Ask Sympraxis Archive

Crafting a compelling home page on SharePoint is an art and a science, requiring a delicate balance of strategic planning and creative execution. At the heart of it all lies the principle of consistency. Whether the page serves as an intranet hub or a team site, users should encounter a familiar layout and navigation that guides them to their desired content. Rules of thumb Beyond consistency, we recommend placing crucial content in the top left corner.

Within your organization, effective management of the Microsoft 365 site lifecycle is critical. First, you must recognize that not all sites hold equal significance in terms of their lifecycle. While certain sites, such as HR intranet sites, may exist indefinitely, other components, like document libraries or collaboration sites, need lifecycle oversight. With no lifecycle organization, companies often face the issue of sprawl. Understanding site lifecycle Regarding the Maturity Model and site lifecycle, organizations at the 100 level have a ton of sites, many are inactive, and they don’t know how to deal with them.

Migrating to and within Microsoft 365 can sometimes be a daunting task fraught with challenges, from data integrity to user adoption. That’s where the Sympraxis Approach comes in. This session of Ask Sympraxis digs deeper into migrations, focusing specifically on a redesign approach. If you’d like a broader overview of migrations in general, please visit our prior session What does migration really mean?. Redesign: Pros and Cons The consensus is clear: lift and shift approaches are a thing of the past.

Feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of migration? Don’t worry, this session of Ask Sympraxis is here to assist you! Our discussion covered various aspects, ranging from the definition of migration all the way to potential speed bumps. Here’s a comprehensive breakdown of the key takeaways: Understanding migration Migration, simply put, involves moving content from one place to another. This process takes different forms, such as organizational mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, reorganizations, and transitioning to the cloud.

In the latest Ask Sympraxis session, we delved into the world of templates for Microsoft Teams, unraveling the nuances that play a crucial role in ensuring consistency and efficiency. The session began with an overview of templates in general. If you’d like to dive deeper into the various types of templates available in Microsoft 365, please check out the other posts in this series. Teams v1.x retirement A key announcement is the retirement of Teams classic on 3/31/24.

At its core, a template serves as a blueprint, allowing repeatability, consistency, and encapsulating institutional knowledge. For more detailed information and an overview of templates in general, please visit our prior Ask Sympraxis session. Maturity Model approach As we love to often reference, templates can also be viewed in relation to the Maturity Model. Starting at level 100, templates are completely absent, and everything is configured manually on the fly.

In this Ask Sympraxis session, we explore the intricacies of page templates in SharePoint and Microsoft 365. For a broader understanding of templates, check out our templates overview session. In short, templates play a crucial role in ensuring consistency, repeatability, and encapsulating institutional knowledge. Creating Page Templates To create a page template, we suggest starting off with building a page using your desired content. Once the content is ready, select the ‘Save as Template’ option, located in the upper left corner while editing the page, this clones the page and places a copy in the templates folder of your site.

This session the team focuses specifically on content types and document templates. Within the Microsoft ecosystem, we must emphasize their role in ensuring repeatability, maintaining consistency, and encapsulating institutional knowledge. Content types as templates Content types are defined as collections of structured or unstructured data representing business objects, for example: benefits, contracts, and vacation requests. Content types play a crucial role in defining these entities and the associated data, enabling the creation of intricate hierarchies of content.

In this Ask Sympraxis session we explore the vast landscape of templates within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Discover how templates serve as essential building blocks for evolving sites over time. A template in the conventional sense may be thought of as a guide. In Microsoft 365, we consider a template something aimed to deliver repeatability, consistency, and encapsulating institutional knowledge. Content types as templates Content types serve as templates for business objects like invoices, contracts, orders, etc.

Microsoft Ignite was held this year November 15-17th. In this recap, we’ll delve into key highlights, updates, and renames discussed. However, there is one overarching theme we must emphasize, which is the significance of grounding security, governance, and structure of your Microsoft 365 content in preparation for the much-anticipated arrival of Copilot. Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 The spotlight was undoubtedly on Microsoft Copilot, which claimed its place in the Book of News a staggering 289 times.

This Ask Sympraxis session focuses on what we are most thankful for, and that’s community-driven initiatives! These diverse and valuable resources within the Microsoft 365 community are aimed at improving user experiences and optimizing organizational workflows. Microsoft 365 Community Content The Microsoft 365 Community Content project is an open platform where anyone can contribute. It emphasizes practical content designed to help users comprehend and effectively utilize Microsoft 365 tools. Ranging from fundamental guides to advanced articles combining multiple products, the project is a collaborative effort that continues to evolve.

Microsoft Teams is constantly evolving to meet the changing needs of its users. In this session of Ask Sympraxis, we dive into several exciting new features and enhancements to boost your Teams experience. While we’ve provided a brief overview of what was covered, for in-depth information on these updates, we encourage you to watch the entire episode. Multi-Account Management The new Microsoft Teams allows you to seamlessly integrate multiple Microsoft accounts into your Teams workspace and quickly switch tenants.

We had another highly productive “Ask Sympraxis Anything” session! Our heartfelt thanks to everyone who submitted questions and actively participated. Here are the key insights and takeaways from the session! What are the ramifications of breaking permission inheritance in SharePoint online? We highly emphasize the importance of avoiding haphazardly breaking permissions. In the past this resulted in performance issues. This isn’t as much of an issue now as the landscape of SharePoint has evolved, especially in SharePoint Online.

Intranet owners have a wealth of resources at their disposal, catering to their needs across various aspects of intranet management. Whether you’re looking to configure your intranet, enhance your knowledge through self-guided learning, explore powerful user configurations, or seek inspiration from configuration examples, there are numerous community-driven assets available to you. Basic Configuration Intelligent Intranet by Microsoft Intelligent Intranet is a Microsoft site that offers insights into their vision for intranets, providing a comprehensive understanding of what an intranet entails.

Introduction to Microsoft 365 Groups When discussing Microsoft 365 Groups, we like to tailor our explanations to suit the audience. For example, these groups resemble familiar concepts like Active Directory security groups for IT professionals. In contrast, when addressing end-users, we liken them to distribution lists in Exchange - a unified permission entity providing access across Microsoft 365 apps. In either description, creating a Group not only grants you a SharePoint site but also sets the stage for various integrated services, such as Teams and Planner.

In this Ask Sympraxis session, we delve into the essence of AI, how to harness its potential, and the tools that stand at our disposal. What is AI? The term AI refers to an ever-expansive landscape, where the term is almost meaningless as it covers so many different things. It encompasses a vast expanse of technologies such as: Natural Language Processing (NLP): where computers decipher and respond to human language.

In the dynamic landscape of PnP Modern Search, fine-tuning your search experience is not just a possibility, but a powerful tool in your hands. Dive into these insightful tips and techniques to elevate your search experience. Crafting an effective information architecture To pull precise data subsets based on metadata, you first need to build a strong foundation. This is done by an efficient information architecture. The root of success lies in robust and well-defined content types.

In this episode of Ask Sympraxis we begin by looking at the home and start page experiences in Microsoft 365 through the lens of the Maturity Model. The journey begins at level 100, where some users have isolated site collections. These site collections lack interconnectedness. At level 200, this could include the utilization of the Microsoft Viva Connections Home Experience, which consolidates news and conversations from various sites, along with surfacing the SharePoint app bar navigation.

In today’s fast-paced world, effective internal and external communication is crucial for organizations. SharePoint News provides a centralized platform to streamline news delivery and enhance collaboration. Join as we delve into the various features and capabilities of SharePoint News. The Maturity Model In relation to an organization’s news and the Maturity Model, an organization at the 100 level solely relies on email for news distribution. Level 200 introduces newsletters and aggregated information from different departments.

Is having employees complete their Microsoft 365 profiles the most effective method to enable a searchable “area of expertise” property in our employee directory? There are multiple approaches to achieve this, and your decision should depend on your long-term goals and platform extension capabilities. The simplest solution is to utilize the existing “skills” and/or “you can ask me” sections in SharePoint User Profiles. To enhance this solution, you can map the values from the skills section to a refinable string managed property, enabling the use of PnP Modern Search for a user interface with filtering capabilities.

The Microsoft 365 conference took place Spring of 2023 and introduced the community to a lot of updates road mapped for the platform. Continue for Sympraxis’ take on many of these changes! Copilot Microsoft Copilot is going to be rolling out slowly and is a new artificial intelligence software. Although there is a lot of excitement about this introduction, we need to mention that it’ll likely be a service you’ll have to pay for and the cost is yet to be announced.

Business use case: Benefits documents Join the Ask Sympraxis team for this session focusing on building sustainable information architecture (IA) through the use case of benefit documents management in your Microsoft 365 environment. From backend management of the content owners, to easy front-end consumption in your intranet, we walk through many of the challenges that are unique to benefits documents. Maturity model approach The Maturity Model for Microsoft 365, based on the capability maturity model, takes a holistic view of this technology and focuses on different business outcomes so you can distinguish your current state versus your desired state.

In this session of Ask Sympraxis Derek, Julie, and Todd are joined by Andrew Connell, developer and SPFx expert, and Stefan Bauer, developer and designer, to discuss when and why to build custom Microsoft 365 code that extends its functionality, particularly in SharePoint and Teams. However, we only suggest extending the platform when the out-of-the-box solutions fail to meet 80% of your business requirements. From there, try some of the tried-and-true technologies that exist such as PnP Modern Search web parts or list/column formatting, which give you more configuration options.

This session of Ask Sympraxis focuses on different methods and steps you can take to empower users while you build your intranet and how to set up Microsoft 365. Not every suggestion will be pertinent to your organization, which is why we suggest starting with the Maturity Model and determining your current and desired levels! This session is also a great reference to come back to as your organization levels up in maturity.

SharePoint Search has been available for quite some time and can be managed by a variety of flexible tools. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Microsoft Search tends to be more rigid as it’s not as mature. Although Microsoft is constantly adding capabilities to Microsoft Search, we are focusing primarily on SharePoint Search for this article. Building columns In SharePoint, a common use is to build a list or library with columns to organize information.

We’ve come across many clients who express the need for an employee directory. We have learned this may mean something slightly different for each company. We always return to, what problem are they trying to solve? This week we are discussing how you’ll find people, their information, and different surfacing options. User stories User stories are a great resource to define outcome goals. For example, an employee directory might be used for a wide variety of different reasons so having your goals outlined upfront and identifying who will be the users, why they need it, and what they’re going to achieve by using it, is important.

In this episode of Ask Sympraxis we are focusing on search optimization. Search may seem initially as simple as typing into a box and having results show up, however you’ll soon learn that there are a tremendous number of options to customize search to truly be the most effective possible for your users. Maturity Model approach How individuals think about and/or use search in their organization can be broken down into different levels of maturity.

Notifications vs approvals Before jumping headfirst into notifications and approvals in SharePoint lists and libraries, it’s important to note that there are crucial differences in their definitions and use cases. Notifications are often seen as routine and intuitive. They are a one-way form of communication. Approvals on the other hand, go both ways as they require a reply or action. The use cases for each differ as well. When it comes to thinking about the impact on your employees and/or on your projects, it’s important to note that notifications are deniable.

This week on Ask Sympraxis we are focusing on managing links to external resources or tools in your intranet. Join us as we dive into the current state and limitations, the Maturity Model approach, and a few customizable solutions. Current state and limitations Your intranet is essentially the entry point to all your company tools and resources. This can be anything from an external website or solution, a custom application, etc.

As with many people at the start of a new year, we decided to begin 2023 with a new year’s resolution. However, we tailored ours a bit. We like to call it a New(s) year’s resolution as our goal is to teach you about SharePoint News and how it can improve your communication this year! Democratization of communications Technology advancements often give us the opportunity to revisit our business processes.

As announced in September at Microsoft IGNITE, Microsoft Viva Connections will have new capabilities including Viva home. This new Viva home experience will surface all the Viva modules you’re licensed for, all the adaptive cards you’ve added to your dashboard, Yammer conversations, SharePoint news and navigation through the SharePoint app bar, frequent sites, and followed sites etc. One of the best parts is that all of this will be accessible through Microsoft Teams with minimal configuration.

Do you still have videos saved in Microsoft Stream Classic? It’s time to migrate your videos to SharePoint! Originally Stream Classic, and before that Office 365 Videos, was a separate destination than content saved in SharePoint. However, as videos are essentially just another object that people need to interact with, similar to a document, bringing videos into SharePoint allows you to manage all your content in one location regardless of the file type.

User research places people in the center of your design process. It’s all about asking the right questions so that you learn the user’s behaviors, needs, and desires, leading you to build the right solutions. The type of research you will conduct depends on the type of project you’re working on, where you are in the process, your timeline, budget, etc. Follow along as we outline different research methods, risks involved with skipping research, and a brief case study.

Life happens. People join an organization and folks leave organizations. It can be a personal decision, a termination, or maybe even just a temporary leave, but regardless of the reason we’ve compiled our suggestions of better practices to minimize the impact when offboarding an individual. First off, clean onboarding leads to easier offboarding. This means that there are certain suggestions we have for when you set up your accounts that will better prepare your organization for if/when an individual leaves.

It is impossible to condense all of Ignite into a 30-minute session so we have rounded up these highlights. For more robust details and further explanation on the announcements, please check our resources. In this session, we focus on the three main areas that correlate best with the common work we do at Sympraxis: Administration, Intranet & Employee Experience, and Customization, Integration, & Extension. Administrative Updates As many are aware, conditional access has been available in Azure for a while, however, it is new to SharePoint.

What is a policy center? For the sake of this session, we are discussing building a policy center. However, what’s covered can really be applied to an infinite number of other types of content. The approaches discussed would work for any distributed content management scenario, which is the ultimate goal we are seeking to achieve. Ideally, we want every department or work group to manage the policies that they own rather than having one site or document library that everyone has to submit their content into.

What is Microsoft Forms Microsoft Forms is a powerful tool that can be used for various data collection situations. Some of the capabilities Forms possesses include creating a survey or quiz, creating a form and inviting both internal and external users to respond and the ability to set responses as anonymous, view real-time results as they’re submitted, and access to rudimentary built-in analytics to evaluate the responses. However, if you need something more robust, you can easily export the results to excel.

Anyone that’s used OneDrive for a while is likely aware that the improvements and additional capabilities added in the past few years have been vast. That said, there are still some confusing features. For example, Microsoft tends to like to use the same name for multiple things. OneDrive is possibly one of the worst offenders of this. The various OneDrive manifestations that we see are: OneDrive for business, OneDrive personal, OneDrive mobile app, OneDrive as a sync client for SharePoint content, and OneDrive backup.

There are a lot of ways and different components needed to make your intranet multilingual. In our experience, the two most common situations that we’ve encountered the need for multilingual intranets is for global business and, likely due to proximity, Canadian businesses as they are bi-lingual by statute. MLP - Multilingual Publishing Multilingual publishing is focused on communication sites, it does not exist for Teams sites. An integral piece to have successful multilingual publishing is assigning flows for the translator role.

Can you provide recommendations for roles supporting SharePoint and/or Microsoft 365? We are commonly asked this question and “it depends” on quite a few factors including your company size, culture, projected growth and complexity of your environment. There are a few resources in the community that can help you determine what roles make the most sense for your organization. The first resource is Intelligent intranet roles and tasks which discusses different people that can potentially be involved in your intranet.

Do you need an intranet steering committee As your company grows, so does the complexity of your intranet. Ultimately, the need for a steering committee will depend on your company’s size, the complexity, and your intended growth. A steering committee is essentially a group of stakeholders that can speak to the overarching company’s goals, can determine which projects are most important, and in what order each project should be tackled.

As a continuation of our last Ask Sympraxis, focused on nudging along content owners, this week we’ve deep-dived into being a good content owner. Review our previous session Content! Content! Content! Nudging along reluctant content owners to learn more about why good content matters and the impact it will have on your intranet. Why being a good content owner matters Organizations are never static. Do you feel like your company is constantly reorganizing?

As consultants one of the biggest challenges we face on nearly every project is the encompassing idea of content: who is the owner of your content and who is responsible for the lifecycle management of that content. When building intranets, often for the first time, it’s incredibly difficult to design the information architecture and prioritize the information hierarchy if we don’t have all the content. Content is what drives both of these and that content is the primary reason employees are navigating to the intranet - to help get their jobs done.

Managing your content lifecycle We often focus on the planning stage of content creation but don’t pay much attention to what happens to that content as it evolves over time. How do you ensure that the content is still accurate after your initial launch? Your approach will depend on your organization and where it falls within the Maturity Model for Microsoft 365. The Maturity Model for Microsoft 365 defines a set of business competencies, that resonate with Microsoft 365 yet underpin real business activities, and outlines expected impacts at each level of maturity.

Another new and exciting update from Microsoft is the initial roll out of a solution called Loop. Currently the only place that Loop is provisioned is within Teams Chat. However, Microsoft has begun advertising Loop within Team Channels and additional Microsoft 365 apps, so expect this update in the near future, although there is no current timeline for when that will be available. What is Loop? In short, Loop is a dynamic widget that opens within your chat allowing anyone in the group to contribute.

Microsoft account switcher announcement Microsoft has recently announced a new account switcher feature for Microsoft 365 web apps. This new feature is a progressive rollout being implemented through the end of June and will allow users of specific applications to log into multiple tenants and seamlessly switch between them within the same browser session. Ideally this will limit the various workarounds so many of us have become accustomed to using.

Announcements at the conference Feature Status Roadmap ID Graph connectors for Confluence, Jira, ServiceNow General availability 86516 & 86517 SharePoint tenant rename Public preview (with tenants under 5,000 sites) 82162 New app catalog experience General availability 88844 Viva Topics integrated with Yammer topics In preview 72184 Lists Android App General availability 70704 Learning Pathways & Viva Learning integration H2 2022 N/A Adaptive Card Extension Design Gallery General availability N/A “memberOf” rule for dynamic groups “Coming soon” N/A Adaptive Card Extensions Design Gallery Newly launched is an Adaptive Card Extensions Design Gallery that is available in the Microsoft Store to install to your tenant.

Why do content types matter? A content type is a business object, something that can be moved around in your organization, whether it’s document-based or not. Some examples are invoices, contracts, status update, etc. Everything created inherits from an existing content type that can be used as a starting point. An information architecture with effective content types enables users to answer questions like “how many proposals did we lose in the last month?

Any recommendations/guidelines for what organizational roles are ideal for supporting SharePoint and/or Microsoft 365 (e.g., business analyst, developers, etc.)? It “takes a village” to successfully support an intranet in any organization. One of the factors of your size of team is going to be related to how many people you’re supporting as well as the complexity of your environment. For all organizations, have a steering committee that is diverse across your organization.

An API is an application programming interface, which means it lets two different pieces of code talk to each other. An API Specification is the contract for those programming interfaces. From the Microsoft 365 platform, there are supported APIs that are known and documented. There’s also First-Party APIs that exist for the platform to operate but the specification can change at any time and is not documented. Prescriptive Guidance Don’t assume that you can automate it just because you can do it through the UI.

This one was a bit of a free for all but the goal was to provide some concrete steps you can take before you try to engage support. Before You Engage Support Be respectful of the people whose help you’re asking for. This can be done by trying what you can on your own, for example, standard trouble shooting techniques. Anytime there is a problem, try to break it down first.

Site Scripts/Site Designs Templates Site Templates are incredibly useful. They allow users to establish information architecture on new sites. These templates don’t have to be the whole site, rather simply componentry. It’s a very powerful engine and a lot can be done with it. Content Hub Sync Site Script Action This feature was added into Site Templates, and grants users the ability to work with the content type hub.

Accessibility is essential for organizations that want to create and provide high-quality tools that do not exclude people from using their products and services. Web Accessibility It’s important to ensure that your application is usable by all users, regardless of ability. Don’t assume users are using a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Accessibility might be a temporary impairment, like recovering from hand surgery. Accessibility is not always about what you see, for example, a physical impairment, etc.

The Premise: “Start small, think big, move fast.” You may not need a robust line of business applications. SharePoint Lists allow you to iterate quickly, fail fast, and provide value with minimal effort. The Power of Lists - some core capabilities SharePoint is already a familiar technology to the organization. Building new capabilities where we are already working reduces the challenges with change management and tool abundance. Many users will use Excel because they are familiar with the application, and then they create it into what they call a “database.

Overview In this special holiday episode of Ask Sympraxis we will be exploring the Island of (Microsoft) Misfit toys. This can be products that never panned out, died too early, or weren’t that great of an idea to start with. Content Type Gallery This was essentially more of a “lipstick on a pig” change, with a different UI but fundamentally works the same way. The promise was initially the ability to syndicate content types from the enterprise to different sites.

Users need to stay informed about organizational news This is one where a lot of people may not even be asking themselves yet, “SharePoint or Teams,” because they may be stuck sharing organizational news via email. We recommend starting to share news from SharePoint, that way all the content is in one place on the intranet versus needing to search the intranet and an email inbox to be fully up-to-date.

Admin Updates SharePoint Server Subscription Edition First preview was announced summer 2021. It is now in General Availability. With the subscription edition you can migrate N-2. It is now licenses and more tightly tied to the Cloud. Migrate Workflows Added support for on-prem to the cloud. It is now possible to migrate workflows through the SharePoint migration tool. Private Channels in SharePoint Admin Now when you look at your active sites, there will be a column that shows the private channels each site has.

Use Case Users need to complete a structured business process (e.g., time off request, travel plan, on-boarding, new asset request, check request, etc.) Example scenarios of structured business processes: Third-party solutions for process automation Ex: ServiceNow, GitHub, Nintex Workflows Power Platform Integrations or other Microsoft 365 apps Ex: Planner, Dataverse Solutions built using SharePoint artifacts Ex: Lists and libraries in combination with each other Customized solutions created with extensibility development tools

We asked you what you wanted to hear about and by an overwhelming margin folks wanted to know about using SharePoint and Teams and our thoughts on when to use each. Of course this elicits the universal consultant response “It Depends”. This topic was so large that we are splitting it up into a few different episodes. Use Case: Users need to collaborate on content related to a project In our experience it makes sense to have the business weigh in on this.

In this session we talked about how organizational complexity and Microsoft 365. At some point, managing all the different subsidiaries or business units in Microsoft 365 becomes difficult. We talked about our approaches to make all this work. Organizational Models We mainly see two different models at play here. The first being, a parent company that has a pool of shared services that all the subsidiaries avail themselves like HR or Finance.

In this session we talked about the intersection to Teams, SharePoint, and other M365 tools and how we can leverage them all together to create an engaging user experience. To start things off we should define what we mean when we talk about an Intranet. What is an Intranet? Wikipedia defines an intranet as: A computer network for sharing information, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization.

The current situation with COVID-19 has made this a very acute problem but what we are talking about in this session is really timeless in this 24/7 world. These are some of the better practices that we use to keep our sanity. Protecting Our Time Setting boundaries and expectations: It is important to express where your boundaries are to folks that you work with and even live with. People like your partner, children, managers, and clients.

M&A and Divestitures - The business context For mergers and acquisitions, you are integrating one organization into an existing organization, or merging two organizations into a new organization and taking the best of both worlds. You need to In most scenarios the organization already has some of the infrastructure in place, HR, Finance, Facilities. On the negative side there is often some redundancy, and it is difficult to figure out what stays and what goes.

Is there an existing resource that shows exactly which parts of a SharePoint site use which theme slots from the Fluent UI Theme Designer? There isn’t an out-of-the-box way to know how SharePoint combines the different theme colors in the Theme Designer. Some members of the community have done some research to try and nail it down a little. Laura Kokkarinen did a good job of pulling out a few of these combinations as did Stefan Bauer.

Microsoft Viva Topics is an add-on component to Microsoft 365 and SharePoint that allows you to curate and publish topic pages. These topic pages can be surfaced via cards across SharePoint and coming soon across Yammer, then eventually Teams and Outlook. Viva Topics Set Up The main entry point to Viva Topics is the topic center. Users will see a personalized view of the content here. This contains topics that they have been listed with or interacted with, along with resources regarding the different topics.

Viva Connections Overview/Update Microsoft Viva Connections is a marketing term that is being used as a collection of functionality. It isn’t a SKU that you can purchase like some of the other Viva components like Topics. Viva Desktop is one of those pieces of functionality that is available for you to enable in your tenant. Viva Desktop was formally called the Home Site app because it allows for personalization in your tenant.

This week we opened things up to you and had a lively conversation running the gambit. Q: Have you encountered any privacy-related issues with public or private content delivery networks (CDNs) in SharePoint? I’m concerned about content being accidentally shared outside of our tenant A public CDN is exactly what it sounds like, a public endpoint to content. When you enable this you define origins for content to be hosted in the CDN.

While we were working on our other sessions on external sharing we realized that there were lots of other miscellaneous things to share about parts of Microsoft 365 that we hadn’t already talked about. So, in this session of Ask Sympraxis we are covering all the rest. OneDrive OneDrive Tenant Level Settings Tenant administrators can set different external sharing policies for both OneDrive and SharePoint. Administrators have the ability to set external sharing policies individually for SharePoint and OneDrive however there is a failsafe.

Tenant-Level Settings Teams Admin Center There are many layers of security which acts like a filter or funnel. When it comes to things like guests or external sharing, it’s important to know that at the tenant level, the tenant admin or teams admin has to turn a couple of switches on or off. The most common factor is differentiating between external users and guest users. External Users External access is less than you think that it is.

Team Site vs Communication Site External Sharing For Team Sites, the external sharing is on by default when you set up your tenant. This is usually where people are doing most of their external sharing and collaboration on documents. With Communication Sites you can share externally, however, you can’t do it from the site itself until you turn on the external sharing in the Admin Center. There are 3 different options for sharing: anyone, new and existing guests, and existing guests only.

Use Cases/Scenarios There are a few common scenarios we see across external collaboration needs: One-Way Sharing of Content - A document needs to be reviewed by someone, for example, a contract, which will be attached to an email or a document workspace. Temporary Collaboration Needs - A short term need which can be composed of internal and external people. These may be project-based transient needs. External Partnership Collaboration Needs - A long-term more permanent need, like client and vendor portals that are used for external partnership.

Intro to the SharePoint App Bar What is it? The SharePoint App Bar will appear along the left navigation on all SharePoint sites. There are 4 different components: Global Navigation Frequent and Followed Sites Recommended News Recent Files Global Navigation is being talked about the most. There are multiple types of navigation within Microsoft 365 for a Communications Site. These include the Global Nav, Hub Site Nav, Top (site-level) Nav and App Launcher.

Microsoft Power Platform: From then to now In the old world, we had InfoPath and SharePoint Designer workflows which centered on SharePoint. There was also SQL Server Reporting Services to report on the data that is collected from InfoPath forms and stored in SharePoint lists or other sources. InfoPath is dead and now we have a new model with the Power Platform. It is designed to be part workflow engine, part data visualization, part low-code no-code solution.

Viva Connections Microsoft Viva Connections is an extension of the SharePoint Home Site concept, which will also integrate with Microsoft Teams. It includes the SharePoint app bar and the home site app in Teams. This extension is one of the four offerings of the Viva employee experience platform, and it’s free with existing Microsoft 365 licenses. In Viva Connections, there will be a centralized location for a user to see actionable tasks and have those actions visible to them in SharePoint, Teams, or a mobile app.

What is Viva? Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform with 4 components: Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Topics, and Viva Learning. What is employee experience? “Employee experience is the sum of all interactions an employee has with their employer. It is the structure and culture of the organization and how the employee perceives the company overall” (Source: https://www.inc.com/elizabeth-dukes/the-employee-experience-what-it-is-and-why-it-matt.html). This may be things like the physical environment where an employee works, tools and technology the employer provides, and how the employer demonstrates commitment to health and success of the employees.

When should I use PowerShell? All the time! Early! Often! Seriously, PowerShell really shines for automating everyday tasks. It’s rreliable, so users can trust that the interface is going to be the same, and so will the job on the other side. It offers repeatability and consistency, and you get built-in documentation for free. When Microsoft introduces new functionality or settings to Microsoft 365, the interface is always PowerShell first.

Who is using templates? We posted a poll on Twitter to hear more from the community around usage of templates in Microsoft 365. The majority of people are using templates only a little bit or are interested in starting to implement them at their organizations. For those using templates at their organization, most are using third-party template tools or PnP site provisioning. Templating support Your governance plan by creating a consistent look and feel in the visual hierarchy of your sites.

Hub Site Improvements In 2020, Hub Sites gained the ability to sync permissions to the associated sites. The first step is to enable syncing permissions on the hub-site (located in Site Permissions under a Hub tab) which will add the Hub Site Site Visitors group to all associated sites. Next, in the associated site, under Site Permissions toggle Sync hub permissions to “On.” As far as “hub of hubs” or “associated hubs,” this has not shipped yet and the date keeps moving but it is on the roadmap for this quarter.

Today we will talk about what it takes to make a visually appealing and accessible SharePoint intranet. We will look at some of the new functionality coming this year and what you can do today. Resources and Takeaways Theme Designer Panthema Flicon SharePoint Look Book Web Accessibility Guidelines Top Application Design Mistakes Visual Design Cheat Sheet Do you have any questions for us? Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #AskSympraxis and mention @SympraxisC.

We had a lightning round session of the Sympraxis’ highlights and top takeaways from Microsoft Ignite. Resources and Takeaways Roadmap Slides compiled by Sue Hanley Julie’s Resources Graph Connectors Ignite Sessions Derek’s Resources “Build a Beautifully Designed Intranet” Ignite session Theme Designer Todd’s Resources Microsoft Moves On-Premises Office Servers to a Subscription Model Microsoft 365 Groups Stream v.Next Cross-tenant migration Graph SDK Powershell GA M365 admin and IT Pros at Ignite Marc’s Resources Announcing SharePoint Syntex Setting Up SharePoint Syntex Emily’s Resources “Living in Teams?

We often hear from people in the community that they know they aren’t using Microsoft 365 capabilities as fully or as efficiently as they would like. Taking a holistic view of the technology and gaining an understanding of current state vs. desired state can help organizations: Understand and compare options for solving business problems Focus time, energy and resources on the right priorities Identify the budget and resources to move ahead Establish a baseline to show improvement over time Resources and Takeaways Microsoft 365 Community Docs GitHub Repo to Submit Issues The Microsoft 365 Maturity Model - Introduction Community Docs GitHub Training Social media:

We had such a great discussion about this topic the last time, we’re going to cover it again! Several of us are getting deep into this topic for client projects, and we have more learnings and suggestions. Resources and Takeaways Todd’s Blog Series on Workflows (now with updates!) Microsoft Workflows to Power Automate John Liu’s “Ninja List” of Resources (including Power Studio for care/feeding of your flows) Ask Sympraxis Workflow Infographic Todd’s Podcast with Joel Oleson How are you planning to use the App Bar?

We bring you a special one-hour episode of AskSympraxis due to Microsoft’s recent blog post from Chris McNulty and support article about ending support for SharePoint 2010 workflows in SharePoint Online. SharePoint 2010 workflows could be created in SharePoint Designer, as could SharePoint 2013 workflows. SharePoint 2010 workflows also underlie the out-of-the-box classic workflows. The Microsoft announcement is about both SharePoint 2010 and 2013 workflows, but the schedule for each is different.

Microsoft is continuously evolving and improving SharePoint Online to be more engaging, flexible, responsive, and easier to use. One of the biggest shifts has been from SharePoint’s classic to modern and Microsoft’s investments are all in modern now. At some point, you will need to move from classic to modern, and you should want to because of the much-improved capabilities. The move to modern changes the capabilities available to you in navigation, branding, information architecture and site hierarchy, search, sharing and permissions, performance, and multilingual capabilities.

The Sympraxis Team talks about how we try to tame the craziness that is working with multiple tenants. Resources and Takeaways Derek’s blog post on Chrome profiles Todd’s blog posts Installing Web Apps on Chromium Edge How to Connect with Multiple Office 365 Accounts in Your Browser without Losing Your Damned Mind How to Store Windows Credentials with the PnP PowerShell Do you have any questions for us? Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #AskSympraxis and mention @SympraxisC.