Everything you need to know about SharePoint – November 2018

 

Sharepoint Hero

This month I get to remind you that even though it is 2018 you need to keep your eye focused on a product from 2010 coming out of support in 2020. Seems like a silly conversation but we are going to talk about it. Then we can talk about some developer stuff, security this and that, and a pending return of a feature we have missed for a long time. Fun times, fun times. And can we just say how proud I am? This will be two articles in a row where I am going to talk about developer things and do so nicely. Miracles never cease to happen.

SharePoint 2010 Extended Support is ending in Oct 2020

This is just a reminder that one of these years you have to get rid of SharePoint 2010. Bill from the SharePoint product team gently reminds you with this post with such an upbeat tone. Good job Bill. I, on the other hand, am going to say “GET IT TOGETHER PEOPLE”. I know, I am rude. I still talk to customers on a regular basis who have 2010 at no fault of their own. It was a great, stable platform that they don’t want to leave but they must.I mean I still know a lot of customers are still on 2007 and a few on 2003. Change is hard. So anyway, I will skip the lecture and just remind you 23 months of extended support left. I will also remind you if you are trying to figure out what to migrate to SharePoint Online is the default answer. Convince me otherwise.

SharePoint Framework v 1.7

If you are a SharePoint Developer then exciting times. SharePoint Framework v 1.7 was released. And while I barely know what that means you probably do. And more importantly, some really smart people that I respect (like Vesa) said this was the largest feature addition ever for the framework so I thought I would include it. Bonus, if you look at my what is new in Office 365 in November article you will see the Graph API documentation got a new home. If you aren’t a developer the Framework is what developers use to build custom solutions in SharePoint Online. It is also slowly trickling its way into on-prem so developers can reuse more of their code, I think it is fully baked into Server 2019. There, you know as much as I do now.

Control Access to SharePoint Online and OneDrive based on Network Location

This is a quick one. As we continue to move to the cloud for everything we continue to look at ways to enhance our security poster. To that end, this documentation talks about how to lock down SharePoint and OneDrive based on network location. While that isn’t super interesting what I think is more interesting (hence why I included it) is it talks about all of the considerations. It is easy to say I only want SharePoint to work from our office IP arrange but that has a lot of downstream issues and considerations. So as you think about security give this doc a read. Make sure that the simple concept of “locking down SharePoint” isn’t stopping a lot of other progress accidentally.

SharePoint Intrazone talks security and governance

Sticking with security for a minute I wanted to call out this great podcast. If you haven’t heard it the SharePoint Intrazone is put on by some of the SharePoint product team and is an amazing way to keep up with all things SharePoint. They show has a great personality to it and has real, detailed, actionable information. Win, win. This episode dives deeper into security and some governance and I think would be super beneficial for all of us to listen. Or if you are not a listener there is also a good write up of the details. Check it out. You can thank me later.

Maybe one day we can change accounts again

One of the most frustrating features of the latest flavors of SharePoint has been the removal of the button to sign in as another user. As a consultant, it kills me but even my corporate friends who support SharePoint struggle with the lack of this feature. Well, Microsoft finally announced that the feature is coming back to our Azure AD derived world. The first pass of Account Manager is coming to Azure with the plan to push it out to the rest of the ecosystem (that is us) in 6 to 9 months. I am way more excited about this than I should be. I am guessing you are also, so I thought I would end on a high note.