Latest Administration topics

What’s Happening with Delve? Microsoft recently announced the retirement of Delve, a move that has been on the horizon for some time. Delve provided a central hub for users within the Microsoft 365 suite, offering access to profile details, connections, recent documents, and activities of colleagues based on permissions. A Brief History of Delve Delve debuted in 2015 with a bold blue logo, introducing users to an innovative way of showcasing collaboration through the Office Graph. Initially, it caused some unease among users, as it revealed activity based on permissions, leading some organizations to disable the Office Graph. Over time, much of Delve’s functionality migrated to other parts of the M365 ecosystem. Today, its departure is less disruptive as its core capabilities have been dispersed across the platform.

In today’s collaborative work environment, it’s essential to seamlessly interact with individuals outside your organization. Microsoft 365 offers a way to invite guest users—external individuals—into your tenant to work together within your environment. This capability fosters cooperation with clients, partners, or contractors, but it’s important to manage these external users carefully to ensure they only access what they need.

Permissions in Microsoft 365 can be complex, but a clear approach can help simplify management, protect data, and enhance collaboration. Below, we break down the highlights from our recent Ask Sympraxis session, The Many Faces of Permissions in Microsoft 365, which explores our philosophy on permissions, the many sharing settings, and best practices for permissions in Microsoft 365.

The SharePoint platform has been evolving rapidly, bringing new features and adjustments that can impact both user experience and governance. While many of these changes offer exciting opportunities, some also introduce challenges. In this session we take a closer look at key updates to SharePoint’s editing experience, offering insights on what works well, and where caution is needed.

In this Ask Sympraxis session, we delve into the intricacies of the SharePoint Term Store, a critical component for maintaining consistency in how we categorize and tag content across an organization’s intranet. What is the SharePoint Term Store? The Term Store in SharePoint is essentially a repository for commonly used terms. It provides a tenant-wide or site-wide source of terms organized hierarchically, ensuring we use the same language when working in SharePoint. This consistency is crucial as it makes information easier to find. However, agreeing on the terms can sometimes be challenging since different groups might prefer different terms, such as “policy” versus “guideline.” To address this, the Term Store allows for alternate labels or synonyms. When users type an alternate label, SharePoint pulls up the actual term, making it easier to standardize language across the organization.

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. At level 200 you see some manual management, but it’s irregular. Level 300 you might have a clear site request, provisioning, and retirement process. Level 400 brings automated rules and policies to manage the site portfolio. Level 500 likely has an AI or rules-based analysis that’s watching the site portfolio and providing suggestions.

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.

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. The Microsoft provided templates occupy the 200 level. Templates can go all the way to the 500 level, where an automated custom approach to template management is applied.

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.