What Me Pa..Panic? – Page 5 – A BLOG about SharePoint & O365 Administration, Design, Development, and Customization . . .

SharePoint Saturday – Cincinnati

I had a small but enthusiastic group at my session this past Saturday at the SharePoint Saturday Cincinnati event. We had an excellent discussion about the planning that organizations should do before they implement or upgrade a SharePoint environment. I promised attendees that I would post my slides by today before I got busy with other things. You can find a link to the session below…

Implementing SharePoint: Failure to Plan is Planning to Fail (Slides) –

One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen clients make when implementing SharePoint is to not spend enough time review a list of seven planning topics that are critical to the success of every SharePoint project. We’ll review what questions you should ask and why each area is critical to project.
The seven areas include:
• Governance
• Security
• Content Classification (Taxonomy/Folksonomy)
• Physical and Logical Architecture
• High Availability/Disaster Recovery
• Staffing
• Training/Communications

Dogfood 2017 Conference Slides

I really enjoyed my time at the Dogfood Conference in Columbus on Friday. The attendees were great and my talk on OneDrive Sync was well attended. There were lots of questions, but I was still able to power through my slides and the demos. I want to express my thanks to the conference organizers and the attendees for the wonderful conference. I really enjoyed myself and I hope to be invited back to speak again next year.

I promised attendees that I would post the slides, so I’ve uploaded them here. If you didn’t get a chance to respond to the survey I posted you can also find a link to that here:

Slides – Intro To OneDrive Next Gen Sync: What is it, how does it work, and can I manage it?

Short Survey – https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZZPWVN6

OneDrive Sync Now Supports ONLY NTFS

An update to the OneDrive Next Gen Sync client that rolled out beginning in early January has limited where you can place the sync folder for your OneDrive files. The target is now required to be a New Technology File System (NTFS) formatted drive. When commenting on this Microsoft says that non-NTFS drives have never been supported, but that the client didn’t check in the past. The change, according to Microsoft, is just tightening up the error checking in the OneDrive client and not implementation of a new feature. According to Microsoft that’s why the change was released with no notice. It should be noted that OneDrive system requirements don’t list the NTFS limitation. Resilient File System (REFS), Microsoft’s newest formatting, is also not supported. User’s should plan to update the format of their drives to NTFS if they plan to use the OneDrive Next Gen Sync client.

MVP for the 10th Year!

For me July 1st has always been an anxious day. No matter how many times I’ve been awarded as an MVP I’m always nervous when my anniversary comes around and its time to be evaluated for a re-award. This year I am being joined by all the other MVPs as Microsoft consolidates and makes July 1st the re-award date for everyone. But other changes in the program made this year’s wait more disconcerting than normal. You can now have community contributions noted in multiple areas, but that also means that your contributions may be diluted by being split up. But for the 10th year Microsoft has decided that my contributions to the SharePoint and Office 365 community were sufficient to earn me an MVP award again for the category of “Office Servers and Services”. In the coming year I will continue to focus on SharePoint and Office 365. But this year I hope to also expand by digging back into Dynamics CRM, especially how it integrates with Office 365.

I continue to start each day by answering a few questions on the MSDN and TechNet Forums. But am also hoping to expand my presence on the public Yammer forums and the Microsoft Tech Community. As a former trainer I still get excited by providing answers to interesting questions for people. Finding the answers to these questions often teaches me new things about SharePoint and Office 365. I’m also looking forward to continuing to share what I know at several conferences this year. I’m always looking for new topics that people would like to hear about. If you have a question or a topic then drop me a line and my next talk may be inspired by you.

I’m also always inspired by my friends and colleagues in the MVP program. The knowledge they have continues to amaze me and its a definite advantage to have so many intelligent friends. This last year has seen a number of my MVP friends leave the program to join Microsoft as employees. That is a constant reminder of all the great people who work for Microsoft. Being able to network with them is also a great privilege.

But the bottom line is still that I wouldn’t be an MVP if it weren’t for all of you out there in the SharePoint community. Its been great to meet all of you in person and thanks for all the questions that you’ve asked. As long as you keep asking questions and listening to me at conferences I’ll keep trying to learn more and share what I’ve learned with all of you. Without you I wouldn’t be receiving this award. I hope to continue to live up to the honor and hope that I never get complacent about what its really about: Helping to support the SharePoint and Office 365 community.

Office 365 Groups: Default Sharing Settings Relaxed

When Office 365 Groups first shipped sharing with External Users was disabled. Over time that default policy was changed to allow sharing with External Users who were already in your Azure AD. In other words you could share with External Users IF you had already shared something else in your environment with that External User. Based on user feedback this default sharing policy is being further relaxed to allow sharing with any Authenticated External User. Anonymous Guest links will still not be allowed.

This change will apply to all Office Group sites that are created in the future, but will not apply to existing Office Group sites. To apply the new default to existing Office Group sites use the following PowerShell:

Set-SPOSite -Identity https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/groupsite ` -SharingCapability ExternalUserSharingOnly

You can also revert new Office Group sites back to the more restrictive setting using the following PowerShell:

Set-SPOSite -Identity https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/groupsite ` -SharingCapability ExistingExternalUserSharingOnly

This change will loosen the security settings in Office 365 somewhat, but should also make the experience more predictable since it matches the setting in most other sites that allow External Sharing. So as long as you are aware of the change it should be a good move.