I saw a demo of it on the European SharePoint Conference in Copenhagen in 2018. Sebastian Fouillade, who showed this, compared this big change with brain surgery. All the urls, all the connections. But now it is possible. Today I have seen it even in my standard release tenant.
It is really appreciated. Soon it will be possible to rename misspelled sites, like “devlepment” to “development” etc.
To rename you need to go the SharePoint Admin, find your site among Active sites and click on “Edit” in the site url area.
I also can image, it will be very handy to change the url of a SharePoint site that was automatically created for a Team (through the Office 365 Group). The team might have some longer name, but a simpler url is often appreciated.
I have tried and seen that also the automatic redirects from an old site url to a new site url works.
Caveats and Limitations
mailNickname ≠ site url
Now it is even more important to not to rely on the fact that mailNickname of an Office 365 Group and Site url are the same. As Elio Struyf describes, it is not a good idea to compose a URL from the group name. I have used in PoCs the site url to get the group id:
Now it the amount of cases where it will work, will be less.
Not all site types can change url
I have found that the App Catalog site cannot get a new url, neither sites with Publishing Features.
The official message from Microsoft
We’re making it possible for SharePoint administrators to change site URLs.
We’ll be gradually rolling this out to customers in mid-October.
The roll out will be completed worldwide by the end of October.
This roll out does not apply to Office 365 subscriptions for EDU tenants.
This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 56205.How does this affect me?
As a global or SharePoint admin in your organization, you will be able to change the URL for the following types of sites (previously called “site collections”):
Classic team sites
Communication sites
Modern team sites that don’t belong to an Office 365 group
Office 365 group-connected team sites
For example, if you have a site named https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/Develpment, you can rename the site to correct the incorrect spelling of “development” via the SharePoint admin center.
Automatically-generated redirects will ensure that old links do not break.What do I need to do to prepare for this change?
There is nothing you need to do to prepare for this change, but you may consider updating your user training and notifying your help desk.
A non-admin user can create no more than 250 resources in Azure AD. That is one of the many Azure AD service limits and restrictions. A “resource” can be an app registration, an Office 365 Group etc. But I would like to discuss Groups more in detail.
Imagine the following scenario: Your organization has disabled Office 365 Group Creation. Only IT can create new groups. A service account has been set up for creation of team sites. The application permissions are “binary”, either everything or nothing: Group.ReadWrite.All. This service account will hit the limit very soon.
To prove that, I have created a small script that creates 251 groups.
By the way, just for clarification, when create a new group, that will also create a SharePoint site.
Please don’t try this with your real account in production. The 251st request will fail:
Directory_QuotaExceeded
The directory object quota limit for the Principal has been exceeded. Please ask your ad ministrator to increase the quota limit or delete objects to reduce the used quota.
Even if you remove, it will take time to get free slots in this limit:
Deleted Azure AD resources that are no longer available to restore count toward this quota at a value of one-quarter for 30 days.
There is not much to do about it. For App Registrations you can create and assign a custom role. But for groups there is no custom roles available.
Exceptions
It might be obvious, but still:
Admins
Admins do not have this limit. But not all “admin roles” are really admins. Those roles are excepted:
Global Admin
SharePoint Admin
…
Those roles are not excepted:
Message Center Reader
…
I don’t have time to try every admin role, but I suppose only admins that can change global configuration, are excepted, not the reader ones.
Communication Sites
Since communication sites do not have an Office 365 Group behind the scenes, a non-admin user will still be able to create such sites even after the limit is hit.
Workarounds and Solutions
Since my scenario for creating groups with a service account does not work, we need to seek workarounds and solutions.
Do not restrict Group Creation
That is the best one. If users can create groups/sites by themselves, then none of this would be a problem. But still, in my scenario, there is a business requirement to control the creation of groups.
Application Permissions Group.ReadWrite.All
That is exactly the opposite of my scenario. This gives that application full access to all groups and files (!). This means, that application can access all Group-Connected SharePoint Sites as well.
Microsoft creates permissions for groups
If we also had “groups” permissions for custom roles, then we could do the same way as with app registrations. Today (2019-10-25), there are only permissions for applications.
Microsoft creates new permission Group.Create.All
If there were a permission for only creating groups, that would solve the problem.
What we have today
There is a similar role: User.Invite.All, it allows only invitations, not editing All Users.
Microsoft allows exceptions per user
If there were a switch for the 250-limit per user, that would also solve the problem.
Granting the service account admin rights
Granting SharePoint Admin would solve the problem, but at what price? That is safer than Application Permissions Group.ReadWrite.All, since you need to actively add this account to the groups in order to read all the files, but this is still less secure than just a non-admin account.
Having multiple service accounts
If we had account 1..100 and we used every account 250 times. Theoretically it should work, but it is a cumbersome process. You need to keep track of how many groups an account as created, or having the right error handling. How should the password be kept safely. Should the accounts be removed when they have reached the 250 limit?
Group Creation Microservice
To overcome the limits and the ungranularity in the built-in permissions in Office 365, one way to solve it would be a tiny, but a dedicated, and secured service for creation of groups (and sites). It would still need the “hefty” Group.ReadWrite.All Application Permissions, but making it do the only thing and do it right, would mitigate the risks.
It could be a simple Azure Function that few have access to. That could be just a couple of lines of code.
Ett nytt tips på svenska: det finns en webpart i SharePoint Online: snabbdiagram.
När du har lagt till ett snabbdiagram, kan du skriva välja mellan stapel och cirkeldiagram
Du kan bara välja mellan stapel- och cirkeldiagram.Data går att mata in direkt.
Resultatet får du direkt:
Använd data från en lista
Det går att visualisera data från en SharePoint-lista. Det är inte så mycket mer komplicerat, men det öppnar nya möjligheter. Du behöver bara hålla listan uppdaterad.
Nyttan med snabbdiagram
Det finns många olika sätt att visualisera data: PowerBI, Excel diagram, man skapa egna webparts. Men det är inte så sällan när man vill bara en liten visuell hjälp för att kommunicera ett budskap. Istället för att fastna på teknikaliteterna, kan man snabbt smälla upp ett diagram. Det gör inte heller att man behöver manuellt uppdatera sidan/listan.
Bra jobbat, Microsoft!
Bara moderna sidor
Snabbdiagram finns bara i “moderna” sidor, inte i klassiska sådana (wikisidor, webbdelssidor).
Mer SharePoint på svenska
Jag tänker använda taggen “svenska” för alla mina poster skrivna på svenska.
Jag har precis börjat med kolumnformatering, bara testat. Det är annorlunda, jag är nöjd med första resultatet. Även om det påminner om jslink som jag har jobbat mycket med, så är det mycket lättare att sätta igång:
Det är enklare att ändra, även för en icke-utvecklare. Man får en början:
Det är tre Ja/Nej-kolumner, som ska sättas till Ja under processen, listan representerar beställningar. Ja/nej-kolumnerna är actions för den som tar emot beställningar. Nej är en tom röd cirkel. Ja är en full grön cirkel. Du kan se koden här.
Det är lätt som en lek att börja med. Det är där för en Citizen Developer, en användare (ägare på siten) kan lätt sätta upp mer visuella vyer. Man behöver inte längre uppdatera JSlink-attributet i kolumnen eller vyn programmatiskt, man behöver inte stoppa in en Script Editor webpart. Med lite meckande av json, kan mycket anpassas. Json som man ändrar valideras direkt.
Om det skulle bli fel (att det inte visar något värde i kolumnen), går det lätt att nollställa formateringen. Jag hade lite problem först med att sätta in alla element på sin rätta plats i json-strukturen, då kändes det bra att kunna ta bort det snabbt, innan man fortsätter att experimentera.
Sammanfattningsvis kan jag säga att det är en intressant och uppskattad funktion i SharePoint för enklare vy-visualiseringar som är lättare att sätta upp och ta bort.
P.S. Vad tycker du om att jag skriver på svenska. Om du vill ha mer innehåll på min blogg på svenska, lämna en kommentar.
Today I will share a short script for getting totals from a list view in SharePoint. Imagine this scenario: you have set up a list view with totals and you want get the totals every day for statistics or some other reasons. Instead of getting all items, and/or fiddling around with CamlQueries, there is a better and quicker way – List.RenderListData. This combined with a tip from Piyush K Singhs blog post Get Aggregate Values… I came up with an idea to read the ViewXml from an existing view and retrieve the totals (in my case Count and Sum). Enough talking, let’s take a look at the code:
The good part of that approach is that you can let your view evolve over time and work together with colleagues on that, your script does not need an update every time you change the view. The only thing it alters is the RowLimit – that’s for better performance. Why load 30 or more list items when 1 is enough.
I have tested it in SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online.
This post is about the default language of a new site in SharePoint Online. There are some pros and cons of using English as the default language for Non-English sites.
In my case I want to know what is better for Swedish users:
A site with English as default and Swedish as an alternate language (among many other alternate languages)?
A site with Swedish as default?
Today, when you create a site, English is pre-selected in the form, you have to choose Swedish actively. When you create a team, the underlying SharePoint Site will have English as the default language.
English is pre-selected when you create a new site
There are a couple of advantages of starting from English:
Stream-lined urls for Document Libraries and Lists. For an admin or a support guy, it is better to know that the Url for the first document library is ../Shared Documents/ and not Delade dokument. It is easier to find things and provide help if needed.
It is less error-prone to create and update Calculated fields from templates.
The disadvantages are:
The choice fields are in English. While the most of the UI is available in all alternate languages by default, the values in choice fields can only be in one language, and it will be in English, e.g. Task status.
More a big caveat: Sort order, a tiny but an important setting for how things should be sorted. More on that below.
Choice Field Values are in English even for a Swedish user
Sort order caveat
If you keep the General Sort Order, the Swedish ÅÄÖ will be treated as AAO, which means Ö-words that are expected to be in the end of a list, will show up in the middle. An important setting for business. And the bad part is you need to change it to Finnish/Swedish Sort Order before you add an indexed column (or a built-in list (e.g. Tasks) that adds indexed columns) .
For a Swedish site (a site where the majority of users are Swedish who expect the right sort order, the very first thing you have to do is to change the sort order (and also the time zone, and 24h clock, and Monday as the first day of week etc). Once you get an indexed column, no matter if you have zero list items, you will get an error like this:
These are my favourite tips and tricks. These are only those who me and my colleguages have tried out.
Architecture tips
Keep it slim
Functions should do one thing and they should do it well. When you develop it in C# and Visual Studio, it is so tempting to develop a “microservice” in a good way, you add interfaces, implement good patterns, and all of a sudden you get a monolith packaged in a microservice. If your function grows, stop, rethink. Better to see how it input and output bindings can be used. Also orchestration with Logic Apps or Durable Functions can help.
Automated Deployment
It might be an obvious one, but it is super easy to setup CI/CD for Azure Functions in Azure DevOps. Set it up as early as possible. Don’t rely on publishing from Visual Studio.
Environments
Different environments like Production and Staging (Test, UAT, QAT, verification), and DEV are not straight forward anymore, when everything is reactive and micro. But it is good to have at least two setups: one for Production and one for Staging. Especially separating the storage accounts has been proven to be a success story. You can have the same queue name, but different connections. Deploying to Staging and Production will be easier. The functions in different “environments” will write/read a queue with the same name but in different storage accounts.
I also find it convenient to have postfix in the azure function names, like collect-shipments-staging and collect-shipments-production.
If it is possible, use separate resource groups for the “environments”.
Instead of adding queue messages in code, define it as an output. You can even add multiple messages. This saves you instantiating of CloudStorageAccount which is a good thing for performance.
Take Last Run into account
Just check the timer parameter: timer.Schedule.Last for the time when your Azure Function ran last.
Reuse HttpClient
This tip is from CloudBurst in Malmö in September 2019. Eventhough your function runs on a consumption plan, the chance is big that your code will run on the same server, which means that you can reuse some resources, like HttpClient.
The issue I got was that indexed columns were there. You can try to remove indexed columns and re-add them. But it is not the best solution. In my scenario, it was an indexed column that I couldn’t remove.
The reason why I use a combination of PnP and CSOM (Load, Update, ExecuteQuery), is that I have not found a way of updating RegionalSettings in PnP.
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