Category Archives: SharePoint

Create a SharePoint Site in Office 365 when it is disabled

By default site creation is enabled and anybody can create a new site collection from SharePoint start page :

with two options: “Team site connected to an Office 365 group” and “Communication site”

SharePoint administrator might disable Sites creation. In Office 365 under SharePoint Admin Center -> Settings -> Site Creation there is “Let users create sites from the SharePoint start page and OneDrive”:

Under classic settings page -> Site Creation it is called “Show the Create site command” with explanation “Display the Create site command on the SharePoint home page and in the sites list in OneDrive so users can create new sites”:

If site creation is disabled, user will not see “+ Create site” in SharePoint landing page:

The fun part is users are still able to create a new Office-365 group based site collection
as “Let users create sites from the SharePoint start page and OneDrive” means literally “from the SharePoint start page and OneDrive” and does not mean you cannot create a site from other places. The same with “Show the Create site command” as it is literally about “Show…command” but not “disable … command”.

Option 1: from OneDrive, using “Create shared library”:

Option 2: using direct link:

Use Direct link: https://changeThisToYourTenantName.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/CreateGroup.aspx
e.g.
https://contoso.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/CreateGroup.aspx

Option 3: from teams:

and worth to mention that from Teams anybody can create a Team and a corresponding SharePoint site:

Unfortunately, if sites creation is disabled, you cannot create a communication site.

How to disable self-sites creation for real

The only way to limit self-site creation is using PowerShell:
– create a security group
– add to this group users who will be able to create sites
– via PowerShell Set-AzureADDirectorySetting command set “GroupCreationAllowedGroupId” property
Microsoft: “Manage who can create Groups“

Python dev env memo

This is just a memo for myself how to Python with Anaconda Jupyter Notebooks

Anaconda: https://www.anaconda.com/
Anaconda prompt
cd your code
jupyter notebook

!pip install matplotlib
import matplotlib as plt
plt.__version__

Eclipse
Java IDE + Install New Software from http://www.pydev.org/updates/

PyCharm
File – Other Settings – Settings for New Projects – Project Interpreter – “+”

Spyder
adfsgv

Django

pip install django==3.0.3
django-admin startproject wisdompets
Set-Location "C:\Users\Vlad\code\Django2\wisdompets"
Get-ChildItem
python manage.py runserver
python manage.py startapp adoptions
python manage.py makemigrations

Virtual environment under Windows

python -m venv ./venv
.\venv\Scripts\activate
pip install Office365-REST-Python-Client
...
pip freeze > requirements.txt
deactivate

reference: Building Your First Python Analytics Solution by Janani Ravi

Office 365 retention labels and policies for SharePoint

As I am a SharePoint person, and retention policies and labels are not a SharePoint engineer responsibility, I do not go to the m365 Compliance Center frequently. Below are My notes for myself on key moments – how to create and configure Office 365 retention labels and Policies at Compliance Center and use labels in SharePoint Online (SPO).

In SPO at each site collection level you can still work with retention policies the old way – create policies under Site Collection Settings – Content Type Policy – and apply policies at library level under Library Settings/Information Management Policy Settings. There is also Site Retention Policy.

But Microsoft is making efforts to centralize and unify such things – so you can specify retention policies in one place and apply them across all Office 365 content (not only SharePoint). That place was called Office 365 Security and Compliance Center (SCC). Later Microsoft separated Security Center and Compliance Center. So currently Retention Policies are under “Microsoft Purview” (former Microsoft Compliance Center) -> Solutions -> “Data lifecycle management”:

To get access to “Data lifecycle management” solution – you need to have a “” or “” roles. SharePoint or Teams administrator cannot access Purview. Even having “Global reader” or “Security reader” an admin will not be able to see “Data lifecycle management” blade. Here is how Microsoft Purview looks like for a Global reader:

Although SharePoint admins usually do not have access to SCC and do not go to Site content, we still need to know how it all works. And labels are recommended way to specify retention in SharePoint, so here we are.

Labels are applied to documents, documents are kept in libraries, and at each library you can “Apply a label to items in this library”.

Create Labels

Labels are created in SCC under Classification. The main part looks familiar to SharePoint people:

You can

Retain Content forever or for a specified number of days/months/years and then
– delete it or trigger a disposition review or do nothing
Delete content if it’s older than specified number of days/months/years

after it was created/modified/labelled

Apply labels

Now you need to publish created labels – and that is how you create a policy. I.e. policies are where you specify which labels to which content (Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Office 365 groups)

You can also auto-apply labels based on conditions, like

content that contains sensitive info
content that contains specific words or phrases, or properties
content that matches a trainable classifier

but as per Microsoft, “It will take up to 7 days to automatically apply the label to all items that match your conditions.”

Note: “trainable classifier” means an AI ML will be used, and as per Microsoft “Creating machine learning rules requires an Office 365 E5 subscription for your organization”

SharePoint admin center

You can do nothing with labels at SharePoint admin center. Labels are created, published and auto-applied at SCC. At each site collection levels site administrators can apply labels.

SharePoint site

At site collection settings you can still see “Content Type Policy Templates” and “Site Policy”, but that is not the case. Labels are applied at library level under Library Settings/Apply label to items in this list or library.

where you can select a label to apply for all new items in the library. With

You can also apply the label to items that already exist in the library.

You can also apply (change) label for each single item or multiple selected items under Details pop-up page:

or from under Contect Menu/More/Compliance details:

Adaptive retention policies and scopes

Microsoft recently implemented “Adaptive” retention policies. At step 2 of “Create retention policy” you’ll be asked “Choose the type of retention policy to create”: “A policy can be adaptive or static. Advantage of an adaptive policy will automatically update where it’s applied based on attributes or properties you’ll define. A static policy is applied to content in a fixed set of locations and must be manually updated if those locations change.”

And if you selected “Adaptive” – on the next step you will need to provide the adaptive scope (so at this moment you should already have created your adaptive scopes):

So, let us create your adaptive scopes.
What type of scope do you want to create? SharePoint sites…

And then you’ll have nothing more then set of conditions:

where you can use objects: “Site Url”, “Site Name” and “Refinable String 0″..”Refinable String 99”. Conditions would be “is equal to”, “is not equal to”, “starts with” and “not starts with”. Or you can select “Advanced query builder” and enter LQL query.

What is the takeaway from this for SharePoint administrators? We would be asked to configure SharePoint the way compliance/retention people can use Refinable Strings.

How do users know – what files are going to be deleted

It would be a good idea to let users know, that their files will be deleted, but the next question would be “can I get a list of files that are scheduled to deletion”?

Surely it is possible for admins to go through site content and find files that were modified last time earlier than a specific date, but there is another method – you can recommend your users to search through their site using

See details in “How to figure out – which files are expiring due to age and going to be deleted as result of retention policy.”

References

Office 365 DSC

(WIP)

Let me do some quick PoC on Office 365 DSC in my Office 365 Dev environment…

So far it is not working…

I have created a simple configuration:

Configuration o365DSC_Config_Tenant
{
    param(
        [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
        [PSCredential]
        $credsGlobalAdmin
    )
    Import-DscResource -ModuleName Office365DSC
    node localhost
    {
        SPOTenantSettings MyTenantSettings
        {
            IsSingleInstance                              = "Yes"
            GlobalAdminAccount                            = $credsGlobalAdmin
            PublicCdnEnabled                              = $false
            PublicCdnAllowedFileTypes                     = "CSS,EOT,GIF,ICO,JPEG,JPG,JS,MAP,PNG,SVG,TTF,WOFF"
            NotificationsInSharePointEnabled              = $true
            OwnerAnonymousNotification                    = $true
            LegacyAuthProtocolsEnabled                    = $false
            Ensure                                        = "Present"
        }
    }
}

and ran it with

$adminAccountCred = Get-Credential -UserName $adminUPN -Message "pw pls"
$mPath = 'C:\scripts\o365\Office365DSC'
$cd = @{
    AllNodes = @(
        @{
            NodeName = 'localhost'
            PSDscAllowPlainTextPassword = $true
        }
    )
}
o365DSC_Config_Tenant -OutputPath $mPath -credsGlobalAdmin $adminAccountCred -ConfigurationData $cd
Start-DscConfiguration -ComputerName 'localhost' -Wait -Verbose -Path $mPath -Force

the error I got:

VERBOSE: [VPC]:                            [[SPOTenantSettings]MyTenantSettings] Test-TargetResource returned False
VERBOSE: [VPC]: LCM:  [ End    Test     ]  [[SPOTenantSettings]MyTenantSettings]  in 11.4040 seconds.
VERBOSE: [VPC]: LCM:  [ Start  Set      ]  [[SPOTenantSettings]MyTenantSettings]
VERBOSE: [VPC]:                            [[SPOTenantSettings]MyTenantSettings] Setting configuration for SPO Tenant
VERBOSE: [VPC]:                            [[SPOTenantSettings]MyTenantSettings] The use of the public CDN is not enabled, for that the PublicCdnAllowedFileTypes par
ameter can not be configured and will be removed
A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'Ensure'.
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidArgument: (:) [], CimException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : NamedParameterNotFound,SharePointPnP.PowerShell.Commands.Admin.SetTenant
    + PSComputerName        : localhost
 
VERBOSE: [VPC]: LCM:  [ End    Set      ]  [[SPOTenantSettings]MyTenantSettings]  in 3.7290 seconds.
The PowerShell DSC resource '[SPOTenantSettings]MyTenantSettings' with SourceInfo 
'C:\scripts\o365\Office365DSC\o365DSC_Config_Tenant.ps1::12::9::SPOTenantSettings' threw one or more non-terminating errors while running the Set-TargetResource 
functionality. These errors are logged to the ETW channel called Microsoft-Windows-DSC/Operational. Refer to this channel for more details.
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidOperation: (:) [], CimException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : NonTerminatingErrorFromProvider
    + PSComputerName        : localhost
 
VERBOSE: [VPC]: LCM:  [ End    Set      ]
The SendConfigurationApply function did not succeed.
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (root/Microsoft/...gurationManager:String) [], CimException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : MI RESULT 1
    + PSComputerName        : localhost
 
VERBOSE: Operation 'Invoke CimMethod' complete.
VERBOSE: Time taken for configuration job to complete is 15.486 seconds

More to come…

Project Cortex Overview Video

Click the link: Cortex Overview Mar 25, 2020, then
Cancel
Watch on the Web instead
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Cortex Overview

During the first meeting of the Project Cortex Office Hours series on March 25, 2020, Microsoft (Chris McNulty and Naomi Moneypenny) introduced the case for Project Cortex, gave an overview of the solution, and walked through demos of its knowledge, capture, and classification features.

Video recorded – can be viewed via MS Teams

Presentation (slides, pdf): https://resources.techcommunity.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ProjCortex-Office-Hours-Presentation-20200325.pdf

Next meeting – April 8: Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Project Cortex - Your knowledge network in Microsoft 365

SPO: Description, Owner fields are not searchable

Scenario:

You have a list (or a document library) in SharePoint Online.
You can search through the list but some fields (or document properties) like “Description”, “Subject”, “Author”, “Owner”, “AssignedTo”, “Created”, “CreatedBy” are not searchable.

Cause:

Crawled properties are mapped to non-searchable managed properties. So this is by design. Check Microsoft’s “Overview of crawled and managed properties in SharePoint Server” (we do not have this document for SharePoint Online, so we have to rely on this doc; though you can go to your Search schema in SPO to verify). You see some pre-created managed properties do not have “Searchable” option enabled.

Solution:

(See below for details, as this is still not finished:)

Prove:

I have created a new SPO site test78, a new list Test11 and created (not added from existing) a custom field “Description” to the list:

I also created “Description2” column the same way. No data is added to the list so far.

Search schema looks like:

for Description managed property:

mapping:

Notice that “Description” managed property is not searchable and “ows_Description” crawled property is mapped to “Description” managed property.

Searching for “ows_Description” crawled property gives me:

and that’s OK, as we have no data in the list so “ows_Description2” crawled property does not exist.

Now let me add some data to the list:

and wait a few minutes while continues crawl grabs data.

You can see:

Title and Description2 are searchable, but we are not able to search through “Description” field content.

Explanation

Actually this is by design.
Microsoft: “The index only includes content and metadata from the managed properties”.
(Maybe Microsoft tries to protect their resources from overloading or maybe they protect us from irrelevant results, but including entire document content in full-text search and at the same time not including properties like Document Subject – this does not make sense to me). So the sad fact is list column “Description” is mapped to non-searchable managed property by default.

“Searchable” means: “…The content of this managed property is included in the full-text index.” I.e. if the property is not searchable – “The content of this managed property is not included in the full-text index.” => that’s by design.

But – the good news – the property is Queryable!
Queryable “Enables querying against the specific managed property”.

E.e. “Description:Descr1*” query should work. And it works:

“Description2:Descr*” query should not work as we did not map Description2 property to any managed properties, so we can find content via full-text search but cannot find under managed property:

Solution

Option #1.
Use queries like “Description:TextToSearch” (check also SharePoint KQL).

Option #2.
Do not use name “Description”.
Choose something else like “Short Description” or “Case Description”

Option #3.
Use existing site column “Description” from group:Custom Columns. It’s “single line of text” though. Note: “SharePoint Server Standard Site Collection features” must be activated.

The thing is it’s internal name is “CategoryDescription” and display name is “Description”. So if you add this column to the list – the content will be searchable:

Option #4
Create a new site column, name it e.g. “DescriptionSrchblClmn”.
Add this column to the list from existing site columns.
Rename it to “Description”.

Option #5.
Create your own managed property (e.g. “DescriptionSearchable”), make it searchable and map it to “ows_Description” crawled property.

ensure crawled property has “Include in full-text index” option ON:

NB: changing search schema affects other site lists/libraries.

Remember: if you made a change in search schema, run “Reindex site” under Site Settings -> “Search and Offline Availability”. It’s like on-prem “Full crawl” but works at web level.

================================

Links.

Microsoft: Manage the search schema in SharePoint
Microsoft: Keyword Query Language (KQL) syntax reference
Vladilen: Search for a crawled property name with wildcards
Microsoft: Overview of crawled and managed properties in SharePoint Server

OneDrive vs OneDrive vs Personal Site

Microsoft sells OneDrive as a personal cloud storage service… But There are actually two separate products behind the service, and each product provides more than “personal cloud storage service”…

What is OneDrive? What is the difference between OneDrive and Personal SharePoint site? Let’s see…

When you login to Office.com, you can click on OneDrive icon:

and you will found yourself at OneDrive site, so

one OneDrive is a SharePoint Personal site:

The other OneDrive is a desktop application

i.e. program that runs in the background and synchronizes files from your personal SharePoint site (“first OneDrive”) to your local machine and back:

Below is OneDrive desktop application in Windows File Explorer. Please notice how “test 01.txt” file and “test 02” folder are synchronized to first OneDrive.

Confused? No? Wanna more?

Here are some more confusing details…

Using OneDrive desktop application you can synchronize your regular SharePoint site library with your desktop computer.

Here is a regular SharePoint site (Test23) with a LibUnderSharePoint library. You can click on the “Sync” button:

and see the magic! Now you have another folder on your local Windows machine:

– but this time OneDrive synchronizes it to regular SharePoint site.

There is also a “Personal OneDrive” – the same as regular OneDrive but free…
(again, do not be confused: initially there was just OneDrive – free personal version and OneDrive for Business – version you could have with Office 365 subscription; now they are Onedrive and Personal OneDrive 🙂 )

OneDrive is a Microsoft thing.
Google has “Drive File Stream” (Google drive)
Dropbox – Dropbox sync