SharePoint Online

Microsoft is notoriously careful at giving out usage numbers for different Office 365 workloads.We know what the overall count is and now we have numbers for SharePoint Online and Teams. Some glances into a handy crystal ball and some inspired guesswork allows us to calculate likely numbers for Exchange Online, Yammer, and Planner and paint a more comprehensive picture of what’s happening inside Office 365.

OneDrive for Business is responsible for how sharing works within Office 365. Big strides are being made to achieving consistency across all the Office 365 apps and new some tricks are coming along too, like being able to link to a PowerPoint slide, requesting people to upload files to a folder, or using the URL in a browser as a link. All good stuff.

Everyone got very excited when Microsoft introduced private channels for Teams. Which is nice. The hard work of understanding the technology and managing its introduction now begins, so in this article we look at how to control the creation of private channels and what to do once private channels are out there in use. Some planning is always good, and mastering private channels will take preparation. Let’s begin!

Microsoft launched private channels for Teams at the Ignite conference. This article describes the architecture and structure of private channels and discusses their intended usage. In a follow-up, I’ll go into how to create and manage private channels in a Teams deployment and discuss some of the issues you should consider when using this new feature.

Microsoft made a ton of Office 365-related announcements at their Ignite conference in Orlando. Here’s a summary of the key news for SharePoint, Exchange, Stream, Teams, Yammer, and Outlook. More information will emerge during the week, so stay tuned for more coverage as news emerges.

SharePoint Online now boasts the ability to rename site URLs, which seems good, but not so good when you discover that the new URL breaks the connection with Teams. The fact that this happens is revealed in Microsoft documentation and it’s been a problem since the beta testing of the site rename function. Microsoft seems curiously disinterested in fixing the problem as quickly as they should have. A case of attention distracted elsewhere?

Javier Soltero, ex-boss of Outlook, is now running G Suite for Google. The appointment is an opportunity to reboot G Suite to take on Office 365 and make up some of the ground that’s been lost in the last five years using the “new brush sweeps clean” principle. In other news, Microsoft bought Mover to acquire its migration connectors that move files into SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, including files from Google Drive.

Office 365 applications now create many guest accounts in Azure Active Directory. You can see what accounts exist, but it’s more difficult to discover who created the accounts – or why they were created. Fortunately, the Office 365 audit log holds a lot of useful data that can be interrogated to find some answers and PowerShell is a great tool for slicing and dicing audit data. See what you think of the answers I’ve come up with.

The fit-and-finish quality within Office 365 is sometimes less than desirable. Two recent changes in SharePoint Online make it easier for users to know when a document library is connected to Teams and to generate thumbnails for items stored in the library. Neither change is awe-inspiring, but both are examples of how to improve SharePoint’s fit-and-finish, which is a good thing.

Microsoft Ignite 2019 is in four weeks, so now’s a good time to start browsing the session catalog to find interesting sessions to attend in person or listen to afterwards. I’ve been through the catalog to find some sessions and present my list here. Feel free to disagree and find other sessions in the > 1,400 listed already.