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 scopes
SharePoint Search center
SharePoint home Office portal Office desktop app Delve
Teams
Bing
SharePoint content
Yes
Yes
Yes
Teams content
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Teams chats
(*1)
Yes
Yes
Yammer content
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yammer chat
(*1)
Yes
User profiles
Yes
Yes
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:
Scope
Out of Scope
SharePoint Search Center
– all sites content (Teams, Yammer, regular), – user profiles – OneDrive
Teams chat Yammer chat
SharePoint Landing Page
same as SharePoint Search center but Teams chats and Yammer Conversations are coming
same as SharePoint Search Center
Office.com
same as SharePoint (Teams chats and Yammer Conversations are coming after SharePoint)
same as SharePoint
Delve
Teams
Teams content Teams chat
OneDrive Yammer User Profiles regular SharePoint sites
Bing
Everything*
* 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.
Good news! On Sep, 18 during the SIG community call, PnP Team shared their plans on PnP Sites Core library and PnP Core SDK. “PnP Sites Core v4” library and “PnP Core SDK v1” with .net core support (.net Standard 2.0) – expected in December 2020!
PnP PowerShell v4 for SPO library built for .Net Standard 2.0 / PowerShell 7 will be released in Dec 2020 as well.
Scenario: You have a large (>5k items) list in SharePoint Online you need to clean-up, for instance:
You need to delete the entire list
You need to delete all the list items, but keep the list
You need to delete some of list items, but keep the others
Deleting a large SharePoint Online list
There was a problem in SharePoint Online – you could not delete a large list – you had to remove all items first, but removing all items was also a challenge. Microsoft improved SharePoint Online, so now it takes ~1 second to delete any SharePoint list, including 5000+ items list via GUI or PowerShell:
Remove-PnPList -Identity $list
command works very fast – ~1 second to delete entire list with >5000 items.
Delete all items in a large SharePoint Online list
In this scenario we need to keep the list, but make it empty (clean it up).
GUI: You can change the list view settings “Item Limit” to <5000 and try to delete items in chunks, but (at least in my experience) when you try to select, let say, 1000 items and delete them via GUI – it says “775 items were not deleted from large list”:
so this option seems like not a good one.
ShareGate: 3-rd party tools like Sharegate, SysKit give a good results too.
for me both methods gave same good result: ~17 items per second ( ~7 times faster than regular).
Deleting some items from a large SPO list
Consider the following scenario: in a large SharePoint list there are items you need to delete and the rest items must stay (typical case might be to purge old items – e.g. items created last year).
In this case you’d
get all list items (or use query to get some list items)
select items that need to be deleted based on your criteria, e.g. created date or last modified date etc.
use PnP.PowerShell batches to delete only what you need
# to get all list items
$listItems = Get-PnPListItem -List Tasks -PageSize 1000
# or to get some list items
$listItems = Get-PnPListItem -List Tasks -Query <query>
# select items to delete
$itemsToDelete = $listItems | ?{$_.Modified -lt $threshold}
# delete some list items
$batch = New-PnPBatch
$itemsToDelete | Foreach-Object { Remove-PnPListItem -List $list -Identity $_ -Batch $batch }
Invoke-PnPBatch -Batch $batch
PnP.PowerShell batch vs ScriptBlock
How fast are PnP batches? What is better in terms of performance – ScriptBlock or Batching? Here are my measurements:
Time elapsed, seconds
with batches
with scriptBlock
without batches
Add-PnPListItem (100 items)
6-10 seconds
60-120 seconds
Add-PnPListItem (500 items)
20-40 seconds
230-600 seconds
Add-PnPListItem (7000 items)
314-600 seconds
Add-PnPListItem (37000 items)
3200 seconds
Remove-PnPListItem (1000 items)
58-103 seconds
58 seconds
430-1060 seconds
Remove-PnPListItem (7000 items)
395-990 seconds 3000 seconds
397-980 seconds
Remove-PnPListItem (30000 items)
one big batch : 13600 seconds 30 batches 1000 items each: 3500 seconds
both – PnP PowerShell batches and ScriptBlocks are 7-10 times faster than plain PnP PowerShell!
Can we use Microsoft Graph API to complete the same task? TBC…
Note… For the sake of history: It used to be like that for 5k+ lists: “Remove-PnPList” fails with a message “The attempted operation is prohibited because it exceeds the list view threshold enforced by the administrator”. Deleting with GUI failed too.
Update: Microsoft is deploying an updated version of “Disable Subsites” feature:
This update makes the setting options for new subsite creation easier to understand and prevents users from being able to create subsites using alternate paths when the subsite setting is disabled.
Admins in the SharePoint admin center can choose to either enable or disable subsite creation across sites or enable for classic sites only. Now, when disabling subsite creation, not only will the subsite option be hidden from the command bar including classic but also users will not be able to create new subsites directly through an URL or API.
The option: Hide the Subsite command has been renamed to Disable subsite creation for all sites and will also hide the subsite creation command (including classic) and disable users from being able to create new subsites through a URL or API. The option: Show the Subsite command only for classic sites, has been renamed to Enable subsite creation for classic sites only. The option: Show the Subsite command for all sites, has been renamed to Enable subsite creation for all sites.
Update is applied. What’s Next?
After this update is applied, if you have “Subsite Creation” set to “Disable subsite creation for all sites”, then if any attempt to create a subsite – you’ll get an error message “Sorry, something went wrong. New subsites are not available for your organization. Create a new site instead.”
Site is a new folder
Microsoft recommend “flat structure”, i.e. no subsites. So SPO admins are disabling subsites creation at tenant level. Did you know that you still can create subsite? Let me explain how it is done.
If creation subsites is allowed, you should be able to see it like this:
But actually subsites are not always best practice. Microsoft recommend “flat structure”, i.e. instead of subsite you should have a separate site collection, and if you need a hierarchy and navigation – use Hub sites. So, in Office 365 SharePoint admins usually “disable” SubSites creation:
Now, you see, SubSites are not really disabled, but only the button to create subsites is hidden: “This controls whether the Subsite command appears on the New menu on the Site contents page”.
Anyway, the result is: you are not able to create a SubSite (web) in SharePoint Online:
Actually there are at least 3 options to create a SubSite:
Generally, if you want to join a public team – you must know exact team name to find it. This KBA explains how to find a public team by name or description or content even when you do not know exact team name. Quick and simple answer: use SharePoint Search center or Microsoft Search, (or Bing if it is integrated).
Detailed explanation
Below is why it is so complicated in teams and on how to find a public Team…
In Microsoft Office 365, under MS Teams, there are 3 types of teams:
Private team
Public team
Org-wide team
Private team: you can only join the team if you are invited or know the team code. SharePoint site behind the private team is shared only to members – not for everyone. You cannot see team name or description or content until you are team member (details). You are not able to search for the team name or content.
Public team: you can join the public team if you wish. The site behind the public team is shared with everyone except external users, so you can see public team name and description, but from MS Teams (desktop or web application) you cannot see public team content until you are team member.
Org-wide team: you are joined the team automatically (details)
From Teams – you can click on “Join or create a team” and you should be able to see some publicteams (but not all):
There is a “Search teams” box at the top right, so what if you are looking for a specific public team (not in the list) …
Scenario 1
You know exact team name or at least some first letters. Solution: You are lucky. Just start typing team name in search bar at top right and hit “enter”- you will see shortened list of public teams matching your search criteria:
NB: do not use wildcards, it will not work:
NB: do not use top search bar, it will not work:
Scenario 2
You want to join a public team, but you do not know exact team name. You know (or guess) something about the team, like
part of the team name
part of the team description
some keywords from team content files
Unfortunately, in this case both great Microsoft technologies – Search and Team – fail. You will not be able to find a public team:
Just use SharePoint search of Bing Search or Office.com – any other plain search wherever you can. SharePoint site is created once a team is created to store actual content. If the team is public – SharePoint site behind will be accessible for everyone.
For public teams – SharePoint site has “Everyone except external users” by default in “Members” group:
which means literally “Everyone except external users” has access to the site with “Edit” permissions.
SharePoint search is security-trimmed, i.e. you will see the site content in search results only if you do have access to the site. So just go to the SharePoint landing page or SharePoint search center of Office.com and search for what you know or guess about the team:
You can use all the power of SharePoint search (wildcards, refiners, keyword query language KQL etc)
Once you found something – you can go to the SharePoint site:
Now from the site – look at the site name and hover the mouse over the site name – you’ll see pop-up window. Now you know exact team name – and you can search for the team under Teams, or, if you are so lucky you see “Join” button – just join the team.click site title or hove over the site title:
One moment – you cannot see team’s chat messages in SharePoint, as chats are kept in Azure. But you can search for chat content after you joint the team.
Somehow both – SharePoint Search and Teams Search are not working against site/team description. Hopefully this bug will be addressed.
You can also search for site Url in teams. When you create a team – Office 365 generates a short team name (removes spaces and adds numbers if the team name is not unique; e.g. if the team name “Test” you might have “test381” as a short name, but if the team name is “This Is My Unique Team” – short name might be “ThisIsMyUniqueTeam”). After you can change team name and/or SharePoint site name. Team search under MS teams work for both names – short name initially assigned (kept as site specific Url) and new team name. But only starting with the beginning of the string.
