Licensing and the Office 365 Portal

If you have an Office 365 (O365) subscription, you should already have access to SharePoint. There are many different levels of licensing within O365. The individual consumer or small business may use a basic plan, while a larger corporation would use one of the enterprise levels of licensing. Most O365 licenses will have access to SharePoint, and the functionality in these environments is the same. The most noticeable difference are the web parts and controls that are available (enterprise level will have much more access to controls that allow for data reporting, for example).

To gain access to your SharePoint Online instance, go to portal.office.com (if you don’t already have an account, you’ll need to sign up). Log in to your account and click on the Admin icon, as shown in Figure 1.1.

In the new window that opens, expand the Users tab and select Active users. You’ll see a list of all available user accounts. From here, you can create new users, delete users, and assign licenses. Click on the user that you want to assign a license and permissions to; an additional tab will open with several options (see Figure 1.2).

In the Product licenses section, you can see an overview of what licenses have been assigned. You’ll need to click Edit located next to this section to see what is included with your license. After you click Edit, you will see something like what is shown in Figure 1.3. In this example, we show the Office 365 Business Essentials license, which includes everything listed (SharePoint Online as well!). You may also see Microsoft Flow, Power BI, and other licenses that you’ve added at some point in your Azure development.

You can see a roll-up view of your licensing arrangement by expanding the Billing tab and clicking Licenses (Figure 1.4). This will allow you to quickly determine how many licenses you have and how many have been assigned. If you need additional licenses, you can easily acquire them from within this O365 portal.

External Users Licensing (Guest Access)

By default, you can turn licensing on and set permissions for each user that you have listed in the O365 portal and enable or restrict their access to tools based on this. You also can allow access to SharePoint Online to external users, who are not listed in your list of Users in O365, by invitation or request. This allows you to engage with the external users without having to purchase licenses for them. The value of this option is that organizations that work with outside vendors and the public do not have to purchase licenses for these users.

For example, you may have a company that has licensed O365 users that have full licenses for various products. Your company engages with the public and wants to share certain document libraries for read-only or basic contributions (like uploads). By allowing for external users, you only need to pay for the internal licenses and can allow for unlimited “guests.” There is no limit to the number of external users you can invite to your SharePoint sites.

To give permissions to External users (or “guest” users), you must first enable your O365 instance to allow for external sharing. In the main O365 Admin portal, click on the home page and in the search bar type “external.” You will see several actions available—click the “Sites external sharing” option, as shown in Figure 1.5. A screen will open where you can set restrictions on external usage and duration of available access for external (in this case “anonymous”) users.

To give access to external users within SharePoint sites, open a specific site, click the SharePoint settings option in the upper right-hand corner, and click Site permissions (refer to Figure 1.6). Once that has opened, click on Advanced permissions settings. You may also navigate to it from the Site settings page by clicking on Site permissions.

Note: accessing the permissions tab is different when accessing it from a parent site or a subsite.

In the window that opens, you can click on the “Invite people” tab, or the Grant permissions icon, then type the email address of the person you want to give permissions to. Next, select “Send an email invitation” and then choose a permission level from the drop-down menu. We’ll choose “Contribute” permissions for this example (see Figure 1.7)—this will allow the person who is being added to add, update, and delete documents and list items in your site. Of course, any level of access or restriction can be set throughout the site on individual apps and functionality if needed.

When you click the Share button, an email will be sent to the external email address. This email provides a link to the user that will allow them to accept the invitation and access your site. Figure 1.8 shows this invitation as it would appear to an external user. When the invited party clicks this link, they will be asked to log in using an account that has access to Microsoft services. Once the credentials have been entered, they’ll be redirected to the site and will be able to work with the content that their security role allows for.

You can monitor the invitations that have been sent and the status of whether they have been accepted within each site. To do this, click on the Site Settings option within a site (in the upper right corner) and then click on the “Access requests and invitations” link. This will open a screen where you can view all pending invitations. Clicking the “History” link will give you an audit trail of all actions that have taken place (see Figure 1.9).

User Administration

All administration associated with users is done at the Office 365 Admin portal level. For example, once an external user has accepted the invitation, that user will be added to the Active users list in your Office 365 portal (see Figure 1.10).

Users can be removed from your Active users list. You can delete any user, including external users, by highlighting their entry and selecting “Delete a user.” Or, you can click the More menu item on the toolbar and select “Delete a user” (see Figure 1.11). This allows you to easily manage your external accounts and your licensed accounts from a single, central location.

You may also want to configure security settings for your users, such as whether they can reset their own passwords or share content. Look at the “Security & privacy” tab under Settings in the O365 Admin portal in Figure 1.12 and review the options available. You’ll see a link to the Azure AD admin center, which is where even more user-related settings and information can be found (refer to Figure 1.13). Some organizations, when setting up O365, will migrate their local active directory users to the cloud and use this as their primary user management tool.

SharePoint Administration

SharePoint online offers administrators several ways to manage the system as well as providing them with many useful reports and views of the health of the entire system. To access SharePoint administration functionality, expand the Admin centers tab on the left of the Office 365 Admin portal and select SharePoint (see Figure 1.14).

Currently, there are two options for administrating SharePoint: “Classic” admin center and the new “Preview” admin center. The Classic admin center will soon be retired but currently has more functionality than the Preview admin center. The new Admin center is still in “Preview” and has some functionality that the classic one does not. You can toggle back and forth between the classic view and the new view, as you will want to use functionality from both. To access the new view, click the “Try the preview” tab, as shown in Figure 1.15.

The first thing you will notice is the new dashboard. It details current site activity. In the old versions of SharePoint, it was complicated to get a holistic view of your deployed and active sites. Now, with this single dashboard, you can quickly view information about the health and usage of all your sites at once. As you can see in Figure 1.16, information and activity with all the sites is combined in a single level. You can drill down into these reports by clicking the “Details” link in the upper right of the individual reports.

Another useful section in the “Preview” portion of administration is the “Active sites” tab. In Figure 1.17 you can see a report of all the active sites in SharePoint. In this case, there are only two, but for environments where there are dozens of sites being administered, a roll-up view like this is critical. Clicking on an individual site will provide information about the site, such as the URL, the amount of data used, and the amount of activity taking place.

Data Migration

In older editions of SharePoint the migration of data from other sources into SharePoint was done primarily with third-party software and tools. These tools (like Metalogix, as an example) still have a place for complex migration scenarios, but the out of the box migration capabilities of the SharePoint Migration Tool provided with your subscription are useful. To get started with migrating documents, click on the data migration tab within the Classic SharePoint Admin center (see Figure 1.18). Clicking the Install tan will initiate a download of the application, which needs to be installed locally.

When the application runs after download, you’ll see the splash screen and be allowed to sign in. Once you sign in, you’ll be able to select the source of your data (see Figure 1.19). For this discussion, we’ll select the File Share option. Browse to a folder that you want to migrate and select the Next button in the application.

Next, select the destination document library you want to migrate your data to. You’ll need to enter in the site URL—you just need the root of the URL, do not include anything after “sharepoint.com” (like /SitePages/Home.aspx or similar). After you enter a valid URL, you’ll then be able to select the target document library from a drop-down menu. Figure 1.20 shows the source and destination configured. After selecting the destination, click the Add tab.

You can add additional folders to migrate by clicking the “Add a task” link, or you can move forward with executing your migration. To migrate your data, click the Migrate tab. A status indicator will show the progress of the migration (see Figure 1.21). Once complete, you’ll see your migrated content in the targeted library in SharePoint Online. If your migration fails, the migration tool creates several reports that you can review to determine the cause of failure. The most common cause of failure is permissions—either your user doesn’t have access to the source data or the targeted document library has restrictions on it for what content can be uploaded.

Note that you will want to turn off any notifications you might have on the target document library before you upload your data. If you don’t, you (and other users) may get a notification for every file that you migrate.

When you examine the migrated data you’ll notice several things in regard to your files (refer to Figure 1.22 for reference).

Usage Reports

Clicking on Usage under the Reports tab in the O365 Admin portal lets you review who is accessing SharePoint and how often. You can also see other details that may be of interest, such as how many files have been uploaded and whether content is being edited, along with other information about applications unrelated to SharePoint, but within the O365 domain. Figure 1.23 is an example of this usage dashboard report.

You can also view details about specific site usage. Within a site click the Settings icon, then choose Site Settings. Within a Subsite, click the Settings icon, then select Site usage. Figure 1.24 shows this option along with several of the reports that you can view. Being able to track what documents are the most popular across your document libraries, how many people are visiting your site, and other similar features is critical information for supporting active sites.

Additionally, you may want to track activity by user. For example, you may want to see what users have deleted content from the site, or who has edited a list. To report on auditing you must first enable it—this can be done by going to Site Settings within a site and clicking on the “Site collection audit settings” link (see Figure 1.25).

You can enable tracking on document libraries, documents within those libraries, lists, and sites. Once you have configured the settings the way you want, click the OK button. Figure 1.26 shows all the settings on this screen.

With auditing turned on, you will now be able to view several reports. Click on the “Audit log reports” link in Site Settings. A list of available reports will be shown, along with a link at the bottom of the screen allowing you to build custom reports. Strangely, all these reports are Excel based, and when you run them you will be required to specify where to export them. For example, clicking on the Content Modifications report (which shows all the content that has been modified during a specific period) opens the screen shown in Figure 1.27. Clicking the Browse tab allows you to select a target to export it to, but this target is limited to locations within SharePoint itself.

Finally, another area where you can view usage information is from the “Popularity and Search Reports” link on the Site Settings page. Clicking on this link will provide you with several additional Excel based reports (see Figure 1.28) that can be used to gain insight into how your SharePoint sites are being used and how data is being shared.

Summary

At this point, you should have familiarity with how to log into your SharePoint instance, how to give permissions and set security, how to administrate your solutions, and how to perform simple data migrations. You also now have information on how to view a variety of reports that will give you information about how your data is being used and who is accessing it. You have many options to manage users, sites, and your overall SharePoint infrastructure, but your key takeaway should be that it is relatively easy to gain a deep level of insight about what is going on. In addition, you can always add a Power BI solution on top of your SharePoint instance for deep business intelligence!