Tuesday, July 6, 2021

New updates to the SharePoint admin center in Microsoft 365

The intelligent intranet is ever changing. To facilitate evolving management requirements, the SharePoint admin center in Microsoft 365 offers new insights for admins, aligning with admin center designs across the suite. These updates highlight activities and connections for your sites and content, with actionable controls for managing your intelligent intranet. Everything we build is inspired from community feedback and is designed to make day-to-day administration easier.

 

The following new features are now available in the SharePoint admin center:

  • Enhanced insights dashboard on SharePoint admin center
  • Improved site information – ‘Created from’ and ‘Teams’-connected status
  • SharePoint root site replacement
  • OneDrive settings now accessible in the SharePoint admin center

Lets dig into the details of each new feature, and we encourage you to scroll the whole post to see a long-form video that showcases all, plus two relevant podcast episodes - toward the end of this blog.

 

Enhanced insights dashboard on SharePoint admin center

One of the most common themes of feedback is around insights and reporting. Thus, we designed a new dashboard to get ahead of this problem. It provides a set of insights and reporting tools that make admins more productive, especially as the number of SharePoint-backed collaboration spaces grows.

 

This new card-based dashboard is command central. SharePoint admins gain visibility of important updates and alerts, saving time and effort. There are several dashboard cards available today, ranging from trends on storage usage, to adoption of sensitivity labels – alongside smart recommendations to improve your Microsoft 365 tenant. Most of the cards provide a one-click experience to act. In addition, most of these same cards will be available to admins in both the SharePoint admin center and the Microsoft 365 admin center.

 

New homepage with actionable insightsNew homepage with actionable insights

Learn more about the updated dashboard in SharePoint admin center.

 

Improved site information – ‘Created from’ and ‘Teams’-connected status

Across many collaborative scenarios, SharePoint is the connected content service. Self-service site creation enables end users and other admins to create sites directly or indirectly - created from Teams, Outlook, the admin center, via API, during migration, etc.. Thus, it’s important for admins to know where sites were created from. This new column, ‘Created from’, shows exactly which workload created the site.

 

The ‘Create from’ column is filterable, allowing admins to view sites based on where they were created from. This information can become a proxy to understand why a site was created. For instance, if a site was created from Teams, it’s clear that the site was created to power file sharing and collaboration for a certain project or team. In addition, the new column, ‘Teams’, shows which sites are connected to Microsoft Teams.

 

The site creation source and Teams connected status provide key information for admins without having to dig into hidden settings. For instance, admins can see all team sites in the organization that aren’t connected to Teams and boost productivity by recommending team sites to be connected to Microsoft Teams.

 

New columns available in the list of active sites - Teams & Created fromNew columns available in the list of active sites - Teams & Created from

Learn more how SharePoint can be integrated with Microsoft Teams.

 

SharePoint root site replacement

The root site of any organization is a vital part of a SharePoint-powered, intelligent tenant. It’s what your users see when they navigate to the root URL: https://Contoso.SharePoint.com. In the past, PowerShell was the only way to set a new site as the root site. Admins can now replace the root site from the admin center directly, by selecting the current root site and selecting ‘Replace site’ on the command bar.

 

Replace root_v2.gif

Learn more about your SharePoint root site and how to modernize it.

 

Suggestion: It is possible to assign your root site to be your SharePoint home site. With this, you can design your company’s primary portal with an easy to remember URL and get one step closer to bringing your company intranet into Microsoft Teams by taking advantage of Microsoft Viva Connections; combine the power of your intelligent SharePoint intranet with the chat and collaboration tools in Teams.

 

OneDrive settings now accessible within the SharePoint admin center

With the new integrated admin center, you can manage everything at an organizational level all in one place: control internal and external sharing, set user access controls, manage default storage limits, enable user device notifications, specify retention policies, and manage sync controls for OneDrive. We’ve also improved the user interface to provide a more consistent experience and support Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 compliance, enhanced reporting, and added the Global Reader admin role, which provides a read-only view of SharePoint admin center. When you assign the Global Reader role to an admin, they can view—but not edit—all administrative features and settings in all Microsoft 365 admin centers, which helps you delegate admin responsibilities more efficiently.

 

Modernized OneDrive settings in the SharePoint admin centerModernized OneDrive settings in the SharePoint admin center

And per the insights dashboard update, there are actionable OneDrive cards such as OneDrive usage and OneDrive file activity. This enables you to quickly see OneDrive activity for files that have been viewed/edited, synced, and shared internally or externally.

 

Learn more about finding and using OneDrive admin settings from within the SharePoint admin center.

 

Additional resources

SharePoint admin center (primary Help content)

 

VIDEO | “Monitor and manage SharePoint investments in Microsoft 365” presented by Dave Minasyan, Trent Green and Rk Menon - team members on the SharePoint admin center team at Microsoft:

 

TWO PODCASTS

"SharePoint roadmap pitstop - June 2021" episode on The Intrazone podcast, featuring a conversation with Rk Menon - lead program manager designing and developing admin experiences and capabilities for the SharePoint admin center in Microsoft 365:

 

 

"Consolidating OneDrive and SharePoint admin centers" - a previous episode of the OneDrive Sync Up podcast interview with Rk's colleague, Dave Minasyan, Principal program manager: 

 

Closing

Managing SharePoint and OneDrive in Microsoft 365 continues to improve. With these new features, we hope that your job as a SharePoint administrator becomes easier.

 

Our goal is to empower you and every person on your team to achieve more. Let us know what you need next. We are always open to feedback via in product feedback  - please let us know within the SharePoint forum within the Microsoft Tech Community —and we always have an eye on tweets and @mentions to @SharePoint.

 

Thanks, Rk Menon (Program manager) and Mark Kashman (Senior product manager) -- OneDrive and SharePoint

 

Posted at https://sl.advdat.com/3hiB2e4