A Knowledge Management Zealot Speaks Out
I’ve been using PnP.PowerShell for years (once Todd Klindt showed me how awesome it is), and I thought I knew most of the tricks. Then Copilot showed me something so simple that I immediately wondered how I’d missed it all this time. Yes, you’re hearing it from me: Copilot taught an experienced PnP.PowerShell user something...
A few days ago I stumbled across something I hadn’t seen before: a Microsoft Support article titled “Create and manage official Brand kits in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app“, thanks to fellow MVP Natanael Mignon posting about it in a conversation we were having in the MVP channels. I tossed it into our internal The Water Cooler chat...
File this in the category of things I didn’t think would ever work. This was definitely a ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ situation: I tried a bunch of other approaches before I hit on this one. Here’s the scenario: We have multiple sites, where each site represents what we at Sympraxis tend to call...
Last Thursday, July 9, my eagle-eyed colleague Julie Turner alerted me to something that Kasper Larsen talked about on the Copilot, Microsoft 365 & Power Platform call at (15:17). In many recent versions of PnP Modern Search, there was a bug which enabled the default extensibility library for all PnP Search Results Web Parts which...
Pulling data out of tables in Excel is a great capability in Power Automate flows. We often use it to load SharePoint lists as part of ongoing processes (monthly, quarterly, annually, etc.) Many times we build these flows with a small amount of data in Excel, but then over time the data grows, and we hit a threshold. The hard part is often realizing this has happened to you. It happened to me…
As SharePoint Administrators, we ought to be able to access the Content Type Hub out-of-the-box. But I’ve found in multiple tenants over the years that I can’t. One of the first indications of the problem is when I try to create a new Content Type in the SharePoint Admin Center and get this error. You...
This is a fun challenge. I’ve run into this multiple times and always just thrown up my hands after a while. This time, I decided to dig deeper, and my pal Lauri Ellis at Microsoft dug up a solution for me via the MVP channels. Occasionally, we end up with a Team Site which had an...
This is truly one of the best tricks I’ve learned in all the years I’ve been using SharePoint. When you refresh a page, it can take 8-10 (or more) seconds before the gear (aka cog) is visible. This first animation shows the normal timing. But if you simply click on your name or face, the...
Some settings in SharePoint don’t make a lot of sense. And sometimes they bite you. There are a few little-known settings in the SharePoint Admin Center for pages. These are tenant-level settings: By default, both settings are checked – they are enabled. The second one about commenting makes some sense: since comments are pretty much...
This is a quick one, but I’ve done it enough times, I figured I should write it up. If you’ve landed here because of searching, I hope I’m making your day go better. Have you ever navigated to a SharePoint site you’ve been to hundreds of times and gotten the dreaded 404 NOT FOUND error?...
Document Sets are one of the best things in SharePoint. They help you manage a set of documents which have more value together than separately. They also give you some great special capabilities beyond what a folder can provide: All that said, Microsoft says they don’t see enough usage to justify investments in them. (See...
Until recently, one of the easiest ways to get "into" Microsoft 365 was to go to Office.com. I'll readily admit that I never spent any time on the page, mainly because most of my time in Microsoft 365 is spent building sites, pages, libraries, etc.
Microsoft modernized Document Sets a few years ago – sort of. They really didn’t finish the job, and they seem to be under the impression that few people use Document Sets. Everyone I know who understands good Information Architecture (IA) knows about Document Sets, and they use them when they make sense – which can...
Sharing content in SharePoint using links is a great capability. Microsoft has worked over the years to make the process simple to use, and we even see the same sharing dialog in SharePoint and on our PCs when we share using Windows Explorer. As tenant owners, we can set the default type of sharing link...
Last Thursday, I did a webinar with ShareGate covering the upcoming changes for unlicensed OneDrives: Race against the OneDrive clock: How to stay ahead of Microsoft’s deadline I tried to cover many aspects of the upcoming changes, which are primarily outlined in this article from Microsoft: Manage unlicensed OneDrive user accounts – SharePoint in Microsoft...
Recently as I've been editing SharePoint pages, I've noticed that the Discard changes button is missing in the toolbar. It's a tiny little thing, and I just assumed that it was an occasional bug. But now that the new experience has rolled out to more tenants I work in, I've realized it's a real change, not just a bug.
There has been a lot of confusion about what's happened to the SharePoint Lookbook. I've found myself explaining the story to many people, so I thought capturing it in a blog post might be helpful: if only so I can refer people to it instead of typing again.
One of the downsides of being immersed in the Microsoft 365 platform is I develop habits based on how the platform worked historically. One of these is my choice to use Sync with Document Libraries exclusively, instead of Add shortcut to OneDrive. (Note that the language on this “button” has changed over time, but as...
If you’ve been using SharePoint for a while, you know that newly added content may not show up in search results immediately. These days, you my most directly notice this with News Posts in roll up News Web Parts or simply using the Microsoft Search box at the top of every page. Microsoft 365 had...
Over the last few months - since around January - I've needed to enable Global Navigation in a SharePoint Home Site as part of three new Intranet launches. In each case, it took a VERY long time to take effect and/or didn't happen until I worked with Microsoft to come up with an unexpected fix.
One thing you learn very early on in consulting (if you don’t – uh-oh!) is that organizational cultures vary drastically. There are many different dimensions to this. Some organizations are very open and honest – perhaps to a fault – and others tend to keep most things hidden from other groups or people. Regardless of...
I think this is going to really boost how fast we can build data collection for lists with no dev at all: Collect information like a pro New Microsoft Lists forms experience in Microsoft 365 Until this rolls out, we have had several approaches we could use (and there may be others): Each of these...
Knowledge management (KM) is hard. This has been proven to me many times over the last 30 or so years I've been paying attention to the concepts. With the announcement of the abrupt retirement of Viva Topics as of February 22, 2025, I've been thinking about the history of KM solutions from Microsoft and where they have all gone.
When we build a new Home Site in a client tenant, usually for a new Intranet, we generally build that new site off in a corner, so it’s not exposed or in the way while we build it. This process can take a few weeks, months or even longer, and while we’re working on things,...
Today I noticed something that threw me for a loop. I created a garden variety Team Site and saw that the home page was named CollabHome.aspx. Home pages have been named Home.aspx in SharePoint forever. I did some searching and came up with nothing for “CollabHome.aspx”. One would thing there would be something documented about...
Today one of my clients had a problem. One of her SharePoint sites was missing. She found it in Deleted sites in the SharePoint Admin Center. Restoring the site from the Deleted sites is an easy fix, of course: she had already done that on her own. But none of the Site Owners or Site...
Content Types are a fundamental building block in SharePoint. Every object you upload or create in a SharePoint list or library gets a Content Type assigned to it, whether you realize it or not. If you create an item in a list, by default, it gets the Item Content Type. If you upload a file...
Today I needed to create an array of all the dates in a data range in PowerShell. It’s a simple little thing. Maybe I should have asked Github Copilot, but I’m old skool, so I wrote it myself. (I also haven’t gotten used to having a virtual assistant!) The reason I even needed to do...
Here’s the scenario: we have a site called Clients where we track potential clients and store files we get from them during discussions. Once they become an actual client, we create a Team Site, connect it to Teams, and we move the files into that site. For years, this has frustrated me no end because...
You might be surprised by the title of this post. Isn’t our goal to get everyone’s content *into* SharePoint? Usually that’s the case, for sure. But many times, in the course of a migration from an older (usually on premises) version of SharePoint, we identify whole sites or branches of subsites that simply don’t have...
Back in October, I was lucky enough to visit my friends at ShareGate, along with fellow MVPs Jasper Oosterveld (@jappie1981) and Maarten Eekels (@maarteneekels) We had several conversations with ShareGate’s Laurent St. Pierre (@laurent_sp), and those were recorded and released as a series of videos: The evolution of IT: Improving digital employee experience to boost...
Recently, one of my clients pinged me because she wasn’t seeing any items in a list she knew had many items in it. She’s used the list many times in the past and she hadn’t changed any of the view settings. I did all the usual stuff: I could see all the items in the...
SharePoint lists & libraries: we all love ’em. With multiple views, they are like little apps. [Why the heck do lists have a brand and logo but libraries don’t? And why aren’t the two just considered simply variations on a concept by Microsoft?] Do you find yourself using both the modern & classic view settings?...
Orchestry is a partner of ours at Sympraxis. (Ask us about them anytime!) We love their toolset and recommend them frequently to our clients to improve their governance and provisioning activities. The stuff they build is incredibly powerful – and reliable. That’s why I was really surprised when I added the Orchestry People List Web...
Another day, another opportunity to spackle the walls of SharePoint where there’s a hole. Wouldn’t it be great if you could go somewhere in the SharePoint Admin Center to see all the places you’ve used a particular Web Part in pages? Well, you can’t, so PowerShell. PnP.PowerShell, in fact. You may be considering migrating your...
When you set a User Profile property with PowerShell, and it has a format of Date no year, how should you pass in the values? In other words, do you pass in the year, and it just gets lopped off or do you just pass in the day, like “November 10”? In many cases you...
In my recent post Using Content Types in SharePoint’s Site Pages Library, I mentioned using interstitial Content Types, but didn’t explain what I meant. Taking advantage of the Content Type hierarchy is an important part of a powerful information architecture, regardless whether you’re working with documents, list items, pages, etc. I’ve talked about this in...
In a modern SharePoint site, we only get one Site Pages library. We can’t create additional libraries which contain aspx pages which act like that special Site Pages library. If we could, we could meet a whole lot of interesting use cases, but it’s not an option. One thing we *can* do is add additional...
Recently, I wanted to create some new Content Types for videos in a SharePoint site. In the old days, we would inherit from the Video Content Type and create our own variations on that theme, maybe Company Meeting Recording, or Team Meeting, whatever “flavors” of Video we might have. I admit that thinking preceded the...
It would seem like the simplest thing in the world: show results in the PnP Modern Search Results Web Part in alphabetical order. My wanting to do this led to multiple conversations with my search guru Mikael Svenson (@mikaelsvenson) and the uncovering of some really useful variants on RefinableString in the SharePoint Online Managed Properties....
Modern SharePoint gives us few options from a design perspective. That sounds horrible, right? Actually, I see it as a very positive thing. By taking the pixel-pushing out of the mix, we can get people to focus on CONTENT, which is the do or die part of any Intranet. Over the years, I was able...
SharePoint Location columns have some issues which are pervasive and repeatable. One of the purportedly biggest benefits of using one of these columns is we can type in an address, and it’s looked up in Bing Maps. What’s supposed to happen is the details of that location are then parsed out and made available for...
PnP.PowerShell is one of my favorite tools of the trade. I’ve had to set up multiple machines for myself or others for this lately, and I always find myself looking for the fastest path to glory. Usually, it takes about 9 articles and 15 blind alleys, so I figured I’d capture what seems to work...
Lately, every time I have shared my screen on a Teams Meeting with other Sympraxians, they have told me my screen looks awful and I should stop sharing. It sounded unpleasant, but I couldn’t see what they were seeing. Today, with help from the awesome Emily Mancini (@eemancini), I figured out the issue. From a...
Working in a client tenant today, I noticed a new suggestion in the SharePoint Admin Center I hadn’t seen before. It’s certainly possible it’s been around for a while, but it was new to me. The tenant where I’m working has been around since at least 2015. That means it was created with a classic...
Another day, another weird SharePoint problem. We’re working on a client Intranet, and just launched it yesterday. Everything works great and the client is happy. But, as is often the case, we needed to make a few tweaks to the Site Nav based on user feedback. (An Intranet is never done, folks.) If you look...
This is something which has come up in several contexts in the last few months, so I figured I’d put virtual pen to virtual paper and record it for future me and all of you. If you’ve ever tried to embed content from an external source in a SharePoint page using the Embed Web Part,...
This is something that’s happened to me in multiple tenants recently. When I delete a News Post which I’ve created in a Hub Site, the post never goes away in the News Web Part. It always seems to be a post we’ve created as some sort of point-proving demo, too. You know, with a title...
At Sympraxis, we often work with clients who have been using SharePoint for a long time. In many of these cases, they have been using SharePoint basically as a cloud-based file server. At some point in the past, they have done a lift and shift from “on premises” servers (wherever they may live) into SharePoint...
Last week, we had a client wondering why they saw this in the Search & Intelligence Admin Center. Not only was Top queries showing “No data”, but there was “No data” for No results queries and Abandoned queries, too. This was the case even when we changed the filter from the last 31 days to...