SharePoint Archives - Cloud Decoded

Automate Newsletter Generation using Power Automate

November 15, 2020 No Comments

Most people working with various organizations are used to receiving nicely formatted newsletters/communications over email about various subjects like IT Security Updates, HR Updates or some know how about certain Applications. While bigger organizations may have a separate team(s) and specific tools to do so, in most small to medium organizations, this process remains ad-hoc and mostly manual. So, what about we help them with some simple to use tool to generate such templated emails much faster! Problem Statement Continuing from the Introductory statement, I have seen in smaller and medium sized organizations and even various groups within larger organizations, […]

SharePoint

Optimize SharePoint Search Results using Auto Tagged Content

June 26, 2019 No Comments

Sometime ago, I wrote an article explaining how to use Azure Text Analytics Service to Automatically Tag Documents stored in SharePoint document libraries. The expected outcome would be that most of your SharePoint documents would be “Tagged” with keywords extracted from the content of the corresponding documents. But what next? How does it help? Let’s take a look at how can we benefit once we have most of the documents properly tagged. Target State Before we jump in to the benefits, let’s establish what we are trying to achieve here Create an additional field, say Content Area(s), in the document […]

Azure

Redirect to SharePoint Online URL using Azure Web App

March 17, 2019 2 Comments

With all the ongoing applications migrations to cloud, specially to SaaS destinations like SharePoint Online (SPO), at times it becomes necessary to provide a period of URL redirections between Old and New applications. For example, in an on-premise environment, we can use any URL like https://companyportal.company.com, but when the same content is migrated to SharePoint Online, we can’t retain the same URL. In SPO, the closest matching URL we can get would be something like https://companyportal.SharePoint.com. Also, because in the on-premise environment there are numerous site collections/subsites hierarchy, so just redirecting the root site may not be enough. Many business […]

SharePoint Online

Send Meeting Invites to SharePoint Online Calendar

August 28, 2018 41 Comments

Sometime ago, I wrote an article about How to enable Incoming Mails in SharePoint Online. In that article, I talked about how can we use Microsoft Flow to achieve the functionality. But there is another common functionality available in SharePoint on-premise versions which allows us to send meeting invites to SharePoint calendars. This functionality has been widely used to make a SharePoint calendar as Leave Tracker or to track important events. Let’s take a look at how this can be achieved in SharePoint Online. This solution makes use of Power Automate/Flow. If you want to know about some of the […]

SharePoint Online

Plan Extranet Sites Migration to SharePoint Online

April 16, 2018 No Comments

Extranet sites or Sites having access to external users in SharePoint have been in use for long, across various organizations. It provides great collaboration when working with multiple vendors/partners. There are various articles about external sharing capabilities of SharePoint Online. In this article I am just going to focus on migration scenarios only. Extranet Sites in SharePoint On-Premise There are various ways to implement external access in on-premise SharePoint farms like External Users created in Active Directory in a separate OU and/or account names starting something like ext_ or gst_ to easily identify external/guest users External Users in a separate trusted […]

SharePoint Online

Hub sites in SharePoint Online

April 2, 2018 6 Comments

Microsoft recently announced a major feature rollout, SharePoint Online Hub Sites, for Targeted Release Users. This is expected to be rolled out for all by end of May 2018. This has created a lot of buzz and rightly so, with the set of features it comes packed with. A common landing page for related sites was one of the most sought after requirements from various customer I have worked with. What is SharePoint Hub Site We can’t create a hub site directly using create site option. There is not specific or separate template for that. This is just regular Team Site […]

OneDrive

Sync Files on Demand with OneDrive Client

March 30, 2018 No Comments

In a complete Office 365 implementation, every user gets a personal web space called OneDrive Site. This is a place where they are supposed to store files which are not supposed to be shared or ready to be shared with larger audience. OneDrive for Business sites combined with OneDrive client provides great way to ensure users are truly mobile. It allows them to access their files anywhere from any device, of course, depending on organizational policies. Organizations have love-hate relationship with OneDrive – Some have accepted it to the core whereas others see it as a potential security hazard, which […]

Office 365

How to Call SharePoint REST WebService from Microsoft Flow

March 22, 2018 11 Comments

Microsoft Flow is getting better and better with each passing day. It now has thousands of templates to get you started quickly and provides connectors for hundreds of other services. Flow can be invoked from across various external applications as well, but I guess, the most immediate users would come from SharePoint world 🙂 I wrote an article earlier about how Microsoft Flow can be used to Enable Incoming Mails in SharePoint Online. In this article, I am going to explain how to connect with SharePoint Online, extract some data using REST Services and send it for further processing. Getting […]

Azure, Office 365

Migrate Files Shares to Microsoft Cloud

March 19, 2018 6 Comments

File shares have been a beloved way to store and share documents around various groups for years. Even though, many organizations moved to collaborative solutions like SharePoint years ago, File Shares didn’t lose their charm. Because of the ease of usage and historical knowhow, it continued to grow both in size and usage over years. I know many organizations who store say 5 terabytes of data in SharePoint, still have four times more data in File Shares. But things are not all rosy with File Shares. Why Move out of File Shares Let’s a take quick look at why we […]

Office 365

External/Guest Access in Microsoft Teams

March 12, 2018 4 Comments

Microsoft recently announced to start rolling out a much awaited feature in Microsoft Teams – Support for consumer email account as Guests or External Users. As per Microsoft official message “Users will have the ability to add anyone with a business or consumer email account (such as Outlook.com) as a guest, enabling them to participate in Teams with full access to team chats, meetings and files. Guests with email accounts such as Gmail.com or others that do not yet have a Microsoft account associated to their email will be directed to create a Microsoft account for free, as this is required […]