Tag: Groups

SharePoint 2016 Team SItes and Groups – It All Comes Together

Published May 4, 2016

SharePoint is back. With a vengeance.

For the past few years, SharePoint has been relegated to a supporting role within Office 365. It even lost its identity a few years back, with the name “SharePoint” being replaced by the bland “Sites”. This has been exacerbated recently by the rise of Groups (referred to either as Outlook Groups or Office 365 Groups). If Groups are the way forward, what value can SharePoint provide?

A lot, as it turns out.

Office 365 Groups

I refer to them as Office 365 Groups, because they incorporate elements from multiple Office 365 products. However, they are also referred to as Outlook Groups, which is the name of the mobile app. The interesting thing is that if you scratch the surface of the Groups user interface in either OneDrive or OneNote, you can see pretty quickly that it’s really a SharePoint site, or more specifically a site collection. Just look at the URL.

In SharePoint, a Group is a specific type of site collection with a single document library for files (the OneDrive), and a library for other supporting files (including the Group OneNote). The difference is that a Group is what it is – it can’t be extended or modified to any significant degree. You can’t even access the All Content or site settings by adding “/_layouts/15/viewlsts.aspx” to the site URL (if you try, you get redirected to the main OneDrive view of the Group). SharePoint is really just there as the container. This can be frustrating, because as anyone that has worked with SharePoint knows, it can be much, much more.

The introduction of Groups initially caused confusion, particularly for users of SharePoint team sites, or Yammer. Was OneDrive replacing SharePoint (which is kind of silly… OneDrive IS SharePoint)? Did the new Exchange based conversations mean that Yammer was dead? Those questions have been hanging out there unanswered for quite some time.

Once I understood them, I came to really like Office 365 Groups. They bring together multiple tools into a single coherent location with a clear security boundary, and they are relatively simple to manage. One of the criticisms of Groups has been that there is no single central UI. Groups are manifested in Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote and Power BI, but there’s really no central starting point for a group. It’s like a city of suburbs in search of a downtown.

There have been more than a few detractors of Groups as well. Most of them relate to their immaturity. The Outlook conversations provide excellent email integration (obviously) but were not as full featured as Yammer in other ways. There have been several others, but the biggest complaint seems to me to be the fact that a SharePoint team site provides much more functionality than a simple OneDrive library. These factors have been a significant blocker for the adoption of Office 365 Groups.

That all changed with the Future of SharePoint event on May 4, 2016.

The New Team Sites

Team sites have been the traditional place for groups of people to work in the world of SharePoint. These sites would be decorated with web parts, both in and out of the box in order to augment their capabilities, and to provide a window into other team based content structures such as calendars, custom lists, reports, etc. Team sites have always seemed like the logical starting place for group data, and now they are.

Beginning in mid 2016, whenever a new group is created, a new team site will be created as well. Conversely, a new team site will create an Office 365 Group, with all of its components (OneDrive, OneNote, Mail address, Planner, Power BI Workspace). To be totally clear, this new style of team site is a SharePoint site collection, and not a subsite (or web), which means that its security details are bound to that of the group.

Yammer users may wonder what this means for the previously announced integration with both Groups and Azure Active Directory. Nothing was announced at the event, so this is pure speculation on my part, but I would have to assume that if there is to be a 1:1 correspondence between Office 365 Groups, and Yammer groups, that Yammer will be a part of this as well. Given SharePoint’s strengths, I can only assume that this will be the place that all non conversational Yammer content is stored (files, calendars, etc.

The new team site will intrinsically integrate many of the things that formerly needed to be added on later, and the new Office 365 connectors mean that many other content sources can be added with a minimum of effort.

External Sharing

While both SharePoint and Yammer have had external sharing for several years now, and Yammer now has external groups (with a lowercase g…), Office 365 groups have been restricted to members of the tenant’s Azure Active Directory. Therefore, if we now have a 1:1 correspondence between Groups and team sites, and we are also able to use Yammer as the conversations provider, Office 365 groups need to accommodate external users.

The good news is that soon, they will. Thanks to Wictor Wilen’s sharp eye, we can see in the Office 365 admin center that as of this writing, the infrastructure to support external access to groups has already rolled out. Coincidentally (or not), Yammer support of external groups also rolled out in the same timeframe.

The new SharePoint team sites, and their integration with Groups will give Office 365 that entry point that so many have been missing. It is exceedingly easy, and fast to get up and running with a usable site that is automatically integrated across the platform. When you create a Group, you not only have the AAD group, but a team site, a calendar, a distribution list, a conversation platform, a Planner Plan and a Power BI workspace. At the same time, it brings SharePoint back out of the shadows, and back in to the limelight.

SharePoint is back at the center of Office 365, and it’s better than ever.

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Sharing Power BI Content with Office 365 Groups

Published July 23, 2015

The Power BI sharing story got a lot clearer this week with the changes in the service that go along with General Availability. These changes included the integration with Office 365 groups, which will in my opinion, be the preferred way to share Power BI content with others.

If you’re unfamiliar with Office 365 Groups, what you need to know is that Groups is not a product per se, but really an integration mechanism that binds together multiple elements of Office 365, and as of now, Power BI. When a group is created, a number of things happen – a distribution list is created in Exchange, a Site Collection is created in SharePoint containing that Group’s OneDrive, and an Azure Active Directory group is created for membership in AAD. Now, a Power BI workspace is created for that group as well.

How Power BI works with groups

If you’ve been working with the Power BI preview already, you are familiar with the personal workspace. This is the workspace that you see when you first log into the Power BI service, and until now, the only workspace that was available. Within the personal workspace, you can create datasets, reports, and dashboards. Dashboards can be shared to the personal workspace of other people within the organization, but now you can also switch to the workspace of an Office 365 Group. To do so, click on the Workspace selector in Power BI. Initially, it will be labelled “My Workspace”.

You’ll then be able to select from any of your Office 365 groups. All groups that you are a member of should appear here automatically, you don’t need to register them. Once selected, you’ll be working within the context of that group. If it’s empty, you’ll be prompted to add data, and if not, you’ll be taken to a default dashboard. Everything that you do at this point will be done within the context of that group, and will not affect your personal workspace. In addition, everything that you do here will be visible to all members of the group that use Power BI. There is no need to “share” anything.

Sharing to the personal dashboard vs sharing via groups

Groups represent a fundamental change to sharing in Power BI. The Personal Workspace is just that, personal. It is possible to share dashboards from here with colleagues, but the assumption is that you are the only person that may make changes. A Groups workspace turns that on its head, and assumes that everything is shared by default.

When you share a dashboard from the Personal Workspace, recipients can view the dashboard, and interact with the underlying reports. There is (currently) no mechanism to allow those recipients to make changes to those reports and dashboards. However, when working in the Groups workspace, any member of the group can make changes. Any changes made are also immediately visible to all other members of the group.

Update – 2015/09/26 – Groups can now share dashboards outwardly in the same manner as personal workspaces. Thanks Ajay for the comment.

Personal OneDrive vs Group One Drive

In its original incarnation, Power BI worked with Excel files stored in SharePoint Online document libraries, including OneDrive libraries. With this version, Power BI will refresh and render Excel workbooks with full fidelity as well, but now they MUST be stored in a OneDrive library. Each user receives a single OneDrive library through Office 365, and they may also have a OneDrive personal library. In addition, each group also has a OneDrive library, and these can be used as well. The way to use them is to connect to the workbook from within the Group’s workspace.

In order to connect to an Excel Workbook from the Personal Workspace, you click on “Get Data”, click the “Get” button in the Files section, and select from Local File, OneDrive – Business, or OneDrive Personal.

Selecting from Local File or OneDrive personal will import the contents of a workbook into a Power BI dataset. That dataset will be refreshable directly from OneDrive, or through the Personal Gateway if Local File was chosen. However, selecting OneDrive – Business will allow you to select your file, then give a further two options.

“Import” is the same process as OneDrive – personal, or local file – the date is imported from the workbook into the dataset. However “Connect” establishes a report connection between the Power BI service and the OneDrive file, allowing it to be rendered in the Power BI site through Excel Services.

Once this is done, the workbook will appear in the Reports section in Power BI with a small Excel icon beside it. Unlike other sources, no dataset or dashboard are created because the report is a self-contained entity.

The experience is quite similar within a Groups workspace, with one important difference – neither OneDrive-Personal nor OneDrive – Business are options.

Instead, we are presented with the Group’s OneDrive which makes sense given that we’re in the Group workspace. The group OneDrive is backed by Office 365 which means that it functions the same way as OneDrive – Business. Excel workbooks can either be imported or connected to.

Can we use Power BI with Team Sites like before?

As mentioned above, the original Power BI service rendered workbooks from any SharePoint Online document library. The new service works with OneDrive libraries only. This means that any workbooks that are currently stored in SharePoint Online and use Power BI features will need to be moved into Group based OneDrive, or personal OneDrive in order to be able to continue to take advantage of Power BI features. In other words, Groups are REALLY important to Power BI. The original Power BI for Office 365 service will continue to be available, but will shut down on December 31, 2015.

Sharing Externally

The V1 service allowed for the external sharing of workbooks through the external sharing facilities of SharePoint. However, due to licensing restrictions, the experience wasn’t optimal. If the data model was too large, the external user would not be able to open the workbook in a browser, and would instead be required to download it in its entirety in order to open it. This was because the external user would most likely not have a Power BI license. The V2 service allows users to share dashboards from their Personal Workspaces, and to collaborate fully in Group Workspaces, but there is currently no way to share Power BI content externally, or anonymously. This has been identified as a priority, but is not available yet.

I have no specific information about how this might be done, so I am free to speculate. I suspect that the Groups mechanism will be leveraged to accomplish external content sharing. At the moment, Office 365 groups do not allow for external members, but if they did, ths would solve the external sharing problem. I’m betting that this will be the approach.

Microsoft is betting a great deal on Office 365 groups, and Power BI is one of the first services to demonstrate this deep integration. If you’re already or will be invested in Power BI, I would strongly suggest that you get familiar with them.

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Ignite 2015 Impressions

Published May 12, 2015

I don’t normally do conference summaries, but Ignite was just so big, and there was so much information that I felt the need to record my thoughts around it, and decided to share. Ignite was very much cross product, which is in line with where Microsoft seems to be headed – a focus on the function, not the tooling. With around 24,000 people in attendance, the conference, and the logistical issues that it imposed was too big for my taste, but the amount of information was excellent, and I imagine that I’ll be digesting it for some time to come. For now, here’s how I interpreted it all.

Azure and Office 365

Cloud services are killing it.

Between Azure’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructiure as a Service (IaaS) and Office 365’s Software as a Service (SaaS), Azure Active Directory is already sporting over 450 million active users. Azure Active Directory is what is used by Office 365, and the accounts within are otherwise known as Organizational Accounts. It’s an important metric because I believe that the Microsoft strategy is to own identity online. It makes sense when you look at what they seem to be doing.

For years, they absolutely dominated operating systems. Nothing to this day has ever really touched them on the desktop, but Apple changed the base with mobile, and developers flocked there. Google tried to do the same thing to Apple, and has been quite successful, but not fully so. While Android is in the majority in the mobile space, iOS is still quite strong, and shows no signs of diminishing. Windows isn’t really a factor in mobile, but still dominates the desktop which remains significant (about 300 million units/year), and is a factor on tablets. Microsoft got flanked by Apple and Android, and is holding the fort, but not conquering any new territory.

Microsoft now seems to be focusing on cloud services, and they don’t care what platform is being used to consume them. I think that at the core of this strategy is cloud identity – whether it is consumer (Microsoft Account) or enterprise (Azure Active Directory). With this identity strategy, Microsoft is attempting to again change the base – to outflank both Apple and Google and make the operating system almost irrelevant. Every app they’re putting out now is usually for iOS first, then Android, then Windows Phone. The new Universal app platform likely means that they will come out for Windows (desktop, phone, whatever) at initial launch with iOS, but the bottom line is that an awful lot of effort is going into supporting all platforms all the time. If the apps work well across platforms, then the choice of operating system simply becomes one of personal preference, not of features. It gets marginalized, and Microsoft owns the back end service. That’s why I think that so much effort has gone into this strategy.

Another thing that I sensed at the show was that in the past, all of the talk around identity and federation (ADFS) was about bringing your on-premises identities into the cloud to support a few new services. Now, there seems to have been a real shift, and the reason for adopting ADFS is to bring the Azure Active Directory identities back down on-premises to where legacy applications can use them. It’s a subtle shift, but discernable.

One of the more interesting product introduced into Azure recently is Logic Apps. As far as I can tell, Logic Apps are the cloud manifestation of BizTalk, which is an excellent product with a steep learning curve. Logic apps remove the learning curve and allow you to quickly connect and flow data through multiple systems. The session on logic apps can be seen here:

SharePoint 2016

In the past, SharePoint announcements would warrant their own post, but now SharePoint is probably best seen as part of a greater whole. Details on SharePoint 2016 details were first announced at Ignite, and I feel that the most informative session was Bill Baer’s on Wednesday morning where he outlined the major architectural changes:

Not surprisingly, this release will be very much about hybrid Sharepoint/Office 365 scenarios. Some of the notable items from the talk are:

SharePoint Server 2016 Will require 64 bit Windows Server 2012 or Widows Server 10, and SQL Server 2014 SP1 as a minimum
Standalone installations are no longer supported. It will be possible to install SharePoint and SQL Server on the same machine, but full SQL Server will be required, and SQL Express will no longer be supported. This obviously raises questions about whether or not there will be a free SharePoint Foundation SKU with the next release.
PerformancePoint will in fact be included with SharePoint 2016. I doubt very much that there will be any investments in it at all, but it will at least be there. I’d view this as legacy support.
SharePoint 2016 will support SAML claims as a first class citizen. That means that it will be possible to login with Azure Active Directory credentials, and is an example of bringing cloud identities on prem. However, don’t trash that domain controller just yet, I’m sure that service accounts will still need to be NTLM – SQL Server needs it.
There will be a new Roles Based installation. It will be much simpler to install and maintain servers with specific roles such as web front end, search, etc. BI will be one of the roles.
There will be new boundaries. Content databases up to Terabyte sizes, 10 GB file size limit, list thresholds of much greater than 5000 items (although how much greater was not specified)
No more FIM. The user profile engine that we’ve all grown to….. deal with from SharePoint 2010 and 2013 is no longer embedded. The full Forefront Information Manager can be used, but the default profile import mechanism will be the good ol’ User import from SharePoint 2007.
Durable resource based links. Every object in SharePoint will receive its own resource based URL. That means that it can be moved around in the farm, and reference URLs will still work. This is like permalinks in WordPress.
While not final, a preview was shown of some operational reporting. This is primarily “speeds and feeds” type information that would interest a farm administrator, although simple usage reporting could be seen.
Integration with the Office Graph – see below section on Delve.

SQL Server 2016

The next release of SQL Server was announces at Ignite. Its chock full of new things, focused primarily at hybrid operation and analytics. One of the more interesting concepts in this version is the ability to “stretch” a database into the cloud. With this, you can take an on-premises database, and extend it into Azure SQL, specifying rules to determine which data goes where. Given that online storage is significantly cheaper than on-premises, this makes total sense, and they’ve figured out a way to make it work reliably. The overall SQL Server keynote can be found here:

I’m very interested in the analytics capabilities, and the session outlining the improvements to SQL Server BI is found here:

I found the following items particularly notable:

A comment was made during the BI session that Microsoft is “Super Committed” to SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). Hopefully this helps quell the naysayers. SSRS is receiving a major facelift in this version, bringing a modern design experience. In addition, the parameters pane has received a great deal of attention, adding, among other things, support for cascaded dropdowns.
Datazen is a visualization company based in Toronto that was recently acquired by Microsoft. There is a good demo of Datazen in the session, and I highly recommend watching it. It will be included with SQL Server 2016.
Datazen has KPIs. It also has “sub-KPIs”. I’m not sure about you, but that sounds a lot like a scorecard to me. This may sound the eventual (see the SharePoint section) death knell for PerformancePoint, given that that’s about all that it uniquely provides to the BI stack.
Tabular models in SSAS (and presumably PowerPivot) will support many-many relationships and a host of other new features.
Tabular models in SSAS and PowerPivot will have time intelligence built in. No longer will separate time intelligence tables be required. It’s an open question however as to how extensible they will be and when.
SharePoint will allow browser editing on PowerPivot embedded workbooks. Currently, you need to launch Excel to edit a PowerPivot embedded workbook.

Office 365 Groups

I attended the roadmap on Office 365 Groups:

(video unavailable as of posting – should be shortly)

During this session, the light really went on for me. Groups was (were? Not sure about the grammar on this…it’s a name) introduced last year and appeared to be a glorified distribution list with Sharepoint artifacts. However, its about to become the center of the Office 365 collaborative experience. It ties together Azure Active Directory objects, a SharePoint site collection, One Note, Skype, and OneDrive into a single cohesive, non-customizable experience. It currently uses Exchange exclusively for social conversations, but full Yammer integration is promised. No date was given for the integration, but my guess is that the target is early 2016.

The current User interface is limited – too limited for my own use at the moment, but during the demonstration, a rather useful interface was shown that is coming soon. You can access groups presently through the Outlook web client in Office 365. I’m running Office 2016 preview on my laptop, and there is a very nice interface contained there. There was chatter, particularly in the Yammer community about confusion as to what tool should be used when, but I think that the coming deep integration of Yammer into Groups will render this point moot’

The next UI, demonstrated in the above session looks really good, and offers a lot of benefits. There is also a mobile app coming very shortly for, you guessed it, iOS and Windows Universal, then Android.

One unanswered question from the show is whether Groups would be available on-premises.

Power BI

Power BI content was sort of sprinkled throughout the conference, without specific focus. There was a session on the new DAX features available in Power BI Designer that is worth a watch from a modeling perspective:

One talk that really impressed me was by Lukasz Pawlowski and Josh Caplan entitled Power BI for Developers:

They cover content packs are mentioned, real time analytics, and an in depth analysis of the “how old” app that went viral during Build.

It was also announced in the SQL BI session that SSRS will in fact be included in Power BI shortly, although little detail was provided. Finally, for development, the best place to get started is http://dev.powerbi.com.

It should also be noted that Power BI was at the center of almost any analytics discussion during the conference. This is by no means a little side project.

Delve/Office Graph

Delve is a newer product in Office 365 that provides insights around what content is relevant in an organization, and how people interact with it. It’s available directly from the app launcher in Office 365, and recently, user profiles have moved to the Delve application. It’s powered by the Office Graph, which in essence an advanced index that contains content from Exchange and SharePoint, and will very shortly, be extensible for multiple content types. The roadmap session for Delve/Graph is available here:

During the session, it was stated that “Delve is the evolution of Enterprise Search”. Given that all of the work on Delve and the Graph is coming from Oslo and the former team from FAST search, this just makes sense. One of the major announcements around SharePoint 2016 was that SharePoint 2016 content can be crawled by the Office Graph to provide both search results and Delve results in Office Graph. The reverse will also be true in that the on-premises crawler will be able to index Office 365 content for search results, but Delve and the Graph will remain in Office 365. The surprise here was that later this year, it will be possible to do the same thing with Sharepoint 2013 through a coming enhancement.

Much of this Graph goodness can also now be accessed through the new Office 365 Universal API:

tyGraph

tyGraph is our product that provides advanced analytics for Yammer. It had something of a coming out party at Ignite, and while we didn’t have a booth or any launch sessions, we were fortunate enough to have several folks, customers and thought leaders present talks that at least in part featured tyGraph. If you’re interested in analytics for your Yammer network, I recommend that you watch some or all of these sessions:

Enterprise Social, from “Ooh, Shiny” to Business Success – Melanie Hohertz, Cargill

The Microsoft Enterprise Social Journey: How We Did It – Chris Slemp, Microsoft

Gain Organizational Insights with Yammer Data Mining and Analytics – Steve Nguyen, Microsoft and Tammy Young Heck, EY

Yammer Mining: Dig in and “Listen” to What Your Big *Social* Data Is Saying – Richard diZerega, Microsoft

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