Microsoft Tahoe and the Evolution of SharePoint Security

In my first post, I explained the biggest problems of SharePoint security model and how it creates risks. With so much change, so much growth, so many new threats - perhaps SharePoint's security model could use a rethink?

Microsoft Tahoe - Where it all began

Back in 2000, an internal project at Microsoft called 'Tahoe' began publicising a new product they had been working on. Tahoe was a new technology that enabled small work teams to perform simple document sharing, collaboration and content searching through a web browser.

By the time it was released, the marketing department had come up with the name 'SharePoint Portal Server'. The market didn't receive the new product particularly positively!

Debra Logan, a research analyst at Gartner said, "SharePoint Portal is just document management based around one Exchange server. It is better than a shared file system, but big deal."

Ashim Pal, programme director for analyst Meta Group, said, "It is lightweight document management for the masses. There will be a mass migration to… [another technology] in the next 24-36 months, so users should be careful not to over commit to any development around SharePoint."

Computing Magazine UK actually used phrases like "too lightweight", "too basic" and "will soon be redundant"!

A typical SharePoint Portal 2001 home page

Looking at the information management powerhouse that SharePoint / Office 365 has become today, and as one of many people who have built a good career on top of it - its hard to resist a wry little smile ;) I don't know many people who would today describe SharePoint as "too basic"!

SharePoint Portal Server 2001 Security

The examples in Microsoft's documentation for SharePoint Workspaces reveals the thinking at the time. This was not a technology designed for serious deployments. They really didn't envisage more than a dozen or so people using them! It didn't use a proper database, it didn't support clustered server farms.

It was really just a small scale, browser-based extension for Windows Server and Exchange that let people share and search across a few documents.

With SharePoint Portal Server 2001, users could be granted one of three 'roles' to content in SharePoint Workspaces:

• 'Coordinator' was for administrators and information owners
• 'Author' allowed the user to add and update documents
• 'Reader' allowed read-only access through navigation or search

Permissions to content were granted either to groups of people in Windows or Exchange, or to individual users. It was very manual and unsophisticated, but it worked.

Permissions in SharePoint Today

Fast forward to today with SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online / Office 365. First lets substitute a few equivalent terms:

Something obvious jumps straight out. The model hasn't changed!! In 15 years, there has been no evolution the security model at all - the concepts and basic ideas line up exactly.

Security in SharePoint is still managed in the same basic way as it was on day one: we manually compile lists of people, and grant them permissions to stuff.

• Even though SharePoint systems have gone from dozens of users to hundreds of thousands.

• The volumes of data have gone from a few folders to terabytes of mission-critical sensitive content.

• The intensity, relentlessness and consequences of the security threat have gone from fairly minimal to extreme.

• The role of SharePoint has gone from being "not much better than a file share", to being central to the operations of millions of organisations around the world.

• And the internet and the interconnectedness of networks became absolutely ubiquitous.

Some of the most notorious information security breaches in recent years have involved information stolen from SharePoint systems. Not hacked by clever anarchists in dark rooms, but simply downloaded by disenfranchised trusted staff with access to far more information than they needed in order to do their jobs.

But still, SharePoint offers the exact same ideas for securing content as it always has!

So, in light of all this change, all this growth, all these new threats - perhaps, the security model in SharePoint could use a bit of a rethink.

We've outgrown it.

In my next post, I'll dive deeper into how SharePoint's security model tends to cause huge problems for organizations, and some of the practical things we can do to minimize them.

Thanks for reading :)

Peter

by Peter Bradley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

[Top Tips] Add Videos to SharePoint 2013

From a project management point of view, ensuring that your team has easy access to training is often key to project success. In this post I’m going to describe how to add multiple videos to SharePoint and to make them all accessible from one page by adding navigation that means the users don’t have to leave the page.

This post assumes that you have multiple videos that you want to make available in SharePoint; however, if you only have one video to start with, you should still find value to the post.

Get iframe Embed Codes

The easiest way to get the iframe embed codes is to add the movies to  a video hosting platform like Wistia or YouTube.

If this is not possible, you can use a SharePoint Assets library to get the iframe embed codes.

1. Click Site Contents | add an app | Assets Library.Note: The Assets Library can sometimes be found on the second page of available apps.
2. Upload the movies to the library.
3. Click on a movie thumbnail to go to the page for that movie.
4.  Click < > on the movie to open the code window.
   
5. Copy and paste the code into a text editor and save this file – you will be using it shortly.
   

Add Videos to Web Part Page

Next, you will add two script editor web parts, one for the movies and one for the navigation that will enable you to switch between movies. If you only have one movie, you will only need to add the one script editor web part.

1. Add the script editor web parts – I’m adding them to the row that has the tow columns.
   
2. Click EDIT SNIPPET on the web part where you want the movies to play.
   
3. Paste in the embed code for the movie you want to be available when the page loads.
4. Add code that names the iframe (e.g. name=”training-movies”) as shown below.
5. Click Insert.
   
6. Save

Create Movie Navigation

Next, you need to add your movie navigation. The below code should get you started –

1. Copy the below code to your clipboard and paste it into the file where you pasted the iframe URLs.
   <p><a href=”//fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/m1″ target=”training-movies”>Movie 1
   <p><a href=”//fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/m2″ target=”training-movies”>Movie 2</a></p>
   <p><a href=”//fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/m3″ target=”training-movies”>Movie 3
   <p><a href=”//fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/m4″ target=”training-movies”>Movie 4
   <p><a href=”//fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/m5″ target=”training-movies”>Movie 5
2. Update the URL (the bit between the brackts) after href and the movie title (e.g. Move 1) in the code for every movie you want to make available.
3. Copy the code.
   
4. Click edit snippet on the other script editor web part, paste in the copied code and click Insert.
   
5. Click Stop Editing!

Voila! You now have a video library for your team to take their training! If you know what you are doing, you could probably improve the navigation panel on the left so that it indicates which movie is select; however, that is another day’s work!

Want to access more tips? Lots more on our blog you can access here!

Thanks for reading, Ciara!

by Ciara McDonnell via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

IIS Application Pool identity password

I recently run on something cool and scary at the same time. While creating a script for creating custom SharePoint web application, I needed to change IIS Application pool identity account.

It turns out it was easier than I imagine, you need just couple lines of code:

            import-module webadministration

            $AppPool = get-childitem IIS:\AppPools | where {$_.name -eq "Services"}

            $credential = Get-Credential
            $AppPool.processModel.userName = $credential.UserName
            $AppPool.processModel.password = $credential.GetNetworkCredential().password
            $AppPool.processModel.identityType = 3
            $AppPool | Set-Item
            $AppPool | Restart-WebAppPool

But what surprised me is that you can, with a simple command, extract Application Pool identity password. All you need is a simple one liner:

(get-childitem IIS:\AppPools | where{$_.name -eq "Services"}).processModel

In third row you can see a password property and its value in plain text! How freaking is that!

According to Microsoft this is a feature and also:

"For maximum security, application pools should run under a special built-in identity called ApplicationPoolIdentity. There are two types of Identity for the application pools: Built-in and Custom. The built-in accounts are ApplicationPoolIdentity, NetworkService, LocalService, and LocalSystem. The default (recommended) and most secure is ApplicationPoolIdentity."

This is all true, but there are many web applications (SharePoint, for instance) which requires custom application pool identity. And with a simple PowerShell command you can read its password.

So please be careful and never give Application pool identity account more rights as necessary. Imagine if you put SharePoint farm admin account to run Application pool. Or even worse, your domain admin account.

by Krsto Savic via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Support Movember – In Memory of Dave Coleman and Men Everywhere

SharePoint How-To Series: Enhanced Content Types

In our last three posts, we examined some of the core building blocks of SharePoint--namely, Content Types, Site Columns and Managed Metadata. A Content Type is really the core construct of everything in SharePoint--from a document, item or a page, it is the same. In our post on Content Types we demonstrated how to create a single content type with multiple site columns associated to it. However, we did not utilize the taxonomy site columns within that Content Type.

read more

by via SharePoint Pro

SharePoint How-To Series: Managed Metadata

Site Columns. These components are the basic building blocks for all the solutions you want to build in SharePoint, from simple lists and libraries to complex publishing solutions such as a public-facing website. Older versions of SharePoint lacked the ability to define a corporate taxonomy that could be used across internal and external solutions built within SharePoint. With SharePoint version 2010 and later, this feature is available to use.

read more

by via SharePoint Pro

SharePoint Community Newsletter – SharePoint 2016 & Office 365

Hello SharePointers and welcome to this edition of the SharePoint Community newsletter that will talk about SharePoint 2016, as well as other great blog posts and events!

Announcing SharePoint Server 2016 Beta 2 and Project Server 2016 Beta 2

Microsoft just released the Beta 2 of SharePoint Server 2016, as well as Project Server 2016.  Furthermore, Microsoft announced that SharePoint 2016 GA will be in Q1 2016, instead of Q2 2016 which means you can get to deploy it sooner than expected!

http://spvlad.com/1PX0dyl

Review of Harmon.ie Outlook Add-in: Manage Emails on SharePoint

Check out this review by SharePoint MVP Vlad Catrinescu about the latest update on the harmon.ie Outlook Add-in which now allows you to manage emails in SharePoint, as if they were documents.

http://spvlad.com/1PX0qBx

Today at Connect()—introducing the Microsoft Graph

Microsoft rebranded the Office 365 Unified APIs as the Microsoft Graph. The Microsoft Graph today exposes APIs, data and intelligence across Office 365 and Azure AD. We are building toward a near future where multiple graphs and all APIs throughout Microsoft contribute to, and are accessible through, a single unified gateway to the power of the Microsoft cloud.

http://spvlad.com/1N5OBUr

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2015-11-20 [Wictor Wilén]

Updates! Yes, updates! After some awesome announcements at the Connect(); 2015 conference the Office Roadmap is updated with some news, and a decent bunch of additions, specifically some nice new stuff in the In Development bucket. Love the Yammer updates - looks like someone has been listening after all, or have they - read the fine prints…

http://spvlad.com/1MOR8TV

New AutoSPInstaller Version

Brian Lalancette just released the latest version of AutoSPInstaller, which includes improvements for SharePoint 2016.  The tool has also passed 100 000 downloads, so if you use it, make sure you send him a big thanks at @brianlala.

http://spvlad.com/1jhROIU

The not so responsive new Office 365 suite bar [Stefan Bauer]

Discover why the latest improvement in Office 365, is not so mobile-friendly after all.

http://spvlad.com/1IdvVkx

Latest Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2015

We’re pleased to announce that Update 1 for the Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2015 is ready for you to install! This update includes a vocabulary change in our tools, Apps for Office and SharePoint are now known as Office and SharePoint Add-ins, and bug fixes, such as the Office/SharePoint node not appearing under Visual C# in the New Project dialog.

http://spvlad.com/1MzUoVh

Join Collab365 SOLUTIONS DAY – Office365 and SharePoint Apps.

On 3^rd December @16:45 UTC (online). Take part and you will learn how to...     

- Put Office365 control at your fingertips with Essentials for Office365 (Metalogix)

- Deploy an out-of-the-box Intranet using the Office 365 Ecosystem (SP Marketplace)

- Track, manage & maintain your assets/equipment with SharePoint (Crow Canyon)

- Merge documents & shorten URLS productivity and adoption gains (Cirrus Soft) - Create powerful workflows in Office 365 (Datapolis)

- Use your Mobile to capture paper documents into SharePoint/Office365 (CumulusPro)

REGISTER FREE HERE -> http://bit.ly/1MzudxI and be in with a chance to win an iPad Air.

by Vlad Catrinescu via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Review of Harmon.ie Outlook Add-in: Manage Emails on SharePoint

Even if some companies aim to be the "Email Killer", e-mail is the most used form of communication between colleagues, as well as clients and external companies. Email has come a long way since its original use as a method for quickly exchanging messages. Today, business emails are documents in every respect. Yet emails are still relegated to silos like Microsoft Exchange, while other documents such as proposals, contracts and product specifications are handled by traditional document management systems such as SharePoint. And with the dozens of emails you get daily, it's easy to lose an important email that contains requirements, statements of work or that important detail about your client that your team should know about.

That is what harmon.ie wants to fix. With the latest update to their Outlook Add-in, users can now drag and drop emails from their outlook window to a corporate SharePoint or Office 365 site, without ever leaving the place they do most of their work – their email client. Here are some of the features the new harmon.ie Outlook Add in offers according to their site:

• Store emails messages from Outlook directly on SharePoint using the harmon.ie sidebar. By staying within the Outlook window, you remain in focus while helping to organize emails and documents.
• Classify email messages in SharePoint. harmon.ie automatically maps email headers such as 'To,' 'From,' 'Subject,' and 'Received' to SharePoint metadata.
• Retrieve email messages from SharePoint. When classified correctly and efficiently, finding email messages is a snap. You can even preview emails with one click.
• Collaborate with colleagues using email messages stored on SharePoint. Realize all the benefits of SharePoint document collaboration, now with email messages.

Review

In this review, I am not going to review all the basic features that harmon.ie has to offer as I have already talked about them in a past review on my blog. In this review, we will focus strictly on the new Managing Emails on SharePoint features. We will actually look at those features in the order of items from the harmon.ie website: Store, Classify, Retrieve, and Collaborate.

Store

One of the new features introduced in the harmon.ie Outlook add-in is the ability to drag emails from Outlook, directly in a document library in SharePoint. By simply doing a drag and drop from your inbox to the harmon.ie Sidebar, you can upload your email, as an .msg file into SharePoint. Unfortunately, it's not easy to screenshot a drag & Drag, however after you drag and drop it, you can see the Uploading to SharePoint progress bar on the bottom of the harmon.ie sidebar.

After the document is uploaded, you will have a message between the Email information and the actual email that displays where the message is saved in SharePoint.

Another very smart way to save emails into SharePoint is as soon as you save them. When sending a new email, you have the option to save the email into SharePoint as soon as you send it, so you don't forget!

When clicking on send, a popup will appear asking you where you want to save it. It remembered my last location which was Client Communications, so I click Yes, and the email is sent to client, as well as saved to SharePoint.

You also have the option to save a Draft Message to SharePoint, so you could share it with your colleagues and asking for opinions before even sending it to the client.

    Classify

I don't have to remind you that a big part of SharePoint is the ability to classify information based on metadata. When dragging an email into SharePoint using harmon.ie, all the data is saved into SharePoint as properties of the document. Properties such as Subject, From, To, Attachments, Date Etc.!

This allows you to easily filter and find the documents you need afterwards! Those emails, are now filtered by the SharePoint Search engine so they can be easily found.

Something I found out is that since the harmon.ie is an outlook add in... And not a SharePoint solution, you don't get all the fields pre-provisioned for you. Meaning that, for all the automatic classification to be done, you need to have all the columns in SharePoint created beforehand. You can either create your own columns, or download the feature pack containing a Document Library template with the Email columns directly inside. For SharePoint Server, it creates a content type you can add to any library, however for SharePoint Online, for now it's only a template document library, but you cannot add that content type to another library.  

    Collaborate

By having our emails in SharePoint, we can now treat them as pure SharePoint documents, instead of emails. That comes with all the editing and versioning capabilities of SharePoint! For Example, once I save a draft of an email I want to send to a client in SharePoint, I could share the link to the document to my colleagues, so they can have a read before I send it.

Once I copy it, I can send it to my coworker so he can bring the edits he wants to the Contoso Follow Up.msg document.

After he gives me the Ok, I just double click the email from the sidebar, and send. All the changes done by my coworker will be in that .msg file, exactly as if it was your normal Office document.  

Office 2016

Harmon.ie also just released harmon.ie 2016 that already works and it's integrated in Office 2016. The native integration of Outlook 2016 and Office 365 Groups as well as harmon.ie 2016 will make Outlook a true collaboration hero.

Conclusion

The latest update to the harmon.ie Outlook Add-in adds a set of new features allowing users to easily manage emails in SharePoint as if they were documents, without ever leaving the comfort of their Outlook. By having emails in SharePoint, you benefit from the metadata around it (which is done automatically), the versioning as well as the history capabilities as well as from all the collaboration features that make SharePoint the great tool that it is.

I found the add-in very intuitive and very easy to use, and did not find any bugs! If you are looking for an Outlook Add-in to facilitate and improve the integration between Outlook and SharePoint, make sure to check out the Harmon.ie Outlook Add-in! For more information, please check out the links below:

Webpage: http://ift.tt/1X50XBL

Aon case study/video: http://ift.tt/1X50XBO

Product demo: http://ift.tt/1QsGE2q

eBook: http://ift.tt/1QsGEiF

Press release: http://ift.tt/1Ycn7p2

by Vlad Catrinescu via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

New Office 365 Admin UI Preview

On the November edition of CollabTalk, I did a short demo of the new Office 365 Admin Center. This new UI is available as a functional preview to folks who have opted into First Release in their tenant as well as some of the small business licenses.

If you’d like to take a look at the new UI and you’ve got First Release enabled, you should see a couple of links at the top of the screen when you visit the main page of your tenant Admin link from the App Launcher, a.k.a. “the waffle”. From these links, you can either take a sneak peek at the new UI or watch a video.

All of this is changing swiftly, so think of these screenshots as indicators of where the admin UI is going – it’s not final. The great thing about it, though, is that what is there actually works. You can use it to get some of the more common activities done.

Here’s a view of the new page as it stands. You can see that it isn’t – by any means – everything you can do in the current Admin Center. To me, that’s a great thing. The full UI can be overwhelming, anyway.

If you start taking the tour, it will highlight the important parts othe new UI in an order that makes a lot of sense to me. I love the fact that Microsoft is starting to build these in-application tours into the newer UIs. We shouldn’t need to read the manual before we know what to do anymore!

What are the most important things we do in the Admin Center? Well, I’d argue it’s managing users, billing, and checking system heath. The next three steps in the tour show us exactly where we’d do each of those important activities, as well as showing us how we can navigate to each activity. Plus – a ninja cat riding a fire-breathing unicorn!

Managing users is front and foremost. Users are at the core of Office 365 – of course, right?

Taking care of licensing and billing is a central activity on Office 365, because there’s no concept of server licenses here. In the new Admin Center, it’s easy to buy additional licenses and assign them.

We all care about service heath, and the new Office 365 Admin Center gives us a one-glance view of what is having problems, rather than a long list of things that are fine, as in the current Admin Center, but with the option to drill into the details.

If you try out the new Admin Center and can’t accomplish something, it’s easy to switch back to the old UI.

What do you think is missing? Well, there’s a feedback link built right into all of the pages so that you can send feedback to the team behind it. And because this is the new Microsoft, they are really listening.

Finally, there are links to helpful videos and articles that can help you get up to speed if all this is new to us – and we’re all new to this at some point.

So what’s not so great yet? Well, the UI isn’t fully responsive. It’s housed inside the newer semi-responsive Suite Bar but the Admin Center itself isn’t responsive enough to work on a phone. (For that form factor, we have the Office 365 Admin app at the links below.)

• For Windows Phone 8.1, download the app from the Windows Phone Store.
• For Android 4.0+, download the app from Google Play.
• For iOS 7+, download the app from the Apple App Store.

The functional map between the old Admin Center and the new one is pretty sparse. But like I pointed out already, managing users, billing, and service health are some of the most important aspects of admin, especially for smaller organizations. More will come, and I expect we’ll see it come quickly.

Right now it’s a little stormy in the cloud. But Microsoft is clearly “Working on it…”

This article was also published on IT Unity on 11/19/2015. Visit the post there to read additional comments.

by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog

They, Them and There

Have you noticed how we insist on assigning a location and demographic to the woes of the world? Add to that all the bad news repeatedly shoved down our throats by mainstream media and you get a pretty bleak picture of our existence.

• US religious leaders make forceful appeals
• Belgium considers extending lockdown
• SA considers more aid for farmers
• Mali hotel cook escaped attackers
• French police release 7 suspects
• 6.1 magnitude earthquake hits Indonesia
• Gunmen shot anything that moved
• Civilians likely killed in airstrikes
• At least 6 killed in suspected Boko Haram attack

Dividing the world up like this makes it so easy for the psychopaths running it to make us turn on each other and fight each other for scraps. Long as it’s “not in my backyard” you think you’re okay jack; you can pretend the atrocities taking place have nothing to do with you and that there is nothing you can do about them.  But what if we replaced all those locations and anonymous words for people with “earth” and “human beings”?

• Earth human being leaders make forceful appeals
• Earth considers extending lockdown
• Earth considers more aid for human being farmers
• Earth human being cook escaped human being attackers
• Earth human being police released 7 human being suspects
• 6.1 magnitude quake hits earth
• Human being gunmen shot anything that moved
• Human beings likely killed in airstrikes
• At least 6 human beings killed in suspected earth attack

Paints a different picture doesn’t it?  Don’t you see that this is what is happening here? There is no us and them, no here and there – apart from a small handful of puppet masters making you believe something different.  We are all part of powerful, cosmic dust that chose to be on earth right now.  Earth is all our backyard and it’s bleeding.

There is a mass global awakening underway and it’s never too late for anyone to join the party, but to do that you need to see through the illusions of the world around you and take back your power. Everyone can make a difference, everyone! Don’t let any media source or person tell you otherwise. No act is too small; and in fact, every act, no matter how small, is making a gigantic difference to the destiny of our planet and our species. Don’t hesitate to do a kindness to a person, plant or animal because it matters! And if someone does it for you, pay it forward.

If there is really no-one you can help, just understand that every time you buy something, you are directly impacting how this planet operates. Learn the true costs of what you are buying and make better, informed choices.  There is no excuse for ignorance on this planet anymore. Are you going to be part of the problem, or part of the solution?

Filed under: Thoughts on Life
by Veronique Palmer via Views from Veronique

Debunking the SharePoint BI and Data Visualization Myths

After seeing a demo of the App from Black Compass for SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2013 I told them they should share more info on their product. It’s amazing to me there are such cool apps that just don’t get good visibility. I’m happy to share this infographic which addresses the common myths around SharePoint [&hellip

The post Debunking the SharePoint BI and Data Visualization Myths appeared first on CollabShow.

by Joel Oleson via CollabShow

Windows 10 and Virtual Desktops with X-Mouse

Since my first introduction to Linux, I have found virtual desktops to be a very interesting and intriguing concept. However, I could find no practical use for myself to be able to utilize them. That, and the fact that I really only used Windows to get things done for work and play, meant I never had much opportunity to try them out fully.

Then, a few years ago, I started using OS X (10.8) and with its wonderful trackpad (both on the laptop and external), virtual desktops became something much more useful. I could swipe between screens of programs seamlessly and loved it, but the implementation on multiple monitors (3) was less than extraordinary (at least, when I first started working with OS X).

Enter Windows 10 and its virtual desktops! Wait... How exactly do these things work? I have to hit WinKey+Tab on the keyboard then click a button with the mouse and to switch desktops I have to use WinKey+ArrowKey? This is never going to work for me. I am mostly navigating with the mouse and my fingers are on the home keys if I am typing. Then, it donned on me: What if I could make use of all these "buttons" on my mouse (Logitech M705) that I never use?

This is where X-Mouse comes in. The typical Forward and Back buttons on the thumb side of the mouse are now mapped to open and close virtual desktop and the mouse wheel that tilts (which I never have had any use for before) is now able to switch between these desktops.

I can now keep all of my applications open instead of being hid behind one another or trying to locate the little button on the taskbar. Now, I would be happier if Windows 10 would remember how many desktops I had open and where I wanted my programs, but it is a small annoyance and doesn't take long to get things set back up in the morning.

Note: Logitech's SetPoint software interferes with X-Mouse and also does not support the WinKey for mouse button assignment. If Logitech will update SetPoint to work with WinKey, then it could do all the work and provide access to the Application Switcher button (where the thumb rests) which does not work without SetPoint. X-Mouse does not see this button, so I have to hit WinKey+Tab manually (*shudder*) in order to move windows around between desktops, but that is rare.

by Christopher Scott via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

The ‘MVP Thoughts’ Series – Live from Sharegate World Headquarters

Last month a handful of SharePoint and Office 365 MVPs (now Office Servers and Services MVPs, but who’s counting?) gathered at Sharegate‘s offices in Montreal to help them with their next series of Damn Simple videos. Stay tuned for those.

After all the silliness – I mean serious cinematography – Jennifer Roth (@jennifermason), Corey Roth (@coreyroth), Fabian Williams (@fabianwilliams), and I sat down with the great Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin) to talk about Office 365 and SharePoint. You know – the usual. Each time a bunch of us gets together, though, the conversations tend to go in different directions. It’s even interesting for me to watch these, as our opinions often change over time.

I’m not sure how many segments we ended up with, but I’ll keep adding them here as they come out. If you’d like to read the transcripts instead, follow the title links.

MVP Thoughts: What to Expect From SharePoint 2016

MVP Thoughts: SharePoint Workflows & Forms in Today’s Environment

MVP Thoughts: What Should SharePoint Developers Focus On?

by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog

Review of Harmon.ie Outlook Add-in: Manage Emails on SharePoint

Even if some companies aim to be the “Email Killer”, e-mail is the most used form of communication between colleagues, as well as clients and external companies. Email has come a long way since its original use as a method for quickly exchanging messages. Today, business emails are documents in every respect. Yet emails are still relegated to silos like Microsoft Exchange, while other documents such as proposals, contracts and product specifications are handled by traditional document management systems such as SharePoint. And with the dozens of emails you get daily, it’s easy to lose an important email that contains requirements, statements of work or that important detail about your client that your team should know about.

That is what harmon.ie wants to fix. With the latest update to their Outlook Add-in, users can now drag and drop emails from their outlook window to a corporate SharePoint or Office 365 site, without ever leaving the place they do most of their work – their email client. Here are some of the features the new harmon.ie Outlook Add in offers according to their site:

• Store emails messages from Outlook directly on SharePoint using the harmon.ie sidebar. By staying within the Outlook window, you remain in focus while helping to organize emails and documents.
• Classify email messages in SharePoint. harmon.ie automatically maps email headers such as ‘To,’ ‘From,’ ‘Subject,’ and ‘Received’ to SharePoint metadata.
• Retrieve email messages from SharePoint. When classified correctly and efficiently, finding email messages is a snap. You can even preview emails with one click.
• Collaborate with colleagues using email messages stored on SharePoint. Realize all the benefits of SharePoint document collaboration, now with email messages.

Review

In this review, I am not going to review all the basic features that harmon.ie has to offer as I have already talked about them in a past review on my blog. In this review, we will focus strictly on the new Managing Emails on SharePoint features. We will actually look at those features in the order of items from the harmon.ie website: Store, Classify, Retrieve, and Collaborate.

Store

One of the new features introduced in the harmon.ie Outlook add-in is the ability to drag emails from Outlook, directly in a document library in SharePoint. By simply doing a drag and drop from your inbox to the harmon.ie Sidebar, you can upload your email, as an .msg file into SharePoint. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to screenshot a drag & Drag, however after you drag and drop it, you can see the Uploading to SharePoint progress bar on the bottom of the harmon.ie sidebar.

After the document is uploaded, you will have a message between the Email information and the actual email that displays where the message is saved in SharePoint.

Another very smart way to save emails into SharePoint is as soon as you save them. When sending a new email, you have the option to save the email into SharePoint as soon as you send it, so you don’t forget!

When clicking on send, a popup will appear asking you where you want to save it. It remembered my last location which was Client Communications, so I click Yes, and the email is sent to client, as well as saved to SharePoint.

You also have the option to save a Draft Message to SharePoint, so you could share it with your colleagues and asking for opinions before even sending it to the client.

    Classify

I don’t have to remind you that a big part of SharePoint is the ability to classify information based on metadata. When dragging an email into SharePoint using harmon.ie, all the data is saved into SharePoint as properties of the document. Properties such as Subject, From, To, Attachments, Date Etc.!

This allows you to easily filter and find the documents you need afterwards! Those emails, are now filtered by the SharePoint Search engine so they can be easily found.

Something I found out is that since the harmon.ie is an outlook add in… And not a SharePoint solution, you don’t get all the fields pre-provisioned for you. Meaning that, for all the automatic classification to be done, you need to have all the columns in SharePoint created beforehand. You can either create your own columns, or download the feature pack containing a Document Library template with the Email columns directly inside. For SharePoint Server, it creates a content type you can add to any library, however for SharePoint Online, for now it’s only a template document library, but you cannot add that content type to another library.

 

    Collaborate

By having our emails in SharePoint, we can now treat them as pure SharePoint documents, instead of emails. That comes with all the editing and versioning capabilities of SharePoint! For Example, once I save a draft of an email I want to send to a client in SharePoint, I could share the link to the document to my colleagues, so they can have a read before I send it.

Once I copy it, I can send it to my coworker so he can bring the edits he wants to the Contoso Follow Up.msg document.

After he gives me the Ok, I just double click the email from the sidebar, and send. All the changes done by my coworker will be in that .msg file, exactly as if it was your normal Office document.

 

Office 2016

Harmon.ie also just released harmon.ie 2016 that already works and it’s integrated in Office 2016. The native integration of Outlook 2016 and Office 365 Groups as well as harmon.ie 2016 will make Outlook a true collaboration hero.

Conclusion

The latest update to the harmon.ie Outlook Add-in adds a set of new features allowing users to easily manage emails in SharePoint as if they were documents, without ever leaving the comfort of their Outlook. By having emails in SharePoint, you benefit from the metadata around it (which is done automatically), the versioning as well as the history capabilities as well as from all the collaboration features that make SharePoint the great tool that it is.

I found the add-in very intuitive and very easy to use, and did not find any bugs! If you are looking for an Outlook Add-in to facilitate and improve the integration between Outlook and SharePoint, make sure to check out the Harmon.ie Outlook Add-in! For more information, please check out the links below:

Webpage: http://ift.tt/1X50XBL

Aon case study/video: http://ift.tt/1X50XBO

Product demo: http://ift.tt/1QsGE2q

eBook: http://ift.tt/1QsGEiF

Press release: http://ift.tt/1Ycn7p2

The post Review of Harmon.ie Outlook Add-in: Manage Emails on SharePoint appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.

by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu