What is Microsoft List and How can I use it?

Microsoft List is a powerful tool that allows you to create and manage lists of data, tasks, events, and more. You can use Microsoft List to organize your work and personal life, collaborate with others, and access your lists from anywhere. Here are some of the benefits of using Microsoft List:

• You can customize your lists with different views, filters, sorting, and formatting options.
• You can integrate your lists with other Microsoft 365 apps, such as Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, and Power Automate.
• You can use templates to create lists quickly and easily, or start from scratch and build your own.
• You can share your lists with others and control their permissions and access levels.
• You can use smart rules and alerts to automate workflows and get notified of changes or updates.

Microsoft List is a versatile and flexible solution that can help you manage your information and projects more efficiently and effectively. To learn more about Microsoft List, visit https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-lists/lists-app

SharePoint Online Gets Closer to Azure AD

We are continuing to see a trend with quite a few of our clients to replace their on site servers and moving to the cloud to share their files with others in their organizations. With the increased security being placed on this practice we are much safer than before for outside risks.

I have recently run across an article from office365itpros.com that discusses the closer integration of Azure AD B2B and SharePoint Services. It describes the need to review your Azure B2B Invitation Manager policies. This is the list that describes the allow and denial of access of domains. This is worth a quick look. I have included a quick list from their site that includes what this article contains.

Table of Contents

• ·         Azure AD B2B Collaboration and Guest Accounts for SharePoint Sharing
• ·         Rationalization Around Azure AD
• ·         Time to Review Applicable Policies
• ·         Review Guest Accounts Too

What is B2B in Azure AD? - B2B collaboration is a capability of Azure AD External Identities that lets you collaborate with users and partners outside of your organization. With B2B collaboration, an external user is invited to sign into your Azure AD organization using their own credentials.

What are the benefits of Azure B2B? - Azure AD B2B can also benefit your organization in other ways.

• ·         It's easy to invite guests and internal users quickly. ...
• ·         Guest users/collaborators can self-serve. ...
• ·         Use policies to securely share your apps and services. ...
• ·         Application and group owners can manage their own guest users. ...
• ·         Integrate with SharePoint and OneDrive.

EOL Notice: Windows Server 2012R2 – Oct 10, 2023

Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 will end on October 10, 2023. After this date, these products will no longer receive security updates, non-security updates, bug fixes, technical support, or online technical content updates. Microsoft has migration guidance for both cloud and on-premises solutions. Jan 3, 2023

This is a good time to sit down and take a look at how you are using your current server in your network environment. We are seeing many of our smaller clients that use a server primarily as a file storage device that provides a centralized access for all of their employees and we can make a very good case for replacing the server with some of the cloud services that you may already be using, specifically with the Microsoft Office 365 environment.

We have had great success in moving some of our clients from an on premise server to SharePoint Cloud with the Office 365 licensing environment. SharePoint is available if you have Office 365 Business Basic or Business Standard licensing. We would use Azure for your authentication of your users in place of your server so that we can set up the right controls for accessing SharePoint file structure. It takes a little forethought in designing the best control but this is all part of the services that we can provide you during the migration from your on premise server to a cloud SharePoint environment.

Be sure to give PAconnect a call to give you a free evaluation of what the best solution for you would be.

Retiring SharePoint 2010 Workflows

Major Update Announcement from Microsoft:

Since the release of SharePoint workflows, Microsoft has evolved workflow orchestration to not only encompass SharePoint, but all the productivity services you use with Microsoft 365 and beyond. With the continued investment in Power Automate as the universal solution to workflow, Microsoft is retiring SharePoint 2010 workflows.

Key Points:

• Major: Retirement
• Timeline:
  • Starting August 1st, 2020, SharePoint 2010 workflows will be turned off for any newly created tenants. 
  • Starting November 1st, 2020, Microsoft will remove the ability to run, or create, and or execute SharePoint 2010 workflows from existing tenants.
• Action: Review and assess impact

[How this will affect your organization]

If your organization still uses SharePoint 2010 workflows, they will no longer function after November 1st, 2020. SharePoint 2013 workflows will remain supported, although turned off by default for new tenants starting November 1st, 2020. We recommend customers to move to Power Automate or other supported solutions.  

[What you need to do to prepare]

You will want to notify your users, workflow developers and site owners. Update your user training and prepare your help desk.  

For admins:  

• Use the SharePoint Modernization Scanner tool to scan your tenants for legacy workflow usage. 
• Review the guidance for migrating from classic workflows to Power Automate flows.  
• Review the Power Automate resources as a solution to legacy workflows. 

Learn more 

• Support update for the retirement of SharePoint 2010 workflows in Microsoft 365.  
• Detailed support article and with additional resources.  

New feature: Column creation in modern SharePoint lists and libraries

MC110033  -  Published On : July 18, 2017

Microsoft is improving the column creation experience in modern SharePoint Online lists and libraries. You’ll begin seeing this new feature in the coming days.

How does this affect you?

Microsoft is adding the ability to create and configure the following column types by clicking the "+" icon that next to the column headers in modern lists and libraries:

• Number
• Yes/No
• Person
• Choice
• Hyperlink
• Picture
• Single line of text
• Multiple lines of text

They will be rolling this out in late July, and the rollout will be completed in the next few months.

Having an issue with OneDrive or SharePoint?

Email a take a quick look at this new version of OneDrive which my guys are telling me that it has stabilized synchronization to both one drive shares and SharePoint libraries out of Office 365. I am all for doing just that and I will be looking forward to getting this installed on all of my workstations and notebooks to see how well it begins a synchronization between all of those devices and are SharePoint document libraries. The link above will take you to Microsoft's blog article that discusses this new update and you may want to view this article to see exactly how to install the new client. Good luck!

Office 365 SharePoint Enhancements coming out this month

So you have started looking towards SharePoint 365 as your shared file access source and using some of the other features to create a central location for file/data sharing and collaboration. Some of the new things to expect are:

• Team Site publishing pages and web parts – so we are looking for easier to use publishing and more web parts to make it easier and quicker to get your point across. The SharePoint web pages are made up of web parts so having more options and easier to use web parts will be exciting.
• Office 365 Groups + team sites integration - When you create a group, Office 365 gives the group a shared inbox, calendar, OneNote notebook, a Planner for task management—and now, a full-powered SharePoint team site. Each group gets a modern home page—with the ability to create additional pages—document libraries, lists and business apps.
• Site Collection Limit – The Microsoft post says that the site content limit is going from 1TB to 25TB’s. I will be interested to see if this means for everyone from the get go or that you have to purchase or earn the .5gb increases for each additional subscription license. I’ll get back to you on that but if it is for everyone than this is great.

New capabilities in SharePoint Online team sites including integration with Office 365 Groups

SharePoint for iOS mobile app is now available

So part of this month’s Office 365 newsletter discussed that the iOS app is now available for access to your SharePoint site. Here is the Microsoft posting discussing this and below is a video running though the functions of this new application. Enjoy!

OneNote July Updates

I love OneNote and it has become a central point of my daily information collection and distribution medium. Combine it with Office 365 and SharePoint file access on the internet and you have a product that will provide you a wonderful tool to capture your ideas and notes.

The earlier versions of OneNote when compared to the ability of products like EverNote was a little lacking. If you haven’t tried it out recently you really should. It is nothing like what it was a few years ago. Whether you are a school student, office worker or retired, this product is a winner.

In this article from blogs.office.com, they posted some of the new July updates to the OneNote program. The three main areas that have been added to include Inking, Clipping and Notifications. Take a look!

Build an On-Line Company-Wide Data Store

One of the ideas that I have been toying with is how an organization that has only a few users design their document storage around a cloud option rather than with an on premise server. There are several questions that come up when considering this and I would like to explore these in this post.

I am going to approach this with the thought of using Microsoft Office 365 has the core product and then explore other options that might enhance this total solution. In a smaller environment that has fewer than 150 users and doesn't have a need for Microsoft's Access Database Program, then Small Business Premium Subscription will provide each user with Microsoft Office desktop installations, hosted Exchange and on-line storage.

Storage

Each user license provides a personal storage using OneDrive of 1 TB and in a Team Site (SharePoint) an initial 1 TB plus 500 GB's per licensed group member. In a small group of 5 licensed employees, each employee would have 1TB personal storage and the group would have 3.5 TB's shared storage.

As you can see, the more people you have in the group your team shared storage will grow quite quickly. In a lot of cases, the cost of having this much storage on a local file server would increase the cost of the initial equipment and the cost of your backup of that data. If you wish to have cloud backup, you're going to have the cost and logistics of getting that data off-site as well.

Backup

Microsoft provides some limited backup of you data but doesn't have a true archival backup solution. Luckily we do. Using our Cloud backup program, we have the ability to back up the entire contents of your Office 365 site for just pennies per user per day. In the example of a five user office, $21.25 per month. This includes backing up all of your data including your SharePoint and your Exchange data. And it is

easy to setup and restore from as necessary.

Setup

In this example you see that I have several SharePoint sites setup on our system. The primary site is our Team Site which contains different kinds of list data, calendars, announcements and links to special information including tutorials, vendor sites and other special pieces of information. I have also created a subsite called PAconnect. This is a site's sole purpose is as a document holder for our on-line document storage. I have shared this site with everyone in our organization so everyone has access to the information here. The last subsite that I have here is a SharePoint site that has limited access. Only the admin group of people will ever be able to access the data located here. You see here that you want to put some thought behind how you set up your SharePoint sites, what their use is, in other words what kind of information you want to put there and lastly who you want to be able to access it. Your administrator of the account has the rights initially to set up the rights mask for the site so whomever is in control will be the one that can set this up.

Here is a link that will help you get started with understanding SharePoint Libraries.

Synchronizing your Library

Once you have created the file structure of your library you will want to create your synchronization to it to your desktop This enables you use it just as you would any document folder you have on your computer. With synchronization setup you will be able to easily access, update current documents and store new documents to your shared area. The other benefit of SharePoint Libraries is versioning. This gives you the ability to restore your document to an earlier version if you make a mistake. Your site admin needs to setup this up and will enter how many earlier versions to keep available.

Turn on Versioning

By default, versioning is turned off. To turn it on and implement your versioning decisions, you must either have Full Control or Design permissions. The picture above shows you the options that are available when your edit the Library's Settings. A good overview of what all of these options are and what they allow you to do can be found here. This is a link to your on-line SharePoint Help site. Another great place to start looking at to learn how to use document libraries.

Collaboration in Office 365–The Possibilities

Posted out on Microsoft’s TechNet blog I found an article discussing things that you can do to within the Office 365 environment that allows for different kinds of data sharing with both internal users (those users who are part of your Microsoft Office 365 tenant) and external users (those that belong to other Office 365 tenants).

What is an Office 365 tenant?

The term “tenant” is purely technical. In an ideal scenario, a single company would sign up for a single Office 365 tenant. Imagine a tenant as an equivalent of a closed on premise setup within which you have all your services running.

A single tenant will have all your users, groups, resources, data, subscriptions, licenses etc.

But we have also seen companies going for multiple tenants – especially if they have entities that are (or need to be) “separate” either from an IT or legal perspective.

Even then we would normally recommend having a single tenant for a single company, wherever possible. Why? Because tenant boundaries limit collaboration capabilities and bring in (IT) barriers between two users that you would normally expect to have between users in two separate companies (or organizations). Your global IT administrator’s credentials are effective only within the tenant boundaries. And, if you own a vanity domain name (like “Microsoft.com”) – you can only use it in a single tenant of Office 365, i.e. users in two separate tenants cannot have email addresses or login addresses ending with the same domain name.

The article provides a lot of insight and ideas on how to use your Office 365 account, and if you haven’t taken the leap yet, this may provide some ideas of why you should.

SharePoint and Office 365

If you have subscribed to Office 365 with either Microsoft’s Small Business Essentials, Premium or any of their Enterprise Level products then you have SharePoint available to you. The following video gives you some insight into some of the things that you can use SharePoint for and make it another useful tool for your organization.

New SharePoint home experience in Office 365 rolling out starting today

New SharePoint home experience in Office 365 rolling out starting today

MC45964

Direct Link Copied to Clipboard.

As announced at the “Future of SharePoint” event on May 4th, we are starting to rollout the new SharePoint home experience in Office 365, starting today, to First Release. The rollout will be completed to all tenants within the course of the next several weeks. We’re committed to evolving your intranet to be more accessible on the go, and more personal with intelligence-driven content based on user activities across sites, the people they work with, and the content they work on.

How does this affect me?

Starting May 11th, 2016, we will begin to rollout the new SharePoint home experience in Office 365. What was the 'Sites' page is now the 'SharePoint home' and the “Sites” tile becomes the “SharePoint” tile - same logo, redesigned for a modern, responsive user experience.

What do I need to do to prepare for this change?

Please click Additional Information to learn more.