Use Of O365 & SP Online To Build A Perfect Intranet

If you are considering Office 365 as an intranet solution, below are a few applications that you and your team will want to be familiar with:

SharePoint Online

SharePoint Online is an all-important tool for an Office365 intranet, helping organizations share and collaborate with internal employees and external partners, contractors, and customers on any device. With SharePoint Online, you can access internal sites, documents, and other information from anywhere in the world – at the office, at home, or from a mobile device.

Team Sites

SharePoint Team Sites allow you to quickly create code-free sites for different user groups within SharePoint and Office 365 that look great on any device. Team Sites are constructed to be fully customized to your needs. Documents, videos, images, site activities, social media feeds, and more can be added in a couple of clicks. It also gives the ability to add ‘highlighted content’ (which will automatically and dynamically populate in that area of the page). The home page of a SharePoint Online gives you instant visibility into site activity and important documents, while providing a great way to communicate, connect with others, and share ideas.

For more details on SharePoint and Office 365 check out the Top 5 Integration Features of Office 365 and SharePoint Online here.

Microsoft Teams

Similar to Slack, Microsoft Teams has a focus on a chat-based workspace, with social feeds and email chains taking center stage. Its overall goal is to bring together people, conversations, and content, helping to create a more open digital environment that makes work visible, integrated, and accessible. You can easily embed and collaborate over Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneNote, and other Office files. You also get built-in video/voice calling features, so your colleagues can easily arrange meetings remotely. There is also a screen sharing option that makes collaboration easy.

As per Microsoft SharePoint communication sites begin rollout to Office 365 customers

During last month’s SharePoint Virtual Summit, we unveiled SharePoint communication sites—beautiful, dynamic sites that let you reach a broad internal audience, and that look great on the web, in the SharePoint mobile app, on PC and on Mac. Today, we’re excited to announce that communication sites are now rolling out to Office 365 First Release customers, followed by full worldwide roll-out to Office 365 customers in the coming months.

Create a beautiful communication site in seconds

Communication sites are perfect for internal cross-company campaigns, weekly and monthly reports or status updates, product launches, events and more. To help you jumpstart getting your message out fast, communication sites provide configurable templates for the sites and pages within. When you click Create site from the SharePoint home in Office 365, you have a choice of three initial site designs:

• Topic—Select the Topic design when you have a lot of information to share, such as news, events and other content.
• Showcase—Use the Showcase design to feature a product, team or event using photos or images.
• Blank—Start with a blank site and make your design come to life quickly and easily.

Communication site designs (from left to right): Topic, Showcase and Blank.

And it is easy to tell your story. Once your new site is created, simply drag-and-drop to reorganize web parts on the page to bring your use cases and scenarios to life. News and pages allow for multi-column layouts to represent your message in a meaningful, intuitive fashion.

Learn how to create a communication site in Office 365, add a page and work with column layouts.

Share your plans and updates in engaging, interactive ways

Communication sites allow people to create and share recurring updates beyond email. When you create a page on a communication site, you can embed documents and video, and dynamically pull in real-time data from across Office 365, including documents from SharePoint, Power BI reports, Microsoft Stream videos and Yammer discussions. The resulting page is a rich and dynamic communication. And the page persists on the site, so people can refer to it easily, even as the membership of your team changes, so new members can more easily get up to speed.

The new capabilities for the rich section layouts and new web parts can be utilized on SharePoint team sites as well.

Consume, create and connect from your mobile device via the SharePoint apps

It’s easy to access, engage with and create content for communication sites from any device. The full site, pages, news, navigation, search and more are natively viewable, functional and engaging. Read a page, create a news article, engage in a Yammer conversation—all in the context of the site—from within the SharePoint mobile app experience.

You can download the SharePoint mobiles apps for iOS and Android today, and the new features will be available in the coming weeks. Learn more about the SharePoint mobile app for iOS, SharePoint mobile app for Android and SharePoint app for Windows 10 Mobile.

Communication sites help further refine and enhance your message

Beyond what we shared during the SharePoint Virtual Summit, communication sites have additional capabilities to further refine and enhance your message.

Make your home page and sub-pages look great

• Full-width layouts—The Hero and Image web parts can be placed in a section layout that spans the page from left to right, giving you ways to emphasize your most essential information.
• Enhanced title region with custom header image—Visually represent your home page, news and subpages with a compelling header graphic and title. You control what portion of the image is the most important, so it looks great, and as intended, across web and mobile experiences.

Continue the discussion in context to ensure reach, retention and engagement

• Comments on pages—Each news article and page can have its own set of comments. It is possible to use the Yammer web part for broad discussion scenarios as well as targeted responses to engage your viewers on the sole message and content on the page—all keeping within the context of the page.
• Share news via email—When you share news via email from a communication site, it’s not just a blue link; it’s a visual, informative preview that adds context to both the email and the news article itself. Within the email, the recipient(s) will see a thumbnail, title, description and an optional message from the sender.

Dynamically pull in and display data, documents and information via web part improvements

• Power BI and Microsoft Stream—Bring in interactive reports using the Power BI web part, and embed single videos or full channels from Microsoft Stream—the single destination within Office 365 for your cross-company video management. Both Power BI and Microsoft Stream are now generally available.
• GIF support—When you add an Image web part into a news article or page, you can now include animated GIFs in your layout.
• New “See all” pages—When there is more content than can be shown within the first view the Highlighted content and Site activity web parts, you can click See all to go to a full-page experience to see all the content and activity.
• Updated News web part—Showcase your news using multiple layouts to highlight what’s important with greater flexibility. You can use the default Top story layout, view news as a list or side-by-side.

10 Reasons To Use SharePoint As A Document Management System

SharePoint was created to manage your documents at your company.

If you have a large organization (like a construction company or commercial real estate firm) and you’re managing your documents without a system like SharePoint Online (in Office 365), your documents are probably unorganized, in a variety of systems, and difficult to find.

Storage systems like Dropbox and Google Drive do work very well for some. However, they are far from ideal when your company needs to share files and collaborate efficiently across different departments, or externally with contractors or vendors.

Not having a document management system or the collaboration tools to keep everything organized and secure will end up costing you in the long run. What you need is a document management system that will place your files in a hierarchy. Microsoft Office 365 has a built-in document management system… it’s called SharePoint Online.

Finnerty says that if you get the right SharePoint consultant who knows document management, the information you need is organized and at your fingertips: “This dramatically increases productivity. You can make decisions faster with the right information easily accessible.”

First 5 Reasons To Use SharePoint Document Management (Per Microsoft)

Microsoft says you can do the following with SharePoint:

1. Store, organize, and locate documents.
2. Ensure the consistency of documents.
3. Manage metadata for documents.
4. Help protect documents from unauthorized access or use.
5. Ensure consistent business processes (workflows) for how documents are handled.

We See 5 More Top Benefits Of SharePoint Document Management:

1. Security: If you are managing by email, then chances are good that you’re blasting your company with sensitive information. Management by email is not only cumbersome and ineffective, it’s also not secure. From a security perspective, it’s a lot safer to leave important documents behind a firewall where employees can get it when they need it, instead of sending it through email.
2. Single Sign-On: SharePoint is also great at giving you access to all the apps you need with one sign-on. Instead of continuously signing into different systems and software, SharePoint is your single sign-on.
3. Version History: Again… if you’re managing by email, there is a better way! Another thing that SharePoint can really help with is version history. Sometimes in corporate environments, a document will be emailed back and forth and it gets difficult to determine which is the most up-to-date version. With SharePoint, you can check out documents, have employees edit them, and then check them back into SharePoint.
4. Automation: According to Microsoft, a SharePoint workflow is like an automated flowchart that takes a lot of the labor, guesswork, and randomness out of standard work processes. SharePoint can ensure employees have the appropriate approval to access and edit the document, removing the guesswork from employees.
5. Easy Team Collaboration: It’s easy to work on projects when the documents your team needs are in one place. Microsoft even says that SharePoint lets you “Collaborate effortlessly and securely with team members inside and outside your organization, across PCs, Macs, and mobile devices.”

However, SharePoint can be tricky to implement.

We have the experience to help. See how our expert SharePoint consultants and developers can make it a breeze.

Managing Data With SharePoint Will Transform The Way You Do Business

“As I talk with organizations around the world, it is clear they are not coping with the explosion of digital data – and that manifests itself as employees struggle to find and act on the information they need,” Microsft CEO Satya Nadella recently said.

ASK YOURSELF THESE 3 QUESTIONS…

1. Are you managing your entire company from a spreadsheet?
2. How do you plan to grow your business with those document management tools constantly changing?
3. Does your SharePoint work the way you want it to?

If you properly implement SharePoint, it will transform your company’s productivity:

• Employees will be more efficient
• You’ll have better access to your company’s data
• You’ll be able to better report on key metrics.

Improve SharePoint Performance

The performance of SharePoint is directly linked to SQL Server

Of course, SharePoint settings and configurations do impact your SharePoint’s performance speeds. However, SQL Server is the real engine behind SharePoint. Everything is stored in your databases, the faster information can be written, stored and accessed from it the faster SharePoint will be.

The Disks and the NTFS Allocation size

Before you even install SQL Server, you will need to make sure you have the right disks. I won’t pretend to be an expert on hardware and I will let you find the best for your scenario. My personal laptop is running on SSDs. However, there is something we can do to help the speed: change the NTFS Allocation size of your drives by formatting the disks. SQL reads and writes 64K at a time, but your disk allows only 4K by default. This change alone may show you up to 30% improvement in speed.

Free Bonus: Download our guide to learn How to Increase Your SharePoint Environment's Performance.

Modifying the Model Database to increase SharePoint performance

Every time a new Content Database is created by SharePoint to store your Web Application in along with anything else you do, SQL uses the information in the Model Database to create it. Unfortunately, it is not even close to being optimized for SharePoint.

Initial Size:

The initial size of the database when it is created should take into consideration what it is being used for. With the very small default size in the single digit MB, it doesn’t make much sense in a SharePoint scenario. We know SharePoint is going to be used to store a lot more; therefore we can automatically give a larger amount of space to the database when it is created.  This will help performance, as SQL won’t have to constantly ask for more space to store data.

Auto Growth:

Eventually, the database will reach the initial size with data and will need to grow. This is where we can tell it by how much it should be growing once the size has been met. Make sure to grow the size of your SharePoint databases by chunks that make sense in your environment.

You should do the same changes to your TempDB SQL Database as SharePoint also uses it indirectly through the database server to store objects.

Instant File Initialization can help speed up SharePoint but be careful

Talking about increasing those SharePoint Database file sizes, how does it actual do it? Well to make sure it can be written to as it creates or grows the database, SQL will write zeroes to validate it can write to it and then claim it. This can be a very long process depending on the required task SharePoint asked of SQL Server. Luckily, there is something that allows us to skip this process called Instant File Initialization.

The amount of time saved for these operations is incredible! However, I can’t say I would recommend this in a production environment, but amazing for dev or demo machines.

**Note: It seems the use of it in production is still debatable, I've had some good points made on Twitter and I invite you to research more on the implications it has. It may be worth it for production as well. One thing is for sure, the performance gains are incredible.

Logs and Maintenance of your SharePoint

Without a log file to tell the Database where it is at inside that big file, it would be meaningless data. That’s why it is extremely important to have the right recovery model for your needs.

There are two models, one with less information that will take less space and require less maintenance and the other one offering the opposite. Regardless of the model that works for you, make sure it is properly maintained and the logs truncated to make sure you don’t end up with something larger than the database itself.

The famous SharePoint Continuous Crawl for Search

Though I have recently covered the Crawled Properties vs Managed Properties, it is not enough to understand the different SharePoint crawls. A crawl is required for Search in SharePoint to pick up these properties and it to work. Though Continuous Crawl is new and awesome, it does not mean it should be activated everywhere you go.

For testing and demo purposes, I have my Search running on no schedules and run a Full or Incremental when I need it. Obviously, in a production environment you will need to properly schedule these crawls for your different Content Sources. And if you are still using the default Local SharePoint Content Source, then you are doing it wrong.

A case of the SharePoint Service Applications

Service Applications provide new features for your SharePoint platform like Search. If they do not exist or are not connected to your Web Applications then you will not be able to benefit from them. However, it doesn’t mean you need all of the Service Applications.

I only have the ones I need created and in use, unless I'm thinking of using Access and Visio services for example I do not need them to exist in my farm. This goes for the services running as well, it is not unlikely to see my SharePoint farm with many services set to “stopped”.

SharePoint isn’t just database, it’s also a lot of IIS

There is a number of things you can do to improve both management and speed of your SharePoint at the server and IIS level. Open up your Sites and Application Pools and see if you can’t add more running processes for them if you have the CPU. You can also enable BlobCache by going into the web.config file of your Web Applications and turning it on by setting it to True.

Explore these settings to set what makes sense for you and your current needs. For example, I sometimes set the recycling of application pools at a specific time in the early morning to make sure I can schedule a warm script soon after that.

The concerns of migrating SharePoint with Database Attach Upgrade

I believe Microsoft did an amazing job for this migration method. Compared to our previous migrations from 2007 to 2010, we can now migrate to SharePoint 2013 and leave our databases in 2010 mode. With deferred Site Collection upgrade scenario we can even do this by Site Collection, it’s great.

However, using the Database Attach upgrade scenario will not let us benefit from the new SharePoint 2013 feature “Shredded Storage” on existing content. Shredded Storage will help us save space only on future content created with SharePoint, but not the existing content in it.

Obviously, tools like Sharegate will allow you to benefit fully from Shredded Storage during your SharePoint migration. I don’t want to do a sales pitch, use whatever you want to migrate to SharePoint 2013, but be aware of the impacts it will have on your performance.

I did not find all of this information by myself; this comes from years of working with this beast of a platform and the generous help and advice for experts in the field. Edwin Sarmiento.

What Power BI does?

For example, you can pull in data from Excel spreadsheets, on-premise data sources, and SQL databases. You can also automatically grab data from your favorite cloud services like Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Zendesk, Facebook, and more. Microsoft is continually rolling out direct integrations with other popular cloud services to make it even easier to get all your data straight into Power BI.

Once you have the data you need, it should then provide you with the information required to make smarter and faster business decisions. That’s where Power BI Q&A comes in.

Simply type in a question about your data (as you would with Google) and it immediately serves up a response in the form of an interactive chart or graph

For example, want to know this year’s sales compared to last years sales by month? No problem!

Power BI Visuals – Ask a Question About Your Data

Power BI Tools Keep You Focused On The Important Metrics.

Gathering insights from your data is a breeze with Power BI’s simple drag-and-drop user experience. You can quickly find the insights you are looking for and visualize them in beautiful, interactive reports.

Once you have a report, save it to your personal dashboard. Here, you can quickly see the charts and graphs with the data and metrics that are most important to you and your business.

As I previously mentioned, you can also embed reports in SharePoint Online so that everyone (with access and the correct permissions) can view the report.

Power BI Visuals – Metrics Dashboard Example in SharePoint

Power BI Gives You The Insight To Stay On Top Of Opportunities And Risks.

Capitalizing on opportunities and minimizing risks are important to sustain business growth (of course). Power BI offers predictive forecasting to help you visualize future business performance (such as potential and predicted sales and risks) while providing more efficient data-driven decision-making opportunities.

Power BI Visuals – Dashboard Example

With Power BI consulting and development services from HingePoint, you can take the blindfold off, and see your data organized visually on one screen (instead of scattered across spreadsheets, software, and organizations). Interested in seeing how Microsoft Power BI can help your business? 

SharePoint Out Of Box Tips And Tricks From The SharePoint Experts

SharePoint Settings

This symbol is important.

When you see the settings icon in the upper right corner of your screen, it gives you access to all of the site contents and all the specific site settings for THAT specific page.

“I always thought it brings you to the same set of contents and settings,” HingePoint Project Manager Brendan Desjardins said. “But even though the top nav doesn’t appear to change, clicking on site settings or contents directs you to the appropriate lists based on the page you navigated from.”

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Out Of The Box Web Parts

Site features is a new component for 2013 and 2016 Sharepoint. Navigate to Site Settings under Site Actions: Manage Site Features. You will be presented with a list of the out-of-the-box web parts that you can activate:

• The Business Intelligence Center is new for 2013 and 2016 which allows you to connect BI Dashboards and BI Data to the Sharepoint
  User can adjust settings for different functionalities at the Site Level and the Site Collection Level
• Library Settings holds all of your metadata and provides you with the ability to implement versioning history, approvals, and document templates
• Best practice: do not create more than 8-12 subsites below the top level.

Other Cool Facts

• In Sharepoint 2016, you now have the ability to upload files with special characters in the title.
• Users can go to Recycle Bin to restore any deleted contents.
• Users can go to Site Settings/ Look and Feel to change how SharePoint looks out of the box. Change formatting, background pictures, and color schemes. It also has many preloaded templates available to make Sharepoint more exciting. You can also upload a picture to the Sharepoint title in the top navigation.

Learn How We Can Help You With SharePoint

Learn how we can make your SharePoint better or contact us for a quick, free consultation.

SharePoint and Office 365 backup alternatives

Malicious or accidental deletion of content and the digital Intellectual property has always been a major concern for the organizations. On-premises this has always been mitigated with regular backups, meticulously performed and managed by an IT Department. In SharePoint Online and Office 365, the situation is a bit different and somewhat challenging. The content is no longer stored exclusively in shared drives and folders or Exchange mailboxes. Instead, it is spread among hundreds of SharePoint sites and document libraries, OneDrive for Business and other Office 365 properties like Planner, Yammer, Office 365 Groups, and Teams. Moreover, your content resides in the Microsoft Data Center, so you do not have access to any servers/hardware.

There is a handful of companies out there that do offer some Office 365 backup and restore software. Since I am not a backup expert, with this post, I would like to provide alternatives to SharePoint Online backup that you might consider for your organization instead of traditional “tape” backups.

ADMINISTRATOR’S RECYCLE BIN

You do have a simple and robust backup solution available in SharePoint Online for 90 days – it is called the Recycle Bin. Everything users delete, ends up in there (documents, tasks, calendar events, folders, lists, libraries and even complete sites). Moreover, even when users empty their recycle bins, the stuff is transferred to the secondary stage recycle bin, accessible only by the SharePoint Administrator. The grace period for all content is 90 days – this is how much you have to restore it back to the original location.

While the Recycle bin can not be compared to traditional backup solutions, this is your first line of defense and relatively simple to use. It can also be monitored regularly.

SECURITY & PERMISSIONS

To minimize the potential loss of data, you should map out the proper security and permissions and follow best practices and guidelines. It is always wise to assign as minimum permissions as possible for each user on a given site. If all your users need it the ability to view data, do not give them Contribute privileges. If all they need is the ability to edit documents, do not give them Full Control (trust me, I have seen a share of those!).

External sharing is another aspect that needs to be taken seriously. From proper information architecture to external user setup – make sure you do not end of with the situation where non-employees will get their hands on the stuff they don’t need to see or edit.

PREVENT DELETIONS

If you are worried about users deleting certain content from sites, you can disable deletions via Permissions. Out of the box, you do not have a permission level that would allow users to add and edit, but not delete, but you can always create a custom one.

GOVERNANCE

Having certain policies, rules and regulations in place will sure minimize inadvertent issues with your content. Governance plan, committee and governance document by itself are a great step to outline and solidify the expected guidelines and behavior related to SharePoint and Office 365 application. Check out this post for more information and different components of the governance.

TRAINING

Say what you want about training, but I bet that most of accidental deletions and loss of data occur due to poor understanding of the technology and features by the employees. Proper education and training are not only a great investment by the organizations but can also help prevent more serious issues like loss of intellectual property. Read more about training here.

RETENTION POLICIES/RECORDS MANAGEMENT

Deletions and loss of content can also be mitigated via proper implementation of Retention Policies and Records Management. I describe how retention policies work here, but essentially what records management in a nutshell means is that you can designate certain content as records in SharePoint, which in turn will prevent deletions of such content (when documents are declared as records manually or via policies).

ALERTS

Alerts can be a real simple way to be notified about deletions and act accordingly. They might not be practical to set up on all the document libraries and lists, but could be great for those super important document management systems.

VERSIONING

It is not always the case that you need to restore a deleted file, but rather restore a previous version of it, in case inadvertent changes were made by your colleagues. In such cases, versioning is your best friend. You can easily restore a previous version of the file or an item. Moreover, this could be done by any of the end users themselves, no need to email an IT administrator. Versioning is automatically enabled for all document libraries in SharePoint Online and needs to be manually set for other lists.

EMPLOYEE AUDITS

Lastly, if you need to keep an eye on certain files or employees, you have all the power with pretty robust Office 365 audit reporting (part of Office 365 Security & Compliance Center). You can easily see and monitor employee activities, file access, and deletions. And, you can also set up alerts as well, to be notified of certain activities. I describe the Audit Log functionality in greater detail here.