Earlier today, a user was looking for recommendations for which file shortcut to use that would be cross-platform compatible. The user wanted everyone who was invited to a shared folder to be able to click links to other locations without much hassle. If you've used OneDrive, Teams, and/or SharePoint across different devices, you may have run into issues where shortcuts work on certain devices and other shortcuts are un-openable. This can be really confusing if you're working with a group of people that have a mix of device types.
I did a little bit of testing and I can say that right now, the best option for cross-device compatible shortcuts is to use the .url format created on the web in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams.
This post will go into different file shortcuts across platforms and how to create these .url shortcuts. I'm not focusing on mobile devices because hopefully your users only access files through the official Microsoft apps and are not directly downloading files. This post may save you some headaches going forward.
I received a request from a client that was struggling with using Shared Mailboxes in Exchange Online. They wanted to be able to see all sent email messages in the Shared Mailbox “Sent” folder instead of the user's email address.
For example:
A user has “Send As” permissions on a Shared Mailbox named “Finance@example.com”.
The user composes a new email in Outlook and changes the “From” setting to “Finance@” and clicks the Send button.
The email is delivered to recipients from “Finance@”.
A copy of the sent email is stored in the user's “Sent” folder.
The issue with this process is that there is no record inside the Shared Mailbox that an email was sent from the account. Only the original sender has a copy of the message, but other users who have access to the Shared Mailbox cannot see which email messages have been sent out or which items in the inbox have been replied to.
To fix this issue, I wrote a quick PowerShell script to update all Shared Mailboxes with 2 attributes.
After setting up a new Azure Subscription, you'll get errors in the Portal that say Resource Providers are enabled for Azure Services:
Resource provider 'Microsoft.BotService' not registered for the subscription
You might also get the following error message:
(Code: NoRegisteredProviderFound)
To fix these errors, you will need to enable the Resource Providers in Azure so that you can allow management from the Portal.
You can enable these Resource Providers one-by-one manually through the portal by navigating to the Subscription > Resource Providers and clicking the “Register” button, but this can take a long time if you want to enable all Resource Providers.
To add them quickly, you can run a one-line PowerShell command to enable all that are currently disabled.
I have multiple email accounts that I juggle to support other client tenants, but I keep one primary calendar in Outlook with my work account. Every morning, I go through my other account emails and manually copy over events into my primary calendar so that I don't get double booked. I'm sure there's a better way to manage my calendars, but this has been working for me so far.
This morning, however, I tried to copy a meeting from my alternate account into my primary calendar, but I got the following popup message:
Microsoft Outlook: Copying meetings is not supported.
I'm running Outlook with a Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise license, version 2312 (Build 17126.20126 Click-to-Run) on the Current Channel. I'm running Windows 11 Business with a Windows 11 Enterprise subscription, Version 23H2, OS Build 22631.2861, with Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.22681.1000.0
To fix this issue in Outlook and to be able to copy calendar entries across accounts, I needed to make a change in the Registry.
To make it easier and to give others the ability to deploy this org-wide, I wrote up a quick PowerShell script that changes the value.
Right now, there's no ability in the Exchange Admin center to list all Shared Mailboxes that a user can access.
To work around this limitation, I wrote a simple PowerShell script to get all Shared Mailboxes, check if the specified user has permissions, then output the report to a .csv file.
Today, I received a request to generate a report of all SharePoint Sites that a user has access to. Currently, the SharePoint admin center portal only has the ability to see which users are members of a group. There's no ability for the inverse: Which Sites does a user have access to?
To do this, I wrote a quick PowerShell script to iterate through all sites, checks if the user is a Member, then outputs the list of sites to a .csv.
A company I'm working with is located in multiple countries and has added Multi-Geo licenses for Microsoft 365. Recently, we rolled out Orchestry to streamline requests and approvals for creating new Teams on behalf of staff.
Currently, one of the shortcomings of Orchestry is the lack of support for Microsoft's multi-geo capabilities. If you have a tenant spanning more than one location, you will need to manually move Teams that were provisioned in Orchestry after they've been created. The lack of multi-geo support is not great—a SharePoint Administrator is required to run PowerShell commands to manually move the site to bring it under compliance with any GDPR or other data governance requirements.
This post will detail the steps for a workflow that allows you to provision Teams in Orchestry and have them automatically moved to the correct location using a webhook and an Azure Automation Runbook.
A finance department that I'm working with needs a way to archive a ton of Excel files before migration. They're using cross-file links in their formulas (e.g. =xlookup('OtherFile.xlsx',A1)) and were concerned that users would accidentally trigger a refresh after their data was moved into a new SharePoint tenant and change historical records.
They started the manual task of opening each Excel file, selecting all, copying, then pasting values. Lots of Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Shift+V, click, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+W.
To make this easier and faster, I created a VBScript that allows you to pick some files and break the links on all of them.
