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From December 1 until December 24 2016, I will post some small and helpful articles about Office 365 (mainly on SharePoint, but also on some of the other new technologies) on a daily basis. This may be some guidance on how to use certain features, a little code snippet to automate a task, or something else that I think may be helpful to you.

Below, you will find all the articles once they are posted (articles will go-live on a daily basis at 8am GMT).

Office 365 Advent Calendar - 24 Office 365: Overview of Services and Applications

I’ll finish this year’s Office 365 Advent Calendar with a small overview of the Office 365 Services and Applications. Basically, the following document contains all current services and applications with a short description. You can use this document as a starting point for your organization, your customer, or anyone...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 23 Bulk-updating File Extensions in SharePoint Online with PowerShell

Scenario

A short while ago, I had to update a fairly large number of documents in multiple libraries in a SharePoint Online site. Problem was that their file extension was .html which doesn’t display in the browser if stored in SharePoint Online, but rather these files get downloaded upon opening....Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 22 Modern and Classic Experience in SharePoint Online

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced and rolled out the modern experience for lists. They didn’t stop at that, but also introduced modern pages and sites. But what are the differences to the ‘classic experiences’, so the type of lists, libraries, pages,...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 21 Get all Instances of a Web Part in a SharePoint Online Site

Scenario

Sometimes you may need to figure out where a specific type of web part has been used. Today, I’ll show you how you can check all pages in your Site Pages library for a specific web part.

I’ve had this code for a while as I was looking for some...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 20 Get notified about new SharePoint Online Site Collection Administrators

If your organization provides business users with the possibility to manage sites themselves by assigning them site collection administrator rights, you may want to know if they add anyone else as site collection administrator. While you could run a script regularly to retrieve a list of all site collection...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 19 Auditing External Sharing in SharePoint Online

When it comes to sharing content with external parties in SharePoint Online, setting up sharing can be done easily. But what if you want to get some details on who shared which content with which external party, for example for compliance or audit reasons?

The good news is that this...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 18 Adding a Web Part to a SharePoint Online Page with PowerShell

Scenario

You’ve got a Web Part which you want to add to one, but more likely multiple web part pages in a SharePoint Online Site. Or maybe even on multiple pages across multiple sites. You could do this manually, but adding the same web part with the same configuration over...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 17 Overview of the new OneDrive for Business Admin Portal

At the Microsoft Ignite conference in September, it was announced that OneDrive for Business would get its own Admin Portal in Office 365. Yesterday, Microsoft finally made it available, even though it’s in Preview at the moment. See the official announcement here, and access it at Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 16 Adoption Guide for Office 365

Having access to a technology is not enough, the users and the company should see some benefits from it in order to achieve some value out of this investment. This is something that is often forgotten when we work with SharePoint or Office 365 – the wonderful new feature...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 15 Activating Publishing Features on SharePoint Online Sites with PowerShell

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Scenario

Activating SharePoint’s Publishing features can easily be done on a single site collection or site. But what if you need to activate Publishing on a hierarchy of subsites, or across multiple site collections?

Code

Once again, we’re using the PnP PowerShell cmdlets.

First some basics. The ‘main’ feature to activate is the PublishingSite feature on...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 14 Exporting SharePoint Online List/Library Details

Well, this is a bit embarrassing. Yesterday, for the first time, I didn’t verify if my scheduled blog post got published properly. And yesterday, also for the first time, it didn’t get published. I made a small scheduling mistake (it’s not 2017 yet…), so the 14th December post comes...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 13 Useful Office 365 Sessions from Microsoft Ignite

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End of September, the Microsoft Ignite conference took place in Atlanta with hundreds of sessions across a huge rang of Microsoft products. The great news is that these sessions are available on demand for anyone to view! If you’re interested in taking them offline, have a...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 12 Get External Sharing Details for SharePoint Online Sites

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Scenario

SharePoint Online allows you to share your content with external parties – that is, if sharing is allowed on the tenant level as well as on the site collection level. But if you allow external sharing on the tenant level, how can you easily see for which site collection...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 11 Adding sample items with random data to a SharePoint Online List

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Scenario

Sometimes you want to create some random sample data to be used in a SharePoint Online list. For example, in yesterday’s post I was using a list with some data which I entered manually, but I thought afterwards that I could’ve scripted it to create many more items in...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 10 SmartFilters and Grouping in SharePoint Online Modern Lists

Microsoft has just started rolling out a new feature called Smart Filters to SharePoint Online tenants with First Release enabled, all tenants will see it in January. Smart Filters are available in Modern Lists, and allow you to filter from a sidebar pane to easily and quickly...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 09 Staying up to date on Office 365 Changes


When you use Office 365, there’s on thing that’s certain: change is constant, new functionalities get introduced all the time, and the pace of updates is much higher than in your own environment. In this post, I’m showing you how you can stay up to date on any...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 08 Get Versioning Details for all Lists in a SharePoint Online Site


Scenario

By default, libraries in SharePoint Online keep the last 500 major versions of a item, but lists have no versioning turned on. And while you can easily finetune the settings for all lists and libraries in a site, it may be good to know how versioning is set on...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 07 External Sharing for SharePoint Online FAQ

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SharePoint Online provides you with the option to share content (sites, lists/libraries, documents) with externals – partners, vendors, customers, basically anyone outside your organization. Here are some Frequently Asked Question I’ve seen regularly:

 

How do I get started with learning more about External Sharing?

To get started, review the following...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 06 Bulk-Uploading Files with Metadata to SharePoint Online

Scenario

A very common scenario is that you have multiple files that need to be added to SharePoint together with some metadata.  One way of achieving this is by uploading all files to the target library, and then using the Quick Edit functionality to update the metadata for them. However, this is...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 05 Exporting large SharePoint Online List to Excel

Scenario

You have a list in SharePoint Online with more than 5,000 items, potentially much more than that. And you now plan to export all that data into Excel, for example for further analysis. The question now is – how do you get all that data out of SharePoint and into Excel?...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 04 Moving/Copying files within SharePoint Online Libraries

Scenario

You have a couple of files within a SharePoint Online document library which you want to move within the same library, for example to a new folder.

Steps

Note: The following steps are only available in the ‘Modern Experience’ for document libraries. If you’re still using the ‘Classic Experience’ (for example...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 03 Programatically accessing a SharePoint Online Recycle Bin

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Scenario

You’ve got a big amount of items in the recycle bin of a site which you want to access. For example, a user accidentally deleted hundreds of files, and now you want to restore them back easily. Or you have a thousand items in the recycle bin and you...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 02 Retrieving SharePoint Online Site Collection Sizes

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Scenario

You want to get an overview of the storage usage of all site collections in your tenant, similar to what you can see in the “SharePoint Administration” section in Office 365. But as you may have hundreds of site collections, or as you want to pass on that information...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 01 Getting all Permissions Levels in SharePoint Online

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Scenario

You want to get an overview of all Permission Levels that are set up in your tenant’s SharePoint Online site collections. Not only the out-of-the-box permission such as “Full Control” or “Read”, but also any custom permission levels which may have been defined by your site collection’s administrators (“Add Only”...Read More »


Office 365 Advent Calendar - 24 Days of Goodies

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Christmas is approaching, and I’ve decided to spread some joy and share some knowledge  by running an Office 365 Advent Calendar on my blog from December 1 – December 24 2016! This means that on each of these days in December, I’ll publish a small blog post with some Office 365...Read More »