We recently got a new long-awaited feature in SharePoint – the ability to copy a Document Library from an existing library!

Given the effort required to set up metadata and custom views, it was a very burdensome task to set up multiple document libraries that had the same configuration.

But now we can copy an existing Document Library with the click of a button in SharePoint Online.

This one has been a long time coming! After many requests from customers and countless workarounds, I’m super excited that the ability to favourite files and folders in SharePoint and OneDrive is now available. Whether it’s a personal working file in your OneDrive or a shared document in a SharePoint library, you can now “favourite” files to easily access them in one place.

As I’ve covered in previous blogs, using metadata is a great way to organise your documents, make them easy and intuitive to find and enable a single source of truth.

However, setting up metadata requires you to predefine your columns and values into lists of categories, which is quite tricky to do, especially if you are just starting out and are new to the whole concept.

There is however an easy, less invasive way to start out with metadata in your business – Enterprise Key Words.

In the past, in order to colour code a calendar in SharePoint, you had to use calendar overlays, which allowed you to merge multiple calendars or multiple views into one calendar view. It was quite time consuming to set up and only allowed a maximum of 10 overlays, which can be limiting.

However, it can now be accomplished in an easier and better way by using view formatting!

One thing I hear a lot from customers when accessing and working with office documents in SharePoint and Teams (Excel, PowerPoint, Word etc.), is that documents always open in the browser by default. Whilst opening in the browser is quick and easy, it doesn’t give you the full functionality of the apps, especially when it comes to formatting features and additional Excel functionality.

However, there are a couple of ways to change the default way files open!

Do you have data that needs to be kept for a certain period of time? Or do you want to ensure that data isn’t accidentally deleted? As you start moving your documents into SharePoint, you can take the guess work out of data retention with Microsoft’s in-built data retention policies.

The default time zone for any sites created in SharePoint is US Pacific Standard Time (PST). For users who aren’t based in this part of the world, it can cause issues in terms of date columns in SharePoint, including the Modified and Created dates. This is why one of the best things you can do when embarking on a SharePoint project is to fix the default time zone for all SharePoint sites.

Let’s consider that someone in your organisation wants to create a new SharePoint site or Team.

Can they do it themselves? If not, who should do it? Is there an approval process? Does it need to follow a consistent look and feel? Does it need to follow a naming convention? Does it need to be communicated?

As you can see, without these questions answered there are lots of potential routes. That’s why setting governance around these tools is crucial.

One of the biggest causes of an unsuccessful SharePoint Implementation is when organisations choose to “lift and shift” all their content into SharePoint.

“Lift and Shift” is exactly as it sounds – a simplistic way to migrate all your content from an old location (usually a file server) into SharePoint exactly as is.

With so many tools at our fingertips in the Microsoft 365 suite, you might have found yourself asking “what tool should I be using for what purpose?”

Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive all enable users to manage and collaborate on documents, however their subtle differences and unique features make them ideal for different purposes.

If you have multiple contributors to SharePoint in your organisation, you may benefit from turning on approvals for your SharePoint pages! It’s a simple out of the box workflow that enables an approval process so that any changes to pages can be reviewed before they are published.

Recently we’ve seen the roll out of the new and improved Microsoft Lists app experience which comes with so many cool new features. And just when you think it couldn’t get any better, Microsoft just added the ability to create a “Board View” of your list!

We’re all familiar with SharePoint calendars – they’re a core feature of SharePoint and a great tool to be able to visualise dates and manage various deadlines.

And even better, if you already have a list with columns that include date fields, you can create a view that will display your list information in a calendar view!

Over the past couple of years, Microsoft has been rolling out Lists as its own app experience, as well as an app that integrates with Microsoft Teams. Let’s have a look at the history of lists, how you can utilise it and some hidden gems to enhance your experience!

Audience targeting in SharePoint Online helps relevant content get to the right audience. It allows you to personalise the experience for your users and feed them certain content depending on which security groups they belong to. Read on to find out where and how you can enable audience targeting!

Modern SharePoint pages are super visual and intuitive to set up – all you need to do is click the edit button and choose from a huge range of layouts and available webparts. You may have noticed though that as you add webparts to your page, there is a lot of white, unused space on the sides of your page.

With Teams being such a fantastic collaboration tool with so many features, your users are probably working in it most of the time. But what then becomes of your beautiful intranet where news and announcements are posted, employee birthdays are shared and all your forms and policies can be accessed?

Managed metadata is metadata that can be used globally across an organisation. It can be added into any document library or list and if anything changes, such as a department name change, it only has to be updated in one place. Changes will reflect anywhere the metadata has been used.

So you’ve uploaded all your documents into SharePoint, but now how do you find them? Back in the nested folder structure world, you’d simply navigate through levels such as Department > Project > Year to find what you’re looking for. But now in SharePoint, we have documents spread across multiple sites, so where do you start?

SharePoint Online allows you to save modern pages as templates. Once you have created and customised a page with webparts and content, you can save this as a template and create new pages from it! This means you don’t have to start from scratch and can bring some consistency to the look and feel of particular pages.