Oh no! We’re talking about folders again… Yes we are! But this time, we’ll get some insights as to when they’ve been created, by whom, and adding a little experiment at the end 😇

Let’s get right into it.

The scenario

Let’s imagine that our organization wants users to refrain from creating folders in libraries. We’d like to see how many folders have been created in a site, by whom and more particularly, run some statistics at the end to (maybe) analyse the data we just extracted from SharePoint.

From my experience, SharePoint training is (very) often neglected. We think it’s going to be “OK” and users will learn on the go, or organisations simply don’t know what is SharePoint. So in case you haven’t seen it, this is an article I wrote for the Microsoft 365 Community Docs, where I also give you some topics to get you started for your SharePoint training!

Share what?

Yes… We hear that often. So first, let’s have a quick introduction. SharePoint is a platform. A product. You collaborate and share information across the organisation, quickly and securely. You reduce email traffic, and always have the latest version of a document or file. You can even have a beautiful Intranet!

Hello friends!

I wanted to share another article I wrote for the Microsoft 365 Community Docs. This question is still confusing for most customers when they are new to the platform, so I thought it needed a little bit of clarity.

To use a product efficiently, it’s important to understand a minimum about it. What it does, what can you do with it, what are the limitations, etc.

Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork. It allows for collaboration, chat, calls, meetings, and so much more! SharePoint Online is primarily a document management and intranet platform where you store, collaborate, and share information seamlessly across the organization, and is also part of Microsoft 365.

Did you know you can enable a minimum of statistics on your SharePoint files? No? Well… Keep reading to know how! This is a short post – straight to the point!

Basic statistics

By default, when you hover over a file in a document library, you can see the following:

Doesn’t seem to be giving much, but maybe for some users that’s enough. Note that even users in the Visitors group will have the same experience. But out of curiosity, most people really want to know who seen their files 😉

Have you ever noticed that in SharePoint, when you attach files in a list item, you can add the column “Attachments” and visualize a little clip thing, but it doesn’t show the number of files nor their names? So what if you wanted to know about all the attachments in a list item? In multiple lists? Are you going to… click click click?

Noooo, let’s use PnP PowerShell for that! 🤠

Today, I wanted to share something I’ve learned thanks to the PowerShell Community out there, who responded to my Tweet for Help within minutes! 👏

Scenario

We have a bunch of columns in SharePoint Online, all different types, but more importantly, some are Multi-line of Text columns. This means that users can enter whatever they like: Initials, words in UPPER/lower case, insert special characters, etc… You name it, users will type it!

It might be another day, and you might have another requirement! In today’s blog post, we’ll have a look at we can find files that are checked out in SharePoint Online and extend the search across multiple Site Collections, multiple document libraries, using PowerShell PnP.

Requirements

Requirements are simple: Find all the checked out files in multiple sites, and multiple document libraries in my Office 365 tenant.

Script

And here we start writing down the logic 🙂

We still have this debate about Folders vs. Metadata. Which one is better? Should I continue to use folders? etc… It’s OK to use a bit of both if you want. There are pros and cons for each one, and really depends on your organization requirements, user experience, and so on.

Today, we’re not talking about choosing one or the other, but rather assuming you’ve got folders, and you want to clean up the empty ones!