SharePoint Premium: What is it?

SharePoint is a powerful, flexible, and popular collaboration and content management platform that has been around for over 20 years. I’ve personally seen it go through many advancements in the nearly 20 years I have been working with it. I want to begin by briefly introducing SharePoint and discussing the lifecycle of SharePoint leading up to SharePoint Premium. SharePoint allows organizations to collaborate on ideas, information, and documents using sites and secure file sharing options. SharePoint also provides the ability to create intranet websites, which enables collaboration within your organization by providing a structured document storage and management system containing advanced collaboration options including versioning, workflows, and forms. SharePoint History… Read More

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Introduction to Microsoft 365 Archive and Backup Functionality

Microsoft has finally introduced a Microsoft 365 built-in backup feature, as well as archiving capabilities. I will begin by explaining the difference between the two features, so you understand why there are two different features, when sometimes the names are used interchangeably. Important: Both new features are currently in Preview mode and are expected to be in General Availability (GA) sometime in 2024. Only tenant-level admins can create and manage your Microsoft 365 backups using Microsoft 365 Backup. End users won’t have the ability to enable backup or restores for their user account, mailboxes, distribution lists, or SharePoint sites. Currently, the admin roles determine which products you can manage with… Read More

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Microsoft Renaming Azure AD (AAD) to Entra ID

Microsoft announced that they will rename Azure AD (AAD) to Entra ID in their attempt to reflect the progression of modern multicloud identity security, eventually simplify secure access for all Microsoft 365 users, and to provide naming consistency for identity and access solutions. Some experts in the industry likely wonder why? Why rename Azure AD (AAD) if Microsoft isn’t providing any enhancements, new features, or even deprecating features in Azure AD. It appears the reason is to integrate the Entra ID product name into the already existing Microsoft Entra product family, which includes: Microsoft Entra ID Microsoft Entra ID Protection Microsoft Entra ID Governance Microsoft Entra External ID Microsoft Entra… Read More

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What’s Changed or Missing in the Preview Release of Microsoft Teams

With any preview release of software, the product is often not yet fully functional. I look at preview mode like half-baked brownies: the recipe calls for you to bake them at 350 degrees for 30 minutes for them to be edible, but instead you bake them at 200 degrees for 20 minutes, producing something that resembles brownies, but they’re not fully baked or ready to consume. The preview of the new Microsoft Teams is no different; it is missing some features that were in classic Teams, and not everything announced has been fully implemented. With this in mind, it is important to balance what you’re gaining versus what you’re losing… Read More

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Microsoft new Teams Desktop app now available in Preview

Microsoft has announced the preview release of a new and improved Microsoft Teams desktop app for Windows that has already been rolled out in preview mode effective March 27th. The 280 million users, over 1900 third-party apps, as well as over 100,000 custom apps will all benefit from the new Teams desktop app that is faster, simpler, smarter, and even more flexible. In addition, for the IT pros managing the deployment and updates to the app, they will also be nicely surprised with the additional deployment and security options available in the new Teams. Faster and Less Resource Intensive One of the biggest changes made in the new Teams is… Read More

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Managing Microsoft 365 using PowerShell

Managing the powerful productivity and collaboration suite Microsoft 365 can be a daunting task, especially for organizations with thousands of users, licenses for those users, and hundreds of groups used to manage the users. PowerShell is a command-line tool that can simplify and automate the management of Microsoft 365 and save time and resources. It’s important for Microsoft 365 administrators to have the ability to automate, bulk manage, and configure these users, licenses, and groups. To benefit, you need a thorough understanding of how PowerShell integrates with Microsoft 365 and how you can use PowerShell to manage users, licenses, and groups, and generate reports and PowerShell scripts to perform some… Read More

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Managing SharePoint Online using PowerShell

The powerful collaboration tool SharePoint Online (SPO) is deeply integrated with Microsoft Teams and OneDrive. A SharePoint administrator needs to carefully automate, bulk manage, and configure these sites, users, and groups because it’s possible that tens of thousands of SharePoint sites each have thousands of users accessing them. Most of those users are managed using groups. To perform some of the more common SPO administrative tasks, you need a thorough understanding of how PowerShell integrates with SPO and how to use PowerShell to manage sites, users, and groups and how to generate PowerShell scripts. PowerShell for SharePoint Online has several cmdlets for managing all aspects of SharePoint Online. The SPO… Read More

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Understanding SharePoint Server Subscription Edition

Over the years there have been several releases of SharePoint Server for on-premises installations. In the past, Microsoft released them about every three years (SharePoint Server 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019). This meant customers didn’t see any new features for three years and then we had to go through a lengthy, well-planned, and thought-out upgrade process to deploy the next version. You may be wondering where the next major release of SharePoint Server is since we haven’t seen anything about SharePoint Server 2022. … Microsoft released SharePoint Server Subscription Edition, which is expected to be the last major release of any on-premises SharePoint Server product. Microsoft is changing things up… Read More

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