Office 365 News – Newly Introduced security feature in SPO hides the Web Designer Galleries

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Newly introduced security feature in SharePoint Online hides the Web Designer Galleries, Save site as template and a lot more too…

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SPO Admin setting (with a dead link)

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During the end of 2014, beginning of 2015, a new security feature in SharePoint Online has been rolled out. The feature in itself is great, it has been introduced to (From the SharePoint admin interface):

Control whether users can run custom script on personal sites and self-service created sites. Note: changes to this setting might take up to 24 hours to take effect.

What is good to know without Reading too much on this feature, is that these things for example will be missing:

Site feature	Behavior	Notes
Save Site as Template	No longer available in Site Settings.	You can still build sites from templates created before scripting was disabled.
Save document library as template	No longer available in Library Settings.	You can still build document libraries from templates created before scripting was disabled.
Solution Gallery	No longer available in Site Settings.	You can still use solutions created before scripting was disabled.
Theme Gallery	No longer available in Site Settings.	You can still use themes created before scripting was disabled.
Help Settings	No longer available in Site Settings.	You can still access help file collections available before scripting was disabled.
Sandbox solutions	Solution Gallery will not appear in the Site Settings so you can’t add, manage, or upgrade sandbox solutions.	You can still run sandbox solutions that were deployed before scripting was disabled.
SharePoint Designer	Site Pages: No longer able to update web pages that are not HTML.Handling List: Create Form and Custom Action will no longer work.Subsites: New Subsite and Delete Site redirect to the Site Settings page in the browser. Data Sources: Properties button is no longer available.	You can still open data sources.

For a good detailed description of what the feature does, have a look here. It affects mostly Everything and since it is activated by default, a lot of settings and functionality is suddenly missing. The feature has two ‘levels’, for personal sites and for self service created sites. (for me, it affects all site Collections)

Turn scripting capabilities on and off (Microsoft support article)
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Turn-scripting-capabilities-on-and-off-1f2c515f-5d7e-448a-9fd7-835da935584f?ui=en-US&amp

The feature in itself is great, but perhaps, since it removes so much of the default functionality, it should have been left off be default? Or, would cause some kind of popup to all affected users?

Well, it is here now anyway…lets consider the feature a great idea, it increases the built in security of SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business!

The complete list of settings affected and webparts missing: Save Site as Template, Save document library as template, Solution Gallery, Web Designer Galleries, Theme Gallery, Help Settings, Sandbox solutions, the Blog Archives, Blog Notifications, Blog tools Blog Webparts, the Business Data Actions, Business Data Item, Business Data Item Builder, Business Data List, Business Data Related List, Excel Web Access, Indicator Details, Status List, Visio Web Access Business Data Webparts, the About This Community, Join, My Membership, Tools, What’s Happening Community Webarts, the Categories, Project Summary, Relevant Documents, RSS Viewer, Site Aggregator, Sites in Category, Term Property, Timeline, WSRP Viewer, XML Viewer Content Rollup Webparts, the Document Set Contents, Document Set Properties Document Sets Webparts, the HTML Form Webpart, the Content Editor, Script Editor, Silverlight Webpart Media and Content Webparts, the Refinement, Search Box, Search Navigation, Search Results Search Webparts, the Catalog-Item Reuse Search-Driven Content Webparts and the Contact Details, Note Board, Organization Browser, Site Feed, Tag Cloud, User Tasks Social Collaboration Webparts.

References and Credits

None at this time…

Credits & many thanks to

Everyone!‘ _________________________________________________________ Enjoy!

Regards

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Office 365 News – OneDrive for Business sync client for MAC released

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OneDrive for Business sync client for MAC released! – January 28, 2015

Finally, after too long, Microsoft has released the first preview version of a sync client to the MAC plattform.
Until now, this was the last gap in the ODfB access portfolio, now we can finally say, no more. We are complete! (Or soon will be anyway, it’s a preview…)
All is now covered, Windows, Windows Phone, Android phone, Android tablet, Iphone, Ipad and now, MAC OSX.

Download the preview here, OneDrive for Business Mac sync client Preview – Download Center

Read more about this news here on the Official OneDrive blog (Also covers OneDrive for Business…)

Read the official story on the Office 365 blog about this news here:
http://blogs.office.com/2015/01/28/onedrive-business-comes-mac-ios-devices/‘

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Enjoy!

Regards

Twitter | Technet Profile | LinkedIn

Office 365 guide series – 101 ways to share a document

101 ways to share a document.

Fellow SharePoint lovers! (And OneDrive for Business…)

Share the Love

More and more individuals and organizations are starting to realize the beauty of OneDrive for Business, the way it allows you to be always up to date and to be able to always access your information no matter where you are or on what device you are on.

This article will delve© into detail on how you can keep the information in one place, instead of spreading multiple copies and versions around like we have always done using email as the sharing method of choice (Not to mention USB sticks). As you all most likely know, every time you send an email with an attachment of one of your files, a new copy and possible a new version of that document is created, it happens out of your control as well and this is not something that we want, it has simply been the only way to share, externally for sure and internally it has been the easiest way for the lazy.

Now, what has changed? What’s new? What’s so special with OneDrive for Business so that we can share thru some kind of Microsoft magic and files never have to be sent in email? What’s up with that? Well, implementing OneDrive for Business as a part of Office 365 is one step, you can however still work like you always have…removing the old Home directory and the Shared folders is another. You can however still work like you always have, sending attachments using email, but, these steps will allow you and your coworkers to adopt a new way of doing things, a better more secure and controlled way to work.

Traditional sharing, send a copy of the original to each user, same as when printing a letter and posting it…

Modern sharing, one original, no copies. Everyone reads or edits the same file.

As you all also probably know and think right now, there are other cloud services that can do this and yes, I agree, but if you have invested in Office 365 already, then you get OneDrive for Business with 1TB (!) storage for free (or it is included in the price but free sounds better, and compared to using a different service like dropbox or box, then it IS free). You have a single sign on between the different applications in Office 365 and if you have implemented ADFS, then you will even have single sign on from your PC. Yes, I know that storage will be unlimited soon…but honestly, 1TB IS unlimited…

But enough of that, now I will show you where you can share a document from your OneDrive for business.

First off, there is a setting that are configured globally in the SharePoint admin portal of Office 365 that we need to know about.

External Sharing, there are 3 levels to select from. Can be set on the tenant or per Site collection. This setting can only be configured by a Global Office 365 Administrator.
The third level means anonymous access…(No! You really shouldn’t)

(Note also that if you restrict sharing on the tenant, then you cannot allow it on the site collection level) When these are set, you can start sharing.

There are a lot of places to do this for the mobile OneDrive for Business user

– OneDrive for Business Online
– OneDrive for Business Offline (from the local cache)
– The Office Applications
– The OneDrive for Business mobile app (Windows Phone, IOS, Android)
– Office Mobile (Windows Phone, IOS, Android) only shares a link, does not grant access
– Outlook Online (formerly known as Outlook Web Access)

It is more or less the same experience everywhere, the web dialog for sharing a document looks like this, from here you can share with internal users as well as external users, and all you need is an email address.

OneDrive for Business Online

Click SHARE then select how to share, or select the document(s) and click on the Share ‘button’

The dialog then looks like this

As you can see, the checkbox for ‘Require sign-in’ is checked by default, unchecking that allows anonymous access to this document.
This checkbox is only available if anonymous sharing is enabled at the tenant and at the site collection level.

The names can be internal users by name or email address, it can be external users by email or it can be everyone.

The permission level can also be set here, they speak for themselves. (Note that sharing with edit allows the recipient to in turn share with or without edit)

You can type in a message, this will be the text in the email that is sent to the recipient

Under SHOW OPTIONS you have the option to not send an email at all.

The recipient receives an email with this content

Clicking the link takes the user straight to the shared file, in its location.

Under Shared with, you can see who currently has access to this document.

When a document is shared, you can also see that the little user icon is replaced to show that someone else besides you now also has access to this document or this file.

Unshare the file again by clicking on that icon and in the Shared with dialog, select Stop sharing and save Changes.

After a quick refresh, you will see that the little icon is back to the Padlock.

This is how you share things in the OneDrive for Business Online, it is very similar in SharePoint Online (A few exceptions like unsharing differs).

The rest you will know when you see them:

The OneDrive for Business Offline (from the local cache)

The Office Applications

The OneDrive for Business mobile app (Windows Phone, IOS, Android)

Office Mobile, Word, Excel, PowerPoint (Windows Phone, IOS, Android) only shares a link, does not grant access

Outlook Online (formerly known as Outlook Web Access)

Select INSERT

Select Share with OneDrive (They really should stop confusing the business version with the consumer version…)

Apply the proper permission level, read or read/write

Note that the file is not sent as an attachment unless you specifically choose to do so. It only looks like an attachment, the file never leaves your personal OneDrive for Business.

And, to sum it all up, a message from inside Outlook Online:

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References and Credits

None at this time…

Credits & many thanks to

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LabCenter – you guys always publish my articles!

Mattias Gutke at Xperta

My family.

_________________________________________________________

Enjoy!

Regards

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Office 365 guide series – Prevent unwanted use of SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer, bad in the wrong hands

Prevent unwanted use of SharePoint Designer (SPD)

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Hi SharePoint Online administrators!

You have all Heard the nickname SharePoint Destroyer right? I’m not a SharePoint Designer hater at all, quite the opposite actually. Some things can simply just be done from SPD and no Place else. Like for example saving a SharePoint online Site Collection from a failed branding attempt…or a miscoded masterpage…
No, SPD is a really good tool for the ones who know how to use it and with the proper skills and the proper permissions it can be a real help in many scenarios, onprem or in the cloud.

However, what I want to Point out here in this post, is that not everyone has the skills needed, and way to many users have too high permissions for their own good.
A powerfull tool like SPD in the wrong hands can be dangerous…
The only example we need: OneDrive for Business…until Microsoft makes a change and restricts every users completely unmotivated administrative privilieges to the OneDrive for Business/Mysite, we want to stop our users any way we can.

So, this is what I have found that can assist in this task in a Office 365 scenario:

1. Remove SPD as a download from Office 365 (Makes it harder)

2. Prevent the use of SPD (Not easy to accomplish in OneDrive for Business)

3. Educate your users. (Often not realistic at all)

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1. Remove SPD as a download from Office 365

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OK, if you did not know this, Office 365 has a link for every user, where they can freely or included in the license, download software. It includes the Office 365 Proplus and Lync+Outlook for Mac and more, one of the applications offered to the users is SharePoint Designer.
The link to download SharePoint Designer can be removed by a global Administrator though…(thank you Microsoft)
This is what you do:

Click the ‘startbutton’ in the Applauncher of your Office 365 tenant, then click on Admin

Expand Service Settings and select User Software

Deselect the SharePoint Designer checkbox and hit Save.

Done. This configuration will stop users from easily finding SharePoint Designer inside of Office 365

Note: Remember however, they can still install it from other sources.

If you did not know this, the software is installed by the users from here:

This setting will be removed/Hidden from the user if you follow the steps above.

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2. Prevent the use of SPD

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Before ywe begin, this is NOT easily done in OneDrive for Business. Since every OneDrive for Business is its own Site Collection (or part of the mysite) it has to be configured on every single OneDrive for Business. And even if this is accomplished, it can be ‘unconfigured’ by the user since he/she has administrative privileges.

Stop the use of SharePoint Designer completely in a single Site Collection this way:

In the Site Settings menu, select the Site Collections Site Settings

Select SharePoint Designer Settings

Deselect Enable SharePoint Designer to stop its use completely. Or, if you rather let the users do some things but not all, select the minor options as you choose.

Hit OK and you are safe!

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3. Educate your users

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This is actually not a bad idea, depending on the type of users and the kind of business you are and the size and so on, this can be the very best way, but it can also be the hardest, the most expensive and the least secure way.
My recommendation, do keep this in mind. It can be a good adea to put some trust in your users and give them some responsibility, sometimes…
How to do this step, that is not my area of expertese, but there are others who know this. If you are a small organization, use email! Or Office 365 Video?

With that, we are done for this time.

References and Credits

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Organize your Office 365 with the new app launcher
http://blogs.office.com/2014/10/16/organize-office-365-new-app-launcher-2/

Introducing Office 365 Video
http://blogs.office.com/2014/11/18/introducing-office-365-video/

Credits & many thanks to

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‘Always, Mattias Gutke, now at Xperta

My excellent colleges/coworkers at Xperta! All of you! My team, Johanna, Oscar, Micke and again, Mattias!

_________________________________________________________

Enjoy!

Regards

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Office 365 guide series – Information Rights Management in SharePoint Online

Hi folks, long time no blogging…

A lot has happened in my life since I last updated my blog, I switched jobs so I have a slightly new focus now in my workplace, it has shifted more against SharePoint Online and Office 365. Say what you want about the cloud service named Office 365 but Microsoft is determined…to make it work and piece by piece it gains in value.

One of the great things offered in Office 365 that is also part of the SharePoint Online offering, is Information Rights Management. Thru the use of the other cloud service Azure Rights Management Service (Azure RMS), real IRM protection can be offered to all SharePoint Online customers on the adequate subscription plan. There is still a lot to be done with the service, but as is, it is way, WAY better than nothing, which is what most people have available today in their current solution. IRM or RMS is available to all customers with an onpremises solution as well, but setting RMS up is a challenge for any administrator. In SharePoint online, you will have it up and running in a total of 5 clicks…(depending on what you count as a click…)

IRM – Its all about stopping unwanted access

And what is so great about this IRM, RMS or DRM you may wonder? A beloved child has many names (Old saying in Sweden), well…it is fantastic. IRM offers you the possibility to set a policy on documents (and email messages) that allows you to specify what the user may or may not do with the document, you may also specify exactly what user or grop may or may not read, write, print, download and so on. The really great thing with IRM is that even if you put a document on a USB drive and someone gets their hand on that USB drive, they still need to authenticate against the Azure RMS service before getting any access at all to the document, and even then, what you may do is controlled by the IRM policy. You are in Control of the data even after the document leaves your controlled environment…not bad huh?

So, how is all this greatness achieved you ask? Well, I will not go into all the magic behind the scenes in this post, but I will show you how you can do it yourself, in your current Office 365 tenant or if you prefer, in an evaluation tenant to avoid the risk of affecting your users (which is virtually impossible anyway but just as a precaution…and to make your bosses feel safe).
Lets get started, jump drectly to a section using the links below:

The complete guide to enabling IRM protection in a SharePoint document library	Jump straigt to the guide, a step by step on how you implement RMS and IRM protection in SharePoint Online.
Who gets access to RMS, license plans listed	Get the list of what subscription plan includes RMS and what does not.
What works and what doesn’t?	The cmplete list of supported OS’s and Applications that support Azure RMS and the ones that do no yet support Azure RMS.
About the IRM/RMS technology – How does it work, what does it do?	The functionality explained.
References/Links – Find the information online	Link to when you get all the info you need in the sometimes difficult Microsoft TechNet way…

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The complete guide to enabling IRM protection in a SharePoint document library

This is done in four steps:
– Activate Azure RMS in the Office 365 administration portal.
– Activate RMS in SharePoint online
– Create and set a IRM policy in a document library
– Quickly verify your Information Rights Management

Step 1. Activate Azure RMS in the Office 365 administration portal.

1.1 Log on to your Offcie 365 tenant as a global administrator, go to the Office 365 admin center. You will find the shortcut in the admin dropdown.

1.2 The Office 365 admin center

1.3 Now select on the lefthand menu, service settings

1.4 In the top menu select ‘rights management’

1.5 Click on the link to Manage your ‘Azure Rights Management’

1.6 This is where you leave your Office 365 tenant, note the URL you now se in your browsers address field:

1.7 In Azure RMS you will be met by this text saying that yiou have not activated Rights Management yet.

1.8 In order to activate the RM feature, click on ‘activate’…DUH! Then click on ‘activate’ again…if you are absolutely sure…

1.9 Wait for it….

1.10 Now you should see this, A nice green checkmark telling you that Rights Managemen has been activated.

1.11 Done! Now you can move on with activating Rights Management in your SharePoint Online admin portal. The steps you have now taken makes the RMS service available in all parts of your Office 365 tenant, like in Exchange, SharePoint (and Lync).
(As you can see, you can lso make some additional configurations of RMS, for example you can create your own custom policys, fr some reason though, you are required to sign up for a separate Azure RMS suscription for this…the link to where you sign up is added to the page to make things simpler for you)

Step 2. Activate RMS in SharePoint online

2.1 Go to the SharePoint administration portal. Find the shortcut in the Admin dropdown.

2.2 In the lefthand pane, select Settings.

2.3 Scroll downto the section named ‘Information Rights Management (IRM)’

2.4 Under Information Rights Management (IRM), on the right side, select ‘Use the IRM service specified in your configuration’

2.5 Click on the ‘Refresh IRM Settings’ button. (Buttons…welll…maybe they are touch buttons?)

2.6 In ashort while, you will see the text ‘We successfully refreshed your settings’ below the button.

2.7 Done! This means that IRM functionality has been enabled in your SharePoint Online tenant and the IRM settings will now be available in SharePoint.

Note! If you have not previously activated IRM in your Office 365 admin portal, then you will see this massage instead:

If that is the case, simply go back to Step 1 in this guide and activate IRM in Office 365 first.

Step 3. Create and set a IRM policy in a document library

3.1 Go to a site in your SharePoint Online site collection of choice (can be the rootsite or a subsite), go to a document library (default is probably ‘Documents’).
Now, click on the ‘Library’ tab.

3.2 To the right in the ribbon, click on ‘Library Settings’

3.3 Click on ‘Information Rights Management’

3.4 This is the Information Rights settings for the current Document Library, what you change here will only affect this document library and the documents in it. Remember though, that what you change here will affect ALL documents in this library, in all folders, of all types. By default, IRM is disabled and has no affect at all.

3.5 What you see here, is only the name and the description and the activate button. In order to see more of the settings, click on SHOW OPTIONS. This offers all the settings that are currently available for a document library in SharePoint Online.
Start now by giving your policy a name and type in a description, this is what will be shown to the user, so its better to use a good explainatory description.

3.6 Click on ‘SHOW OPTIONS’. Configure what the policy is and what is allowed and what isn’t. For the sake of easily verifying the functionality, only configure that the document cannot be opened in a browser. In the first section, ‘Set additional IRM library settings’ check the box to prevent the documents from opening in the browser.

3.7 The two other sections has even more options, ‘Configure document access rights’…

3.8 …and ‘Set group protection and credentials interval’.

3.9 When you have configurd the policy like you want it, hit Ok.

3.10 Done! All document in your library are now protected uing the IRM policy you configred. THat IRM is used cannot be seen unless you have access to the IRM setting in the Library Settings. What a regular user can see, is the effect of the policy alone.

3.11 Whithout the policy activated you get a preview of the document(offered by Office Web Apps) and the option to view and edit in browser like below:

3.12 When the policy has been activated, you do not get any preview and the view and edit in browser options are gone.

3.13 You are now done, your document library is IRM protected using Azure Rights Management Service.

Step 4. Quickly verify your Information Rights Management

4.1 Upload a Word document to the document library. (Your document is now IRM protected)

4.2 Click on Edit, you should be prompted to download the document. Cancel the dialog.

4.3 Click on the three dots, you should see a notice that a preview is prevented by RMS.

4.4 You will also notice that the dropdown many does not offer any choice to open in browser or preview in browser.

4.5 Done!

Note: A good bestpractise is to Always verify that your IRM protection policy is activated and works as expected. Some settings must be tested using a Office client application andsome can be tested onin like in this scnario.

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Who gets access to RMS, license plans listed

Licensing option	Office 365 Small Business	Office 365 Small Business Premium	Office 365 Midsize Business	Office 365 Enterprise E2Office 365 Education A2	Office 365 Enterprise E3Office 365 Education A3Office 365 Government G3	Office 365 Enterprise E4Office 365 Education A4Office 365 Government G4	Office 365 Enterprise K1	SharePoint Plan 2	Exchange Online Plan 2
Information Rights Protection (IRM)	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No

Like you can see, far from all license plans include RMS.

In addition to the Ofice 35 subscptions that include RMS, there is also a RMS for individuals subscription that will allow a user outside of the organization to open and access IRM protected documents from an organizaton that uses IRM protection using RMS.

Note: If you have a subscription plan that does not include RMS, like a Office 65 E1 or E2, then you can get the RMS functionality as an add-on from Micosoft (Azure RMS Standalone). Talk to you account represenative or your LAR/license vendor. This optio cos a lot less than to upgrade to a E3 plan simply for the RMS functionalty.

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What works and what doesn’t?

So, we wat to use RMS and IRM protection, but what is supported, can we use it whereever we want and whenever we want? No, you can’t…
There are some things that work and sometings that don’t work, I have tried to list them all blow, as time goes by, Micrsoft will most likely subtract from the No list and add to the Yes list *.

Implementation	Supports Azure RMS
Operating Systems
Windows 7 Professional SP0	Yes
Windows 7 Enterprise SP0	Yes
Windows 7 Ultimate SP0	Yes
Windows 7 Professional SP1	Yes
Windows 7 Enterprise SP1	Yes
Windows 7 Ultimate SP1	Yes
Windows 8 Pro	Yes
Windows 8 Enterprise	Yes
Windows 8.1 Pro	Yes
Windows 8.1 Enterprise	Yes
Mac OS X (minimum 10.7, Lion)	Yes
Mobile Devices
Windows Phone 8	Yes
Android 4.0.3	Yes
iOS 6.0	Yes
Windows 8 RT	Yes
Windows 8.1 RT	Yes
Applications
Office 365
Office Professional Plus 2013	Yes
Office Professional 2010 (With RMS addon)	Yes
Microsoft Office for Mac 2011	No
Microsoft Office for iPad	No
Microsoft OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive)	No
Microsoft OneDrive for Business (formerly SkyDrive Pro)	No (!)
Sharing Applications
Minimum OS version of Windows 7 Service Pack 1	Yes
For Mac OS	No
On premise Servers
Exchange 2013	Yes
Exchange 2010	Yes
SharePoint Server 2013	Yes
SharePoint Server 2010	Yes
Windows Server 2012 (FCI)	Yes
Windows Server 2012 R2 (FCI)	Yes

* I asume that all else not listed here does not support Azure RMS.

The RMS connector is supported on Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2008 R2.

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About the IRM/RMS technology – How does it work, what does it do?

(This section is a direct quote from Microsoft, they actually have a pretty good short and to the point explaination here.)

What is Azure Rights Management:

Azure Rights Management lets you encrypt and assign usage restrictions to content when your organization subscribes to Microsoft online services. Rights Management helps protect content that is created and exchanged by using Microsoft Office as well as other applications or services that have been updated to integrate with the Rights Management service. By implementing a cloud-based rights management service, Rights Management provides an alternative for organizations seeking information protection capabilities within Microsoft Office 365.

Rights management provides the following:

Safeguards sensitive information
Applications and services such as Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013, SharePoint Online and Microsoft Exchange Online are enabled to help safeguard sensitive information. Users and administrators can define who can open, modify, print, forward, or take other actions with the information. Organizations are provided usage policy templates such as “Company Confidential – Read Only” that can be applied directly to the information.

Provides persistent protection
Rights Management persists protection of file data when at rest and in motion. Once information is locked, only trusted entities that were granted usage rights under the specified conditions (if any) can unlock or decrypt the information.

Supports closer management of usage rights and conditions
Organizations and individuals can assign usage rights and conditions using rights management that define how a specific trusted entity can use rights-protected content. Examples of usage rights are permission to read, copy, print, save, forward, and edit. Usage rights can be accompanied by conditions, such as when those rights expire.

Integrates rights management with Office 365
Rights Management is integrated with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and other Office 2010 and Office Professional Plus 2013 applications to provide rights management functionality across the Microsoft Office suite.

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References

Office 365 Information Protection using Azure Rights Management
http://blogs.technet.com/b/rms/archive/2013/11/11/office-365-information-protection-using-azure-rights-management.aspx

Set up Information Rights Management (IRM) in SharePoint admin center
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/set-up-information-rights-management-irm-in-sharepoint-admin-center-HA102895193.aspx

Azure Rights Management
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj585024.aspx

Administering Azure Rights Management by Using Windows PowerShell
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj585027.aspx

Requirements for Azure Rights Management
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn655136.aspx

Cloud subscriptions that support Azure RMS
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn655136.aspx#BKMK_SupportedSubscriptions

_________________________________________________________

Enjoy!

Regards

Twitter | Technet Profile | LinkedIn

The Iphone Apps of SharePoint Online and Office 365

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Greetings SharePoint Online users!

This time I will shed some light on what Microsoft have made available for the Iphone users out there. I’m usng different phones over time, but I have an Iphone and I discovered that there is actually quite a lot you can do from and on the Iphone that is SharePoint Online related (Only focusing on the supported Microsoft realesed here)
In this post I will try to list them all and write a bit about what you can do with them.

This is the list of SharePoint Online related apps available (2014-03-23)

1. OneDrive for Business (Formarly SkyDrive Pro)
2. Office Mobile for Office 365 Subscribers
3. SharePoint Newsfeed
4. Microsoft OneNote for Iphone
5. Office 365 Admin
6. OWA for Iphone
7. Microsoft Rights Management Sharing

Lets start to show what you can see in the App store where they are all available as free downloads, first one out is OneDrive for Business. This is not a Deep dive into technology or functionality or detailed feature sets, but rather a listing of what is available, see what can be done in the gui, the next step is your own, download the apps and try them out for yourselves.

Good luck!

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1. OneDrive for Business (Formarly known as SkyDrive Pro)

This is as good as they get, you can easily access your personal and shared files at any time (Located in your MySite or other organizational sites within the Office 365 tenant). OneDrive for Business will keep your OneDrive files in synch at all times and available online or offline.
OneDrive for Business or SkyDrive Pro as it was originally called, is the shit, no doubt about it.

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2. Office Mobile for Office 365 Subscribers

These are the classical Office application, do some final Changes or touch ups, create the files you need while on the road without any Computer. This is a complete ‘mini Office’ compatible with Office 365.

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3. SharePoint Newsfeed

SharePoint Newsfeed, follow what is happening in your organizations social and Corporate newsfeeds. This app will make sure that you are up to date at all times.

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4. Microsoft OneNote for Iphone

OneNote…if you don’t use it today, start using it! It is a really really good companion in your daily work, not sure if the App can replace the real application, but you can read and edit your OneNote files in your phone, how cool is that?

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5. Office 365 Admin

For the Office 365 Administrator, or for the partners out there monitoring the Office 365 tenants for customers, this is the best app of them all(except for OneDrive for Business obviously). In the Admin ‘hub’ you can get the status of all the services in your Office 365 tenant. You see all the major services status on the start page, then you can drill down to what is failing, which Component has the issue, and you can read the log from the Microsoft maintenance staff, what they are doing to solve the issue. This is great. If onluy you could add users and reset their passwords as well…but you can’t get Everything. A good monitor/dashboard from Microsoft this anyway.

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6. OWA for Iphone

Well, no need to explain, this is the OWA (Outlook Web App, not Office Web Apps) experience in your Iphone. You get email, calendar and Contacts in your hand. In a familiar format.

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7. Microsoft Rights Management Sharing

Microsoft Rights Management Sharing. Well…this is what it says, use the App to set IRM protection on files and to open IRM protected files. IRM protected files, and you can access them on your Iphone, who would have thought…?

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Ok, thats it. These are the Apps on the Iphone that are related in one or many ways to SharePoint Online, or at least to Office 365. They are all written by Microsoft Corporation and they are free to download from the App store.

References

See Appstore in your Iphone, search for Microsoft Corporation and you will find them all.

_________________________________________________________

Enjoy!

Regards

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Office 365 guide series – Using your document templates in SharePoint online

SP2013logo

Greetings SharePoint Online users!

This is the third in the Office 365 and SharePoint Online series.

1. Office 365 guide series – Create a new list from an Excel spreadsheet

2. Office 365 guide series – A guide to SharePoint Navigation using metadata

3. Office 365 guide series – Using your document templates in SharePoint online (This post)

This time I will explain how to:

Use Office templates within your SharePoint Online document libraries. In every organisation, or at least the majority, you talk about templates and you know that you have them, somewhere, but in the end, you and everyone else end up using an existing document and make changes, like you take an agreement from one customer and make changes to the numbers and customer names…would it not be nice if you could get everyone to use the same template? And if a change to the template affected everyone? Wouldn’t that be just smashing eh?

Now I’ll show you the easy steps you have to follow to just get started, We’ll use a simple word template in this example, but you can use any template that you allready have.

Note: In this guide, I will show the quick and easy method, in a later post, I wil show how to use Content Types wich will also allow you to use custom templates, but in a much more controlled way. A link to that post will be added here when that guide has been posted.

Start by locating a word template, or create one, add some info to the header with logo and company name and address maybe, and add something to the footer for example and save the file as a dotx file. Save it locally so that you easily can access it when we want to upload it to our SharePoint online. – I have created a simple letter template for the company DonkeyMind, with their logo and some additional info in it. I’ll use this in my step by step guide below. I saved this as letter.dotx in my ..\documents\DonkeyMind templates\ folder.

In a SharePoint Online site, now do this:

1.0 Upload the template file. This is not the easies thing to do, unfortunately Microsoft has choosen to make it a lot harder in SPO and SharePoint 2013 than it really has to be (Browse button from 2010 has been removed), unknown to me why. But this is how you do it:

1.1 Browse to your document library in SharePoit online, where you want to use your own custom document template.

1.2 Click the tab, Library. This will present the ribbon for you with the settings available for a document library.

1.3 In the ribbon, click on Open with Explorer

Note: The site URL has to be added to the ‘Local intranet sites’ or ‘Trusted sites’ with added logon automatically, if it isn’t, you will get a popup telling you that it will not work otherwise.

1.4 Click ok on the Internet Explorer Security warning

1.5 The library will now open in a Explorer window, in this windows you will see a folder named forms which is a bit greyed out.

1.6 Double-click on the folder forms, now you will see the following list of files

1.7 Now, in a separate explorer window on your computer, locate your saved template file (dotx)

Note: In my case, I stored it under ..\Documents\DonkeyMind templates\

1.8 Put the tw0 explorer windows side by side

1.9 Drag and drop the template file from your local folder to the SharePoint library forms folder

1.10 The file will now be uploaded to the SharePoint forms folder

2.0 When the file is uploaded ok, go back to your browser and the document library

2.1 Now, we need to change the template used from the default template.dotx to our own template, in my case, letter.dotx. Again, click on the Library tab.

2.2 Click on Library Settings

2.3 In the Library Settings dialog, click on Advanced settings

2.4 Locate the Document Template section

2.5 Change the filename in the Template URL to reflect your template files name

2.6 Click on OK

2.7 Click on Documents in the ‘breadcrumbs’ to go back to the library again.

2.8 Click on the Files tab

2.9 Now, on the New Document button, click on the dropdown and New Document

2.10 Press Yes in the dialog asking if you really want to open this file, because you do…

Note: Avoid this by changing the Trust Center settings in your Office applications.
1. Allow trusted locations on my network.
2. Add new location
3. Type in the https path to your SharePoint Online tenant
(See references for 2007 and 2010)

2.11 You may also get prompted for your username/email address for the Office 365 account. Type it in and press Next

Note: This dialog only shows up if you are not logged into your office applications using your Office 365 account

2.12 And Password…Sign in

2.13 The new document opens, based on the template

2.14 When you have types your letter and are done, simply press Save, this will show you the save as dialog with the path to the SharePoint document library at the top

2.15 Select that and type in a filename and save the file

2.16 You are done, use the New Documents button to create your standard letters based on the custom template, again and again.

3.0 Done!

Note: All the same steps apply in SPO as well as SharePoint 2013 onpremise, exept for the ‘add site URL to trusted sites’ issue. In an onprem situation the URL is most of the time already considered Trusted or Local intranet.

References

Learn how to set up a template for a library.

How to enable or disable hyperlink warning messages in 2007 Office programs and in Office 2010 programs
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925757

_________________________________________________________

Enjoy!

Regards

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Office 365 guide series – A guide to SharePoint Navigation using metadata

SP2013logo

Greetings SharePoint Online users!

This is the second in the Office 365 and SharePoint Online series.

1. Office 365 guide series – Create a new list from an Excel spreadsheet

2. Office 365 guide series – A guide to SharePoint Navigation using metadata (This post)

3. Office 365 guide series – Using your document templates in SharePoint online

This time, I will explain how to:

Use Managed metadata and the termstore to control your Navigation.

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This is not as complicated as it may seem, the difficult parts have been taken care of by Microsoft when setting up the ManagedMatadata Service Application for us.

Navigation is part of the Publishing Infrastructure features in SharePoint, so in order to manage Navigation, the Publishing features must be activated. So if you do not already have it activated, lets do so now.
In your SharePoint root site: https://orgname.sharepoint.com (in my case I’m using a separate Site Collection for this https://blksthl.sharepoint.com/sites/donkeymind) do this:
1. Go to Site settings.
2. In Site settings, locate the column Site Collection Administration, click on Site collection features

3. In the list of Site Collection features, scroll down to the one called SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure

4. On the far right, click on Activate

5. Wait for it, it will take a little while and then it will to show that it is Active. Scroll to the top while waiting, there you will see the ‘Working on it twirl’…

6. Next step is to go back to Site Settings, and locate the category Look and Feel and there you now have Navigation.

7. Click on Navigation.
8. The Navigation settings will by default be configured to use Structural Navigation

Note!
You have the same choice for both the Global Navigation (Top) and the Current Navigation (Left)
In this guide, we will focus on the global, but in order to manage the current navigation follow the same steps.

9. We want to change the Global Navigation setting to Managed Navigation as below.

10. Scroll down a bit past the Current Navigation setting to the area called Managed Navigation: Term set
11. Here you will see your Term Store content

12. Expand the Taxonomy node, and you will see the shared terms and the site collection specific node, in my example: Site Collection – blksthl.sharepoint.com-sites-donkeymind

13. Click on the button Create Term Set and a termset for your navigation will be created.

14. In the Term Store tree you will also see a new node:

15. This is were your navigation entries will be stored. Next we will go to the Term Store Management Tool to start on our new navigation.
16. Before you do, notice the setting below the term windows, these settings will allow you to control what happens when new pages are created.
17. Make changes if you want to, I’ll just leave them as is, I will be creating subsites, not pages.

18. Now, click on the link to the Term Store Management Tool

19. or if you go via Site settings, find the Site Administration Category

20. Click on Term store management
21. In the Term Store Management Tool, you will same as before, see some shared metadata and a site collection node.
22. Expand the site collection node, now you will see the Navigation node we just created.

23. In this example, I will add an entry to the global navigation that is for a subsite I have created, named SubDonkey. It will only be one entry in the navigation and that will open my subsite SubDonkey.
24. Right-click on orgname Navigation

25. Click on Create Term
26. Type in the name of the term, use the same name as you want to show up in the Navigation when done, in my case I named it SubDonkey, hit enter
27. A new empty termlabel will show up but simply click on the new term to make it go away.

28. When the new term is selected, you get a list of choices and configurations you can make.
29. You can here type in a description, add a second label, language and some more. Let this page be as it is.
30. Now click on the tab Navigation

31. This brings up a new page of navigation specific settings.

32. In here, I’m making a few modifications.
33. I add a Navigation Hoover Text: Take me to the SubDonkey.
34. I set Visible In Menus to: Show in Global Navigation Only (deselect the show in current)

35. I select Simple Link or Header, I hit browse and locate my subsite

36. select the icon for the subsite, like in my case, SubDonkey.

37. Click on Insert at the bottom right.

38. Verify your navigational settings for the new node. When done, hit the Save button.

39. Now you are done, go to your rootsite to verify the result.

40. Note the SubDonkey Navigational link with the Hoover Text showing (Mouse is over in image).
41. Repeat the steps 20 to 40 to add more terms and new nodes to your navigation.

Note!
Do not be afraid of trying new things, link to pages, to external sites, you can always delete the node if you don’t like the result.

42. Done!

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Note: All the same steps apply in SharePoint Online as well as SharePoint 2013 onpremise, you will need to first configure the Managed Metdata Sevice Application before any of these steps can be performed though.

‘

References

‘

None so far 🙂

_________________________________________________________

Enjoy!

Regards

Twitter | Technet Profile | LinkedIn

Office 365 guide series – Create a new list from an Excel spreadsheet

SP2013logo

Greetings SharePoint Online users!

This is the first in a series of Office 365 and SharePoint Online guides primarily aimed at users and power users, my aim with these guides is to show in an easy to grasp way, how you do a few relatively easy but important tasks in SharePoint Online/Office 365. Tasks that will give you a lot of functionality with relatively little effort. Since a lot have been covered already for SharePoint onprem in blogs and other online documentation like TechNet, but not specifically for Office 365 or SharePoint Onlne, I feel that there is a gap to fill here.

1. Office 365 guide series – Create a new list from an Excel spreadsheet

2. Office 365 guide series – A guide to SharePoint Navigation using metadata

3. Office 365 guide series – Using your document templates in SharePoint online

This first time, I will explain how to:

Create a new custom list from an existing excel spreadsheet
This task is simple if everything goes smoothly, but if you have never done it before, or if you have tried but got stuck on any of the little hickups you may encounter, then this may be the perfect guide for you.

– Start by creating your Excel spreadsheet. Make sure that it is a xlsx file. You may also use an existing spreadsheet with your listdata, copy from an old file, save another format as xlsx.

In the spreadsheet, follow the following rules to get a good result:
– Make sure that you do not have any empty column headers between columns. This will cause all headers to be imported as row 1 instead of beeing headers, new column headers will be created as 1, 2, 3 and so on.
– Keep the spreadsheet ‘clean’, remove empty rows, empty columns and any text above the header row and to the right or under of the table or cell range.
– The first column to the left will be the default edit field in the SharePoint list. Make sure that it has values on all rows.
– For best result, avoid formulas with calculated values.
– Use Excel 2013.

In a SharePoint Online site, do this:
1. Decide on a name for the list, it will be the URL and name of the list.
2. Go to the ‘cogs’/Settings and select Add an app

3. You will now see a list of all available apps (installed)
4. Search for Import or scroll down until you find the app called Import Spreadsheet
5. Click on Import Spreadsheet

6. Type in the Name of the new list
7. Type in a optional Description
8. At the File location field, click Browse…
9. Browse to your xlsx file on your computer
10. Click on Import

11. The Import Wizard starts, by default, the Range type is set to Table Range
12. Change this to Range of cells
13. Click in the Select Range field
14. In the Spreadsheet, select the top left cell and then make sure that you select the entire table of data you want imported
15. It should now read something similar to: Sheet1!$A$1:$G$400 (top left : bottom right)

16. Now you click on Import
17. You may now get a logonprompt from Excel, enter the emailaddress for the SPO account and click next
18. Enter the account password and click on Sign in
19. Excel will now create the list and start importing the data, you will see a little progressbar at the bottom of the Excel application.
20. When the import is done, the new list will open and you will see the columns from the top

Note: You may note sometimes that a ‘mailto:’ has been added to the email column values.

This is added in excel but hidden when a cell is formatted as an email address. In the example above, note that the first row has the value of ‘Email’ which made the list field be formatted as single line of text instead of email.
The trick is most of the time to make sure that all fieldvalues in a column are consistent in format. One cell with a different format will cause the entire column to get a different formatting.

21. Done!

– You may now want to add a link in the left hand navigation to the list. Check the url in the addressbar of IE and copy it.
– Click on EDIT LINKS
– Click on +Link
– Type in the Text to display (will be seen in the navigation), for example ‘Contacts’ and paste the URL into Address
– Click OK
– Try the link out to make sure
– Done! (Again)

Error list

1
You get ‘The specified file is not a valid spreadsheet or contains no data to import’
When: When you browse to your Excel spreadsheet and click Import
Fix: Add site URL to trusted sites in Internet Explorer, it has to be in either trusted sites or Local Intranet sites.

2
A new header row is created instead of the headers I got (Column1, Column2, Column3…) and the headers becomes values if the first datarow
When: You have one or many empty headers in your cellrange
Fix: Remove all columns with blank headers, or add a value to them, this is only within your cell span.

3
If you get the error, ‘An unexpected error has occured. (-2147467259)’
When: Something is wrong with the SPO User session you have open
Fix: Sign out of your SPO session, close all IE windows, Close Excel – logon again to SPO, Add app…same procedure as last time.

4
Very large files, field data types get wrong, you expect Single line of text but get Multiple lines of text
When: The cellrange probably contain one or more ‘special’ values that is interpreted by excel/SPO as something else than it is.
Fix: With large files, create a new excelfile with only header and one row, make sure that the header row or the data row do not contain any value or characters out of the ordinary. Then, copy paste the rest of the rows in quick edit or datasheet view.

5
The wrong Column becomes the default edit column with the ‘…’ for the edit dropdown meny.
When: The column you want to use for default edit is not the first from the left.
Fix: First column will be the default edit field with the …make sute the Cell range starts with the top left cell.

‘

Note: All the same steps apply in SPO as well as SharePoint 2013 onpremise, exept for the Excel logon prompt and the ‘add site URL to trusted sites issue. In an onprem situation the URL is most of the time already considered Trusted or Local intranet.

References

None so far 🙂

_________________________________________________________

Enjoy!

Regards

Twitter | Technet Profile | LinkedIn

Skydrive Pro availability and functionality chart

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Wow! Skydrive Pro, what a great invention! (I know, It has been out there for a while already…)
I assume that you all know what Skydrive Pro is all about, but to just real short sum it up, SkyDrive Pro is:
A client application that allows a user to keep files synchronized between his device and his online SharePoint document library.

Now, the thing is, that apparently, you are not really supposed to run Skydrive pro unless you with that mean to it against anything but Office365…seems like this was meant to be but is slowly turning toward not meant to be…
I do realize that Office 365 is the future for Microsoft, but when such a great feature is available, and it must be a rather easy task to get the functionality dynamic so that you can connect to any webfolder, it is a shame that the support for running Skydrive Pro as a SharePoint onprem has so little support.

From my tests and research this is what works and what does not work:

	Windows 8.x x64	Windows 8.x 32bit	Windows 8.x RT	Windows Phone	IOS	Android	Mac OSX
App to Onprem *	No	No	No	Yes	No	3^rd party	No
Desktop to Onprem**	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
App to Office 365 ***	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	3^rd party	No
Desktop to Office 365 ****	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No	No

Please, do let me know if I am missing out on anything in the chart!

Windows 7 uses the same App and Desktop application as Windows 8x

* The App model with the possibility to connect to SharePoint 2013 Onprem
** A Desktop integrated application that connects to SharePoint 2013 Onprem
*** The App model with the possibility to connect to SharePoint Online/Office 365
**** A Desktop integrated application that connects to SharePoint Online/Office 365

So, if you want to make use of your internal onprem SharePoint 2013 farm for Skydrive Pro, you have to rely solely on Windows 8x or Windows Phone (Available in the Office hub)

The Skydrive pro desktop klient is available in Office 2013 versions as well, except for the Office 2013 for Windows RT

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Skydrive pro requires SharePoint 2013 or Office 365 (Eligable subscriptions)
SharePoint 2010 works only with SharePoint Workspace on Windows OS

References

What is SkyDrive Pro?
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/what-is-skydrive-pro-HA102822076.aspx

What is SkyDrive Pro in SharePoint 2013 and how does it relate to SkyDrive?
http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=388

How to setup SkyDrive Pro on Mac OSX
http://www.dogu.no/blog/posts/2013/08/26/how-to-setup-skydrive-pro-on-mac-osx.aspx

_________________________________________________________

Enjoy!

Regards

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