4 Easy Steps to SharePoint Data Compliance

Compliance and Data protection has never been more important.  Microsoft has put a huge effort behind the “Data Loss Prevention” and “Labels” as well as site designs and levels to help users do the right thing.  Unfortunately, there has been a major disconnect between the business and IT (those tech teams providing the solutions) based on SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2019.  Business users often expect that IT has already setup the proper governance, compliance settings and all that’s necessary before the solution is released.  Very few company have setup the necessary, but new built in features of Site Classification, Data Loss prevention or the new SharePoint Labels.  Something I’ve repeated in the past that’s very applicable is defaults have faults.  SharePoint out of the box is not necessarily setup to ensure compliance in your industry without configuration.  These 4 prescriptive setups designed in a easy to consume Infographic provide the settings and configuration that’s required for compliance and due diligence for modern data protection.

Download the “4 Steps to Data Compliance in SharePoint” Infographic…

Feel free to use or share this infographic it in your slides, in your blogs, with your business and review with Information security Legal or security teams.  This Infographic is designed to be shared.  It has a license of creative commons share alike.

As it relates to the importance of compliance in Office 365 SharePoint Online, many companies are missing the keys to success and may find a lot of value in seeing a sample built out based on prescriptive guidance.  SharePoint Online may seem plug and play, and releasing the service as is and letting users get on with their work and sites may seem like the right thing to do.  The reality is, with a little bit of configuration the environment can be setup in a much more purposeful way to protect data and the company from litigation due to lack of reasonable compliance actions taken to protect information privacy and records.  SharePoint Server in 2016 and 2019 have support for Data Loss Prevention.  The need for compliance and privacy applies to all types of environments.

There are really 4 key steps in setting up and configuring your SharePoint environment for base compliance.  I’ve worked with Colligo to put together this clever Infographic designed to simplify the process.  I hope you enjoy it.  Hope you like the Infographic, but even better I hope you join us for the upcoming free webinar where I’ll walk you through the 4 steps in more detail.

Free Webinar: SharePoint Data Compliance Made Easy: Site Classifications, Labels and the User Experience

Over 60-minutes we’ll review 4 Easy Steps for Compliance:

  1. Defining Office 365 Labels for information protection
  2. How to create, publish and apply Labels to Libraries
  3. How to create and apply data loss prevention (DLP) policies to warn users and block data from leaks
  4. How to make it easy for users to Save and Classify emails and files to SharePoint without leaving Outlook and Office 365

Join Joel Oleson, a Microsoft MVP/RD and 19-year SharePoint veteran with 7 years of experience at Microsoft as he shares practical guidance to keep your data secure and compliant. Colligo’s Roland Reddekop will show how users can save, classify and label emails and files right from the applications they primarily work in like Outlook and Office 365.

Title: SharePoint Data Compliance Made Easy: Site Classifications, Labels and the User Experience
Date: Thursday, April 11, 2019
Time: 8 a.m. PST, 11 am EST — Register
Date: Thursday, April 11, 2019
Time: 11 a.m. PST 2 pm EST — Register
Speakers: Joel Oleson, MVP Office Apps and Services & RD
Roland Reddekop, Colligo

>> RSVP for the Webinar

This webinar and infographic is sponsored by Colligo. See more on the colligo.com website

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Addressing Office 365 Adoption Challenges Infographic

Office 365 is clearly popular.  In fact the new Okta 2019 Business at Work report lists it as the clear leader in the cloud SAAS space for the past 5 years.  It’s an incredible commanding lead at this point, but while that may help comfort you in your decision to deploy it isn’t enough to call it mission successful as 76% of customers in their report also some have overlapping solutions including duplicates such Box, Google Apps, and Salesforce.  In addition, in an AIIM report focused on adoption and enhancing Office 365, has concluded in their summary the need to enhance your implementation

Office 365 is the best

Chart Courtesy of Okta Business at Work 2019 – it’s truly a must read… I’ve been following their annual reports, and they are great.

AIIM Research www.aiim.org/research survey for responses from 124 individual members of the AIIM community during the month of November 2017.  In the report, they share Forty-four percent report their users like it.  It makes sense why in a subscription model, Microsoft is so focused on adoption and consumption of the workloads.  The overlapping solutions also were exposed in the AIIM research, “Fifty-five percent of our respondents agree that getting users to manage and share their content in Office 365 and no place else is their biggest on-going issue [while] Forty-six percent feel that lack of expertise is the biggest issue.”

“Use add-on, and auxiliary products and services to supplement out-of-the-box functionality and lack of in-house to maximize your investment and transition to Office 365 and fill the gaps where they are needed.”  – AIIM Research

In my conversations with Apps 365 on their solutions and their success in the ecosystem they shared how they have been addressing Gaps exposed by the product.  It’s not unusual in fact Microsoft has a very rich ecosystem and welcomes partners to address gaps in the product.  These could be considered enhancements or things that may eventually come on the roadmap, but customers who hold their breath waiting for unannounced features may be disappointed and may want to consider proven solutions.  The AIIM research suggested 30% or more customers are looking to implement two or more third party add-ins in the next 12-18 months and more than 20% have already deployed one or more add-ins.

The Conclusion from AIIM research lines up with the emphasis Microsoft has put on it’s rich ecosystem… “Use add-on, and auxiliary products and services to supplement out-of-the-box functionality and lack of in-house to maximize your investment and transition to Office 365 and fill the gaps where they are needed.”

Office 365 Adoption Infographic
Office 365 Adoption Infographic

There are really three areas of focus in addressing Gaps in Office 365: Expertise, Staffing Resource, and Tools.

The new certifications can help you with your expertise gaps, as well hope to see you at the SharePoint Conference 2019 use discount code OLESON if you register to save yourself some money, the resources are something the many many partners can help you with, feel free to reach out for local or regional recommendations, and the tools gap is filled by the immense vendor partner network such as in the app store.  Consider these gaps in the graph below…

Apps 365 is sponsoring a webinar where we’ll be diving into the Microsoft Roadmap and in helping you understand the Gaps and Solutions.

New Webinar – 2019 YEAR OF THE LIST: Five Top Futuristic SharePoint List Trends to Follow in 2019

“We’re excited to host our first webinar from the ‘Mind The Gap’ webinar series with Joel Oleson, MVP who will be highlighting the Five Top Futuristic SharePoint List Trends to Follow in 2019.”

When: Mar 13, 2019 1:00 PM Pacific, 4:00pm Eastern

>>Register Now

Here are the 5 Trends we’ll be covering…
1: Automated Transcription and Enrichment
2: File Sharing Compliance Enhancements
3: Search & Findability Enhancements
4: Client-Side Enhanced & Extensible List UI
5: GPS 1and Location Metadata

Community FlashMob at #SPC19 Ministry of Silly Walks

Join @JoelOleson, @EricaToelle, @HeatherNewman, @PaulSwider, SPCPartyPatrol and a bunch more at the community at the SharePoint Conference Ministry of Silly Walk (click here to register to join us).

Apps 365 is providing a bunch of Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks T-shirts.  You can find out more about that on my post about the Ministry of Silly Walks at #SPC19.

silly walks spc

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Office 365 POWER TOOLS Infographic: What to use When

It’s incredible how much effort Microsoft has put into so many new tools.  People’s heads have been spinning around all of the new tools in Office 365.  The most important tools as it relates to Application development are the Office 365 Power Tools.

This infographic is designed to help you understand which of the Power Tools to use when…  Apps, Forms, Workflows, Reporting, and More this simple infographic is designed to make it easier to understand.

Office 365 Power Tools

If you like this Infographic you can download it and use it in your internal decks and training materials.  Simply right click on the image and save it.

Feel free to use it in your SharePoint Saturday and event decks as well.  It is shared Creative Commons Share with Attribution… Just let ’em know you got it from Collabshow.com

If you like this Infographic you may also like the companion Infographic on Microsoft Forms Limits and Boundaries

Looking for more?  Join the Webinar where I’ll dive deeper into the comparisons between Forms and Forms Pro, Flow and Flow Premium, Power Apps and developmental scale challenges.

This Webinar is not designed for the hard core developer whose been using these tools day in and day out, but for the Power Users and those trying to get their heads around the differences in the Office 365 Power Suite of Tools.

Join “the Apps, Forms, Workflows and Tools of Office 365: When to Use What?” free webinar on March 7, at 11am Pacific Time, 3pm Eastern Time.  See you there!

 

 

 

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Getting Started Guidelines to Microsoft Forms Limits and Boundaries

Infographic_MicrosoftFormsGuidelinesFinal

 

Microsoft Forms is a basic lightweight app for quickly collecting information via surveys and quizzes, but you should be aware of its limits.  The strength of Microsoft forms is its licensing.  It’s free to use for anonymous or authenticated users, and the data can be stored in a list or connected to flow to push into other systems, but there are some limits to be aware of especially in relation to using it to build an app.  When do you decide to use a PowerApp vs. a form or even just use the list?  Microsoft Forms is a great way to get started with the new generation of tools in Office 365, but when should you look into the Microsoft ecosystem?  It was when I started pushing the limits that I found there are some limitations in Microsoft Forms.  Even walking through User Voice, you can’t get a clear picture.  I couldn’t find a single place with guidelines on what those limits were that I decided to put together an infographic to simplify the process.  I’m working on a broader infographic for what to use when, and I’m hoping this will simplify the process.  As with all things in Office 365, it’s a moving target and these limits are subject to change anytime, but this is current as of my evaluation and testing on 2/11/2019.  I did see acknowledgement on various forums, but never saw a list of Microsoft Forms Limits in one place so this is my effort to try to consolidate.  Feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments or feedback on my experience as well.  Hopefully this posting will encourage users to weigh in on User Voice options to increase these limits.  Let me know if you see any changes as time goes on.  I will plan to support this list over the coming year… and maybe more with encouragement from the community.

1.  Users Can’t Update or Come back to finish their responses.

In this limitation users have to fill out the form and be done.  If users might need to come back to change a response such as in an RSVP or if they want to save and come back later to finish, Microsoft Forms is currently not able to support users coming back.

2. Hard Limit of 100 Questions.

Essentially there is a hard limit of 100 questions in Microsoft Forms.  This boundary does seem like one that should be published and I expect it will be published in the near future.  Of note it really depends on how you ask the questions and what style of questions you’re using as to how this limit is reached.  Some users have experienced the limit at 60 by using different style of questions… see #6 for another example.

3. You are limited to 2 to 10 options on a ranking question.

If you have 10 ranking questions you can only ask 10 questions.  If you have a ranking question with 2 options you’ll only be able to ask 50 questions.  This can make for an odd survey if you keep finding you’re hitting a limit.

4. Choice Questions store only 60 options.

This is a soft limit, so you won’t even notice.  You can provide hundreds of options, but only a max of 60 options are stored to viewed in your results.  So imagine you’re asking the user to choose their country.  As a traveler I know there are 193 UN countries, but At&t seems to think there’s a whole lot more than that so they can say they are in a ton more than they actually are.  That aside, if you ask someone to choose their country, you’ll find Microsoft Forms is only storing 60 options.  So when you’ve got users from 90 countries you’ll find only 60 of them were stored.  In my mind that’s pretty serious.  You could ask that question in a text field, but that’s a little strange.

5. You get a max of 4000 characters in a response.

Imagine your users are giving you feedback and you get a nice essay as a response and find it’s only half there.  Be aware you’ll only get 4000 characters in the long text box response.  I can’t imagine someone pouring their heart out to provide detailed responses and then you get only the first 4000 characters in that response.  Is that enough?  Who knows, but to have it be truncated isn’t cool.

6. Likert scales are limited to 20 questions.

Just as in the limits above, you might find yourself designing a survey and finding you’re running out of questions.  Be aware.

If you like the infographic and want to use it in a blog or in your presentations at SharePoint Saturdays or community events, no problem.  This infographic is shareable with creative commons share with attribution.  As long as you include the whole image you’re good to go.  You can download this infographic on Microsoft Forms Limits from slideshare as a PDF or as a JPG from this blog post, simply right click on the image and choose save.

Join me for a Webinar on this Topic and More

If you liked what you saw here and want more.  You can join me on a webinar where I will dig into the differences between each of the Power Trio and Forms and Forms Pro (what little we know from recent news).

Webinar on March 7, 2019 at 11am Pacific

TOPIC:  “Apps, Forms, Workflows and Tools of Office 365: What to Use When?”

Sponsored by Crow Canyon.

Register free << RSVP – register >>

I’ll be going over each of the Microsoft Apps and Tools and describing their strengths, helping you best understand “when to use what tools” in building out your solutions.

Join Microsoft MVP Joel Oleson with Scott Restivo, CEO of Crow Canyon Software to explore the core of Office 365 tools and dive into the fundamentals of business applications. In this session we’ll: 1). Demystify the tools and reveal limits in application construction and look at when to use what in your biz app lifecycle. 2). Focus on fundamentals and directing when to use what in your tooling and fundamental approaches and provide you with some great take-away’s in the form of Infographics. 3). Finally, we’ll explore the interconnected nature of business solutions from ingestion, business processing, evaluation, reporting, and data analysis in a single platform with integrated tools all in a content services platform. It doesn’t stop there as Hybrid solutions can be constructed with gateways and the power of the cloud allows scale like no other time.

<UPDATE! 2/22/2019>

Kudos to Phil Worrell among others who shared their thoughts on things they thought for which people should be aware.  I’ve gathered theme here from various social platform (in comments) who had some additional “Feature” differences and things to be aware of…

More Forms Limits or Desired Features

  • Limited customization and look & feel, no ability to even change fonts size
  • No attachments or file upload option
  • No country picker (as I mentioned above if you create your own it won’t work well if you use over 60 items and expect to get all items back)
  • No paging or section breaks
  • No way to share a link to collaborate share a secure form with selected individuals only a group option or a link that is open to the entire org
  • No comments on questions to add to an answer for further details.
  • No multiparty questions e.g. fill in you details first name , last name, address etc in one question.
  • No field validation, including email address or other data type validation except numbers
  • No calculated field options

Remember these are subject to change.  In fact, have may have heard about Forms Pro?  We should hear more about this solution, but as you look at what they’ve shared it doesn’t appear to be focused on addressing the things we’ve called out here.  Keep reporting things you care about and voting on User Voice!

Read more about the recent announcement of Microsoft Forms Pro

Microsoft Forms Pro highlights:

  • Easy to set up and configure
  • Trigger surveys around specific events
  • Collect feedback across channels
  • Embed surveys across apps, web, and mobile
  • Identify sentiments automatically
  • Analyze feedback for impactful insights

“This enterprise survey tool makes it easy for organizations to collect feedback across customer touchpoints using surveys, quizzes, and polls, correlate the feedback with business transactions, and derive actionable insights from the combined data,” wrote Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications & Industry at Microsoft.

Microsoft Forms Pro will be available in public preview this spring [2019].”

 

 

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Three Tiers to Increase to Unlimited Storage in OneDrive for Business

In recent history, Microsoft quietly supported 1TB to 5TB.  Many customers didn’t notice that change.  Many Office 365 Admins don’t realize the limit is NOT 1TB.  This quiet update to the pricing plans with the reference to unlimited storage with the little circled i with more information has not really made it to general mindset of the community and many customers still support competing products not realizing that OneDrive as well supports UNLIMITED STORAGE for users!  A simple search for OneDrive Unlimited results in old information no recent discussions.

Why would you not want 25TB quotas for your users especially those who refuse to move because there isn’t enough cloud storage or they are worried about the cost?  OneDrive just got 25x more cool and beyond!

 

image

I put together the very sharable infographic above, so you can help promote the fact that OneDrive for Business is now Unlimited.  Feel free to use the image how every you’d like feel free to download it or use it in your slides.

Download the OneDrive Unlimited Storage Infographic.

It’s not hard to give all your users 5TB of storage by default.  Simply go to https://admin.onedrive.com/?v=StorageSettings and change the default 1TB to 5TB

 

image

Or through the Office 365 Admin Powershell:

To change default quota to 5TB  for OneDrive for Business for entire Tenant

Set-SPOTenant -OneDriveStorageQuota 5120

To change quota for a user:

Set-SPOSite -Identity <user’s OneDrive URL> -StorageQuota <quota>

Note Subscriptions with less than five users receive 1 TB of personal cloud storage per user.  In fact all start that way.

“Customers will initially be provisioned 1 TB of personal cloud storage per user in OneDrive for Business. You may increase the default OneDrive for Business storage space to up to 5 TB per user with the help of your Office 365 administrator once the 1TB quota is 90% full.”

Thats the tricky part.  Microsoft is basically saying wait until a user has reached that capacity, but getting to 5 TB default you don’t need to wait, but going to 25 TB quotas you’ll need MS support help with justification such as a user who is close.

“Whenever you need cloud storage beyond the initial 5 TB, open a case with Microsoft technical support to request it. Additional cloud storage will be granted as follows:

  • When a user has filled their 5 TB of OneDrive for Business storage to at least 90% capacity, Microsoft will increase your default storage space in OneDrive for Business to up to 25 TB per user (admins may set a lower per user limit if they wish to).
  • For any user that reaches at least 90% capacity of their 25 TB of OneDrive for Business storage, additional cloud storage will be provided as 25 TB SharePoint team sites to individual users. This additional storage is provided to the tenant by way of credit.

To see how much personal cloud storage you are using, your Office 365 administrator can go to the OneDrive Admin Center to manage their users’ personal cloud storage.”

See Change your users’ OneDrive storage space using PowerShell for more information on how Office 365 administrators can manage user storage in OneDrive for Business.

 

I had heard rumors that the 15GB per file limit was increased.  I have not seen this play out.  Uploading a file of 15.1 GB failed. I confirmed 15GB max individual file is still the case.  I’m hoping to see this increased for video files.  clip_image002

You can determine your personal quota by navigating to your onedrive for business and appending /_layouts/15/storman.aspx?root=Documents  It’s also in site settings… look for Storage Manager.  The nick name was StorMan

References:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/set-default-storage-space

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/change-user-storage

https://products.office.com/en-us/onedrive-for-business/compare-onedrive-for-business-plans

https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-more-office-365-for-business-plans

Joel Oleson1 Comment

5 Powerful Steps to Maximize Office 365 & SharePoint UX

5 Simple Steps to Maximize Office 365 and SharePoint Usability

 

I am humbled to have been selected as a Microsoft Regional Director, which made me realize it’s been a little while since I’ve posted.  I intend to correct that.  I’m excited to announce a new blog series on how to drive maximum usability in Office 365 in SharePoint Online, Office 365 Groups and beyond.  In my experience at Blizzard I’ve found simply migrating our data to SharePoint Online won’t accomplish the most important updates in the past year.

 

5 Steps to Maximize Office 365 & SharePoint Usability

Classify – Both Sites and Groups support classification in Office 365.  Being able to take action such as not listing a group or site in a directory, or using a flow to approve a site based on the need to support external guests can allow one to have a much better handle on HR data vs Finance or Legal data as an example.  It can also lend itself to support putting sites in Hubs based on department, division or location.

Hubify – Hubs are a new type of site, but really they simply roll up the documents and provide search scopes.  It’s running a Windows Powershell that makes a site into a hub site.  In this post we’ll dig into the how and why with samples.

Groupify – Groups is all the buzz.  Groups gives you all storts of stuff you never asked for, but the approach does have some merits especially in relation to adoption.  Much of the new tools will never be used until people experience them.  Teams and Groups expose these new tools.  The Group OneDrive and Group Inbox and Group Calendar are fantastic as is Planner for a team.

Modernify – The Modern UI is out, but there’s no one big switch to take your classic site all the way to a Modern SharePoint Site, but you can do it in 3 pretty basic steps.

Culturify – How are you going to handle branding and incorporating company culture? We’ll look at the best approaches available today the answer is slightly different in Modern and Classic sites.

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Upgrade SharePoint 2016

Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade to SharePoint 2016 Infographic

“The most reliable, scalable, secure and high-performing SharePoint Server release ever”

The Future of SharePoint got everyone’s heads spinning, but I’ve seen tons of new energy in the community. Companies everywhere are looking for ways to help justify upgrade or migration to the new platform that is poised to be the platform that nails it. (At least it may be time to give it another shot, right?) Microsoft calls SharePoint 2016 release “the most reliable, scalable, secure and high-performing SharePoint Server release ever”

Is that enough?  There’s more. I think many businesses want the details in an easy to consume easy to share format that makes it easy for management to make a clear decision on a winning platform designed for the future. Following the Future of SharePoint event, I gathered my list of reasons to upgrade and updated it with a few of the new additional reasons to upgrade and I think we have something that is worth sharing.

You have unlimited permission to share this with infographic with your management, share it on your blog, share it in your social media circles. We want to get the community up on SharePoint 2016 and I think this list of reasons will help!

You can download the Infographic as a sharable PDF document or as a PNG image.

Download, Share and View

Joel Oleson2 Comments