Rules

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

• Powerful content discoverability via full-text search
• Rich workflow capabilities (e.g. approval & distribution processes)
• Document Accessibility (over the web and via Office programs)
• Information Management Policies (e.g. Document retention policies)
• Compliance suitability (e.g. Email archiving)
• Great for storing both structured and unstructured content. (e.g. meeting workspaces, ad-hoc lists, project workspaces, company portal)
• Highly customizable and extensible

You want to be on the latest version of SharePoint.

There are multiple ways to get it:

See Get SharePoint version number of your platform quickly for details.

vti\_encoding:SR|utf8-nl 
vti\_extenderversion:SR|16.0.0.4327  

Figure: On SharePoint 2016, this is what you get for intranet.ssw.com.au for example

OK Example

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

TODO TIAGO: ADD IMAGE OF WINDOWS EXPLORER (4 files in it) AND ANOTHER WITH SHAREPOINT DOCUMENTS LIBRARY

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.

Details on how you to create a link to a document in a SharePoint library.

A. Create a shortcut in windows, then upload the shortcut file (.url) to the document library.

To do this, you need to remove .url file type from your blocked file types in your web application. This will bring some security risk, which is not recommended, and I won't show the step details here.

B. Use "Link to a document" content type in SharePoint.

1. Enable "Content Type management" in your document library. Figure: Enable Content Type management in library setting
2. Add "Link to a Document" content type into the library. Figure: Add from existing site content type Figure: Select "Link to a Document" content type
3. Create a "Link to a document" instance Figure: select "File | New Document (dropdown) | Link to a document" Figure: Input "Name" and "URL"
4. Done

You should be able to see the link type document in your library: Figure: Link type documents with the lovely shortcut icon

Renaming pages in SharePoint site will cause broken links. All requests to the old URL will be responded to with a 404 error.

Options to resolve this issue are:

• Add a page every time for a rename…. add a JavaScript or META tag redirect to the original page
• Use custom 404 page to look at a list in SharePoint, the list contains all the renaming records, the records are automatically maintained via page updating events handler. (We are using this way)
• Wait for MS to fix the problem - support classical alternative links for a page.

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

The "request manager" will receive an email:

To setup permission request for a SharePoint site collection, go to " Site Settings (Gear Wheel icon) | Site Permissions ": Figure: Open "Access Request" setting

Limition: This "Access Request" only works for authenticated users to inquire more access permission, that means if your site allows "anonymous access", then an anonymous user cannot send "access request" as he doesn't have an identify to be assigned more access permission.

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

Use the below PowerShell script to clean them:

$site = Get-SPSite("http://<site collection URL>/"); # Specify url here
foreach ($web in $site.AllWebs) {    
    $lists = $web.Lists
    for ($i=($lists.Count-1);$i -gt 0; $i--) {  
        $list = $lists[$i]
        #Write-host $i  $list.Title $list.BaseTemplate.ToString()
        if ($list.BaseTemplate.ToString().ToLower().contains('events')) {      
            if ($list.Items.Count -eq 0)
            {
                Write-Host $list.Items.Count "items in the list" $list.Title '('$list.BaseTemplate') at '$web.Url "- cleaning it!"
                $list.Recycle()
                #$list.Delete()
            }
        }
    }
}

This script will put the calendars which do not have any events into Site Settings | Recycle Bin : Figure: Empty Calendars in Recycle Bin folder

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

Suggestion to Microsoft: send an email to the user to remind them they have outstanding checkouts potentially blocking other users.

Upgrade warning: The pages that are not checked-in, will not be migrated on a SharePoint upgrade. There is *no* warning either.

There are 2 ways to remind users of their "checked out files":

• Solution A: Manage Content and Structure Report (No Code)
• ** Solution B: Custom application report (Includes some coding work) Eg. SSW.Dory **

Solution A. Manage Content and Structure Report (No Code)

1. Create CAML query in site content and structure

Go to "Site Settings | Manage Content and Structure | Content and Structure Reports", click "New":

Fill the "CAML Query":<Where><IsNotNull><FieldRef Name="CheckoutUser" LookupId="TRUE"/></IsNotNull></Where>

Fill the other fields like below:

2. Run Checked Out report

Run the checkout report from "Site Settings | Manage Content and Structure | View: Checked out documents":

3. Go chase after the users.

**Solution B. Custom application report (Includes some coding work)**

TODO: Move this tool to GitHub, find a better name than "SSW.SharePoint.CheckedOutFilesReport". Also change from a farm solution to a solution that can be used on Office365 - now in SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint online called "Sharepoint Add-ins"

Even better, we have also improved the application with a scheduled task using SharePoint CSOM API to find checked out files and send these notification emails automatically every night.

     <img class="ssw-rteStyle-ImageArea" alt="CheckedOutFilesApplicationReport.png" src="CheckedOutFilesApplicationReport.png">
  <dd>Figure: One button reminds all users of their "Checked out Files"

        <font color="#3a66cc"><a href="/rules/do-you-confirm-there-is-no-checked-out-data">http://&lt;siteurl&gt;/DesignandPresentation/RulesToBetterVideoRecording/Pages/Default.aspx</a>  (parent folder)</font>

        <font color="#3a66cc"><a href="/rules/do-you-confirm-there-is-no-checked-out-data">http://&lt;siteurl&gt;/DesignandPresentation/RulesToBetterVideoRecording/Pages/testing-rule.aspx</a>  (parent folder)</font>

Figure: An example of the reminder email that all users receive **

**

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.

Figure: The People Picker Unfortunately, if you have added users directly to your site collection, and later deleted or disabled them from Active Directory, you will notice that these orphaned users will still appear in your People Picker. This will eventually clutter up your People Picker. Figure: A user in the People Picker that was deleted from Active Directory Figure: Searching in Active Directory for the user shows the user is in fact deleted To remove these orphaned users, as a SharePoint Administrator, you can open the following URL (where www.northwind.com is your SharePoint URL):

• http://www.northwind.com/\_catalogs/users/simple.aspx

On this page you will find a list of all the users that are members of your site collection, including the orphaned users. Figure: We have found our orphaned user! To remove the user simply click on the Username | Click Delete User from Site Collection . This will instantly remove the user from the People Picker.

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

For those out of date data, you can use an archive page and change the filtering of CQWP to return all of them, so that the old data are still there and the ranking of the page won't be influenced.

For more SharePoint SEO, check from this article.

Because SharePoint server will create quite a few databases, it’s easier to manage them in a separate SQL instance rather than mixing it with other system’s databases:

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

You can select the folder (or file) and click on "Copy link" at the top bar to get the link:

You can also right-click the folder/file to copy the link:

On previous versions, you can open the menu on ellipsis link and get it from there:

Related Rule

• Do you know not to send attachments in emails?

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.

Reverse proxy handle https connection to client, and connects to SharePoint via http to reduce https overhead on SharePoint

SharePoint also needs to support https for internal traffic, if I click on a link to HTTPS it should work internally

For this scenario to work, web application needs to be extended 2 to 3 different zone

Default  (http for internal and search)

Internet  (http for reverse proxy)

Intranet  (https for internal https link)

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.

Get rid of classic features in SharePoint Online.

Microfeed

Microfeed list is used to support the MicroFeed Classic web part. If you’re using Modern SharePoint Sites and Pages (and you should !) everywhere, you don’t need that list anymore.

To delete the Microfeed List, simply de-activate the Site Feed feature at the Web level:

Company Announcements

"Announcements" is a default List that used to be created with classic Team Sites. If you’re not using it, chances are you will never do, and modern News should be your replacement for it.

To remove company News, click “Settings” | “Remove” from Site Contents:

Drop Off Library

Drop Off Libraries (Content Organizer feature) were a way to automate moving documents around based on Metadata. This is no longer the optimal solution and you should use Power Automate instead. To remove Drop Off Library from your site, you need to disable the “Content Organizer” Web level feature:

Deleting leftovers from Migrations

After migrating content from older versions of SharePoint, you may end up in a hybrid state where the abovementioned features are disabled, but associated libraries/lists are still present on your site. If that happens, you ideally want to clean it up.The first thing you can try is enabling/disabling the feature again. In some cases, that will fix the issue and remove the unwanted list/library.If that doesn’t work, however, there is a more radical approach: removing the list/library using Powershell:

(In case you prefer using code straight away instead of the screenshot)

Remove-PnPList -Identity "Workflow Tasks" -Force

However, on system Lists, you may get an error:

The workaround is to set the “AllowDeletion” flag to true before calling delete:

(In case you prefer using code straight away instead of the screenshot)

$list = Get-PnPList -Identity "Workflow Tasks"
$list.AllowDeletion = $true
$list.Update()
Remove-PnPList -Identity "Workflow Tasks" -Force

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.

More info: Getting started with the SharePoint modernization scanner.

AD has all your users e.g. Bob, Mary, Jane...

SharePoint also has all your users, plus you can extend this information using the UserProfile Service – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/manage-user-profiles

The beauty of this is that if everyone has updated their skills, it is wonderfully searchable.

SharePoint has an Admin UI to manage User Profiles

Delve is a cool product with a nice UI that is essentially a portal onto the User Profiles.

Where it all falls down...

What if your people’s skills are stored in another system such as Dynamics 365 CRM or Salesforce ?

You can use PowerShell and SharePoint PNP libraries to programmatically interact with the SharePoint UserProfile service. This process allows you to sync skills across systems with a custom solution:

OpenSearch is another solution, using the OpenSearch protocol you can add external data sources to your SharePoint search results

Suggestions to Microsoft:

#1 Help me better sync my Dynamics 365 CRM data with the SharePoint user profile service

This should be a simple SharePoint connector so this piece of PowerShell glue is not required 👌
E.g. CRM user skills to User Profile properties

#2 Help me make Dynamics 365 CRM data searchable from SharePoint search

If not using a connector, we should be able to easily index and search through Dynamics 365 CRM data.This is essentially just calling a different API.

#3 Help me customise SharePoint search results

If you don’t want either of those options (i.e. you users’ skills are stored somewhere else), we should be able to change the search results UI.
E.g. Search for people here: https://ssw.com.au/people

#4 Help me search for user entities in Dynamics 365 CRM

There should be a global user search that goes across all entities in Dynamics 365 CRM.

Did you know that when you delete or disable a user in Active Directory or Azure Active Directory 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'.

1. Open ShareGate Desktop
2. Click All reports | Orphaned user report

   

3. Add your connection

   

4. Add your site address, Choose your Authentication method and press Connect

   

5. Choose Navigate to choose individual sites or tick the box to choose all sites and teams folders

   

6. Under Navigate choose the individual site | Click Next

   

7. Click Run now

   

8. Select Users | Select Clean orphaned users

   

9. Click Continue

   

10. View results of report

    

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.

There are several reasons why sub-sites are no longer recommended. This blog post has a good list, including:

Flexibility – Sub-sites are a pain to move - you'll never need to do this with a flat hierarchy. Using Hub sites, it’s easy to change links and use dynamic content to make sure your SharePoint architecture matches your organisational structure.

Microsoft Teams & 365 Groups – Every Microsoft Team you create has its own SharePoint site, and SharePoint integrates with Microsoft 365 groups. So with a flat hierarchy, users and admins have a consistent experience across apps and Document Libraries.

It is worth noting that this flexibility comes at a cost - permissions can be more difficult to manage, as each site will need permissions set separately, and you cannot use nested groups.

Links

Introduction to SharePoint information architecture - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Docs