Author Archives: Vlad Software Engineer

About Vlad Software Engineer

Microsoft 365 Teams, SharePoint, Search, PowerShell, Azure...

Long-running PowerShell Office 365 reports

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(WIP)

PowerShell is our best friend when it comes to ad-hoc and/or scheduled reports in Microsoft 365. PnP team is doing great job providing more and more functionality with PnP PowerShell module for Office 365 SharePoint and Teams.

Small and medium business organizations are mostly good, but for large companies it might be a problem due to just huge amount of data stored in SharePoint. PowerShell reports on all users or all sites might run days… which is probably OK if you run this report once, but totally not acceptable if you need this report e.g. daily/weekly or on-demand.

How can we make heavy PowerShell scripts run faster?

Of course, you start with logic (algorithm) and leveraging full PowerShell functionality (e.g. PowerShell 7 parallelism or PnP batching).

(examples)

What if you did everything, but it still takes too long? You need something like brute force – the closer your code runs to your tenant – the better.
What are the option?
– Automation account runbook (+workflow)
– Azure Function Apps
– Azure VM in the region closest to your Tenant

Automation account runbook (+workflow)

Seemed like a good option, but not something Microsoft promotes. Even opposite – automation accounts support only PowerShell 5 (not 7), no plug-ins for VS Code and recently there were messages on some retirement or smth.

Meantime, I tested it – and did not find any significant increasing in speed. In a nutshell, what is behind this service? Same windows machines running somewhere in Azure .

TBC

References
– PnP PowerShell

Exact Location of your SharePoint Online Microsoft Office 365 tenant

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Quick answer: spin-up a few VMs in different Azure regions, then ping your SharePoint tenant. The moment you see 1ms ping you know the tenant exact location.

Full story

Microsoft says: “Customers should view tenant specific data location information in your Microsoft 365 Admin Center in Settings | Org settings | Organization Profile | Data location.”
And it might look like:

That’s accurate to the geography (e.g. US, UE, AP), but not to the region (for instance – “Central US”, “UK West” or “Australia Southeast”).
In other words, If you know your data are in the US, you do not know where exactly – East/West/Central or South US.
Meantime when you create an Azure resource (e.g. Virtual Machine) – you can select specific region.

How do I know – where is my Microsoft 365 tenant actually located?

Can we just ping the tenant, analyze result and find Office 365 tenant region?
Luckily, SharePoint tenant is pinging with just
PS>ping tenantName.SharePoint.com
I have tested 5 regions and 4 different tenants:

ping from/to (ms)tenant 1 (US)tenant 2 (EU)tenant 3 (US)tenant 4 (US)
North Europe731796101
East US1833931
Central US221142323
West US631463633
South Central US3111211

So I figured it out:
My o365 tenants #3 and #4 regions are South Central US (Texas, San Antonio),
tenant #1 resides in East US.

Why do I need this?

Imagine you are running heavy reports against your tenant.
So probably you want your code running as close as possible to your tenant.
For this, you can spin-up a VM in Azure or use Azure Functions – just select proper region 🙂
(please check also “Long-running PowerShell reports optimization in Office 365“)

References:
– Where your Microsoft 365 customer data is stored

SPO: Allow users to create modern pages

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Microsoft: “Using modern pages in Microsoft SharePoint is a great way to share ideas using images, Office files, video, and more. Users can Add a page to a site quickly and easily, and modern pages look great on any device.
If you’re a global or SharePoint admin in Microsoft 365, you can allow or prevent users from creating modern pages. You can do this at the organization level by changing settings in the SharePoint admin center. If you allow the creation of site pages as the organization level, site owners can turn it on or off at the site level.“

By default both
– Allow users to create new modern pages
– Allow commenting on modern pages
are turned on (enabled)

Tenant or SharePoint admin can find settings under
SharePoint Admin Center -> Settings -> Pages

How it looks like:

Site Pages are created under “Pages” Library.

Let us test it, with:
– (tenant-level) Allow users to create new modern pages: ON
– (tenant-level) Allow commenting on modern pages: ON
– web feature “Site Pages” – “Allows users to add new site pages to a site”: Activated

User
Permissions		can create Pagecan edit pagecan Enable/Disable
page comments		can comment on Page
Full Control (Owner)YesYesYesYes
Edit (Member)YesYesYesYes
Read (Visitor)NoNoNoYes

There is a web feature “Site Pages” – “Allows users to add new site pages to a site”.
The feature is activated by default:

What if we disable this feature?
“New -> Page” has disappeared from “New” menu under “Site Contents” for Owners and Members…
From “Home” and “Pages” you still can see “New -> Page” options.
You can still create a new page from but if you try to create a page from Pages – “Sorry, something went wrong” “Cannot create a Site Page. Please have your administrator enable the required feature on this site.” :

Office 365 behavior, with:
– (tenant-level) Allow users to create new modern pages: ON
– (tenant-level) Allow commenting on modern pages: ON
– web feature “Site Pages” – “Allows users to add new site pages to a site”: Deactivated

User
Permissions		can create Pagecan edit pagecan Enable/Disable
page comments		can comment on Page
Full Control (Owner)Yes,
but only from “Home”
not from “Site Contents” or “Pages”		YesYesYes
Edit (Member)Yes,
but only from “Home”
not from “Site Contents” or “Pages”		YesYesYes
Read (Visitor)NoNoNoYes


If we disable feature “Site Pages” – “Allows users to add new site pages to a site” on the root web – it does not affect subsites (subwebs).

Can we Activate/Deactivate the feature “Site Pages” using PowerShell?

PowerShell

(TBP)

References
– Microsoft “Allow users to create and comment modern pages“

See also:
– Allow commenting on modern pages

Office 365 Search scopes

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Search is everywhere in Microsoft 365. You can search from SharePoint, Teams, Delve, Yammer etc.

But! You cannot search for anything from everywhere!

  • Search for your Teams chat messages works only in Teams.
  • But from Teams you cannot search for regular (non-group) sites and public teams sites
  • All descriptions are totally out of search (e.g. site description, library/list description – including Yammer groups, Teams and regular sites).
  • Public Team Sites content is not searchable from Teams and Yammer

So, what are the scopes of each search entry point in Office 365 and is there an entry point you can search for everything?

Search scopesSharePoint
Search center		SharePoint home
Office portal
Office desktop app
Delve		TeamsBing
SharePoint contentYesYesYes
Teams contentYesYesYesYes
Teams chats(*1)YesYes
Yammer contentYesYesYes
Yammer chat(*1)Yes
User profilesYesYes
Email
(*1) Microsoft announced they are working on bringing conversations (both Teams chats and Yammer) to SharePoint landing page first, then to Office home page.

Detailed:

ScopeOut of Scope
SharePoint Search Center– all sites content
(Teams, Yammer, regular),
– user profiles
– OneDrive		Teams chat
Yammer chat
SharePoint Landing Pagesame as SharePoint Search center
but Teams chats and Yammer Conversations are coming		same as SharePoint Search Center
Office.comsame as SharePoint
(Teams chats and Yammer Conversations are coming after SharePoint)		same as SharePoint
Delve
TeamsTeams content
Teams chat		OneDrive
Yammer
User Profiles
regular SharePoint sites
BingEverything* * except people profiles content
(e.g. about me)

Seems like the only tool you can search for EVERYTHING with is Microsoft Bing:

Update: there are rumors that Microsoft is decommissioning work search in Bing… Pity… But something tells me that decomm is due to lack of usage/popularity, so Microsoft will introduce something similar…

After Microsoft add Teams chats and Yammer conversations to SharePoint landing page search scope (then to Office home page) – it’ll be the best place to search from for everything.

More on Microsoft Search vs SharePoint Search and Microsoft Search RoadMap

Microsoft Office 365 Search: Find what you need with Microsoft Search in Bing

It is possible customize Modern Microsoft Search pages with PnP Modern Search

Microsoft Licensing

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Как купить Microsoft

  • Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
  • Office 365 (SharePoint, Teams, Exchange etc.)
  • Azure cloud subscription

Option 1: прямо на сайте Microsoft :
– Office 365 for Home
– Office 365 for Business
– Azure subscription (начать бесплатно)

Option 2: через партнёров Microsoft :
– Find a Microsoft Solution provider
– Top 200 Partners