SharePoint Online

With September coming to an end, here’s what you need to know about Office 365 and SharePoint announcements during the past month.

Adoption and Change Management are often discussed when companies move to cloud services, including Office 365. How quickly can we adopt the new services and how can we manage change? As it happens, Microsoft is extremely interested in driving customer adoption, so much so that this can cause problems with change management simply because so much change happens so quickly insist Office 365. As we discuss here, a structured approach to change management helps.

With August now behind us, here are the important announcement this month that relate to SharePoint.

SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business are making increasing use of Azure B2B Collaboration for sharing, which means that Office 365 tenants will have more guest user accounts. Using Azure B2B Collaboration is a reasonable approach because it’s secure and works well, but it does mean that tenant admins have some extra work to do to keep an eye on those guest accounts.

It’s great when Microsoft introduces new functionality to SharePoint Online to make the lives of administrators and users easier, which is what the Restore this library feature is all about. Then problems happen, and we understand where the flaw lines exist. Recovering from a recent ransomware attack caused one Office 365 tenant more problems than they thought likely because Restore this library didn’t work as well as expected.

Microsoft’s output typically slows down during the summer but July had a few SharePoint updates that are worth pointing out.

The need to download PDF files to work with them has been a longstanding irritation for SharePoint Online users. Now Microsoft and Adobe have come up with a new file handler that sends PDFs to the Adobe Document Cloud, where the files can be updated and sent back to SharePoint Online for storage. The changes look good in the standard file viewer too! Worth looking at…

PowerShell is a great way of automating common administrative Office 365 operations. That is, if you know what module to use and how to use the cmdlets in that module. Unfortunately things are a bit of a mess with too many modules and inconsistent behavior in areas like error handling. With so many development groups working on Office 365, the PowerShell situation might be inevitable, but it needs cleaning up.

You can easily rename a team by giving it a new display name, or do the same thing to a channel. But Teams and SharePoint Online have the kind of relationship that’s based on tight connections, so renaming team or channel names leaves SharePoint untouched. Site URLs remain unchanged and if you try and fix up the folder names for channels, you can end up with a real mess.

Microsoft made a ton of announcements at this week’s SharePoint conference in Las Vegas. If you’re an Office 365 tenant administrator, the health of SharePoint Online and what it and OneDrive for Business can do is important to you. Among all the fluffy stuff about intelligent intranets, there was some good news about improvements in administration, security, and network utilization, all of which will help other Office 365 apps too.