I think this is going to really boost how fast we can build data collection for lists with no dev at all: Collect information like a pro New Microsoft Lists forms experience in Microsoft 365 Until this rolls out, we have had several approaches we could use (and there may be others): Out of the box list forms Enhanced list forms with JSON formatting Microsoft Forms with Power Automate Power Apps Custom solutions with SharePoint Framework (SPFx) [or other tools] Each of these approaches is still very useful and may be valid for the scenarios you run into. The new List Forms approach adds to o ..read more

Knowledge management (KM) is hard. This has been proven to me many times over the last 30 or so years I’ve been paying attention to the concepts. With the announcement of the abrupt retirement of Viva Topics as of February 22, 2025, I’ve been thinking about the history of KM solutions from Microsoft and where they have all gone. But first, a few tangents… In 1996, I took a job as a consultant at a company called Renaissance Solutions. It was started by Harry Lasker, David Norton, and David Lubin to marry the concepts of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), knowledge management, and technical solutio ..read more

Today I noticed something that threw me for a loop. I created a garden variety Team Site and saw that the home page was named CollabHome.aspx. Home pages have been named Home.aspx in SharePoint forever. I did some searching and came up with nothing for “CollabHome.aspx”. One would thing there would be something documented about a change like this, but no. As I usually do, I turned to Twitter to try to find out why this had happened. I just created a standard Team Site using the Standard Team template (simplest), and the home page was set to /SitePages/CollabHome.aspx. When did that start to ..read more

Today one of my clients had a problem. One of her SharePoint sites was missing. She found it in Deleted sites in the SharePoint Admin Center. Restoring the site from the Deleted sites is an easy fix, of course: she had already done that on her own. But none of the Site Owners or Site Members could access the site. This was why she had pinged me. But why had the site been deleted? As a Global Admin in a very small organization, she felt should have known why this had happened. Analysis We thought about what the causes might be, and these were data points about the site which made it a little di ..read more

Content Types are a fundamental building block in SharePoint. Every object you upload or create in a SharePoint list or library gets a Content Type assigned to it, whether you realize it or not. If you create an item in a list, by default, it gets the Item Content Type. If you upload a file to a library, it gets the Document Content Type. (Sure, there are some exceptions to this, but it applies to the majority of the content we add to SharePoint.) If your information architecture (IA) is more mature (See: Management of Content in the Maturity Model for Microsoft 365), you will create your own ..read more

Today I needed to create an array of all the dates in a data range in PowerShell. It’s a simple little thing. Maybe I should have asked Github Copilot, but I’m old skool, so I wrote it myself. (I also haven’t gotten used to having a virtual assistant!) The reason I even needed to do this is the dread 5000 item view threshold in SharePoint lists and libraries. We have a list with about 1.6 million items in it, and I wanted to “slice out” the ones which matched a specific date range. No matter how I tried to do that in the UI, I failed – not surprisingly, since there are about 1500 items per dat ..read more

Here’s the scenario: we have a site called Clients where we track potential clients and store files we get from them during discussions. Once they become an actual client, we create a Team Site, connect it to Teams, and we move the files into that site. For years, this has frustrated me no end because when I create the new Team Site, it can take until overnight for that site to be visible in the Copy to / Move to dialog. As I am wont to do, I finally turned to Twitter for a solution (though I don’t think this is the first time!). with the #SPHelp hashtag. How do I get a site to show up in th ..read more

You might be surprised by the title of this post. Isn’t our goal to get everyone’s content *into* SharePoint? Usually that’s the case, for sure. But many times, in the course of a migration from an older (usually on premises) version of SharePoint, we identify whole sites or branches of subsites that simply don’t have any real purpose anymore. In some cases, we migrate the content into SharePoint Online, maybe into a site called Archive or similar. But other times we just want to save the content somewhere *in case* someone needs it. Which approach you take may hinge on your organizational cul ..read more

Recently, one of my clients pinged me because she wasn’t seeing any items in a list she knew had many items in it. She’s used the list many times in the past and she hadn’t changed any of the view settings. I did all the usual stuff: Checked permissions on the site: She was a Site Owner, as we both thought. Looked for broken inheritance on permissions – unlikely to be the problem, since she was a Site Owner. A bunch of random stuff. I could see all the items in the list, as could a few others. It seemed like such a simple thing, but nothing in my normal arsenal was solving the problem, so I ..read more

SharePoint lists & libraries: we all love ’em. With multiple views, they are like little apps. [Why the heck do lists have a brand and logo but libraries don’t? And why aren’t the two just considered simply variations on a concept by Microsoft?] Do you find yourself using both the modern & classic view settings? If so, why do you continue to use the classic view settings? I’m building a list (ha!) for the Microsoft folks. I’m after feedback about view settings in particular, but anything you find yourself returning to the classic settings UIs for regularly would be helpful. For example ..read more