Apply your custom helpline contact details in Office 365

Adding contact details of your support center will doubtlessly help users to promptly obtain the necessary support. Office 365 allows you to customize the organizational level details in the global settings and the help desk details is one of them.

To customize the Office 365 “Help”, follow these simple steps.

Sign in to Office 365 as an Admin and direct to –> Admin Center –> In the Office 365 admin center, Click on Settings –> Organization profile

Scroll down till you see the following area and hit “Edit”

Enable the “Help Desk Card” here and “Save” it.

Now that you have enabled it, you can add the details as shown below (well, it has to be your organization’s details of course !) and hit “Save” once done.

Sometimes, it will take a few seconds this message to appear after saving so give it a moment and close the message.

Now, If you log-out and log-in again, you will notice that the change have applied under the “Help” bar.

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Fix: Save List as a Template capability is missing in SharePoint Online

Are you struggling to save a SharePoint Online list as a template just like I did recently? Then you are reading the right post.

Well, worry no more as this article will demonstrate the solution to simply get it fixed.

Usually when you go to your SharePoint list/library settings page, you can easily spot the “save list as a template” link. But if you check the SharePoint online – this is missing.

Now let’s get our good friend back. The reason behind this, is a feature which is disabled by default.

Log in to office.com using your admin credentials and head on to Admin Center –> SharePoint Admin Center –> Classic SharePoint Admin Center (Yes ! at this moment, you really need to go to back to classics, but don’t worry at all, it wont change anything).

Go to “Settings” from the left navigation and scroll down until you see the “Custom Script” section.

Under this section, enable both these features (Allow users to run custom script on personal sites | Allow users to run custom script on self-service created sites)

And hit that “OK” button at the bottom of the page to save the changes. This might take about 24 Hours to affect as it depends on the Office 365 maintenance job schedules.

Run the following PowerShell code to enable it in “Site Collection Level” – (this affects immediately)

##SharePoint Online Admin Center and Site Collection URLs
$AdminCenterURL = "https://TenantNameGoesHere-admin.sharepoint.com/"
$SiteURL="https://TenantNameGoesHere.sharepoint.com/sites/SiteNameGoesHere"
 
##Connecting to SPO Service
Connect-SPOService -url $AdminCenterURL -Credential (Get-Credential)
 
##Enable the feature
Set-SPOSite $SiteURL -DenyAddAndCustomizePages $False

It will prompt you to provide your Office 365 SharePoint Admin credentials for the 3rd command.

Last line is for the real job !

That should immediately affect the target site collection.

Now if you head back to the list/library settings page, you will immediately notice the feature is back.

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor. Please do not copy/duplicate the content of the post unless you are authorized by me to do so.

Get Started with SharePoint Hub Sites (Part 02-CLI)

This is the part 02 of this article series. If you prefer to do this from the Admin Center, refer to my previous article here

Hub Sites in SharePoint Online is the new way of organizing your sites. Now what does that mean?

Based on the size of an organization, SharePoint admins create multiple sub sites to classify and organize content which usually aligns with the organization hierarchy (Department wise). There can be Team Sites and communication sites and yet, Hub sites can consist both these under one umbrella to help you relate them together based on any attribute such as Projects, Departments, Division, Region or whatever you have.

Let me put it in a simple way – Hub Sites will now help you to associate team sites and communication sites to provide a common navigational hierarchy, search, Logos and look and feel.

Hub sites allows you to standardize the site hierarchy. More importantly, it brings the consistency across all sites. Following are some of the characteristics of Hub Sites Capability:

Some of the Hub Site characteristics are:

• A Common Top Navigation (Global Navigation)

A common global navigation is maintained across all connected sites of the particular Hub site.

• Consistent Look and Feel

Sub sites inherits their look and feel from the root (Hub site) which allows you to maintain a single branding across all your sites. In a simple term, all sites are associated, which means they resides under one Hub.

• Scoped Enterprise Search

Search acts relevantly here. When you search for something in a Hub site, it performs the search within all the sites of that particular Hub Site.

• Site activities

User activities happens within the associated sites which means, the engagements are specific to an defined area.

• Content Aggregation

Automatically aggregates content and displaying from multiple sites. News Web Part, Sites Web Part and Content Web Part can be used in a Hub Site to aggregate content from the associated sites and display the content on the Hub Site’s home page. This reduces a lot of manual work that developers supposed to do to get this done in the earlier days.

Provisioning a Hub Site:

There are two ways you can create hub sites in SharePoint online (Yes ! for now its only supported in SharePoint online). However, there is no template to create a Hub site so you can’t simply create a one using the “New Site” option. Instead, these are the options you have.

1. Create a New site collection and set it as the Hub site
2. or Promote an existing site as the Hub Site and associate other site collections to it.

A SharePoint Team Site or an Communication Site can be converted in to a Hub Site. Ensure you have the “SharePoint Administrator privilege or above” in Office 365  to perform these changes.

First and foremost, you need the latest SharePoint Management Shell installed in your machine. Get it here. If you have it installed already, you better uninstall it and install the latest version.

Once installed, launch the Shell as an administrator.

And here’s the first line to connect to the SharePoint online service.

Connect-SPOService -Url https://tenantname-admin.sharepoint.com

Provide your Admin credentials and hit next.

And now to create a new site to act as our Hub. Following is the PowerShell code to provision a new site with modern experience. Adjust the parameters to reflect your localizations.

New-SPOSite -Url https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/HRM -Owner admin@mantoso.onmicrosoft.com -Template "SITEPAGEPUBLISHING#0" -StorageQuota 1024 -Title "HR Management"

Now let’s head on to SharePoint Admin Center –> Active Sites –> and notice the new site just provisioned

Register-SPOHubSite -Site https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/HRM -Principals $null

If the command was successful, you will see that the Hub Site has affected with the change.

Add-SPOHubSiteAssociation https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/CoreHR -HubSite https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/HRM

Head back to the Active sites and you will find that the site now has the association with Hub Site.

The rest would be similar to the things we did in the previous article.

And, the following code can be used to control the permission of “who can associate their site with hub sites”

Grant-SPOHubSiteRights -Identity https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/sites/HMR -Principals admin@mantoso.onmicrosoft.com -Rights Joins

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor.