Category Archives: SharePoint

Sites.Selected SharePoint API brief overview and history

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Sites.Selected MS Graph API permissions were introduced by Microsoft in March 2021. It was a good move towards site-level access for non-interactive (daemon) applications, but still developers were limited with only what MS Graph API provides for SharePoint. SharePoint CSOM and REST API still provides much more than MS Graph API.

So developers had to use AppInv.aspx at site level to provide ACS-based permissions to their apps to be able to use SharePoint CSOM and REST APIs. The bad news is ACS-based permissions have some downsides so some SharePoint/m365/security engineers consider them legacy and deprecated. But if we decide to disable SharePoint App-only service principals – all apps with ACS-based permissions provided via AppInv.aspx will stop working.

2021: Microsoft Graph Sites.Selected API

Microsoft Graph Sites.Selected API

Recently Microsoft introduced Sites.Selected SharePoint API permissions for registered Azure Apps! So from now developers should be fully happy with API permissions provided in Azure (without SharePoint ACS-based permissions).

2022: SharePoint Sites.Selected API

SharePoint Sites.Selected API

Why is this so important? Because this should allow us to be able to switch from ACS based permissions provided in SharePoint via AppInv.aspx to Azure-provided permissions and as a consequence – disable SharePoint-Apps only principal (‘set-spotenant -DisableCustomAppAuthentication $true’).

Why we are eager to disable Custom App Authentication in SharePoint? Simply say, SharePoint App-only service principals are not trackable (they all appeared as a “app@sharepoint.com” id in all logs) and hard to manage (there is no way to get list of existing/registered SP app-only service principals, sites and their owners) – see more in this article. (Update: there are tools – check Azure ACS retirement: Track down ACS apps).

So, SharePoint Sites.Selected application API permissions provided in Azure is a significant step to make Microsoft 365 SharePoint environment more secure and manageable.

2024: Delegated Sites.Selected Permissions

Since Feb 2024 Microsoft supports also delegated Sites.Selected permissions. Delegated Sites.Selected permissions are assigned the same way as application Sites.selected permissions – through the /permissions endpoint. You still assign only the application id and role. When the call is made the permissions are calculated either as application or delegated, and assuming the request is authorized it will go through.

2024: Granular Sites.Selected Application Permissions

Microsoft implemented granular permissions ( e.g. to a list, item or file) alongside with Sites.Selected permissions. Original implementations of Sites.Selected allowed access to entire site collection only. With new ‘Lists.SelectedOperations.Selected’, ‘ListItems.SelectedOperations.Selected’ and ‘Files.SelectedOperations.Selected’ permissions it is possible to provide application permissions to list, library or list item or particular document (reference).

Details To Be Provided…

Delegated Sites.Selected API permissions

Since the beginning of 2024 Microsoft supports Delegated Sites.Selected API permissions. This is to support security best practices – the minimally possible access should be provided. I.e. the idea is: even Sites.FullControl.All delegated permissions allows access not to all sites, but to sites current user was provided access to, it would be a good idea to restrict access with only sites this specific app is required access to. That’s good.

More on the Sites.Selected:

References

Connecting to SharePoint Online programmatically: Secret vs Certificate

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Update: Sites.Selected API MS Graph permissions was introduced by Microsoft in 2021. It was a good move towards site-level development, but still developers were limited with only what MS Graph API provides for SharePoint dev.
So devs had to use AppInv.aspx at site level to provide ACS permissions to their apps to be able to use SharePoint CSOM and REST APIs.
Recently Microsoft introduced Sites.Selected SharePoint API permissions for registered Azure Apps! So now devs should be fully happy without ACS-based permissions.

Scenario

You have an application that needs access to Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online site/list/documents. Application is running without interaction with users – e.g. unattended, as daemon job.

There are two options you can authenticate to Microsoft 365 – with the secret or with the certificate. Authenticating with certificate is considered more secure.

Questions

  • What happens if SharePoint-Apps only principal is disabled
    (i.e. ‘set-spotenant -DisableCustomAppAuthentication $true’ )?
  • Why I’m getting 401 error when authenticating to SPO?
  • Why I’m getting 403 error when authenticating to SPO with secret?
  • What permissions to I need to work with SPO?

Findings

Note: we will use PowerShell 7.2 and PnP.PowerShell 1.9 to illustrate it.

Disabled SharePoint-Apps only principal

If SharePoint-Apps only principal is disabled in your tenant
(i.e. ‘Get-PnPTenant | select DisableCustomAppAuthentication’ returns $true ), then the only way you work with SPO from code is:

  • an App registered in Azure
  • API permissions provided via Azure (MS Graph, SharePoint)
  • Certificate is used

In all other cases (even your Connect-PnPOnline command complete successfully) – you will be getting error 401 (unauthorized) when trying Get-PnPTenant or Get-PnPTenantSite or Get-PnPSite

Enabled SharePoint-Apps only principal

If SharePoint-Apps only principals are enabled in your tenant
(i.e. ‘Get-PnPTenant | select DisableCustomAppAuthentication’ returns $false ), then you have three options to work with SPO from code:

  • Azure App with a secret (Client Id + Client Secret) and permissions to SharePoint provided via SharePoint (AppInv.aspx) to access SharePoint REST API
  • Azure App with a certificate (Client Id + Certificate) and permissions provided via Azure to access SharePoint REST API
  • Azure App with a certificate or secret (Client Id + Secret or Certificate) and permissions provided via Azure to access SharePoint via Microsoft Graph API

Get list of new m365 SharePoint sites or teams with PowerShell and Graph API

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There are scenarios when you need to pull only newly created SharePoint sites, e.g. get sites created since yesterday or get last 100 created sites. Usually other articles and existing PowerShell scripts solve this by pulling all sites from tenant and then iterating through sites to get only new sites. That approach is not nice and simply does not work in large environments. How can we get only sites created recently, not all sites? Here is how I use Microsoft Graph API to get only new sites.

Update (6/28/2024): Microsoft announced updates to it’s delta API for SharePoint, so I added option 3 – see below.

Scenario

Let say you administer Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint Online in a Microsoft 365 tenant. You have a pretty big environment – ~10k or more sites and you want to quickly find just new SharePoint sites or teams (e.g. sites created recently – during last hour/day/week/month). This might be required for ad-hoc reports and for automation scenarios – like applying required configurations or assign some property value to all newly created sites.

With GUI it’s done easily: SharePoint Admin Center -> Active Sites -> sort based on “Date Created” – done.

With PowerShell – not so simple.
“Get-PnPTenantSite” cmdlet returns a site object but the object does not have “Created” field. It’s a web property (not site property). But to get a web object – you have to connect separately to each site and get root web object to check when the web was created. For small environments it is possible, for large environments it can take days… And still not nice.
“Get-PnPTenantSite” with “-Filter” option would help, but “…Currently, you can filter by these properties: Owner, Template, LockState, Url.”

Get-SPOSite – similar experience.

Teams + Exchange modules can help a little:

Get-Team | select GroupId | % { Get-UnifiedGroup $_.GroupId | select DisplayName, WhenCreated } | sort WhenCreated

but… 1) it’ll give you group-based sites only 2) it is not easy to automate 3) this might take long for large environments. I know much better solution:

Solution

Microsoft Graph API helps. It returns result in seconds and you can sort or filter results based on created date . Below are two methods: Option 1 is based on Search and filtering and Option 2 is based on Sites Search and sorting. So there are some pros and cons for each method.

Option #1: Microsoft Graph Search API.

Entry point: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/search/query

Microsoft Graph Search API allows KQL in queries. So we can form a query with something like “created>=1/1/2021” and use entity type = ‘[“site”]’. Search should return only sites created after Jan 01, 2021.

Check PowerShell script sample here: Get-NewSites.ps1
https://github.com/VladilenK/PowerShell/blob/main/reports/SharePoint/Get-NewSites.ps1

If you are getting more than 500 results – think of paging.

Option #2: Microsoft Graph Sites API

Entry point: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/sites

This option is also based on Microsoft Graph API, but sites entry point, which allows search too and sort results by property “createdDateTime”. So we will just search for everything and select how many results we need based on createdDateTime property.

Check PowerShell script sample here: Get-NewSites.ps1
https://github.com/VladilenK/PowerShell/blob/main/reports/SharePoint/Get-NewSites.ps1

Option #3: Microsoft SharePoint delta API

You can use “Get delta” under SharePoint Graph API – check for details here. It says “Get newly created, updated, or deleted sites without having to perform a full read of the entire sites collection”. I’ll do my own testing, but for now check this:
Video: Microsoft Graph Delta Capabilities in SharePoint API

References

Video tutorial:

DepartmentId for Enterprise Intranet Portal – Home Site and Search Scope and Relevance

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Scenario

Your organization use Microsoft 365. You are implementing or configuring an Intranet Portal (Home Site). Search plays an important role here – you want search be relevant to the context – i.e.

  • Official Results – if a user searches something on a company’s intranet portal – user expect “official” results, not a something from somebody’s OneDrive or Yammer chat
  • Promoted Results – so information management team can adjust search with search answers – Bookmarks, Acronyms and Q&As

Problem

Microsoft Bookmarks are working only at tenant level search – i.e. if you want bookmarks work on site level search – you need to set up site search scope as tenant.

So if you configure the Intranet Portal site (Home site) search scope to “site” or “hub” to limit results with site/hub content – you will loose “answers” functionality.

Solution

The solution is very simple:

  • Keep site search scope as tenant-wide to use answers (boormarks), and
  • Configure search verticals and query to limit results to “official” sites only

Update Query field with KQL – e.g., with something like

(path:http//contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/IntranetPortal/ OR path:http//contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/CompanyNews/ OR path:http//contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/Onboarding)/)

to get results only from “Intranet Portal” and “Company News” sites.

Keep in mind that this will affect all other SharePoint search entry points – SharePoint landing page, Office.com etc. – so although you can configure All (and Files) verticals, but it’s not recommended. It will confuse users – they expect to search for everything under “All” vertical. Instead, consider custom vertical – e.g. “Official” scope.

After configuring – It might take 1-24 hours for the change to take effect, depending on tenant size.

Service vs Site search

If you configure that at the tenant level – i.e., Microsoft 365 Administration -> Settings -> Search and intelligence ->  Customizations -> Verticals
then search results will be trimmed everywhere  – SharePoint Landing Page, Office landing page (Office.com), Office App, Bing search.
Teams search will not be affected as from Teams you only search for teams content. Same for Onedrive and Yammer.

If you want the “official” search results only under Intranet Portal and leave other search entry points unaffected – then
you need to configure the same at Home (Intranet Portal) site level: Site Settings -> Microsoft Search -> Configure search settings -> Verticals
and configure site search scope to site or hub scope. But in this case you will loose answers functionality.

Global search settings – like acronyms, bookmarks and verticals – works only if site search scope is tenant.
If site search scope is site or hub – then site-level search verticals will apply (and no answers functionality will be possible).

Home site is a root site

There might be two problems with that:

  1. if a home site configured as a root site – you KQL will look like(path:http//contoso.sharepoint.com/ OR path:http//contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/CompanyNews)and that query will not work as any site Url will match the root site Url.
  2. if you need to mention many sites in KQL – like 50 sites with an Official Information – you might hit the “number of allowed character” limit

The solution is DepartmentId property:

DepartmentId

Use DepartmentId={<Hub Site ID>} in the KQL qury and your search results will be limited to your hub content while answers will still be working too. You can even combine DepartmentId with other conditions to add more sites (that are not in hub) to search scope:

(DepartmentId={4965d9be-929b-411a-9281-5662f5e09d49} OR path:http//contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/Onboarding OR path:http//contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/CompanyNews)

It worth to mention, that DepartmentId is the property that propagated from the root of the hub site to all associated sites and their content – list items, documents and pages.

Site Property Bag

Another possible option would be – site property bag…
The ultimate goal is to provide users with “Official” results only. But official sites might not be all part of one Home site hub. We can include in All search vertical query 10, 50, 100 sites, but what if we have 10k official sites in enterprise – e.g. operated by different departments – and all of them might want to be present in search results.
So, how about – if the site is considered official – we create an indexed site property, e.g. “SiteIsOfficial” with a value “Yes”. Then we map the crawled property to a managed property – e.g. RefinableString89 – and use this managed search property in query – e.g. (SiteIsOfficial=Yes).

This is actually clever idea, but this does not work… This query would only return sites, not sites content. E.g. what was indexed as site object – will be included (including home page). But site items – i.a. documents, lists, other pages – all site content – will not be included…

So let’s get back to DepartmentId…

Rename All Vertical

Again – the ultimate goal is to give users option to have “Official” results. But they still might want to be able to search through all content.
What if we rename the default “All” vertical to “Home Site” and configure query for official results only.
Then we can create a custom vertical called “Everything” or “All” with no query limitations to give users all reasults

Update: not a good idea either… If the home site search scope is tenant – so verticals are configured and be visible at tenant level – i.e. everywhere…

Separate Official Vertical

My personal preference is to keep All vertical as real All, and create a custom Vertical “Official” for official results only where we would use query trick.

In addition, it would be nice to highlight results from official sources by using custom result type – check “Manage result layouts for SharePoint results in Microsoft Search”

Update: Restricted SharePoint Search

There is a new feature in Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online – “Restricted SharePoint Search“. With Restricted SharePoint Search you can restrict organization-wide search to a curated set of “allowed” SharePoint sites – sites that you have checked the permissions and applied data governance for.

Resources:

Retrieve SharePoint Online system page html content programmatically (PowerShell)

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How can I get HTML content of a SharePoint online page from code, e.g. PowerShell?

Invoke-WebRequest returns “Sign in to your account” page, not a real page, even with -Token option.

Thanks to Denis Molodtsov, the solution is found. It turns out the “Invoke-PnPSPRestMethod” PnP cmdlet works not only against /api endpoints, but also against site pages and system pages.

But (as per my experience) it works only with PnP.PowerShell and with -UseWebLogin authentication option and with -raw parameter.

Connect-PnPOnline -url $siteUrl -UseWebLogin
Invoke-PnPSPRestMethod -url /_layouts/15/viewlsts.aspx -Raw

Other combination of authentication options ( -interactive, -clientId, -Token, -SPOManagementShell, -PnPManagementShell ) – worked well, but only for /_api endpoints, and gave me “401 UNAUTHORIZED” against system/site pages.
Unattended authentication (with clientId, clientSecret and certificate) – same.

Legacy PnP module SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline did not work at all: “EXCEPTION,PnP.PowerShell.Commands.Admin.InvokeSPRestMethod”.

I tested it with
– SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline v 3.29.2101.0 (under Windows PowerShell 5.1) and
– PnP.PowerShell 1.8.0. (both Windows PowerShell 5.1 and .net core PowerShell 7.1.5)

PowerShell Script to Fetch All Alerts from SharePoint Online Site

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Microsoft announced SharePoint Alerts retirement. Starting from October 2025 – the SharePoint Alert expiration feature will be gradually activated. In January 2026 Microsoft will turn off creation of new SharePoint Alerts (gradually). In July 2026 the ability to use SharePoint Alerts will be removed.

How do we know how many alerts are configured in our tenant? Can we get a report on all alerts of all users from all tenant SharePoint sites?

Approaches are:

  • use Microsoft 365 Assessment tool (they have a mode to get all alerts – here is the doc)
    Microsoft 365 Assessment tool is a great tool, but it is an .exe software, so in large orgs it might be difficult to use it and it requires admin’s permissions to run
  • use custom PowerShell scripts – this option might help if you
    – need a specific report format/data/columns
    – want to quickly get report on alerts for a specific site or site/user
    – can run the script as a site collection admin/owner (does not require tenant admin permissions)

PnP.PowerShell-based script

You’d just use “Get-PnPAlert” cmdlet. That is it.

It requires connection to a specific site, and it allows to get all alerts for the specific user, all alerts for the specific library and all alerts for all users and all lists/libraries:

Get-PnPAlert -AllUsers

The cmdlet returns an alert object with the following properties: AlertFrequency, AlertTemplateName, AlertTime,AlertType,AllProperties,AlwaysNotify,DeliveryChannels,EventType,Filter,ID,Item,ItemID,List,ListID,ListUrl,Properties,Status,Title,User,UserId,Context,Tag,Path

If you need to get all alerts from all tenant sites – just do the same in a loop. Here is the example:
https://github.com/VladilenK/m365-PowerShell/blob/main/reports/Site/Get-Site-Alerts.PnP.ps1

CSOM-based PowerShell script

This is an old-style CSOM-based script we used before PnP designed their beautiful cmdlet. Notice that what took 20 lines of code PnP implemented in one cmdlet.

PowerShell Script to get All Alerts of all Users from a specific SharePoint Online Site Collection, including subsites:

https://github.com/VladilenK/PowerShell/blob/main/reports/Site/Fetch-All-Alerts-from-SPO-Site.ps1

( raw: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/VladilenK/PowerShell/main/reports/Site/Fetch-All-Alerts-from-SPO-Site.ps1 )

it is based on Salaudeen Rajack’s script:
“SharePoint Online: Get All Alerts from a Site Collection using PowerShell“
I updated authentication part, so now the script support both MFA and password-only based authentications

Connect to SharePoint Online and MS Graph Interactively with Client App and MSAL token

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Scenario

You have a Microsoft 365 subscription with SharePoint Online. You use PowerShell, PnP.PowerShell module and MS Graph API to work with SharePoint under current user’s credential. You need to authenticate to SharePoint Online via Connect-PnPOnline and to Microsoft Graph API interactively on behalf of a current user.

Problem

Unfortunately, both “Connect-PnPOnline -Interactive -Url <siteUrl>” or “Connect-PnPOnline -UseWebLogin -Url <siteUrl>” might fail with something like “Need admin approval”, “App needs permission to access resources in your organization that only an admin can grant. Please ask an admin to grant permission to this app before you can use it.” or “Permissions requested” or similar

Solution

  • register an Azure App. Choose “single tenant”
  • configure authentication blade:
    – add platform – “Mobile and Desktop app”
    – select “https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/nativeclient”
    – add custom Redirect URI: “http://localhost”
  • configure API permissions blade:
    – add delegated permissions you need (refer to specific API you’ll use)
    e.g. Microsoft Graph Sites.FullControl.All and SharePoint AllSites.FullControl
  • use the following code samples

PnP.PowerShell

$siteUrl = "https://contoso.sharepoint.com/teams/myTeamsSite"
$appId = "" # Client Id
Connect-PnPOnline -ClientId $appId -Url $siteUrl -Interactive
Get-PnPSite

A pop-up window will appear to authenticate interactively. If you are already authenticated with another credentials (or single-sigh-on) – an interactive window might pop up and disappear – that prevents you enter your other id.
To ensure Connect-PnPOnline prompts you for your credentials – use ” -ForceAuthentication” option.

If you are a SharePoint tenant admin – you can connect to a tenant with:

$orgName = "yourTenantPrefix" 
$adminUrl = "https://$orgName-admin.sharepoint.com" 
$appId = "" # Client Id 
$connection = Connect-PnPOnline -ClientId $appId -Url $adminUrl -Interactive -ReturnConnection # -ForceAuthentication 
$connection

Microsoft Graph API

Use MSAL.PS module to get an msal token then use token in Microsoft graph-based requests:

$tenantId = ""
$clientid = ""
$url = ""
$token = Get-MsalToken -ClientId $clientid -TenantId $tenantId -Interactive

By default token expires in ~ 1 hour. But you can refresh it silently.
This helps you in long-running PowerShell scripts that takes hours to complete.
So you can include something like this in the loop:

if ($token.ExpiresOn.LocalDateTime -lt $(get-date).AddMinutes(10)) {    
  $token = Get-MsalToken -ClientId $clientid -TenantId $tenantId -ForceRefresh -Silent    
  Write-Host "Token will expire on:" $token.ExpiresOn.LocalDateTime
}

Application permissions

Somehow using Connect-PnPOnline with AccessToken option did not work if the token was acquired with MSAL.PS interactively. But it did work when you get msal.ps token unattended (using App credentials). So…

If you can get an Application (non Delegated) permissions to your azure-registerd-app,
you can use msal token to connect to site with PnP

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

NB: For delegated permissions, the effective permissions of your app are the intersection of the delegated permissions the app has been granted (via consent) and the privileges of the currently signed-in user. Your app can never have more privileges than the signed-in user.

Track SharePoint App-only Service Principals in Microsoft 365

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Update (Feb 2025):
A new KBA: Azure ACS retirement: Track down ACS apps

Update (May 2023):
You can use Get-PnPAzureACSPrincipal to returns the lists of all Azure ACS principals installed in your Tenant including subsites.

Update: Sites.Selected API MS Graph permissions was introduced by Microsoft in 2021. It was a good move towards site-level development, but still developers were limited with only what MS Graph API provides for SharePoint dev.
So devs had to use AppInv.aspx at site level to provide ACS permissions to their apps to be able to use SharePoint CSOM and REST APIs.
Recently Microsoft introduced Sites.Selected SharePoint API permissions for registered Azure Apps! So now devs should be fully happy without ACS-based permissions.

Update: I’m not sure when Microsoft implemented that, but I recently found another Record Type – “SharePointAppPermissionOperation”. There is an Activity type – AppPermissionGrant…
To be explored…

After all the updates the original article below is probably obsolete…

Scenario

Developers in the organization can use both – Azure Apps and SharePoint Apps to work with SharePoint sites in their “daemon” applications.

It is recommended to use Azure apps so, you want to know – what are SharePoint Apps registered and their owners, who registered SharePoint Apps. Eventually you would disable SharePoint Apps-only principal but before that you’d move Devs from SP-App-only to Azure App (see Disable Custom App Authentication).

(SharePoint App-only service principals aka SP-App-Only are SPN or App registered from within SharePoint using AppRegNew.aspx system page).

One of the approaches is to track Apps/Owners (or who register an app) with Unified Audit Log

Use Unified Audit Logs

The following PowerShell code:

$operations = 'Add service principal.'
$recordType = 'AzureActiveDirectory'
Search-UnifiedAuditLog -StartDate $start -EndDate $end -ResultSize $resultSize -Formatted -Operations $operations -RecordType $recordType

returns events with operation = ‘Add service principal.’ Nice, but…
if an app was registered in Azure – event contains an UPN under UserIds property:

Unfortunately, in case with registering app in SharePoint, an audit log event will be like:

i.e. UserId registered is “spo_service@support.onmicrosoft.com”, so we do not know who registered a SharePoint-only app

In theory – we could use events recorded immediately before and after “Add service principal” event to track a user and site who has registered a SharePoint-only app… But for me it seems like too complicated for automation.

Instead we can do simple search through audit log for events “AppRegNew.aspx page visited”. This gives us a good approximation of who registered SP-App-only principal. Worst scenario – we reach more people than we really need (including those who started registering sp-app-only but did not complete) but all of them would be definitely our target auditory.

Consider the following code:

$freeText = "appregnew"
$operations = 'PageViewed'
$recordType = 'SharePoint'

$results = Search-UnifiedAuditLog -StartDate $start -EndDate $end -ResultSize $resultSize -FreeText $freeText -Operations $operations -RecordType $recordType

this would give you all users who loaded “/_layouts/15/appregnew.aspx” page

References