Introduction

Organizations are rapidly moving into the Cloud with Office 365, but some are still not ready to move completely to Office 365 and SharePoint Online.

Upgrading to SharePoint 2019, that has an improved support for a hybrid scenario, can be a valid solution to allow organizations to gradually take the path to the Cloud.

A hybrid scenario in SharePoint 2019 will allow you the following:

• Hybrid App Launcher
• Hybrid Sites
• Hybrid OneDrive for Business
• Hybrid Business to Business (B2B) sites
• Hybrid self-service site creation
• Hybrid auditing
• Hybrid taxonomy and content types
• Hybrid Business Connectivity Services
• Hybrid Search

With these scenarios, organizations can keep some of their workloads On-Premises and start taking advantage of all the innovations in SharePoint Online and Office 365.

Enabling Hybrid Experience

To enable an hybrid environment in a SharePoint 2019 farm, you will have to follow the following steps in Central Administration:

• Select the “Configuration Wizards” option

• Launch the Hybrid Configuration

• Select “Next”

• Select the SharePoint 2019 and Office 365 accounts that will allow the hybrid experience to be enabled. The Office 365 account must be of a global administrator. In the end, select the “Validate credentials” option so that both credentials can be validated.

• Next, the credentials are going to be validated

• The Hybrid Configuration prerequisites are going to be validated. In my case, some errors were found.

The errors that the wizard showed were originated by the fact the App Management Service was not configured in the farm. To solve this problem, I had just had to create a App Management Service service application. In my case, I used an automated way to create the service application using AutoSPInstaller.

• To confirm that the App Management service application was successfully created, go to the Service Applications page and check if the service application is listed

• After creating the service application, I started the Hybrid Configuration Wizard again and the prerequisites are now correcty validated.

• Select the features you want to use in your hybrid environment. In my case, I selected Hybrid OneDrive, Hybrid Sites, Hybrid B2B sites and Hybrid App Launcher.

• Wait until the Hybrid Configuration Wizard finishes configuration.

• After the successful run of configuration wizard, SharePoint server environment will be connected to Office 365. To finish the process, click “Close”.

• To complete the process, perform an IISReset on the SharePoint 2019 server.

Testing the Hybrid Environment

After the hybrid environment is configured, you can test it:

• Hybrid App Launcher: the App Launcher will now allow users to start using Office 365 (ex: OneDrive)

• Hybrid OneDrive: when users select “OneDrive” in the App Launcher, they will be redirected to OneDrive for Business in the connected Office 365 tenant

Technical Considerations

There a few important technical notes to consider:

• You have to register your domain with Office 365 (ex: contoso.com)
• You have to create a UPN domain suffix in your On-Premises Active Directory domain that matches the public domain
• You have to sync On-Premises Active Directory with Azure AD and Office 365

For more details on these requirements, click here.

Related Articles

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you want to learn how you can rename a modern SharePoint site, click here.

If you want to modernize your SharePoint classic root site to a modern SharePoint site, click here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you learn how to greatly speed up your SharePoint farm update process to ensure your SharePoint farm keeps updated and you stay one step closer to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If you prefer to use the traditional method to update your farm and want to learn all the steps and precautions necessary to successfully keep your SharePoint farm updated, click here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2010 farm to SharePoint 2016, click here and here.

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you are work in a large organization who is using Office 365 or thinking to move to Office 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Office 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from Ignite and some more recent announcements, including Microsoft Search, What’s New to Build a Modern Intranet with SharePoint in Office 365, Deeper Integration between Microsoft Teams and SharePoint and the latest news on SharePoint development, click here.

If your organization is still not ready to go all in to SharePoint Online and Office 365, a hybrid scenario may be the best choice. SharePoint 2019 RTM was recently announced and if you to learn all about SharePoint 2019 and all its features, click here.

Happy SharePointing!

The post How to Configure a Hybrid Experience with Office 365 in a SharePoint 2019 farm appeared first on Blog IT.

Introduction

Site URL Rename has been one of the most popular requests via UserVoice and in SharePoint Conference 2019, in one my favorite announcements of the event, Microsoft finally announced the possibilty to rename a Site URL.

How It Works

Renaming a site can be done either using the SharePoint Admin Center or using a PowerShell script.

Important: This feature is currently on Preview (you can test it if your tenant is part of the Admin Center Preview) and should be available soon! You have to be a SharePoint Administrator to be able to rename a Site URL.

Using the SharePoint Admin Center

The easiest way to rename a site URL is using the SharePoint Admin Center. Select “Active Sites”, then the site you want to rename and click “Edit”.

A popup will appear and the only thing you have to do is to write the new URL and ensure that the new URL is not being used.7

Using PowerShell

The same thing can be achieved using a simple PowerShell script, using the Start-SPOSiteRename cmdlet.

The syntax of the Start-SPOSiteRename cmdlet is the following:

Start-SPOSiteRename [-Identity] [-NewSiteUrl] [[-NewSiteTitle] ] [[-SuppressMarketplaceAppCheck]] [[-SuppressWorkflow2013Check]] [[-Reserved] ] [-WhatIf][-Confirm] [CommonParameters]

The main parameters of the cmdlet are:

-Identity

Current Site URL.

-NewSiteUrl

The new site URL. This the URL you want to rename the site to.

Follow the steps below to do the magic:

1. Open a PowerShell console (as adminstrator) and type the SharePoint Online authentication command. In this command, you must use your tenant’s Admin URL
   
   Connect-SPOService -Url https://yourtenant-admin.sharepoint.com
   
   
2. Supply your tenant’s administrator credentials
3. Run the following command:
   
   Start-SPOSiteRename
   -Identity https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/oldURL
   -NewSiteUrl https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/newURL

For more details in the Start-SPOSiteRename cmdlet, click here.

If all goes well, your site will be renamed. If the feature is not enabled in your tenant, you will get an error message like the one below.

The “This site address can’t be changed.” message means that the feature is not available in your tenant yet and you have to wait a little bit more.

Impact on Links

If you are worried if you are going to have broken links, stop worrying! The changes to the site URL will have no impact since access requests to the old URL will be redirected to the new URL, meaning that users will not need to update their links and bookmarks or reshare previously shared links.

Important: The redirection may take a few minutes after the site URL is changed and in that period is possible you can see a HTTP 500 error.

Limitations

The site cannot be a Hub Site – if the site is a hub site, unregister it as a hub site, rename the site URL and then register the site back as a hub site.

Related Articles

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you want to modernize your SharePoint classic root site to a modern SharePoint site, click here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you learn how to greatly speed up your SharePoint farm update process to ensure your SharePoint farm keeps updated and you stay one step closer to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If you prefer to use the traditional method to update your farm and want to learn all the steps and precautions necessary to successfully keep your SharePoint farm updated, click here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2010 farm to SharePoint 2016, click here and here.

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you are work in a large organization who is using Office 365 or thinking to move to Office 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Office 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from Ignite and some more recent announcements, including Microsoft Search, What’s New to Build a Modern Intranet with SharePoint in Office 365, Deeper Integration between Microsoft Teams and SharePoint and the latest news on SharePoint development, click here.

If your organization is still not ready to go all in to SharePoint Online and Office 365, a hybrid scenario may be the best choice. SharePoint 2019 RTM was recently announced and if you to learn all about SharePoint 2019 and all its features, click here.

Happy SharePointing!

The post How to Rename a Modern SharePoint Site URL in Office 365 appeared first on Blog IT.

Now, using the recently released Invoke-SPOSiteSwap PowerShell cmlet, you convert your classic tenant’s root site collection to a modern site collection (for example a modern Communication Site).

Introduction

In Microsoft Ignite 2018, announced that all new Office 365 tenants would start getting the modern Communication Site as the root site by default.

Microsoft will soon release the possibility for administrators to set a Communication Site as the experience for the root site of a tenant (should be rolled out in September, more details here) and until now, there wasn’t an easy way to convert a classic root site collection into a modern SharePoint site. Now, with this release, we will finally be able to get a modern SharePoint site as the root site collection even on an older Office 365 tenant!

The Solution

Dependencies

To be able to modernize your SharePoint homepage, you will first need to download and install SharePoint Online Management Shell version 16.0.8812.1200 or later. To get the latest version of the SharePoint Online Management Shell, click here or run the following PowerShell command:

Install-Module -Name Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell -force

NOTE: If the Invoke-SPOSiteSwap PowerShell cmlet is not available yet in your tenant, just wait a little bit more, since it is currently being rolled out!

How It Works

In the steps below we are assuming the following:

• You have a classic root site collection at https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com
• You have a modern Communication Site already created in your tenant (for example at https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/modernintranet)

Important Note: the Invoke-SPOSiteSwap cmdlet doesn’t transform your existing classic root site collection into a modern site collection. Instead, it replaces the current root site collection (a class site collection) by another existing site collection, in this example, a modern Communication Site.

The syntax of the Invoke-SPOSiteSwap cmdlet is the following:

Invoke-SPOSiteSwap -SourceUrl <string> -TargetUrl <string> -ArchiveUrl <string> [<CommonParameters>]

The main parameters of the cmdlet are:

-SourceUrl

URL of the source site. The site at this location must exist before performing the swap.

If the target is the root site at https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com then the source site must be either a Team Site (STS#0), a Modern Team Site (STS#3), or a Communication Site (SITEPAGEPUBLISHING#0).

In our example, this will be our modern Communication Site at https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/modernintranet and it represents the site that will replace our old classic Team Site.

-TargetUrl

URL of the target site that the source site will be swapped to. The site at this location must exist before performing the swap.

The target site must be the either:

• The root site at https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com; or
• The search center site at https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/search

In our example, this will be our classic Team Site root site collection at https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com that will be replaced by our modern Communication Site.

-ArchiveUrl

URL to where the target site will be archived. There should be no existing site, including a deleted site in the Recycle Bin, at this location before performing the swap.

In our example, this will the URL where our classic Team Site root site collection will be archived to.

Pulling the Trigger

Follow the steps below to do the magic:

1. Open a PowerShell console (as adminstrator) and type the SharePoint Online authentication command. In this command, you must use your tenant’s Admin URL
   
   Connect-SPOService -Url https://yourtenant-admin.sharepoint.com
   
2. Supply your tenant’s administrator credentials
3. Run the following command:
   
   Invoke-SPOSiteSwap
   -SourceUrl https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/modernintranet
   -TargetUrl https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com
   -ArchiveUrl https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/oldroot

Making the swap will take about one minute and it is pretty straightforward. After the swap, you should have a brand new Communication Site as your homepage.

Limitations

Making the swap will take about one minute and it is pretty straightforward, but you must take some restrictions into consideration. Neither the source or target site can be:

• Neither the source or target site can be connected to an Office 365 Group
• Neither the source or target site can be a Hub Site – if a site is a hub site, unregister it as a hub site, swap the root site, and then register the site back as a hub site
• Neither the source or target site can be associated with a Hub Site – if a site is associated with a hub, disassociate the site, swap the root site, and then reassociate the site
• Only sites within the same domain, for example, https://contoso.sharepoint.com can be swapped
• The source site must be a modern team site (STS#3), a communication site (SITEPAGEPUBLISHING#0), or a classic team site (STS#0)
• All subsites contained with the source and target sites will be swapped
• Any sharing links or bookmarks will need to be recreated after the site swap

Conclusion

If you want a modern experience in your existing Office 365 tenant and convert your classic team site into a modern SharePoint Modern Experience, this is the easiest way to go.

Before doing the swap, there are a few things you need to consider:

• Assign permissions to the new Communication Site so that users can access the new site
• Plan navigation (ex: Mega Menu navigation) to ensure navigation to your existing content
• Configure your new Communication Site homepage to show the most relevant content you want to show to your users
• Migrate content from the old classic root site collection to the new Communication Site

Another great thing about this approach is that if you don’t like the result of the swap, you can always swap back using the same PowerShell command.

Related Articles

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you learn how to greatly speed up your SharePoint farm update process to ensure your SharePoint farm keeps updated and you stay one step closer to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If you prefer to use the traditional method to update your farm and want to learn all the steps and precautions necessary to successfully keep your SharePoint farm updated, click here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2010 farm to SharePoint 2016, click here and here.

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you are work in a large organization who is using Office 365 or thinking to move to Office 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Office 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from Ignite and some more recent announcements, including Microsoft Search, What’s New to Build a Modern Intranet with SharePoint in Office 365, Deeper Integration between Microsoft Teams and SharePoint and the latest news on SharePoint development, click here.

If your organization is still not ready to go all in to SharePoint Online and Office 365, a hybrid scenario may be the best choice. SharePoint 2019 RTM was recently announced and if you to learn all about SharePoint 2019 and all its features, click here.

Happy SharePointing!

The post How to convert a classic root site to Modern SharePoint in Office 365 using Invoke-SPOSiteSwap PowerShell cmdlet appeared first on Blog IT.

I recently was involved in a scenario with a customer that had to choose between having multiple Office 365 tenants or just a single tenant. This post will talk about some of the technical considerations that you will have to ask yourself if you are considering choosing between a single or a multi-tenant approach and the impacts that this decision has on the end user experience.

Introduction

The decision of going with multiple tenants for your organization should not be taken lightly since it has a LOT of implications for the end user experience. I will discuss the end user experience implications in a greater detail below but let me be clear: you should choose to use a single Office 365 tenant for your organization if you can.

Common Scenarios for Multiple Tenants

There are a few scenarios that organizations may feel that the best or even the only option is to go with multiple tenants. Here are some of the most common scenarios:

• Our organization is composed by several divisions worldwide and each division must have its data stored in different geographies
• We must provide complete autonomy of administrative control for each division within the organization
• We want to avoid network latency problems with Office 365 workloads (Ex: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams)
• One of your divisions may one day leave the organization and we want to ensure that if this happens, data is properly isolated
• The organization has multiple Office 365 licensing providers from different geographies

Going with multiple tenant is a possible way to solve the problems above but there are almost always alternative solutions. Recently, Multi-Geo capabilities were announced that allow organizations to split its data residency across different geographies without the need to have multiple tenants. To learn more about Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365, click here.

Important Technical Questions To Consider

Domains

One fairly common mistake that many organizations can make is to think that because they have multiple DNS domains, they need to have multiple Office 365 tenants. This is NOT true and you can have multiple domains in a single tenant (you can have up to 5000 domains in a single Office 365 tenant, more details here).

Identity

In Office 365, users will authenticate to every workload using their identity, typically in one of the following scenarios:

• An Azure Active Directory account synchronized with your local Active Directory environment (recommended scenario for most organizations)
• A Cloud Only Account (if your organization doesn’t have a local Active Directory or some users will only need to access Office 365 and Cloud resources)

Azure Active Directory

If you need to sync your local Azure Active Directory with Azure Active Directory, there are a few considerations you have to take into account:

• An Azure Active Directory tenant is associated to a single Office 365 tenant
• Each user is unique in Azure Active Directory and you cannot synchronize the same user into multiple tenants. This has a very important implication: each user is a member of a single tenant and is consider as a Guest user in any other tenant
• If you have multiple tenants, each DNS domain can only be registered in a single tenant
• If you have several local Active Directory forests and you want to sync all forests into a single tenant, you can only have one Azure AD Connect instance that will have to have access to all the local AD forests. To learn more about the Azure AD Connect supported topologies, click here

Tenant Migration

If you are in a case where there are already several tenants in your organization and you want to migrate users and Office 365 workloads into a single tenant, it is important to evaluate which workloads are already being used. The easiest migration path is if the only workload in use is email and the more workloads in use, the harder the migration will be.

If you still evaluating if you are going for a single tenant or multiple tenants, read on.

User Experience

One of the most important things to consider before deciding between a single or multiple tenants is the end user experience. Next, I will discuss in greater detail, what the end user experience will be like in each of the two scenarios.

Single Tenant

This is how the end user experience will look like if you go with a single Office 365 tenant:

• All users are treated as from the same company
• Single point of access for all collaboration (single Intranet Portal for collaboration), users will only have to access one URL, making it easier for users to find the information they are looking for
• Better user experience overall
• Seamless sharing experience
• Sharing Office 365 groups can be done directly from SharePoint
• SharePoint Search will returns results for all information in the organization that each user has access to and the new intelligent/modern search recommendations will have a full experience on all the organization’s content, making it easier for users to find the information they are looking for
• Term Store can be used across the whole organization
• Users will access their OneDrive for Business site from any location in the tenant
• Users will access their user profile from any location in the tenant
• Using services like Flow, PowerApps, PowerBI, Stream, and Forms will be much easier:
  • PowerApps applications are all in one tenant and can be shared with all users in the organization without restrictions (Ex: Vacation Request App to allow all users in the organization to shedule their vacations)
  • Flows can be used by all users in the organization
  • Forms can be responded by all users in the organization
• Full Microsoft Teams Experience (no need to switch between tenants). This is how Microsoft Teams experience will look like with a single tenant:
  • Users do not have to switch between tenants in Teams and can talk to everyone in their organization
  • Users are notified of new conversations (or conversation replies) they have with anyone inside their organization
  • Presence of users in Teams is consistent (there is only one tenant and users are always connected to the same tenant)
  • You can talk to anyone in the organization in Teams and you can easily find anyone in the organization in the Teams search bar
• Full Experience in Office 365 Groups
• A single tenant already supports Multiple Geographies (for Exchange, OneDrive and SharePoint). To know more about Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365, click here
• Shared mailboxes may include users from different domains as all users are in the same tenant
• Sync offline any document library in any SharePoint site in the tenant using the same identity
• Office 365 App Launcher will appear for all users since they are always using the tenant they belong to

Multiple Tenants

This is how the end user experience will look like if you go with multiple Office 365 tenants:

• Users from other tenants are treated as Guests (limited user experience)
• Several points of access for collaboration (several Intranet Portals for collaboration), users will have to access several different URLs, making it harder for users to find the information they are looking for
• Delve is limited to one Office 365 tenant and users will not be able to collaborate using Delve with users from other tenants
• Shared mailboxes cannot include users from different tenants
• Across Office 365 tenants, external Out of Office replies will be used. The internal Out of Office replies will only work for users within the same tenant
• Guest users cannot be pre-authorized on SharePoint content; they need to follow the invitation workflow on a case-by-case basis through an email invitation. External Access will also need to be enabled in the tenant
• Adding external users to a Office 365 group must be done from Outlook Web App (confusing for users, since they have two places to share an Office 365 group: SharePoint for internal users, Outlook Web App for external users)
• SharePoint Search and Term Store are bound to a single tenant. Users will have to search in multiple tenants, making it harder for users to find the information they are looking for
• Microsoft Search does not work across tenants, and the new intelligent/modern search recommendations will not be nearly as helpful as they could be
• Users will only be able to access their OneDrive for Business site from the tenant they belong to
• Users will only be able to access their user profile from the tenant they belong to
• Trying to use the services like Flow, PowerApps, PowerBI, Stream, and Forms will be much harder:
  • PowerApps only supports users from one tenant . For example, a Vacation Request App can only be used by users in one tenant (or the app should be installed in all tenants and data gathering for all organization would have to be merged)
  • Flow can only be used by users in one tenant
  • Forms can only be answered by users in the same tenant. If we want to share the form with other tenants, the form must be public which allows users from any organization or an anonymous user to respond
• Users can’t sync offline document libraries from multiple tenants using OneDrive for Business with the same identity (there is a user voice request to enable this feature)
• Limited Teams Experience (users from one tenant need to switch between tenants to talk with users from another tenant).
  This is how Microsoft Teams experience will look like with multiple tenants:
  • Users have to switch between tenants in Teams to talk to people from another tenant
  • Users are not notified of conversations of other tenants in which they are Guests when connected to another tenant (eg, the tenant to which they belong)
    • Only when there is a direct mention to the team, users are notified of other tenant’s conversations in the upper right corner of Teams
  • Users, when connected to another tenant as Guests, are only notified of their tenant’s conversations in the upper right corner of Teams
  • The names of users when connected as Guests to other tenants appear with suffix “(Guest)”
  • Presence of users in the Teams is not consistent, and the indication of presence is only correct in the tenant to which the user belongs to. Example:
    • User as Guest appears as Offline
    • User in the tenant that belongs to appears as Busy
  • By default, it is only possible to talk with people of the same tenant at the same time. If we want to talk to people from other tenants, we have the following possibilities:
    • We have to switch tenants in Teams and we can no longer talk to people in our tenant
    • We add the person as guest in our tenant in one of the teams to which we also belong
• There are several Teams features limitations for Guest users (see the table below)

• Limited Experience in Office 365 Groups (see table below)

• Office 365 App Launcher will only be displayed for users when they access the tenant they belong to. When they access other tenants, the App Launcher will not be displayed, making it a confusing experience for the user

Conclusion

The analysis above takes in consideration the current features in Office 365 and things may change in the future. Despite the changes that may occur in the future, the user experience with multiple tenants will always be limited in comparison with the end user experience with a single tenant.

If your organization needs to collaborate without barriers and have a richer collaboration experience, a single tenant scenario is your best option.

You may go for multiple tenants but in the way I see it, this should only be an option if technically there is no other option.
One of strongest arguments in favor of a multi tenant scenario is the case of organizations that are composed by multiple divisions or companies (ex: hotel chain with multiple hotel units) and one of the companies may leave the organization. Even in this case, the decision to go for multiple tenants should be carefully evaluated since the degree of separation that this solution imposes within the organization and the limitations in what regards to collaboration experience are very significant and should not be overlooked. No doubt that if, in the scenario above, a company leaves an organization that has a single Office 365 tenant, migrating users and Office 365 workloads will be harder but should this alone make organizations go for multiple tenants, sacrificing the collaboration experience? I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject and feel free to leave your opinion in the comments section of this post below.

Related Articles

If you want to convert your tenant’s root classic site into a modern SharePoint site, click here.

To learn why your business should migrate to SharePoint Online and Office 365, click here and here.

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from SharePoint Conference 2019, click here and here.

If your organization is still not ready to go all in to SharePoint Online and Office 365, a hybrid scenario may be the best choice. SharePoint 2019 RTM was recently announced and if you to learn all about SharePoint 2019 and all its features, click here.

If you are a SharePoint administrator or a SharePoint developer who wants to learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2019 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, I invite you to click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2013 farm to SharePoint 2019, click here and here.

If you want to learn all the steps and precautions necessary to successfully keep your SharePoint farm updated and be ready to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If you learn how to greatly speed up your SharePoint farm update process to ensure your SharePoint farm keeps updated and you stay one step closer to start your move to the cloud, click here.

If SharePoint 2019 is still not an option, you can learn more about how to install a SharePoint 2016 farm in an automated way using PowerShell, click here and here.

If you want to learn how to upgrade a SharePoint 2010 farm to SharePoint 2016, click here and here.

Happy SharePointing!

The post Pros and Cons of Single Tenant vs Multiple Tenants in Office 365 appeared first on Blog IT.

Finally the the SharePoint Server 2019 RTM version has been announced, and we can now take a look of what the new version brings to the On-Premises world of SharePoint. Not much has changed since the announcement of SharePoint 2019 Preview but still there is a lot of good stuff brought to this new SharePoint Server release.

Introduction

SharePoint has come a long way and it is nothing but amazing to see the constant innovation that Microsoft has been introducing to the platform over the years!

With this release, SharePoint Server finally gets modern and includes a major set of the features that are already available in SharePoint Online. After the release of SharePoint Online back in 2013 and with the release of SharePoint 2016, Microsoft has adopted the “Cloud-first, mobile first” vision where all new features are first released to SharePoint Online and then gradually released to SharePoint On-Premises through new major versions that occur approximately every 3 years and through Feature Packs that were introduced in SharePoint 2016 and allow the latest Cloud innovations to be brought to the On-Premises world. SharePoint 2016 was the first major SharePoint On-Premises release that took advantage of the extensive Microsoft experience managing SharePoint Online and the second major version was just recently announced: SharePoint 2019.

The previous release, SharePoint 2016, has brought us several major improvements over its predecessor (SharePoint 2013). Here are some of its main features:

• New Hybrid Experiences like Cloud Hybrid Search, Hybrid Team Sites and the ability to use Delve as the User Profile Experience
• Major limit increases (ex: Search Index Size, Number of Site Collections, List View Threshold Increase with Automatic Index Column Creation)
• MinRoles
• Feature Packs
• Durable Links
• Zero Downtime Patching
• Integration of the new SharePoint Framework development model (available with SharePoint 2016 Feature Pack 2)

Three years have passed with lots of new features released to SharePoint Online and it is time to take a look at what Microsoft is bringing us with the new SharePoint 2019 Preview release.

What’s New In SharePoint 2019

Lets’ take a look at the major features that the new version will bring!

The main focus of the new release is no doubt the inclusion of major parts of the Modern Experiences already available in SharePoint Online, bringing a responsive user experience and allowing access to SharePoint 2019 from any device (PC and mobile devices). Here are the major new features that were announced and that will be included in SharePoint 2019:

• Modern Team Sites
• Modern Communication Sites
• Modern Lists
• Modern Libraries
• Modern Pages
• Modern Web Parts
• SharePoint Home Page
• SharePoint Mobile App
• Modern SharePoint Development Platform
• Support to the latest OneDrive Sync Client
• Improved Hybrid Support
• Improved support for PowerApps and Flow
• Improvements on Large File Support, Character Restrictions and File/Folder Names
• Administration / Infrastructure Improvements

The following features are not going to be available, possibly in future Feature Packs:

• Hub Sites
• Site Designs and Site Scripts
• Site collection app catalog
• Power BI web part
• Most of the modern web parts available in SharePoint Online

As expected, some of major features in Office 365 will not be available and will remain as cloud only offerings:

• Office 365 Groups
• Planner
• Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Forms
• Delve (possible to integrate with SharePoint 2019 in a hybrid scenario)
• PowerBI (possible to integrate with SharePoint 2019 in a hybrid scenario)

Modern Team Sites

The major difference between SharePoint 2019 and its predecessor is that it will include some of the major UI improvements already available in SharePoint Online. One of its core components are the Modern Team Sites. Team Sites have always been the major collaboration tool in SharePoint and will continue to be so but now with a modern and responsive user experience, allowing users to easily collaborate and share information within Teams and the whole organization. This is how a new Modern Team site will look like:

One major difference between Team Sites in SharePoint 2019 and their counterparts in SharePoint Online is that they will not be supported in Office 365 Groups and thus not taking advantage of some of the coolest collaboration features in Office 365 such as:

• Planner
• Office 365 Group features including a shared calendar and integration with Outlook
• Ability to connect a Team Site with a Team in Microsoft Teams

Modern Communication Sites

Another major piece of the modern experience that will be included in SharePoint 2019 are the Modern Communication Sites. While Team Sites are all about collaboration and mainly people working on SharePoint Lists and Libraries and sharing information between them, Communication Sites are all about user engagement and having a way to easily share relevant information in an engaging way with a whole department or the entire organization. While in Team Sites, most users are active contributors, in Communication Sites most users will be consumers and there will be a restricted set of users that will publish information for a department or the entire organization to consume. This is how a new Modern Communication site will look like:

Modern Lists

Lists are one of the core collaboration features in SharePoint, allowing users to work on and share information in a structured way, also allowing information from external systems to be presented in SharePoint. Modern Lists will bring the SharePoint Online experience to the On-Premises world, allowing users to interact with the information with a richer user experience, available across multiple devices and browsers. This is how a Modern List will look like:

One of the major advantages is the possibility to easily format column data using the conditional formatting features already available in SharePoint Online. Other major improvements that will be available later this year or in 2019:

• Row Formatting: Ability to create new formatting experiences for any List or Library with scripting
• Realtime List updates: Ability to see updates to Lists and Libraries instantly without having to refresh the page
• New Ways to create Lists: Ability to create Lists based on Excel, templates or other Lists

Modern Libraries

Libraries are the other main collaboration feature in SharePoint, allowing users to work on files (and add metadata) and easily share them with other colleagues in the organization. Modern Libraries will bring the same modern experience already available in SharePoint Online and will allow users to easily sync their files with their computers using the latest version of OneDrive for Business, thus allowing users to work offline and sync files to SharePoint once they get back online. This is how a Modern Library will look like:

Modern Pages

In Classic SharePoint experience, pages are typically rendered server side and are composed by a set of web parts (native SharePoint web parts or custom developed web parts implemented using server side code in the language of your preference, typically C# or VB.NET).  Modern pages are rendered client side and bring the power of client side web parts to give users a responsive user experience, available across multiple devices and browsers. Publishing modern pages is also greatly simplified and users can now create new pages with rich content quickly and easily, This is how a Modern Page will look like:

One of the best parts of Modern pages is the possibility to extend SharePoint using the new SharePoint Framework development model, allowing developers to build modern client side web parts and extensions.

Modern Web Parts

As expected, most of the new modern web parts available in SharePoint Online will not be available On-Premises. Despite of that, there are quite a few modern web parts that will be available out of the box in this release:

Support for custom developed modern web parts will also be available using SharePoint Framework (SPFx) web parts.

SharePoint Home Page

Already available in SharePoint Online for quite some time, the SharePoint Home Page will also be available in SharePoint 2019 and will allow users to easily find and access SharePoint sites within their organization, find news from the sites they are following and from suggested sites. Additionally, users will be able to easily create sites directly from this page.

This is how the new SharePoint Home Page will look like:

SharePoint Mobile App

Also already available for SharePoint Online, SharePoint 2019 will also be accessible using the SharePoint Mobile App, allowing users to easily find the most relevant information within the organization from any location.

Modern SharePoint Development Platform

With the release of SharePoint 2019, support to SharePoint Framework web parts and extensions will be enhanced.  SharePoint 2019 will include SharePoint Framework version 1.4.1 and will also include support to Webhooks that are already available in SharePoint Online.  Here are the supported development options in SharePoint 2019 (this list may change until RTM version is released):

• SharePoint Framework client-side web parts
• SharePoint Framework extensions
• Webhooks
• Asset packaging and automatic JavaScript file hosting from app catalog
• Column formatting

For more details on the new development options, click here.

Support to the latest OneDrive Sync Client

Until now, OneDrive support was missing on the On-Premises world, while it is already present for OneDrive and SharePoint Online for quite some time. Fortunately,  this will change since SharePoint 2019 will add OneDrive Sync Client support for both Personal and Team Sites, which will also include files on demand!

Improved Hybrid Support

As part of Microsoft’s strategy to gradually move costumers to the Cloud and SharePoint Online, started with the first stages of hybrid support in SharePoint 2013 SP1 and further enhanced in SharePoint 2016, configuring an hybrid environment will get even easier in SharePoint 2019 with the new features below, allowing organizations to leverage existing investments on On-Premises solutions while also taking advantage of all cloud innovations of SharePoint Online and Office 365:

• Hybrid configured during deployment: It will be possible to configure a hybrid SharePoint environment during SharePoint deployment
• New SharePoint Hybrid status bar: A new hybrid status bar will be presented in Central Administration once the SharePoint farm meets the minimum system requirements necessary to enable a hybrid scenario. Also, it will give you direct access to launch the SharePoint Hybrid Configuration Wizard

• OneDrive in Office 365 by Default: Setting up OneDrive for Business Redirection to Office 365 was already possible in SharePoint 2013 with SP1 and SharePoint 2016.  With SharePoint 2019, when a hybrid environment is configured, users will be using OneDrive For Business in Office 365 by default
• Modern Search: Although in SharePoint 2016 we already had an integrated Search experience with Cloud Hybrid Search that allows SharePoint Online to store the search index for both Online and On-Premises results, the search experience was not totally consistent in a hybrid environment. SharePoint 2019 will take advantage of the improvements made in Office 365 search and will bring a better search experience for hybrid environments. Some of the major improvements in the search experience are:
  • Users see results as they start typing and the results update as they type (Search as you type)
  • The search results page shows an overview of search results, grouped by type and it will be easy to expand to see all the results of each type, for example people or sites
  • On a people result, users can click the email address to quickly get started on an email to that person

One of the main challenges on the move to cloud and Office 365, continues to be security related (Data Ownership and areas like Security, Compliance and Privacy). To learn more about the Intelligent Security features available in Office 365, click here.

Improved support for PowerApps and Flow

It isn’t quite clear all the improvements that will be included in SharePoint 2019 but there is going to be some deeper integrations with Flow and PowerApps to On-Premises data which will facilitate the creation of Apps and Flows that integrate with Line Of Business systems. The connection to On-Premises systems will be done through the On-Premises Data Gateway (that supports integration with several On-Premises data sources) and with the release of SharePoint 2019 several performance improvements will be included and there will be fewer restrictions than we had before.

Unfortunately, there is still not going to be native PowerApps and Flow buttons directly from On-Premises SharePoint Lists and Libraries.

Improvements on Large File Support, Character Restrictions and File/Folder Names

With SharePoint 2019, there will some important improvements on Large File Support, Character Restrictions and File/Folder Names:

• It will be possible to store files up to 15 GB in SharePoint 2019 document libraries. This is 5 GB up from the 10 GB supported in SharePoint 2016
• Support for # and % characters in file and folder names across document libraries in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business
• SharePoint 2019 will increase the URL path length limit from 260 to 400 characters

Administration / Infrastructure Improvements

The hardware requirements for SharePoint 2019 are not very different from SharePoint 2016 (for more details, click here)  but there are a few Administration/ Infrastructure improvements such as:

• Direct links in Central Administration to SharePoint documentation: Direct links to SharePoint documentation will be available from the Central Administration pages.
• Workflow Manager 2019: Despite improved support for Microsoft Flow, SharePoint workflows are not going to go away yet and Microsoft just released Workflow Manager 2019 that replaces Workflow Manager 1.0. For more details on Workflow Manager for SharePoint 2019, click here.
• SharePoint can now authenticate to SMTP email servers: No more anonymous relays just for SharePoint

• Recycle Bin recovery improvements: Users will be able to recover their content deleted by others from the recycle bin

Removed and Deprecated Features

There are a lot of new features in SharePoint 2019 that makes this the best SharePoint Server release so far but as usual there a number of features that will be removed or deprecated in the new release.

Removed Features

This is the list of removed features in SharePoint 2019:

• Automatic mode in incoming email
• Code-based sandboxed solution
• Digest authentication
• Multi-tenancy
• Silverlight rendering in PerformancePoint Services and Visio Services
• SQL Reporting Services integrated mode
• Power Pivot
• Power View

Deprecated Features

This is the list of deprecated features in SharePoint 2019:

• Access Services 2010 & 2013
• Aggregated Newsfeed
• Custom Help
• InfoPath Client / InfoPath Services (Microsoft has stopped investing in InfoPath and is putting all the eggs in PowerApps but it will be supported until 2026)
• Lists web service
• Machine Translation service
• PerformancePoint Services
• SharePoint Designer (Microsoft has stopped investing in SharePoint Designer but it will be supported until 2026)
• Site Mailbox
• Site Manager

Conclusion

While Microsoft continues to push customers to the Cloud and to Office 365, Microsoft is now releasing another major release of SharePoint Server that brings many of the major improvements made in the last three years in SharePoint Online to the On-Premises world. Meanwhile, the path in the Online world doesn’t stop and many exciting features are being announced, including the arrival of AI to SharePoint through SharePoint Spaces.

If you want to know more about what recent updates in the SharePoint world, I invite you to read all about the latest Ignite 2018 announcements including the brand new Microsoft Search:

• What’s new Microsoft Teams features
• Build your modern intranet with SharePoint in Office 365
• SharePoint powers teamwork in Office 365
• What’s new in security, compliance, & administration for SharePoint & OneDrive from Microsoft Ignite
• New innovations in SharePoint & Microsoft 365 deliver power and simplicity for content collaboration
• Do more with new upcoming SharePoint development capabilities announced at Ignite 2018
• The Microsoft Ignite YouTube Channel

To get a broader vision of SharePoint evolution over the years, don’t miss Jeff Teper “Hitting Refresh on SharePoint” articles:

• Hitting Refresh on SharePoint and More – Part 1
• Hitting Refresh on SharePoint and More – Part 2
• Hitting Refresh on SharePoint and More – Part 3
• Hitting Refresh on SharePoint and More – Part 4

If you are new to SharePoint and Office 365 and want to learn all about it, take a look at these learning resources.

If you are work in a large organization who is using Office 365 or thinking to move to Office 365 and is considering between a single or multiple Office 365 tenants, I invite you to read this article.

If you want to know all about the latest SharePoint and Office 365 announcements from SharePoint Conference 2019, click here and here.

Happy SharePointing!

The post Meet the new Modern SharePoint Server: SharePoint 2019 RTM is here! appeared first on Blog IT.