The wait is over for my long-suffering public sector customers chomping at the bit to dig into Microsoft Teams! Check out all the juicy details over at the office Microsoft Teams Blog site.
Continue reading Microsoft Teams Now Available for Public Sector Customers
There is a LOT of information out there, and a lot of ways to consume it. I find myself investing a good chunk of time maintaining lists of resources I find most helpful, and to be honest… its hard to keep up, but there is hope:
If you’re trying to keep up with the new rapid release cycle of SharePoint Online features as part of Office 365 and don’t want to scour half the web to do it, have I got just the podcast for you! From none other than Mark Kashman himself, “The Intrazone” podcast focuses on new and useful features that help lower barriers for user productivity and create sophisticated solutions with a minimum of specialized expertise. All directly from the SharePoint team themselves!
So turn that time on the commute, treadmill or even that pilgrimage to the DMV into something productive and to my surprise, even entertaining.
SharePoint can solve many problems and provide workable solutions to many use cases. Though perhaps not as intuitive or elegant, many enterprises have even used it to provide Dropbox-like functionality. The upside being the security and enterprise integration with other Office 365 features, the downside… well, configuring your document repository for this kind of active sharing takes a bit of extra doing.
The Mission: Share out folders in a document library to external users.
The Problem: Sharing out individual folders within a SharePoint library may result in an error when the user attempts to access.
But you did everything correctly right?
You sure did, you just didn’t do that other thing you didn’t KNOW you needed to do 🙂
But don’t worry, we’ll get you fixed right up.
The Solution: It seems that in order to share out folders it is first necessary to disable a little site level feature called “Limited-access user permission lockdown mode” (just rolls off the tongue, does it not?).
And there you go! You should be ready to rumble. For you pragmatists, that’s pretty much all there is to it.
For anyone who wants a little more detail read on…
The Boring Details:
But Martin you ask, how should I know about this little detail? Well, I had to more or less stumble my way across it.
First, I went to assign permissions to an individual folder using the standard interface using the “Grant Permissions” button:
Which triggered a somewhat useful message stating that:
Deactivating the feature took care of the access problem but then I ran into an interesting artifact.
In my testing I had uploaded some new files to the folder before sharing it out.
So when I finally got access to the shared folder what I actually saw was, well… nothing. More accurately, I saw an empty folder:
Turns out that I had Check-in/Check-out enabled on this library so files I just dumped in there were checked out by default which is pretty typical of most libraries.
… (and/or disabling Check-in/Check-out in the Library Settings panel) …
… made them visible to me as an external user.
I thought this was worth mentioning because as check-out is typically enabled by default and I think we’ve all had that experience of uploading some files and forgetting to check them in, which effectively makes them invisible to others until they do get checked in.
Hope that helps some of you avoid some frustration.
Martin Ballard 