User Profile
Anthony-123
Iron Contributor
Joined May 19, 2020
User Widgets
Recent Discussions
What's going on with office.com / web apps?
I'm aware that Microsoft had already chosen to upend usability once by changing office.com into 😡m365.cloud.microsoft😡 and make accessing web apps more difficult. This week I found they're hidding applications even further by burying them at the bottom of the page behind another menu - even when "pinned". Below are two screenshots of the 😡m365.cloud.microsoft😡 portal from different accounts that were created on the same day and accessed from the same computer and web browser via admin priveledges. I have observed this discrepency more than once with various accounts. Can someone explain the rational for Microsoft continuing to further bury office applications from users? Am I unaware of a new portal to access the Office applications our users rely upon every day?Re: How to STOP Teams from auto-deciding for me what I should see and not see
I couldn't agree more. I have many dozens, if not hundreds, of channels that I should be monitoring on a regular basis. It has been an absolute disaster for me. I've basically given up on Teams at this point since it's no longer a productivity tool that can be relied upon. I've pretty much given up on using any software tools to maintain productivity because they keep changing. As soon as you figure out how to use the thing and get your team to rely on it, it completely changes. This topic doesn't even get into all the other changes they've been making that have broekn productivity norms. These companies think they can use some sort of algorithm to do the thinking for us but it more often robs us of predicability and productivity. I spend more time searching for things when we should be able to simply know were things are to find them. Instead of walking into a room, opening the A-D filing cabinet and then the 'Brooks, Mel - Drawings' folder, I have to figure out what floor the filing room is on, then walk into it and ask to give me the Brooks drawings and hope it knows which Brooks I mean and which drawings I need. It takes SO. MUCH. LONGER. Actually, this is the exact same issue I'm having on the new MacOS update. They got rid of the LaunchPad app which allowed you to organize app icons in a manner that made sense to your workflow and replaced it with a less efficient search command. They're all trying to hide the software and do this thinking for us and it's making it harder to use computers - because they're trying to move in a direction where the computer no longer exists and an ether-intelligence does all the thinking for us. See: Microsoft Copilot / office.comDifference between Move To and Show In?
From the Teams list on the left, you can select a channel to Show In [favorites]. From the list of channels in a Team in the center of the app, the option is Move To [favorites]. Why are these different phrases for what appears to be the same action and why are they not just called Pin? As a user, I would never want to move a channel out of a Team. Showing something outside the Team it belongs in is confusing and disconnects the user from the originating location.Always Show All Teams + Channels
I am getting an increasing number of befuddled users complaining that they have lost access to Teams and Channels as well as countless efforts to create channels for projects that already exists. I have had to take a lot of time out of my daily workflow to scour "See all your Teams" to find all the teams and channels Microsoft has determined on its own that I don't need to see. I get that some people may want to hide stuff they don't want to see and that would be a fantatic OPTION to have. In fact, Teams is not intelligent enough to hide the Teams people don't want to see so the option to hide or not hide permanantly should be implemented. We require a way to LOCK all Teams and all Channels to be visible. _ Let Teams decide what to hide. _ Always Show / Hide This Team _ Always Show / Hide This Channel _Pin this Team Why is this so hard?New post titles aren't saving for the page title and URL
When users create a new page, the page URL is something like https://company.sharepoint.com/sites/Region/SitePages/Page(6).aspx instead of the title of the post. I see there's now a new location to set the page title. Why is this necessary and why has the inherit function of setting the page title as the title of the post gone away? Why does Microsoft continue to make our work increasingly less productive requiring users to take more steps to do less work? Is there a site setting somewhere to re-enable setting the page title to the title of the post?Re: How to create a shared company calendar for time off and holidays?
Wow. This is old... Here's the solution I've come up with. It's not ideal. TL;DR: Just use Outlook and SharePoint. Make sure groups are displayed in Outlook. Add Group Calendar web part to SharePoint. The first thing we had to do was (compromise 1) ditch the hope of accessing the calendar outside Microsoft 365. The calendar is only accessible in Outlook and SharePoint. I think one big issue I had was that Groups and their calendars were not being displayed in Outlook by default. I had to use Powershell to enable this. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/troubleshoot/groups-and-distribution-lists/microsoft-365-group-does-not-appear-in-outlook#resolution Company Communications Calendar We have an org-wide Company Communications Group/Team with a calendar in Outlook. I can easily create an event like Memorial day and have it repeat every last Monday of May. How to get this in SharePoint? You can add a Group calendar web part in a Sharepoint page. However, (compromise 2) it only shows as a list, not a calendar. I guess this solves the larger issue but at some point I decided I wanted the staff calendar seperate. Staff Calendar I have another Group called Staff Calendar. For this, I built a Birthday PowerApp that I've embedded in SharePoint and a PTO PowerApp that I uploaded to Teams. Both of these have PowerAutomate actions upon submission. For a Birthday, there's an action to create the event in the group calendar and then update its properties to repeat every year on the same day. For a Day Off, there's a workflow to request a day off. This workflow adds an item to a SharePoint List, prompts the supervisor in Teams for approval (logs the approval results in the List), adds the PTO to the group calendar, adds a record to the employee's folder (in SharePoint), sends an email to HR with links to the approval record and calendar event, updates the List with links to events and records. So, if you're keeping track; there are two group calendars in Outlook and two web parts in SharePoint - which are lists, not grid-like calendars. You could do it all in one group but I didn't. I guess the other big fix for this was creating apps for users to submit information. This way, instead of asking people to give me their info or having them screw with the calendar, I have a workflow doing the work and keeping things consistent. I wouldn't be surprised if you could pull this together with CoPilot or something now. Hope this helps someone, four years later.How to get around clearing sorting filters after a folder has been opened?
One of the greatest issues our staff has had is using the sorting views in SharePoint. Let's say the view is sorting folders based on Status:Active. When they open that folder, if the value for those files / folders in that folder aren't also Active, the folder apperas empty (with an easily overlooked tag indicating the applied filter). While I understand the logic behind why this happens, I can not oversate how horrendous this is as a user expereince. It should be either that the view is locked to a root folder path or the view is cleared out whenever another fodler is selected. Or, there may be some other function here I'm not aware of.Locking the Default view
I don't know how this keeps happening but everytime I change the default view for a directory it keeps changing to something else. It's driving me mad and it's confusing our users. As the admin, I need to be able to create a view, save it as default, and prevent anyone from changing it. I would love others to create their own views and to make them public - I just need the default view to remain locked.What is '_ip_UnifiedCompliancePolicyUIAct'
Our PowerAutomate workflow has broken due to an error that reads: Column '_ip_UnifiedCompliancePolicyUIAct' does not exist. It may have been deleted by another user. This is not a column that has ever existed, to my knowledge. The action in this workflow is copying a folder from one site to another. I've created a new flow that just copies the folder and I'm getting the same error. When I try to manually copy the folder in SharePoint I get an error that "something went wrong". In both cases, the folder does copy to the destination. It's just that the flow is failing. I've created the column _ip_UnifiedCompliancePolicyUIAct in both the source and desitnation folder and this appears to resolve the issue. No data is found in the column.How do you make a Shared Mailbox the default Send From account? (New Outlook)
I'm using Outlook for Windows version 1.2025.109.100 (on behalf of another user). I'm reading some suggestions online that say you need to add the account to Outlook first before making it the default Send From. I'm also looking at the Help section in Outlook that directs you to change this in the Compose and Reply settings. However, it's not possible to sign into a mailbox that isn't a user. I thought you used to be able to 'sign into' a shared mailbox using your own account but that is not the case now (perhaps it never was?). What it seems like is that we instead need to convert "Accounting" to a User account, give it a license, then sign into it in Outlook. That's not a Shared Mailbox - that's a user mailbox. I don't want to create a point of weakness for a potential cyber-attack (which we've had several). I can't really set up MFA for this account that no one can maintain. And I really don't want to have to spend money on a license to do something just because one piece of software is incompatible. Having to repeatedly instruct people and then repeatedly remind them to change their FROM account is just bonkers. On Outlook for Mac, as long as you're in the Shared Mailbox, the default FROM is that mailbox. (but, don't get me started on how much better the Mac version of Outlook is than the Windows version - see: All Accounts)Is there ANY way at all to change the UX for SharePoint List Views?
What Microsoft has done to SharePoint Lists has been detrimental to our organization (to put it lightly). It's much harder for people not using the site to get around the list using the Views. I have to constantly consol people, like the owner of the company, who are yelling at me because they can't figure out how to use this interface. I myself who created and use this almost daily have a hard time navigating these views as well. It makes no sense to have some views spread horizontally and others vertically. Most of the view names are cut off making them all appear to be the same. Our organization has over a dozen offices around the world and it appears SharePoint isn't even able to scale to that level. Ideally, we could get rid of the views entirely and use some other SharePoint site menu for navigation. Is it possible to use CSS on the page to (1) hide the Views and (2) create a dropdown menu next to Add New Item? While we're at it, let's also hide Forms, Automate, and Integrate for this page. Orrrrr... I dunno - just thinking here... can I use the data in the SharePoint List to create an entirely differently page in SharePoint? I've got a list with thousands of entries (they're client projects) and about two dozen columns.Re: Can no longer delete more than one folder at a time.
Thanks for checking, Dave. I'm not sure what version of SharePoint we have or how to check that. It's been an issue for months so it doesn't feel temporary. If I go into the folder, I can delete each of the subfolders individually so I don't think this is related to check-out. Incidentally, I love that this forum allows users to reply to a comment. Coming from the debacle over at community.powerplatform.com this is a pleasant joy.Can no longer delete more than one folder at a time.
It's been a couple months now that SharePoint is no longer allowing me to select more than one folder to delete at once. I get an error that reads: "You have to delete all the items in this folder before you can delete the folder." I often have to delete dozens or more folders at a time so having to add something so gut wrenchingly time consuming to my daily tasks list that should take all of two seconds is just 😠Re: Microsoft Search in Bing Gets the Bullet
I don't know how people who have worked with Microsoft products for their careers have learned to cope with the corporation. They are constantly breaking things that are good/great/useful and replacing them with mediocre-to-horrid solutions, if they're replaced at all. It feels like every week, sometimes every day, something I heavily rely upon is broken or deprecated. My job is to use the tools Microsoft provides to help our business run more efficiently. Sometimes I find or invest weeks to build a great solution, write up a user guide for our staff, then ensure everyone is following the new "path of excellence". Inevitably though, Microsoft foobars that solution causing me to invest double to triple the amount of time to pick up the pieces and (hopefully) build a replacement. More often, there is no replacement so the product or efficiency our organization relied on just goes away (ex. Wiki). All that is to say - I wish Microsoft would stop increasing my workload. I have projects that are literally backed up over a year because I have to keep repairing what they keep breaking. It may seem like a little thing, but I now have to rewrite all my user guides that suggest to our staff that they use Edge and Bing for work because of the superior search tools. For years, I have had the joy of introducing people to bing.com/work to instantly find literally anything among hundreds of thousands of files on our SharePoint sites. I have dozens of links saved across our SharePoint sites utilizing this prefixed URL that I now have to spend weeks resolving. I now have to take back all the lessons I've taught people (especially older people) to use "this one simple trick". It's not a huge issue. But it's another issue. Another issue Microsoft has added to my plate that I have to deal with on top of my already stacked backlog of the actual work I'm supposed to be doing. So, when my boss asks why a two-month project isn't done three months later, I can point to all the issues and the trickle-down impact caused by these choices Microsoft is making FOR. NOOOO. GOOD. REASON. For what possible reason is Microsoft choosing to deprecate another perfectly fine and useful tool - YET AGAIN? This announcement reads as Microsoft instructing its users, "DO NOT USE BING.COM", instead, edit your browser preferences to search using office.com/search/?q= What product manager thought it was a good idea to drive users away from their search engine?How to resolve 'broken' unique permissions in a SPO library?
PROBLEM: I have many thousands of files and folders in multiple SharePoint Site libraries that somehow seem to have acquired unique Group permissions. Users with high-level permissions have lost visibility to many folders and files. DETAILS: There are five different permission groups that are given access to any new folder created in the library: Owner; Site Member; Library Manager; Library Contributor; Library Member. I'm using Teams to apply most user permissions. A Team is given a particular group permission and any user in that Team inherits that permission level (Library Member). For high-level permissions (Library Manager), I just manually put that person in that permission group. OBSERVATIONS: If I create a new folder, as the admin or someone with 'manage' permissions, the folder inherits the proper permissions. We also have a new folder workflow that creates these folders. I've confirmed that the items created with this process inherit the proper permissions. My only guess is that at some point the permission levels or groups were changed and folders did not inherit the proper updates. What I'm also struggling to track down is how some files in more recent folders are still hidden from users with Manage permissions. I think this has to do with the way sharing links are being created and shared. For instance, if "Jen" unintentionally creates a restrictive sharing link and shares that with "Bob", when Bob clicks on that link, the web browser is caching that permission even though he has full write access to all documents. When Bob clicks this link in his email, the files are showing as view only and he can not view any other contents of the library. There's a prompt that says something like you must be an authorized user, click here to sign in. When you click that, this restores all proper permissions. SOLUTIONS(?): I've found that there's a script to remove unique permissions and intend to give this a try. I'm hesitant to pull the trigger on this because it will kill any legit sharing links with our outside partners. I really don't want to kill links; I want to reset the Permission Groups for all contents of a library. # Set Variables $SiteURL = "https://yoursharepointsite.sharepoint.com" $LibraryName = "Documents" $BatchSize = 500 # Connect to SharePoint Online Connect-PnPOnline -Url $SiteURL -Credentials (Get-Credential) # Function to reset permissions for a batch of items function Reset-PermissionsForBatch { param ( [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)] [array]$Items ) foreach ($Item in $Items) { if ($Item.HasUniqueRoleAssignments) { Set-PnPListItemPermission -List $LibraryName -Identity $Item.Id -InheritPermissions Write-Host "Reset permissions for item ID: $($Item.Id)" } } } # Get all items in the library in batches $ListItems = Get-PnPListItem -List $LibraryName -PageSize $BatchSize -ScriptBlock { param($items) Reset-PermissionsForBatch -Items $items }No longer able to update Hyperlink column values.
Since Microsoft has chosen to upend the usability of (previously working perfectly great) SharePoint Lists and we have yet to find a suitable alternative, we're stuck trying to apply band-aids every day. Today, I'm struck with the issue of no longer being able to edit the value for a hyperlink column. We're using this hyperlink column to show employee photos. The file (jpg) is in a shared folder in SharePoint. When in Edit Grid mode and I select the cell to edit, my browser (Edge) just opens a new blank tab. I can not edit a single item because the form was reformatted in PowerApps and there's no longer an option to edit this form. The formatting for the column is below. The option to format the url is picture. {"$schema":" https://developer.microsoft.com/json-schemas/sp/v2/column-formatting.schema.json","elmType":"a","attributes":{"href":"@currentField","target":"_blank"},"children":[{"elmType":"img","style":{"width":"150px"},"attributes":{"src":"@currentField"}}]}Teams for MacOS constantly quitting while I'm away.
Practically every day, I'm finding that Teams has closed on its own while I was away from my computer. This could be while I'm away for an hour for lunch or it could be over night while the computer is on with the laptop lid is closed with the lid open overnight. This also happens, though with less frequency, with Outlook. The main issue is that I can easily go hours without noticing that my main communication tool is no longer running, causing me to miss important calls and messages. These is no notification or warning or anything to notify me of what happened or if there may have been an issue. It's difficult to say for how long this has been happening. I think the quitting on its own has always happened a few times a year. The quitting every day, or multiple times a day, has been an issue for maybe a couple weeks. MacOS: 14.5 Teams: 24231.507.3099.9636. You've got the latest version. It was last checked on 9/11/2024. The client version is 50/24081700419. Outlook: 16.89Re: What is going on with LISTS?
Perhaps a company like Microsoft could FULLY test something before it's deployed to millions of customers without their knowledge or permission. No, I suppose being a responsible business partner is not something Microsoft would ever consider. I genuinely do not have the time to sit down and document the wreckage that this has caused. Because the only thing Microsoft can be trusted to do is break all the things that have worked comfortably for years. our company is actively seeking an alternative to Microsoft for our corporate needs.
