResultRows){
#get user profile properties
$props = Get-PnPUserProfileProperty -Account $res.AccountName
#check if blog site exists
if($props.UserProfileProperties.'SPS-PointPublishingUrl' -ne ""){
#add to export object
$obj = New-Object PSObject
Add-Member -InputObject $obj -MemberType NoteProperty -Name DelveBlogUrl -Value $props.UserProfileProperties.'SPS-PointPublishingUrl'
Add-Member -InputObject $obj -MemberType NoteProperty -Name WorkEmail -Value $props.UserProfileProperties.WorkEmail
$resultsarray += $obj
$obj = $null
}
}
$startrow = $startrow + $rowcount + 1
}
while ($rowcount -ne 0)
#export results
$resultsarray | Export-Csv -Path $outputfilepath -NoTypeInformation
Write-Host "Finished" -ForegroundColor Green
}
catch
{
Write-Host $_.Exception.Message -ForegroundColor Red
}
This is not the most efficient way to get this information but it could be helpful to double check the SharePoint sites approach. This is also a handy way to loop through user profiles via search.
I am excited to share that I will be speaking and attending the next SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas during the full week of May 20th in 2019. This is a can’t miss event that will keep you up to speed with all of the great new things coming out in the collaboration and communication space at Microsoft in 2019. Last year we got the introduction into SharePoint spaces! You will want to be there in person to see what’s next.
Networking & networking & more networking. I love events of this scale because of the opportunities to meet new people and learn from others experiences. There is no better spot than after a great session at a lunch table or after sessions are done and you are out at a great dinner in Vegas! Strike up conversations and who knows what kind of nuggets of great info you might find.
It’s not just about SharePoint anymore. Yes the name is SharePoint Conference but this event is really about bringing together all of the Microsoft workloads around communication and collaboration and how they work together. This includes primary focuses outside of SharePoint and OneDrive like Teams, PowerBI, Yammer, Planner, and larger topics like Microsoft Search and Azure.
Interactions with Microsoft. What is that super specific question or issue or scenario that has been nagging you or your company? An event like this is a great time to connect directly with people on the product team about how things work and why they were done the way they were. These discussions can provide priceless value that you can take back with you that you can’t find anywhere else.
From start to finish: How to create your modern SharePoint site provisioning solution
Creating modern SharePoint sites only takes a second, but what if you want to customize or control that process? It can be a challenge to keep up with all the sites in an organization and can affect support and governance of a SharePoint environment. In this session, learn how to use Microsoft’s latest tools such as Site Designs, PnP Site Provisioning, PowerApps and Flow to create a full site provisioning system with custom templates, custom branding, and easy approval before creation!
This is a session I am doing with Vlad Catrinescu and will be a deeper dive into what we presented at Microsoft Ignite in 2018. Here is a video sneak preview of what to expect!
Taking OneDrive for Business administration to the next level
OneDrive for Business is a key workload in Office 365 and is an integral part of your collaboration and content strategy. Whether you are looking to roll-out OneDrive for Business or are already are utilizing it, there are important things that you should know about for administration. Do you know what is possible for admins? Do you know if your content really is secure? Do you know who can and can’t share? You also can’t have a great OneDrive for Business experience without sync but there are things you need to know about deploying and managing sync across your enterprise. This session will go through real world experiences of managing OneDrive for Business and what you really need to know to be successful.