SharePoint Excellence

Microsoft continues to strengthen the foundation for AI-powered workplaces with the announcement that several SharePoint AI innovations are reaching General Availability (GA) . As organizations increasingly adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot, the quality and structure of content stored in SharePoint become even more important. Copilot and AI agents can only deliver meaningful insights when they can securely access well-organized and relevant business knowledge. The latest SharePoint AI capabilities are designed to help organizations: ✅ Make enterprise knowledge more discoverable and useful for Copilot ✅ Improve content understanding and retrieval for AI-powered experiences ✅ Power the new Copilot app and intelligent agents with high-quality organizational data ✅ Unlock greater value from existing SharePoint investments For businesses already using Microsoft 365, this represents another important step toward creating a more intelligent digital workplace where AI can provide better answers, aut...

If you’re still relying on passwords to protect Microsoft 365, you’re leaving a critical gap in your security. A single phished credential can be enough to access email, files, chats, and sensitive business data. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) adds a second verification step—such as an Authenticator prompt, a one-time code, or a security key—so a password alone can’t grant access. As a Microsoft 365 administrator and technology enthusiast, I’ve seen firsthand how implementing MFA dramatically reduces account takeover risk and strengthens organisational security. Who this is for This guide is aimed at Microsoft 365 administrators, IT teams, and business leaders looking for practical steps to bolster tenant security with consistent MFA enforcement. Whether you’re managing a small business or a larger enterprise, the principles here apply to everyone seeking to protect critical business data. The goal: require MFA for interactive sign-ins Enforcing MFA for all interactive use...

 Today Microsoft announced that GPT-5.2 is now available in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio , bringing two tuned variants: GPT-5.2 Thinking for deep reasoning and strategic work, and GPT-5.2 Instant for fast writing, translation, and skill-building. In Copilot, the model connects to Work IQ to surface insights across your meetings, emails, and documents—helping you turn scattered information into actionable plans. If you use Copilot Chat or Copilot Studio, you can pick GPT-5.2 from the model selector and try prompts like asking for strategic takeaways from a meeting, building comparative tables of market leaders, or preparing focused talking points for upcoming conversations. Microsoft emphasizes model choice , so teams can select the model that best fits the task while keeping security, compliance, and privacy controls in place. Rollout starts today 11-Dec-2025 for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and will expand over the coming weeks; Microsoft 365 Premium...

At Microsoft Ignite 2025 , over 70 announcements were made, focusing on the introduction of AI "Agents" and the new Agent 365 control system for managing AI within organizations. Key Announcements Agent 365: This new control plane allows organizations to manage AI agents effectively. It provides a centralized registry of all agents, enabling IT administrators to monitor their behavior, ensure compliance, and manage access controls. Each agent is assigned a unique identity through Microsoft Entra, which helps secure data access and reduce risks associated with unauthorized actions.  Shift to AI Agents: Microsoft is moving beyond traditional chatbots to more autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks and make decisions. This shift is aimed at enhancing productivity and streamlining workflows across various applications.  Integration with Microsoft 365: New vocal commands for Microsoft 365 Copilot were introduced, allowing users to interact with AI more naturally. This integr...

Agents are already changing how people work, and  IDC  predicts there will be 1.3 billion agents by 2028. 1   Agent 365  is the control plane for agents, extending the infrastructure you trust to manage your people to agents. Whether your agents are created using Copilot Studio , Microsoft Foundry , open-source frameworks, or from a growing ecosystem of partners, including Adobe , Manus , SAP , ServiceNow , Workday , and more—Agent 365 helps you deploy, organize, and govern them securely.  Agent 365  includes five key capabilities: A   registry  to give you a single source of truth for all the agents in your organization. Access  control  to manage agents and limit their access to only the resources required to perform specific tasks. Visualization —a unified dashboard and advanced analytics to see connections between agents, people, and data, and monitor agent behavior and performance in real time. Interoperability  to equip agents...

Microsoft Project Online—a trusted project management solution for over a decade—is officially retiring on September 30, 2026. If your organization relies on Project Online, now is the time to plan your transition to modern, AI-powered tools like Microsoft Planner and Project for the Web. Why Is Microsoft Retiring Project Online? Project Online was built on older architecture, which limits innovation and integration with today’s collaborative work tools. Microsoft is shifting its focus to cloud-first, AI-driven solutions that deliver: Better collaboration across Microsoft 365 AI-powered insights with Microsoft 365 Copilot Scalable, modern project management for all team sizes. Key Retirement Dates October 1, 2025 – End of sale for new Project Online-only SKUs. September 30, 2026 – Project Online will be fully retired and inaccessible. Important : This does not affect Project desktop, Project Server Subscription Edition, or Planner. What Happens After Retirement? Your Project Online ...

Recently, a business user reached out to me with an interesting issue: He was unable to create a new library because SharePoint indicated that the library already existed. However, when he checked the Site Contents, the library was nowhere to be found. If you’ve faced a similar problem, here are a few possible solutions to make the hidden library visible again: 1. Check Permissions Ensure that you (and other users) have at least Read or Contribute access to the library. Sometimes the library exists but remains hidden due to restricted permissions. 2. Verify Navigation Settings Go to Library Settings → Navigation . Check if the library is set to appear in the left-hand navigation/quick launch . If not, enable it so the library becomes visible.  3. Confirm Library View The default view may be filtered or misconfigured , hiding all items. Switch to All Documents view or create a new one to confirm visibility.  4. Check Site Contents From the site home...

Microsoft announced that the New Analysis Engine is now generally available (GA)! This major milestone is all thanks to the feedback from our early adopters and app makers during the experimental and preview stages. Performance Boost The New Analysis Engine optimizes how we approach continuous analysis of app elements and their interactions in Studio. This ensures faster startup when loading your app and quicker updates while you edit. The new analysis algorithm scales linearly with app size, eliminating complex cases that previously caused performance issues. Complex Canvas apps that previously took minutes to load should now load much faster. Accuracy The New Analysis Engine is not only faster but also more accurate. It enables precise determination of variable and collection types and reliably identifies the columns used in your app, addressing several long-standing bugs and enhancing Data Source call performance in published apps. It also facilitated the development of the ...

In our office, the people need to be logged into the corporate account and a business (client) for communication in client's network but we can run only 1 instance of MS Teams by default. There is a user voice on the same rum multiple instances on a machine.  Follow the below listed steps to setup multiple instances on a single machine Open any text editor, you can use default notepad app of your windows pc Copy the below code to your editor @ECHO OFF SET MSTEAMS_PROFILE=%~n0 ECHO - Using profile "%MSTEAMS_PROFILE%" SET "OLD_USERPROFILE=%USERPROFILE%" SET "USERPROFILE=%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Teams\CustomProfiles\%MSTEAMS_PROFILE%"   ECHO - Launching MS Teams with profile %MSTEAMS_PROFILE% cd "%OLD_USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Teams" "%OLD_USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Teams\Update.exe" --processStart "Teams.exe" Save the above file on your machine with extension ".bat" or with ".cmd" Onc...

Microsoft has launched a new update on 11 March 2022 that is helpful for Teams Administrators of a Tenant. With this update Teams Administrators will get a list of all Teams for a user is a member of in the Teams admin center. Earlier there was no way from Teams Admin center and forced to use PowerShell Script for this. Get-Team -User vivek.jagga @ sharepointexcellence.com To view the list of Teams for a user is a member of in Teams Admin Center, execute the below steps  Go to Teams Admin Center Click to Users --> Manage Users Select a user for that you wish to retrieve the list of Teams for which the user is member. This will open the User Detail page Now click to the Teams tab. System will show to view all the teams that the user is a part of For more details, go through Microsoft roadmap feature ID 87969 and Message Center  MC332869

Introduction SharePoint administrators always want to know which user is accessing any site or site collection extensively and which user has access to the site but not using it. The other site details required are related to traffic, access, edit, etc. The user's behavior changes as per the nature of the site and their working department like project team site, department site, and managerial workspace. Fortunately, Microsoft 365 has given multiple methods to generate or view various reports related to SharePoint usage. We will check all the methods one by one and see how they provide the required results. Several options are available at different parts in SharePoint Site or Admin Center where the Administrator can check status or create reports. Method-1. Check Site Usage in Site Contents Page. The Site contents page shows the analytics data like their unique visitors, total site visits, average time spent by the user, etc. The report can be generated for multiple days like 7, 3...

Microsoft is focusing on collaboration and MS Teams is most popular now a days. We can update settings / profile from MS Teams and other Office 365 documents. Sometimes we may faced issue related to cache, it means that we are updating something and its not working on our local machine only. Same situation was with me, user had changed his name and its available correctly for other team member but on his local machine its old one even in all Office 365 clients (MS Word, Excel, etc.). Manually tried to clean up some files but its not working. So drafted a PS script that worked.  Sharing that PS snippet with you all so that you can also save your time. PowerShell script at GitHub  Clean MS Teams Cache $VerbosePreference = "Continue" # Force Close any Teams Process Get-Process -Name "Teams" | Stop-Process -Force # Get Microsoft Teams Paths $TeamsRemovePath = @() $TeamsRemovePath += Join-Path -Path ([Environment]::GetFolderPath('ApplicationData')) -ChildPath (...

Overview While deployment of apps / add-ins or SPFx solutions to SharePoint Online App Catalog, this solution will be available to all of collections in your tenant as it is centrally deployed. This may lead to a lot of confusion when you are working with a lot of solutions in your Tenant, as all of solutions is available to all site collections as it is deployed centrally in Tenant app catalog. To overcome this problem, Microsoft has introduces Site Collection App Catalog.With the introduction of site collection app catalogs, tenant administrators can enable app catalog on the specific sites. Once enabled, site collection administrators can deploy SharePoint add-ins and SPFx solutions that will be available only in that particular site collection. The following schema illustrates using site collection app catalogs Use below script to Enable / disable site collection app catalog To Enable Site Collection App Catalog $siteUrl = "https://yourdomain-admin.sharepoint...

OneDrive is a part of Office 365. This cloud service from Microsoft allows you to access data anywhere, anytime. One Drive for Business has numerous advantages for businesses as it makes it easy to access documents, speeds up the sharing of data, and facilitates collaboration within different departments of the organization. OneDrive for Business has helped many business organizations to grow many folds by ensuring better document management and collaboration. Migrate Windows File Server data to Office 365 Here is the brief procedure to migrate Windows file system data to Office 365 – Sign in to Office 365 account Click the App Launcher icon at the top left-hand side Click the Office 365 icon Click Upload and Open Browse the desired files and click Open Files get uploaded After the successful upload, the file will automatically open There are two other methods too which you can use to upload data – SharePoint Migration tool It is a free tool which y...

Overview When we are working with Office 365 in our organization, some time there is requirement to connect on premise AD to get feed and update it. In this article, I’m explaining a case; export data from AD only for specific (custom) attribute and update it in SharePoint user profile. Requirement We are working on Office 365 and in user profile we have created some additional custom attribute. By default, Office 365 supports sync only default properties with AD. To sync additional custom properties, we have to write custom sync engine. Microsoft has released API to sync additional attributes. Solution Microsoft has released Bulk update custom user profile properties for SharePoint Online APIs to direct sync custom attributes from JSON feed file. To achieve solution, below are the steps Create and upload JSON feed file Feed output of step 1, to Microsoft Bulk User Import API Check the status of an import job Create and upload a JSON feed file It’s the im...

Users who are are using Office Mix to create and share interactive online videos based on PowerPoint presentations, got an email last week that Microsoft is retiring the service on May 1, 2018. If you are one of the affected users, please continue with this article. Microsoft will bring the best features of Office Mix directly into PowerPoint, Microsoft Stream, and Microsoft Forms for Office 365 subscribers on Windows PCs without any additional add-in. As the service becomes obsolete, this also means that Microsoft will delete every Office Mix content from their server. In order to avoid losing your data saved into Office Mix workspace, you need to migrate them to Microsoft Stream, or download it into your OneDrive workspace. Everything you need to know about the migration, and the future of these features, are collected into this MS help article: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Migrate-your-content-from-Office-Mix-c1c04f84-a7bb-4602-9645-258017155258?ui=en-US&rs=en-U...

Symptom : A user at our tenant is not able to share files with external users. This issue is occurring for the Office Group, when the user tries to share a folder from the "Documents", with an external user, the following message appears "Sharing to external users is not supported". However when a colleague shares a document with the same external user account, the sharing is successful. The affected user has created a new Office group and tried to share a document with an external user, however the same message appeared. In the Office Admin Center, Security & Privacy, the tenant has the following settings: Let users add new guests to the organization - on Let users share SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business content with people outside the organization - on Users can share with - new and existing external users (sign-in required) In the SharePoint Admin center: Allow users to invite and share with authenticated external users Let onl...

Sign in to Office 365 with your tenant administrator account Navigate to Settings > Organization profile Next to Manage custom themes for your organization , click or tap Edit Change the theme elements with below settings Custom logo : Select the McAfee image and upload with a resolution of 200 x 50 pixels, no larger than 10 KB. This appears in the top navigation bar on every page URL for a clickable logo : Enter the URL for the clickable logo, starting with http:// or https://. This is optional Prevent users from overriding theme : Check this box to disable theming at the user level so that everyone in the McAfee sees the same suite bar. Accent colour : set colour code e.g. C01818 Nav bar background colour : Set colour code e.g. C01818 Text and icons : set colour code e.g. FFFFF Click Save Rollback steps Sign in to Office 365 with your tenant administrator account Navigate to Settings > Organization profile Next to Manage custom themes...