Come Sway with me

So, Sway.

It has been positioned as something between PowerPoint (beautiful presentations) and SharePoint pages (easy newsletters). Sway can be found between your Microsoft apps – it is available for both your free Microsoft account and it is included in the Microsoft365 suite.

I like the idea of Sway, but since it has become so easy to work with both PowerPoint and SharePoint, I wonder what it’s use is. So, when I had nothing better to do 😉, I decided to find the benefits of Sway.

In case you are new to Sway, or want to learn how to use it, you may want to watch this video by Kevin Stratvert.

Paid or free – is there a difference?

My first question is if there is any difference between the business (Microsoft365, paid) and the free version?

I created a simple Sway in my Microsoft 365 tenant. I did not use a template. This is what the edit (Storyline) screen looks like:

The storyline page in the paid version (Business Sway)

I then created one in my personal Microsoft account. I used Firefox browser to make sure there is a separation between the two accounts. (Edge has a tendency to mix things up). The Storyline part looked the same, so I clicked on the Design button top left. This was the result:

The Design page in the free version – it is the same as the paid version

Trust me, this is the same as the paid version.

You see there is a warning at the top that from May 15, 2024 you will no longer be able to upload your own videos or audio files, but will have to work with embedded videos, so videos living on “other platforms”. Hope that is not an issue for anyone. I have removed that message from further screenshots.

What can I do about the look and feel?

If you click on the Design tab, and then on “Styles” top right, you will get a number of options:

• You can select whether the direction of your presentation is vertical, horizontal or slide
• You can customize colours, fonts and textures – more about that later
• You can click one of the buttons below and get a surprise look-and-feel (I assume over time you will know what’s under which button). There are some clues, such as background and letter colours, and typeface.
• Or you can remix (top left) for a completely “random” look and feel

I clicked “Remix!” and now my business Sway has suddenly turned into a knitting pattern or recipe 😱

A remix – but this is not very business-like

I have the same set of styles to use for my free Sway. I chose a horizontal style, which looks a bit more compact than the vertical business one.

A design of my free Sway. It has the same options as the business version.

Can I apply my house style?

Communication and Marketing peeps will want to know how how to create all messages consistent in look-and-feel. I asked CoPilot and apparently you can freely choose colours, but you are limited to the existing typefaces. That is a bit of a bummer.

To see what can be done, let’s click on the Customize button in the Design pane.

You can add a colour at the bottom of the white box in the middle

If you click on the colour button you can add a colour of choice; let’s go for #C133FF, a hot pink/purple.

After uploading a colour hex code, the styles change to incorporate that colour

Your available colour palettes will change to the uploaded colour. I chose the most right one and well, that is impressive! (NOT)

Better colours, but it looks like a tea-towel 😁

All appears to be dependent on the selected style button, so you can play around with it to find one that changes the background or the letters into the desired colour.

This style looks much better!

On we go. Below the palette you can select from 22 typeface combinations. And as much as I love all things Charles Rennie Mackintosh, I do not think that many organizations use this for their house style.

Lovely font, but not suitable for all businesses

This one is also very nice, but unsuitable for most businesses, unless you sell gothic novels or create horror movies.

Another style that is not too business-like

Fortunately, there are some good combinations, but still they may not be your company typeface.

This looks more business-like

At the bottom you can change font size and something about animations.

As for the front image, you can of course ask people to use one certain image, but there is no option to make it the default. You can save a Sway as a template, but that is personal.

The free version behaves in exactly the same way.

So, after a long check, the answer to this question is NO. You can not use your corporate or brand style.

What happens when I share?

If you click the Share button top right business and free Sway are really different.

Business

Sharing options in the business version.

This gives you the option to share with 3 audiences (specific people or groups, people in your organization with the link, or everyone with the link).
The URL is generic, it does not show any hint of your tenant name.
You can also allow people to edit.

When you select “everyone”, it will be a public Sway and people will also be able to share to Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
(Twitter? That has been X for more than a year and a half, right?)

You can create a visual link, which is a picture with the introduction text, that you can paste into an email.

The visual link

You can also embed it on SharePoint. But why you would not create the content directly on SharePoint, is beyond me.

Under “more options” you can set a password and make the share buttons visible. You can also change the Share settings, which means you create a new link.

Free

You can only share your Sway with the whole world. Additionally to the visual link and embed, you can share to social platforms.
Again, you get a very generic link but I expect that with the free version.

The “More options” are the same as for the business version.

Sharing options for the free version

Where do my Sways live?

Your Sways are personal and live online in your Sway app. You can also see them mentioned on your Microsoft365 homepage.

This means that if you want to create a repository of Sways for your organization, e.g. weekly Newsletters, you will need to store them manually in SharePoint for easy distribution. That can be done in document format in a Document Library, or in a Links List.
This also means that any important Sways that are shared in the business need to be handed over before the author leaves the organization. 😱

Can I turn a Sway into a document?

Yes, you can export it to Word or PDF. If you click … top right of your Sway, you can select this from the menu.

Where to start exporting to Word or PDF

However, this does not always export the colour and typeface correctly. Below and example of my business sway as PDF, where the typeface is suddenly italic and the colour blue instead of hot pink.

This does NOT look like the Sway I exported!

It downloads to your PC so you will have to upload it to OneDrive or SharePoint.

You see from the menu above that you can also print (e.g. to PDF – this also changes the design) or save this Sway as a template. But the template is for yourself, not for the organization.

How do I keep a Sway for later?

If you want to revisit a Sway, you should be able to find it under the “Viewed” tab.

The “Viewed” tab shows the Sways you have looked at.

If you expect to have many Sways, you can also make them a favourite on your Microsoft365 homepage. In the paid version of Microsoft365, there’s a new Tag option which might help you keep things together.
By the way, do you see how much the Sway icon (the top 2 in the screenshot below) looks like the SharePoint one? (bottom of the screenshot). Confusing!
(But not if you use the free version, as that does not have SharePoint)

How to favourite a Sway for later usage

How do I hand over a Sway?

When you leave the organization, you may need to handover any important Sways that need to stay in the organization. Otherwise your Sways will be lost after removal of your account. Here’s how – thank you, CoPilot!

1. Share the Edit Link:
   • Open the Sway you want to transfer.
   • Click on the “Share” button (usually located in the top-right corner).
   • Choose the “Edit” link option.
   • Copy the provided edit link.
   • Share this link with the person you want to hand over the Sway to.
2. Recipient’s Actions:
   • The recipient should open the edit link you shared.
   • They’ll be able to edit the Sway as an author.
   • If they only need to view it, they can do so without editing.
3. Remove Yourself (Optional):
   • If you no longer want to be associated with the Sway, you can remove yourself as an author:
     • Open the Sway using the edit link.
     • Click on the “Edit” button.
     • Go to the “Authors” section.
     • Remove your name from the list of authors.

What do I think?

To be perfectly frank, I fail to see the use for business purposes:

• You can not enforce a house style. You can add a colour, but not use your own typeface. I think this is a major issue for organizations where corporate branding is important.
• Sways live in the creator’s Sway app, so any series that needs to be published together (e.g. weekly Newsletters) has to be published through SharePoint.
• You can print or export a Sway, but the colours and typeface may not be the same as your online Sway
• Sways are all stand-alone “things”; there is no “glue” such as a Team- or SharePoint site to hold related Sways together. There are also no company keywords to act as a binding factor.
• Sways are personal, so whenever an important Sway author leaves, they will have to consciously hand over those Sways that need to stay. Do you really think this is going to happen?
• Sharing creates a generic URL with no information scent about your organization. This is like Forms, but Forms are generally a means to an end and temporary, so it is less of an issue there.

All this screams: “USE SHAREPOINT!” I think SharePoint is so much better for sharing content. It has more robust content management and News and Newsletters are SO easy to create these days that I really do not see the added value of Sway. Perhaps for sharing Newsletters externally? No, there are better newsletter tools.
And PowerPoint has so many easy design options, and the possibility of enforcing a template in house style, that Sway is just too weak to compete.

At my last two organizations we removed the app from people’s view.
In my second organization we were afraid that people would start hobbying and producing lots of content that was not “on brand”. Also, we did not have the bandwidth to support it.
In my third organization people were not very computer savvy and did not like functionality that was “optional”. They needed more guidance. (That is one of the reasons why we introduced our News publishing guidelines)

I can imagine Sway may be a nice tool for private purposes if you do not have too many requirements for typefaces etc. But for my private use it had too many limitations. I wanted to create my “Curses for intranet and digital workplace peeps” in Sway, and wanted an image to the left or right of each paragraph. But that cannot be done; you can only select a background image, not a left or right image.

My findings are consistent with Ami Diamond’s recent question on LinkedIn. He asked about the similarity of the SharePoint and Sway icons and many replies were: “I do not know Sway” or “I do not use Sway”.

But then, Dean Martin liked to Sway so it cannot be all wrong! From this video, it even looks as if he used it for the lyrics! 😁😁 Oh no, Sway does not do animations 😉

What do YOU think?

What are your thoughts on Sway? Do you, or your organization, use it? Are you happy with it? If so, let me know what makes this a good tool for you!

SharePoint site naming conventions – my experience

The other day, Gregory Zelfond’s SharePoint Maven newsletter featured best practices for naming conventions for SharePoint sites.
In the three organizations I worked for, I have used very different naming conventions. So let me share them to illustrate Greg’s points.

My first intranet

We had central creation of sites, but not really a naming convention. We checked if there was already a site with that name, tried to keep names short, avoided spaces and special characters, and tried to bring some order in the chaos by adding business or brand abbreviations into the name, such as AP (AmbiPur), CT (Coffee & Tea) and some others.
It all worked, which is strange for such a large organization (120.000 employees at one time), but then SharePoint was not yet widely used, so we had a few hundred sites at most.

Good practice: central site creation; short, no spaces or special characters; somewhat meaningful for users
Bad practice: no formal naming convention (but best efforts)

My second intranet

This was an excellent example of bad practices before and after migration 😁
(Read more at: my second SharePoint intranet)

When I arrived at the scene, every business or corporate department had their own site collection. (Yes boys and girls, site collections were still all the rage then!)
Ownership of the site collections (including site collection administration permissions!) was with the business, and ICT was site collection admin for general support. And every site owner could create subsites. 😱
As most business owners did not really know about URL character limitations, we also experienced that documents could not be opened due to a too long URL, caused by endless “nesting” of subsites and sometimes very long site names.
Every business had a number of sub businesses, all in that same site collection. As soon as someone needed a site for Marketing, the business owner created one called Marketing under their own sub business, or created a subsite under Marketing if there was already a site with that name. So we ended up with several layers deep and various sites called Marketing (or even “…/Marketing/Marketing/…”) within one site collection.
You can imagine this was a bit messy. 😁

It was fun to support.
“Ellen, could you help me with the Marketing site please?”
“Which Marketing site?”
“Ours”
“Can you send me the link please, as we have four sites called Marketing in different parts of the site collection.”
“Oh really?”

Good practice: meaningful to users
Bad practice: no central site creation, no formal naming convention, spaces turning into “%20” in URLs, long URLs

After migration to SharePoint Online, every subsite became a stand-alone site, as recommended. We finally had central site creation and adopted a naming convention. This was simple: a number, starting with 00001 for the first site being migrated and then onwards. There was no other logic, nothing like “we reserve 00001 until 09999 for this business” so the order was the order of migration, then creation, which is completely irrelevant.
We changed the site name after creation to something more meaningful, but that number was still in the URL, providing no information scent whatsoever. I think it was rather cruel to users.

A site with a numeric URL

On site pages (see above) the number is not so bad, as the site name is shown in various places. Also across SharePoint you will see the site name, not the site URL.

But in documents you only have the number to remind you which site you are in, as seen in the screenshot below.

A document in a site with a numeric URL

Good practice: central site creation, formal naming convention
Bad practice: not meaningful to users

My third intranet

My last employer had central site creation and a solid naming convention when I arrived, and we never felt the need to change:

• a letter to mark the purpose of the site, determining the template, e.g. a for archive, p for project. We later added g for groups (Teams-sites) and i for intranet sites.
• a dash – to separate the letter from the rest
• 3 letters to mark the part of the organization
• 3 letters as abbreviation for the required name

So, that could be “p-ictprt” for a printer replacement project from ICT, or “c-fehsec” for a collaborative site for secretaries of the FEH unit.
After creation, we changed the site name to a more intuitive name.
It was short, it had an information scent, and it allowed us to filter and sort for housekeeping purposes. (In the Active Sites list in the SharePoint admin center)

The homepage of a site with a (somewhat) meaningful URL

Good practice: central site creation, formal naming convention, short, no spaces or special characters, meaningful for users, useful for maintenance and support
Bad practice: none (well, perhaps the dash in the URL but I think that added meaning and it is still short)

Remarks:

1. Please note that the site’s icon displays the characters from the original URL. It will not change upon changing the site name. You may need to change the site icon to get rid of that “2” in the screenshot below.

The first character(s) of the original URL will be displayed

2. You may also want to think about a naming convention for Teams, see this article from Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/community/microsoft-teams-naming-importance
In my third organization, we used the same convention as for SharePoint sites but then with g as the first letter, and we changed the Teams name after creation into something meaningful.

3. Please sign up for SharePoint Maven’s Newsletter if you have not done so yet. Gregory knows a LOT and explains things very well.

Which naming conventions have you used?

Please let me know in the comments!

Confused by CoPilot

A former colleague asked if they could use SharePoint for their corporate internet site, as their SharePoint intranet site had lots of success in the organisation. As far as I know that option has been discontinued in 2015, see my earlier post, but I thought I’d ask Copilot in Bing, just to be sure that the answer is “no” and not make a fool of myself, and perhaps receive a few arguments why not. And experimenting a bit with CoPilot is useful, too!

The below text, until “Conclusion 1”, is what I received. May I say this was a bit of a surprise?

👇

Question 1 to CoPilot in Bing: Can you use SharePoint for an internet site?

Certainly! SharePoint is a versatile platform that can be used for both internal and external websites. Here are some ways to utilize SharePoint for website purposes:

1. SharePoint Team Sites:

• These sites are designed for internal use within a team or organization.
• Use them for project management, document sharing, and team communication.
• Ideal for collaboration within a specific group.
• ¹

2. SharePoint Communication Sites:

• These sites cater to a broad audience, including external users.
• Perfect for public-facing websites, news portals, and knowledge bases.
• Share information with a wider community.
• ¹

3. SharePoint Hub Sites:

• These sites help organize and aggregate content from multiple SharePoint sites.
• Useful for creating intranets and portals.
• Streamline information across related sites.
• ¹

4. SharePoint On-Premises:

• If you require total control over your environment, consider using SharePoint on-premises.
• It allows you to host public-facing websites and blogs.
• Unlike SharePoint Online, which is hosted by Microsoft, you manage your own on-premises environment.
• ⁴

Remember that SharePoint can be accessed via a web browser (such as Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Chrome, or Firefox) and provides a secure place to store, organize, share, and access information from any device ². Whether it’s an internal team site or a public-facing website, SharePoint offers flexibility and collaboration features to suit your needs! 🌐👥.

Source: Conversation with Bing, 08/04/2024
(1) What are the different ways to build or use SharePoint as website for …. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1391890/what-are-the-different-ways-to-build-or-use-sharep.
(2) Is SharePoint a Good Platform for Building a Public Web Site …. https://www.zubairalexander.com/blog/is-sharepoint-a-good-platform-for-building-a-public-facing-business-web-site/.
(3) What is SharePoint? – Microsoft Support. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-is-sharepoint-97b915e6-651b-43b2-827d-fb25777f446f.
(4) Can Microsoft host my SharePoint Web pages? – Microsoft Q&A. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1383465/can-microsoft-host-my-sharepoint-web-pages.
(5) nl.wikipedia.org. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharePoint.

👆

Conclusion 1

Confusion! 😕

CoPilot presents the results as if you can do this with no problems at all. But apparently you can only make public SharePoint sites when using SharePoint on-premises. When looking at the references, there is quite a few incorrect or outdated content in there.

1. You can not create public-facing websites with Communication sites. If you can share with externals at all, it is with an email-address, but not anonymously. Anonymous access has been discontinued in 2015. Source 1 is not entirely correct.
2. Source 2 is from 2017 and it also states that Microsoft is phasing out public websites. This is the post that mentions that SharePoint On-premises can be used for public sites. The author also mentions the limitations of SharePoint for public sites.
3. Source 3 describes SharePoint in general. BTW, in case you still want to download SharePoint Designer 2013, you can do so on that page. 😱
4. Source 4 is a question (from 2023) from someone who wants to host his external site, but the person who answers does not fully understand the question, so it is quite a confusing conversation. This is not a good source, I think.
5. Source 5 is an article about SharePoint On-Premises but it does not mention the public websites capabilities.
6. I would have liked to see the article about discontinuing the public websites.

Question 2 to CoPilot in Bing: Can you use SharePoint for a public-facing website?

I had read the term: “public-facing website” during my investigation so I thought I’d rephrase the question.
Apparently that is a better prompt as I now received info that was more accurate, in my opinion.

👇

No, unfortunately, you cannot create a public-facing website using SharePoint Online. Microsoft requires authentication for all users accessing a SharePoint site, which makes it unsuitable for public-facing purposes². The previous option of SharePoint public sites has been discontinued, and Microsoft now recommends third-party providers like GoDaddy or WiX for public websites¹. If you must use SharePoint, you would need to install and license it separately, using a Publishing Site template. Keep in mind that the licenses for public/anonymous access are different from the Office 365 or CAL-based license model¹. Alternatively, consider using an Azure Web App for hosting your public website¹. 🌐🔒

Source: conversation with Bing, 13/04/2024
(1) Can I create a public-facing website using SharePoint Online? – Pa. https://www.pa.com.au/products/microsoft-sharepoint/faq/can-i-create-a-public-facing-website-using-sharepoint-online/.
(2) How to create a public facing website? – sharepoint online. https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/227497/how-to-create-a-public-facing-website.
(3) SharePoint Online: Change a Site from Private to Public (or Vice versa). https://www.sharepointdiary.com/2020/05/sharepoint-online-change-site-from-private-to-public.html.
(4) Alternative to public-facing website – SharePoint Stack Exchange. https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/211705/alternative-to-public-facing-website.

👆

Conclusion 2

1. Although the response is in line with my understanding, imho the references are quite feeble.
2. Source 1 is a one-liner from a site I have never seen or heard of before.
3. Source 2 is an online forum and the question is from 2017, when Microsoft was shutting down external websites.
4. Source 3 is totally unrelated as it deals with making a private SharePoint Online site public, but “public” here means “accessible for all employees in the organization”.
5. Source 4 is again from an online forum from 2017 and asks about alternatives for the public-facing websites. In this case, their requirements can be met with regular SharePoint configured for external users, so not alternatives are given. Nice, but again not really related.

Again, I would have expected the formal Microsoft information in the references.

Recommendations

First, think about your question and rephrase it a few times and see if you get similar responses. I have heard that the correct question or “prompt” is very important in AI-land. People are even exchanging “good” prompts for specific purposes, and sharing them through websites.
Well, it certainly was the case for my question. Mind you, I know SharePoint and I know the answer, more or less, so I could judge whether the answer is plausible or not. If I had known nothing, and had just stuck to my first question, I would have been slightly misguided.
In fact this is the same issue with a search engine: if you truly do not know the answer, you will accept the first result that appears to be correct.

Secondly, check the references to see how CoPilot gets its information. Do they look like official information or is it a blog from someone you never heard of, or a Q and A in a forum? I am still not quite happy with the fact that the official Microsoft information appears to be missing in both questions, while I would expect that to have preference when answering questions about SharePoint.

By the way, I received this info from Sjoerd de Valk: an overview of many SharePoint public-facing sites, including one for Ferrari!https://www.dutchdatadude.com/you-will-not-believe-these-sites-have-been-made-with-sharepoint
Thank you, Sjoerd!

About references:
I also asked CoPilot about the history of the name of the location where I currently live. It came up with a story about a brave knight who rescued a lady from a dragon. The brave knight received “my” plot of land from the king as a gift of gratitude. The house built upon it got the name of the owner (that part is correct) and it was used as a gathering place for knights to share their adventures.

Yeah right. 😂🤣😂

The fact that there were no references was quite telling…

SharePoint: the good old intERnet days

Did you know that SharePoint used to have internet sites? If you have been there from the start, or from about 2008 or so, you will know that, but if you started after 2015 you may not realize. So, as part of SharePoint’s 23rd birthday celebration, let’s talk about SharePoint and intERnet. And I am not talking about sharing sites and documents with your customers, suppliers or other business partners, but about real websites.

Brand and product sites

I do not know the exact dates anymore, but around 2009 we had a large project at the organization I worked for at that time. We had a successful intranet based on SharePoint (see My very first SharePoint intranet), and at that time you could use SharePoint also for internet sites.
Management decided that we were going to move all our brand and product websites to SharePoint. We wanted to make the best use of our investment in Microsoft tools, have more control over the hosting and maintenance, and save money.
We had a long-term partnership with a good, but very expensive web and brand design agency. They would still be responsible for the design and branding and action mechanisms.
Everyone in Marketing and Sales was very upset as at that time it was fashionable to hate SharePoint. They were very afraid that “it would look like SharePoint” and that was the worst critique you could give a website. (Some people still have that attitude, but I guess they have not seen SharePoint for years 😉)
The design agency was most dismissive, as “you could not build decent websites on SharePoint”. Of course.
Our SharePoint support team was hesitant because they expected tons of questions from Marketing and Sales about maintenance and new requirements, especially about functionality that SharePoint did not have. (And the “I-told-you-so”s that would be the result)

I would love to tell you a story of successes or horrors, but I left the organization before the project was in full swing, so I am curious if it was ever brought to a conclusion. If they had done it, they would have had to change everything back a couple of years later, when Microsoft phased out the website options in 2015 because they realized that other parties could do a better job on internet and web sites.
Do you have any real-life experiences from websites-on-SharePoint? Please share!

Personal sites in Office 365

When I started with my Office365 subscription in 2011, it came with an external site. As I have a “Small business plan” it was meant to promote my small business and services, but I have never put a lot of work in it.
The site is no longer accessible from the internet, but I can still see and even edit it! It is in Classic SharePoint, so it does not look as nice as modern SharePoint and it is also less easy to manage. This option was discontinued in 2015.

This is the homepage of my former internet site. Please look at the URL. The message in red says “Reminder, this site will be deleted shortly. Click here for more info” and then I get an error message.

In the “Edit mode” (accessible via the gear wheel) you recognize Classic SharePoint.

The site in edit mode.

Libraries and lists, site settings are still there, and I could probably rework this into a Modern site, but it is easier to create a new one. 😁

External sharing

Of course you will know the options to share sites, documents, Forms etc. with your customers, clients, suppliers and other external business contacts. That has been around since around 2005 and has proven to be very useful. But it is not the same as an internet site where everyone can access.

As part of the preparation for this post I asked CoPilot about SharePoint and internet. The answer will be something for my next post. 😉

SharePoint, the good old intranet days

As SharePoint celebrated its 23 year birthday last week, as mentioned by Veronique Palmer and many others, I thought it might be nice to share my personal history with SharePoint.

The beginning: SharePoint 2001

The first version of SharePoint that I worked with, SharePoint 2001, was a document management solution. It was comparable to the current document library, but with very limited functionality and a different design. There were folders and subfolders, you could subscribe, you could set permissions per (sub)folder and that was it.

The picture below has been taken from this post.

A document library from SP2001. Jussi Roine was also already active at that time! 😉

At the company I worked for at that time, we had developed our own “document cabinet” functionality on a different platform. It was just one flat list of documents with permissions on the cabinet level.
We provided the SharePoint solution to “serious” users only: people who had experience with document and records management, such as research departments, quality control functions, finance etc. Everyone else, such as Communications or Marketing, had to make do with the document cabinets, as SharePoint was considered “too complicated” for “normal people”. Can you imagine? 😁

My first intranet: moving to SharePoint 2003

We had built an intranet around the year 2000 using our own document cabinets, a third-party Discussion Forum functionality and Frontpage webs. When we started to develop a new intranet for the organisation, we found out that the next version of SharePoint, SharePoint 2003, was something more than just document management. It was a complete intranet platform, so we could replace everything with SharePoint! It sounds very simple and obvious now, but at that time we were so used to building things ourselves that we were very confused at first. How would this work? How should we replace our Forums? Could we move documents from our cabinets to SharePoint? What would it mean to our developers? How could we inform people about this complicated new functionality?
Despite making a few mistakes (such as wanting to replicate old functionality) we created a rather successful intranet on SharePoint 2003.
I wrote about that here: My very first SharePoint intranet.

My second intranet: moving from SharePoint 2007

After that came SharePoint 2007, which had more functionality. After that, there was a split in SharePoint on-premises (the installed version on an organization’s servers) which has versions SP2010, SP2013, SP2016 and SP2019 (I do not think any versions have been added since) and SharePoint Online, which is the cloud version used by most organizations, I think.

I have worked with SharePoint 2007, struggling with storage space, and moved to SharePoint Online from there. I wrote about that here: My second SharePoint intranet.

My third intranet: moving to SharePoint Online

The third intranet project I was involved in meant moving to SharePoint Online from a very outdated non-Microsoft platform. By that time (2021) most employees were already familiar with SharePoint Online and the complete Microsoft365 suite. Combined with just a few requirements and a very good project manager, this was a model project completed in record time. I wrote about it in this post: My third SharePoint intranet.

So, I have worked with various versions in the years that I worked with SharePoint. And I still love it, it can do so much!

Next time, I will discuss the external capabilities of SharePoint. It used to be more than what you can do now. Did you know?

Colour your collaboration

When you open my clothes cupboard you will see , from left to right: red, orange pink, purple, blue, white, grey and black. That is right:  I organize my top garments (blouses, sweaters, jackets etc.) according to their colour.  

Colour sends a very strong message, it is almost the first thing you notice when you look at something. Colour can also be used to highlight differences and similarities between entities. 

So, I am very happy that it is now possible to change the colour of a folder in OneDrive or SharePoint. I think this can help with finding the content you are looking for. 

Gregory Zelfond shares a pretty complete how-to and a number of facts about coloured folders:
How to Color Code Folders in SharePoint and OneDrive | SharePoint Maven 

Colour can give a very fast indication of the contents of a folder, but no more than that. It should not be your only organizing principle: 

• Some of your colleagues may have eyesight issues, so if they use a screenreader they may hear the name of the folder, but not the colour; they may be colour-blind (especially common for red/green colours), or they may suffer from cataracts, which may make it hard for them to distinguish colour nuances.  Light red and light orange have little contrast between them, as have light green and light teal, and perhaps light purple and light pink. 
• Light can influence contrast, both the light in the room as the brightness of the screen. 
• A colour may mean different things to different people, for instance a favourite (or hated) football club.  ⚽🏉
• The colour sequence green-yellow-orange-red may confuse colleagues if used in a different context than meaning something like good, not so good, bad (or variations on that theme).
• Colour is not specific enough to be a stand-alone attribute. You will still need a good folder name, and possibly a number and an emoji.  (I wrote about the use of emoji earlier) 

Light Green and light Teal may be difficult to distinguish from eachother

Light Orange and light Red do not differ that much

Light Pink and light Purple are quite close to one another

So, how can you use the colours to your best advantage? It depends….on the owner but mostly on the audience. 

OneDrive 

OneDrive is your own set of folders, so you can do whatever you like. You can create a rainbow, make all folders pink, use the favourite colour of the person you share a folder with, or apply the colour according to the app where the folder comes from. (Remember that Microsoft365 creates folders in your OneDrive when you use certain apps?)

This is the latter:

My OneDrive folder colours reflect the colour of the app they originated from (approximately).

So, whatever works for you.  

SharePoint team sites 

For SharePoint it is slightly different.
Firstly, your OneDrive is one document library, and you will see your folders immediately. In SharePoint you will need to open a document library first to see the folders.  
Secondly, team sites are for collaboration, so colours may not be your decision alone. You will generally know the people working in this site, and probably meet on a regular basis, so you need to discuss what colours and labels and sorting principles to use for different folders, so that everyone understands what the folders are about. If there is a lot of employee turnover, you could add instructions about the use of colour.  

SharePoint sites from Teams 

In general, this works like SharePoint collaboration sites with a few gotchas, e.g. you can not change the colour of the General folder, and in some views the colours will not be shown. Please see Greg’s post!
As with the stand-alone SharePoint site, you will want to discuss with your Team members which labels and colours you would like to use.  

SharePoint communication sites

As these have a large and generally unknown audience, this is more of an “information sending” site. It will be more difficult to use meaningful colours, as they may not be obvious to your diverse and dispersed employees. Some explanation may be needed. 
On the other hand, I do not think many employees will go into your folder structure. I expect they will mostly access documents through Search and links in News items and on pages.  

Still, there are few things you can do to make things easier:

You could use one colour per document library, so people know in which library they are, e.g. the Finance, HR or Communications library.  

If you have one library for all departments, you can use one colour per folder for each department.   

A coloured folder for each department publishing on the intranet.

It makes sense to agree on the distribution of colours over the departments in order to be as consistent as possible within your organization. So, all folders containing public Finance documents could be green, all folders containing public HR documents could be red, etc.  

Even if it may not be relevant to the entire audience, it can be useful for editors – so your HR officers know they have to upload in red folders. 

You can also give all folders in all public SharePoint sites your corporate colour, if available. (At his moment, you are limited to the 16 colours shown, so SaraLee’s red would be an option, but AkzoNobel’s dark blue would not.) That way people will know they are looking at corporate information. 
Does anyone know if you can create folders with another default colour than the yellow? I could not find that information.

Imaginary library for the Sara Lee intranet – every folder is created in the corporate colour by default.
(Please note I don’t know if this can be done at all, and Sara Lee as a company no longer exists)

So, it may be small and trivial feature for some, but it can help people knowing where they are, as long as you use it with some caution.  

A few more things to know:

Colour is not metadata so you cannot search, sort or filter on colour. So if you want all folders of a similar colour to be together, you may need to add letters, numbers or a prefix to the labels to get them together.  

There is no bulk-changing available for folder colours. So in case you want to change colour for multiple folders to the same colour, you have to do it one-by-one.

You can not make bulk edits for the colour.

Unfortunately, you cannot change the colour of a document library. Those libraries will always have that yellow/brown colour. It would be nice if you could change that, too!

Are you using this?

Are you using coloured folders right now, and if yes, how? Please let me know in the comments! Much has been written about it, but I am curious to know how much it is being used.

Goodbye to Delve

I am a big fan of using colour as an organization principle. So I always wonder what connects “things” from the same organization/sender/application suite/etc. with the same colour.

In August 2022 I wrote something about three apps with a dark red icon, wondering if they were connected somehow. At that time we already knew that Stream was being transformed, and I was thinking about the future of Delve. (See that post below)

Well, I was right! On December 14, 2023 we learned that Delve will be retired in December 2024, as the functionality is now well embedded into other applications across Microsoft365.

This is part of the message in the Admin Message Center:

Message Summary

We will be retiring Delve on December 16th, 2024. Most of the features and value offered by Delve today are already available and improved in other experiences in Microsoft 365. The main one being Profile Cards in Microsoft 365. Here is a list of features offered in Delve and the experiences we recommend using instead:

• Delve Home – discover relevant documents recommended on Office.com, in Office apps and in Profile Cards.
• Delve Profile – view profile data in the Profile Cards cross M365, through people in search on Office.com and search in SharePoint.
• Edit profile – a new edit profile experience tightly coupled with Profile Cards are being developed and will be released in second half of 2024. It is also possible for users to edit their profile data in the SharePoint profile edit experience (editprofile.aspx).
• Organizational view – exists in the Profile Card and as a dedicated experience in Org Explorer
• Favorites – favorites on Office.com and OneDrive is not connected to Delve and is a good option for users with similar functionality and improved availability.
• Boards – will not be replaced.

I checked whether Outlook Boards could be a replacement for the Boards, but guess what? Those have been retired in June 2023 due to low usage. I guess the same was the case with Delve Boards.

Do I mind? Not particularly. As mentioned, the functionality has already been incorporated into other apps for some time, the Delve app is not visible to F3 users (although they can access it) and the app often causes confusion as generally, more documents are visible to you than you expect. Additionally, having one app less to think, teach or worry about in the Microsoft365 suite is probably welcome.

Now we just have to wait for information about Access 😉.

Dark red apps = danger?

There’s a new font in town

You may have heard, read or noticed that there is a new Microsoft default typeface called Aptos. As I have an interest in typography, I thought it might be nice to write something in the different Microsoft fonts used over the years, to show you how the different types look in writing. As I can not use different fonts on this platform, I am embedding a PDF created out of a Microsoft Word document. (Which was very frustrating with all the images that mess up the layout)

If you can not see the embedded document, please view it in a PC browser or watch it here: This is Aptos!.pdf

Here goes:

Download

So, after this trip to memory lane, I have set my defaults to…Arial. I like that one most. Please be aware you can only change the default fonts in

• Outlook (web and desktop)
• Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote desktop (NOT in web, although you can change it per document)

It was interesting to notice that the option to change the default font is in various places across the 365 suite. 😁 How tiring!

Update April 2024:
I just came across an article advocating the use of Aptos in your resumé as it shows you are up-to-date. So I guess using Arial shows that I am outdated. 😉

What do you think about the new type?

Work in progress – but different work

It has been some time since I posted here. I mentioned it at the bottom of my latest posts: I am currently moving house, which includes

• selling our current house, involving presenting the house as nicely as possible when people visit for a tour
• decluttering, as we are moving to a smaller apartment with less storage space
• renovating our new apartment, which we leave to professionals, but needs a lot of decisions, discussions and organizing

All this takes up more time than I had expected, and I find it difficult to focus on Microsoft365. In retrospect, I wonder how we managed our last move (in 2005) while having full-time jobs! 😁

So to all followers: apologies for the silence, but there is a good (happy) reason for it. And I will be back!

Picture by Monica Silvestre on Pexels.com

Why can Frontline Workers not add a Teams meeting to their meetings?

The other day I received a comment on my post “Some quirks of the F3 license“. The commenter’s Frontline Worker F3 colleagues do not have the option to “Add online meeting to all meetings”. Apparently the option is not visible in the Outlook web app.

Enter a new Microsoft365 detective: Teams Thorne*. Will he become as famous as SharePoint Holmes, you think?

Let’s find out! Here’s what Teams Thorne did to see if he could find out if this was user-, admin, or license-related.

1. Is it a user thing?

Teams Thorne has a Small Business License, which, like the F3 license, is 100% online. He opened Outlook (on the web, obviously), and first checked what the normal behaviour of his Calendar was with regards to organizing meetings. He created a new event.
The “Teams meeting” was visible, but not checked. But as soon as he added a person to the invitees, the box got checked.

The Teams meeting checkbox is automatically checked when you add another person to your meeting.

He then looked at how things were after disabling it in his settings.
In Outlook or Calendar, click the Gear Wheel > View all Outlook settings > Calendar > Events and Invitations. The option to add an online meeting was indeed checked, so he unchecked it and waited for some time.

When this box is unchecked, you do not automatically add a Teams Meeting. You do it manually.

He went back to his Calendar, created a new event and noticed that the box did not get checked when he invited someone. But he could enable the Teams Meeting manually by clicking on the button.

With the setting disabled, you can still add a Teams meeting, but you have to check the box yourself.

This did not match the issue described. Teams Thorne had the option to add an online meeting to all meetings, so there must be something that disables that button entirely. In any case, this did not appear to be an incorrect user setting.

2. Is it an admin thing?

The next thing to investigate was the Teams Admin Center. Perhaps there is a setting that prevents that button from loading?

Teams Thorne opened the Admin center and headed to the Teams Admin Center > Meetings. The Meeting Settings did not give any indication, but the Meeting Policies looked promising. He opened the Global (Org-wide Default) policy and looked at the options available. Hmmm, there was permission given for the Outlook Add-In, could that be the thing that made the connection between Teams and Outlook?

The Meetings > Meeting Policies menu items contains a setting for an Outlook add-in. Is that a clue?

He disabled the Outlook add-in, logged off and waited some time for the new policies to “settle”. It now looked like this:

The Outlook add-in has been disabled.

The next day, he opened his Calendar and started creating a Meeting. Hey, that Teams box was not there!

There is no “Teams Meeting” option to the right.

He went back to his Outlook settings and noticed that he could not check that box, apparently because there was no provider mentioned.

As there is no meeting provider mentioned, it is impossible to activate this setting.

So, it looks as if you need the Outlook add-in in Teams to have that option.

But…in the Global Policy, which is the Default for everyone who is not in another policy, it is enabled. I hope that organizations will not edit their Global Policy unless they have a very good reason. I can not imagine why you would want to disable adding a Teams meeting to all meetings – you do not HAVE to meet with Teams, but it is pretty convenient to have it just in case something goes wrong with your face-to-face meeting.

3. Is it a policy thing?

Teams Thorne had never tinkered with the Meeting Policies, in fact this was the first time he ever looked at them. So he concluded that the option to use the Outlook add-in is standard. But perhaps there was a special policy for Frontline Workers?

He went through the Teams Admin Center to see if there was anything else that could shed some light on whether this might be different for other groups. Hey, there was a Policy Packages menu item – could that help? He saw a number of policies, including a Frontline Worker Policy:

In the Meetings > Policy Packages there are a number of policies for different roles.

Upon clicking the Frontline Worker Policy Package, it showed a number of options:

The different policies for Frontline Workers

When he opened the Meeting Policies he noticed the following settings. The items were the same as the Global (default) policy, but a lot of things are OFF, including the Outlook add-in.

The Outlook add-in has been turned off for Frontline workers.

But when he compared it to, for instance, a Higher Education Student, or a Healthcare Clinical Worker, you see that the Outlook add-in is available for them.

In other roles, such as the Higher Education Student shown here, the Outlook add-in is enabled.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to make changes to the Policy Packages, unless you have a Teams Premium or Advanced Communications license.

Conclusion

So, there is a number of things that we have found out.

1. Your colleagues need to have the Outlook add-in in order to be able to add a Teams meeting to a meeting they schedule.
2. The Outlook add-in is enabled in the Global (Organization-wide default) policy and is therefore available for all employees, unless they have another policy applied to them.
3. The standard Frontline Workers Meeting Policies have the Outlook add-in disabled, so employees with this policy package are unable to add a Teams meeting to their scheduled meetings.

So, in the organization of the person who made the comment, it is most likely that the Frontline Workers have the Microsoft Teams Frontline Workers Meeting Policy Package applied to them, or another policy without the Outlook add-in.
In theory the Global (Org-wide default) Meeting policies could also have been changed, but in that case all employees would be unable to add a Teams meeting. That was not what I understood from the comment.

But why you would want to exclude Frontline Workers from adding a Teams meeting, is totally beyond me. But that is another topic.

So, what do you think of Teams Thorne’s first case?

* About Teams Thorne:
Part of my role was solving user issues. Sometimes they are so common that I had a standard response, but sometimes I needed to do some sleuthing to understand and solve it.
As many of my readers are in a similar position, I thought I’d introduce Teams Thorne, Teams investigator, who will go through a few cases while working out loud. Teams Thorne is based on Tom Thorne, a British detective, who was created by Mark Billingham and has featured in books and a TV series.

Please note: Due to an exciting, but rather time-consuming private project (moving house) I am currently posting a bit less frequently than usual.