Rules to Better SharePoint

SharePoint is a great platform for intranet, and the new version SharePoint 2019 and SharePoint Online is getting even better every day.

It's important for all your SharePoint Sites to be as consistent as possible. This helps users' navigation through new pages as they know exactly where to look.

In the days of classic SharePoint, subsites were a popular way of organising your intranet. Modern SharePoint architecture leans toward a flatter hierarchy, where sub-sites are generally not recommended.

Did you know that when you delete or disable a user in Active Directory or Entra ID the user is still stored in SharePoint. Did you also know that SharePoint retains any permissions that the user did have in SharePoint at the time? This means that if the user returns and their account is re-enabled they will have all of the same permissions that they had before. Luckily for us ShareGate offer us an easy way to remove these 'orphaned users'.

Get rid of classic features in SharePoint Online.

You want to be on the latest version of SharePoint.

You should review all your Intranet content and for all classic features (pages, web parts, etc…), and decide if you want to keep  or migrate them.

To make office documents with content preview available in search result, you need to setup an Office App server and link it to SharePoint:

You may need a link in a SharePoint document to help you navigate to a different URL (like shortcut in Windows), there are different ways to implement this.

Instead of displaying a direct " Access Denied " warning info, you can allow end users to send an " Access Request ".

Figure: Joanna is requesting access to SharePoint site

Most SharePoint site templates contain a calendar list, this will bring lots of useless calendars.

One of the annoying things with SharePoint document and page libraries is that users often accidentally leave checked out files, that prevents others from modifying them.

The SharePoint "People Picker" is a great tool for quickly selecting users of your SharePoint site. It allows you to quickly select users from your organization by browsing Active Directory.

Try to use content query web part to show data instead of jQuery as it's better for Google indexing.

You often need to share links to a file or folder in SharePoint.

You might need to recover a delete file in SharePoint. You will find it at the Recycle bin. This is where you can find it:

Here are the options we have:

For cloud users:

• LinkedIn skills [sync] office365 list. (Preferred)
• Office 365 users profile | skills. (Limited)
• Azure AD [sync] office365 list

For on-premises users:

• User profile [sync] list. (Old)

• default zone should be over http, this is so search can access it over non-secure connection
• default zone should not be accessible outside of internal network
• extend the web application to an internet zone, this should be https to provide secure connection
• this section should be extended with strategy to work with reverse proxy.

It is recommended to bind https by extending web applications in central admin site, rather than configuring in IIS

Using default zone URL in search content source, it will be automatically convert to the relative URL on the search result (e.g. if a user access search "keyword" via http://projects.ssw.com.au/search, the result will be like http://projects.ssw.com.au/search/keyword).

While another user access search center via https://projects.ssw.com.au/search, the result will be https://projects.ssw.com.au/search/keyword.