Hide (Exclude) Content from Office Delve

On January 8, 2019January 21, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Delve, Microsoft365, Office 365, Office DelveLeave a comment

Microsoft Office365 is doubtlessly a sophisticated collection of Microsoft tools which has an immense value for business. As you will store data across many of these applications such as Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive etc.. It’s nice to have a single interface to see the spotlight of your collaboration activities and items you have been dealing with. Delve in Office365 helps us with this vital role, however, there are some scenarios people prefer to hide some content from Delve no matter how clear the approach is to them, and I believe that’s a fair requirement.

With this post we are going to learn how to hide a specific SharePoint content from Delve. There are several options as documented below.

You can restrict a specific record
Or restrict a library
Or the entire SharePoint site from Delve

Before you start with this, it’s important to ensure whether you really need to do this. Ensure you have defined permissions in your environment appropriately so that it only allows authorized users to engage with content. Even after doing so, if you still want to restrict content appearing on Delve, there are few ways to get it done. Some of these approaches impacts on search results so do this with caution.

Option1: Restrict one or more records in a library

Note: This options wont hide content from search results, just in Delve. A hidden property in SharePoint called “HideFromDelve” can be used in this case.

Add a column to your library with the exact name (no spaces or special characters) – Add a Boolean field (“Yes/No“) and name it “HideFromDelve”

For the items you wish to hide from delve, set the property value as “Yes” and “No” to those you want to be appeared.

If you wish to hide all content of a document library, set the automatically default value as “Yes”

Select the particular item and go to details. Tap the button to “Yes” it.

Option2: Restrict a library

This option hides the target document library from both Delve and SharePoint search. TO do this simply head on to Document library’s advanced settings and set the “Search” to “No”

Option3: Hide a site

Note: This option will hide the entire SharePoint site’s content from both Search results and Delve at one go so beware of doing this.

Head on to target SharePoint site and look for “Search and offline availability“, under “Indexing Site Content” set “Allow this site to appear in search results” to “No“. Simple as that and the whole site will be hidden from Delve thereon.

Notes: Apart from this, If you wish you hide people from showing Delve and SharePoint online people search, it can be done as well. However, there are some limitations so you better go through this post – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Support-Blog/Exclude-Users-From-Delve-and-SharePoint-Online-People-Search/ba-p/170731

Again, I would like to emphasize that you should be aware of some downfalls this approach. If you have chosen to exclude some content form Delve appearance, there are other interconnected tools that may impact from this (Search is one as documented, and DLP [Data Loss Prevention] too). DLP heavily depends on the search index to apply its conditions and rules so if you are adding exclusions to a library or site from search, DLP will not be able to detect and eventually protect these content. Hence be very cautious.

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Find and export the list of users who has not completed About Me section in their Office 365 profile

On November 26, 2018February 6, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Delve, Microsoft Cloud, Microsoft365, Office 365, Office Delve, PowerShell, SharePoint, SharePoint Knowledge, SharePoint Online, SharePoint OOTB Features, SharePoint Shell8 Comments

This is the article 08 in this series.

Having a complete profile in Office365 is not just a benefit for user himself, but for the entire organization which directly impacts on productivity. A finished profile leads to better visibility and eventually results in faster communications across hundreds of thousands of employees in an enterprise setup. Ultimate idea of Office Delve (latest interface of profile comes with more capabilities such as recent activities) is to provide overall insights of a user information and his activities/engagements which makes obvious sense for anyone.

Nevertheless, none of these would be in action unless you have a complete profile with basic details entered in. No matter how much HR would try to push, we still spot a lot of random users who haven’t completed their profiles.

With this short and sweet article series, I’m trying to give you the steps that we followed during the identifying process as requested by our HR. screenshots may differ than our production setup, but you surely will get the point here.

I had to use some PowerShell scripting to get this list out from Office 365 and generate a CSV file for each criteria so that HR can directly reach out to the user via emails and advice to take an action to update the profile on the spot. As a result, we were able to get 100% completeness of profiles across a 5000+ employee organization.

There is no out of the box reporting when it comes to Profile Completeness in Office 365, therefore we have no option other than PowerShell. PowerShell is the ultimate tool for O365 administration, whenever graphical interface has a barrier, hence, make sure you dig around it to understand its capabilities to go beyond.

FINDING USERS WITH EMPTY ABOUT ME SECTION IN THEIR PROFILE (This Article)

In this article I’m trying to explain the steps it takes to find out the users who has not filled “About Me” section in their Office 365 profile (or simply, delve profile).

So here we go, following are the requirements before we get started:

Azure AD PowerShell Module – download here
Azure AD Administrator rights
SharePoint Online Administrator rights
SharePoint Online PnP Module – Download here

Script steps breakdown:

First and foremost, we need to fetch the Office365 credentials and then connect to both SharePoint Online Admin Centre and Azure Active Directory.

$cred = get-Credential
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $cred
Connect-PnpOnline -Url https://mantoso-admin.sharepoint.com/ -Credentials $cred

Then let’s fetch all users in this tenant, who are internal to the company and that have at least one license assigned to them.

$Users = Get-AzureADUser | Where {$_.UserType -eq 'Member' -and $_.AssignedLicenses -ne $null}

Now to create an empty array in which we will later store the output (user list who has not filled the About me field).

$NoAMUsers = @()

Now we will dig in through each user, and check if they hold a SharePoint profile (This is because About Me field is hosted in SharePoint online, not in Azure AD). If the property exists, and empty, it simply means the About me section has not filled by this user.

foreach ($user in $Users) 
{
    $SPProfile  = Get-PnPUserProfileProperty -Account $user.UserPrincipalName -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
        if ($SPProfile -ne $null)
        {
          if ($SPProfile.UserProfileProperties.AboutMe -eq "")
            {
               $NoAMUsers += $user
            }
        }
}

And, finally we can export the SharePoint result to a CSV through below part.

$NoAMUsers | Select DisplayName, UserPrincipalName | Export-Csv -Path "C:\Tools\reports\NoAMUsers.csv" -NoTypeInformation

If you need to obtain a similar report on other user criteria’s, here are the other articles of this series which would help you to achieve it.

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

Find and export list of users with no Department set in Office 365 profile

On November 25, 2018February 6, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Delve, Digital Transformation, Microsoft365, Modern Collaboration, Office 365, Office Delve, PowerShell, Productivity, SharePoint7 Comments

This is the article 06 in this series.

FINDING USERS WITH NO DEPARTMENT SET IN THEIR PROFILE (This Article)

In this article I’m trying to explain the steps it takes to find out the users who has not set the relevant department in their Office 365 profile (or simply, delve profile).

So here we go, following are the requirements before we get started:

Azure AD PowerShell Module – download here
Azure AD Administrator Rights

Script steps breakdown:

First and foremost, we need to fetch the Office365 credentials and then connect to Azure Active Directory.

$cred = get-Credential
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $cred

Then let’s fetch all users in this tenant, who are internal to the company and that have at least one license assigned to them.

$Users = Get-AzureADUser | Where {$_.UserType -eq 'Member' -and $_.AssignedLicenses -ne $null}

Now to create an empty array in which we will later store the output (user list who has not set a mobile)

$NoDepUsers = @()

Now we will dig in through each user, and check if their Department property is filled or not. If not, I will add them to the array I just created in the previous step, and export them to a CSV file called “NoDepUsers.csv”. Similar to the ones we did in the previous articles of this series.

foreach ($user in $Users) 
{
    if ($user.Department -eq $null)
    {
        $NoDepUsers += $user
    }
}

And, finally we can export the SharePoint result to a CSV through below part.

$NoDepUsers | Select DisplayName, UserPrincipalName | Export-Csv -Path "C:\Tools\Reports\NoDepUsers.csv" -NoTypeInformation

If you need to obtain a similar report on other user criteria’s, here are the other articles of this series which would help you to achieve it.

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

Find and export list of users with no Country set in Office 365 Profile

On November 23, 2018February 6, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Delve, Digital Transformation, Microsoft365, Modern Collaboration, Office 365, Office Delve, Productivity7 Comments

This is the article no 05 in the series.

FINDING USERS WITH NO COUNTRY SET IN THEIR PROFILE (This Article)

In this article I’m demonstrating the steps it takes to find out the users who has not set their relevant country in Office 365 profiles (or simply, delve profile). This isn’t sort of a blog I wanted to write but since this daily requests comes from HR to find users (not criminals though !), this might be a common case in most places and why not write down the steps right?

So here we go, following are the requirements before we get started. Make sure you setup your environment with these:

Azure AD PowerShell Module: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/AzureAD
Azure AD Administrator

First and foremost, we need to fetch the Office365 credentials and then connect to Azure Active Directory.

$cred = get-Credential
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $cred

Then let’s fetch all users in this tenant, who are internal to the company and that have at least one license assigned to them.

$Users = Get-AzureADUser | Where {$_.UserType -eq 'Member' -and $_.AssignedLicenses -ne $null}

Now to create an empty array in which we will later store the output (user list who has not set the relevant Country)

$NoCountryUsers = @()

Now we will dig in through each user, and check if they have any value set in their Azure AD user profile. If not, we will save them in to the array we crated. And then finally export these set of users in to a CSV file called “NoCountryUsers.csv“.

foreach ($user in $Users)
{
    if ($user.Country -eq $null)
    {
        $NoCountryUsers += $user
    }
}

And, finally we can export the SharePoint result to a CSV through below part. This line will save the data that we extracted and stored in the array we created as “NoCountryUsers”

$NoCountryUsers | Select DisplayName, UserPrincipalName | Export-Csv -Path "C:\Tools\Reports\NoCountryUsers.csv" -NoTypeInformation

If you need to obtain a similar report on other user criteria’s, here are the other articles of this series which would help you to achieve it.

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

Find and export list of users with no Profile Picture set in Office 365 Account

On November 21, 2018February 6, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Delve, Digital Transformation, Modern Collaboration, Office 365, Office Delve, Productivity, SharePoint, SharePoint Online7 Comments

This is the article no 04 in the series

FINDING USERS WITH NO PROFILE PICTURE SET IN THEIR PROFILE (This Article)

Profile picture on a name helps recognizing coworkers easily among thousands of other people in a organization. Not setting a picture in a profile would not look nice as it reflects to most of the productivity, communication and collaboration apps such as SharePoint Online, Delve, Teams and Exchange. A gray sample placeholder like below, is not suitable for a corporate setup and not the optimal experience, so let’s find out how we can fetch such users so our HR can alert them to take action.

In this article I’m trying to explain the steps it takes to find out the users who has not set Profile Picture in Office 365 accounts. This isn’t sort of a blog I wanted to write but since this daily requests comes from HR to find users (not criminals though !), this might be a common case in most places and why not write down the steps right?

So here we go, following are the requirements before we get started. Make sure you setup your environment with these:

Azure AD Administrator
Exchange Online Administrator
AzureAD PowerShell Module
Exchange Online PowerShell Module (only if MFA in use)

Script steps breakdown:

First and foremost, we need to fetch the Office365 credentials and then connect to Azure Active Directory and the Exchange Online.

$cred = get-Credential
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $cred
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session

Then let’s fetch all users in this tenant, who are internal to the company and that have at least one license assigned to them.

$Users = Get-AzureADUser | Where {$_.UserType -eq 'Member' -and $_.AssignedLicenses -ne $null}

Now to create an empty array in which we will later store the output (user list who has not set a Picture)

$NoPicUsers = @()

Now we will dig in through each user, and check if they have set a picture as part of their profile.If not we will add that user in the newly created array. and Then lastly we will export these set of users in to a CSV file called “NoPicUsers.csv“.

foreach ($user in $Users)
{
    $Picture = Get-UserPhoto -Identity $user.UserPrincipalName -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
    if ($Picture -eq $null)
    {
        $NoPicUsers += $user
    }
}

And, finally we can export the SharePoint result to a CSV through below part. This line will save the data that we extracted and stored in the array we created as “NoPicUsers”

$NoPicUsers | Select DisplayName, UserPrincipalName | Export-Csv -Path "C:\Tools\Reports\NoPicUsers.csv" -NoTypeInformation

If you need to obtain a similar report on other user criteria’s, here are the other articles of this series which would help you to achieve it.

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

Find and export list of users with no Birthday set in Office 365 profile

On November 21, 2018February 6, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Delve, Digital Transformation, Microsoft365, Modern Collaboration, Office 365, Office Delve, Productivity8 Comments

This is the article 03 in the series.

FINDING USERS WITH NO BIRTHDAY SET IN THEIR PROFILE (This Article)

In this article I’m trying to explain the steps it takes to find out the users who has not set their Birthdays in Office 365 profiles (or simply, delve profile). This isn’t sort of a blog I wanted to write but since this daily requests comes from HR to find users (not criminals though !), this might be a common case in most places and why not write down the steps right?

So here we go, following are the requirements before we get started. Make sure you setup your environment with these:

Azure AD PowerShell Module
SharePoint Online PnP Module
SharePoint Online Administrator
Azure AD Administrator

Script steps breakdown:

First and foremost, we need to fetch the Office365 credentials and then connect to Azure Active Directory and the SharePoint Online Admin Center with the PnP cmdlets.

$cred = get-Credential
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $cred
Connect-PnpOnline -Url https://mantoso-admin.sharepoint.com/ -Credentials $cred

Then let’s fetch all users in this tenant, who are internal to the company and that have at least one license assigned to them.

$Users = Get-AzureADUser | Where {$_.UserType -eq 'Member' -and $_.AssignedLicenses -ne $null}

Now to create an empty array in which we will later store the output (user list who has not set Birthday).

$NoBDUsers = @()

Now we will dig in through each user, and check if they have a SharePoint online profile as this property is stored in SharePoint, not in Azure AD. If profile is available and the SP-Birthday property is null, it simply means the particular user have not set the birthday. Then lastly we will export these set of users in to a CSV file called “NoBDUsers.csv“.

foreach ($user in $Users) 
{
    $SPProfile  = Get-PnPUserProfileProperty -Account $user.UserPrincipalName -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
        if ($SPProfile -ne $null)
        {
          if ($SPProfile.UserProfileProperties.'SPS-Birthday' -eq "")
            {
               $NoBDUsers += $user
            }
        }
}

And, finally we can export the SharePoint result to a CSV through below part. This line will save the data that we extracted and stored in the array we created as “NoBDUsers”

$NoBDUsers | Select DisplayName, UserPrincipalName | Export-Csv -Path "C:\Tools\Reports\NoBDUsers.csv" -NoTypeInformation

If you need to obtain a similar report on other user criteria’s, here are the other articles of this series which would help you to achieve it.

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

SharePoint 2016 Hybrid Options and Your Leap Towards Cloud

On April 1, 2016May 31, 2016 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Delve, Hybrid Cloud, Microsoft Cloud, Office 365, Office Delve, SharePoint2016Leave a comment

This is the part 1 of my Series: SharePoint 2016 Hybrid Options and Your Leap Towards Cloud

With the latest announcement of SharePoint 2016 releases in last few months, Hybrid has been the most popular word across the community and users. There are various scenarios and requirements yet Microsoft on its way of concluding this.

However, not to be surprised much because Hybrid isn’t that new ! It’s been there for 2013 as well.

First of all, What is Hybrid ?

The name says it all. Hybrid is when you have some set of SharePoint services runs On-Premise and some on cloud. This isn’t new in SharePoint as it has been already there from 2013 as well. Microsoft has made it much more broader and robust with SharePoint 2016.

Ladder towards the cloud (What’s Hybrid in SharePoint Perspective?)

Some of the organizations may not have an interest yet in going completely cloud based but to keep a foot on it with few services and that’s where SharePoint 2016 going to play a big role. SharePoint 2016 has been introduced to make that leap easier by providing better tools.

Hybrid Sites

Hybrid Sites allows you to keep some SharePoint sites on-premise and some on the cloud (Office 365 ultimately). As Regulatory Compliance is the main point blocks many organizations (Specially Government Entities) of moving to the Cloud, Hybrid Sites would be the strength to move forward.

A Simple Example: If ABC Corp has an intranet Built on SharePoint On-Premise and there are many legal and finance records stored in some of the sites in it. In this scenario Regulatory Compliances block ABC crop from moving to cloud entirely. Using Hybrid Sites capability, ABC can host selected set of Sites in Office 365 (SharePoint Online) and let the other (Legal and Finance) sites remain in On-Premise.

Hybrid Profiles

With Hybrid Profiles you don’t need to have a heavy On-Premise SharePoint Setup with User Profiles Services running on it. Instead just let the Office 365 play that role for you so that you can make your servers light weight and lesser management overhead. Having the Profile in Cloud will also a huge benefit as you will get the latest updates that Microsoft deploys to Office 365.

Having User profiles on Cloud will also benefit (Depends on the O365 Plan Mostly) users with latest features such as Planer. Planner is the latest replacement of “My Task” SharePoint feature which is now available in Office 365. This feature hits the ceiling of User adoption and productivity indeed.

With “Planner” my tasks and timeline is nicely presented and made user friendly. Isn’t this gorgeous dashboard impresses you to have your tasks over here ?

Hybrid OneDrive

Depends on your Decision to host services either On-Premise or Cloud, OneDrive can sit anywhere you want. If ABC Corp do not want to expose their user’s content to the cloud, they can keep OneDrive (MySites Ultimately) On-Premise. Or simply go for Office 365 and let it host the service so that there is no additional storage cost or management overhead for ABC Corp.

App Launcher Becomes Hybrid Ultimately

App Launcher was introduced in to SharePoint 2016 now. This was one of the attraction used in office 365 to make the navigation of Apps easier. With the configuration of Hybrid Services, you will get the App Launcher of your In-Premise SharePoint Portal modified accordingly. Each link will direct your users to relevant destinations without hassling around.

Hybrid Search What if you could get a single Unified Result set even though you have content in On-Premise Sites and SharePoint Online Sites ? That’s the whole idea of Cloud Search Service application which delivers the capability of Crawling your On-Premise and Online content centrally yet unified. The Results Highlighted are from On-Premise Content and others from Cloud (SharePoint Online). Cloud Search Service Application is a ultimate Standout here.

Lot more to write about and I will keep posting on configuration of Hybrid features soon as well. till then happy flying towards cloud folks !

Microsoft Announces Delve Availability. A Significant Milestone of Office 365

On September 22, 2014September 22, 2014 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Delve, Office 365, Office Delve1 Comment

As Per Microsoft, Delve is the new codename of Oslo which is the latest member of Office 365 Family.

Discovering and working on Information in a Effective and Attractive way seems to be the Goal with Delve. Exciting new Look with smart interfaces makes me so much wants to experience it right now. Though you have information stored in many logically divided places such as Lync, SharePoint, Exchange etc.… it seems this new way makes finding information more easy and interesting together with more social networking features such as Liking and Commenting.

Delve Comes with E1-E4 Office 365 Plans as per latest Microsoft Information’s. Awaiting for All new Delve with my Cooperate O365 !

Check out the Overview from Julia White (GM of O365 Technical Product Management of Microsoft) here – http://blogs.office.com/2014/09/08/milestone-office-delve/