SharePoint Connect Newsletter – June 2017

Tips and Tricks:

We’d like to talk about a simple trick that can enable you to restrict users to only modify their own entries on a Discussion Board List in SharePoint for users to submit their questions/feedback. This is addressed by a feature known as “Item Level Permissions.” Here’s how you can configure it:

• In the Discussion Board List, go to List Settings > Advanced Settings
• Scroll down to Item Level Permissions section
• Inside the section, you will see two categories
  • Read Access
    • Read all items – Everyone who has access to the list will be able to read any items, whether they were created by the user logged in or someone else.
    • Read items that were created by the user – Users will only get to see the entries they created.
  • Create and Edit Access
    • Create and edit all items – Everyone can create and everyone can edit each other’s entries.
    • Create items and edit items that were created by the user – Users will be able to create items, but will only be able to edit the items they created.
    • None – Users will not be able to create or edit items.
• Choose the appropriate option from the above set

The question of the Month:

How to enable audit logs in SharePoint/Office365?

To Activate Audit Settings in SharePoint:
Go to the Central Administration homepage

• In the Application Management section; click “manage service applications”
• Select the “secure store service” application
• On the ribbon, click “properties”
• In the “enable audit” section; click to select the audit log enabled box
• To change the number of days that entries will be purged from the audit log file, specify the number of days in the ‘Days until Purge” field – the default value is 30 days.
• Click OK.

To Activate Audit Settings in Office 365:

• From the admin center, select Compliance under Admin
• In the Compliance Center, select Reports
• Click the Office 365 audit log reports link
• In the upper left corner of the page, click the Start recording user and admin activities link

You can view the audit log report by going to the “site actions” menu and clicking “site settings”; from there click “modify all site settings”; In the “Site Collection Administration” section, select “Audit log reports”; then select the type of report you need.

Feature Update:

Some of the key new features in the latest version of SharePoint – SharePoint 2016:

• Speed up the Site Creation
  SharePoint 2016 has inbuilt templates that enable site collections and sites created in a few seconds which is much faster compared to its previous version.
• Enable OneDrive Redirection
  Now, a user will be redirected to Office 365 My Site, instead of On-Premise on clicking OneDrive
• Removed 5,000 View Threshold
  The view threshold is now increased to 30,000,000 documents in a document library
• Increased File Size for uploads
  SharePoint 2016 does not have the previous limit of 2 GB for files.
• Mobile Experience
  Having the ability to work with your mobile device gives you the power to collaborate 24/7, from wherever you go. The new mobile app has a modern look with a responsive design.
• Compliance Experience
  The In-Place Policy Hold Center and the Compliance Center allow you to build your own policies and apply them to your environment. As an example, new basic policies allow you to delete data in OneDrive for Business sites after a certain amount of years for example, similarly to the retention policies.

Security and Backup:

With the recent Ransomware attacks, one can never know when their systems may be attacked, thankfully, SharePoint, both Online and On-premise versions are completely secured. In on-premises environments, the strategy to address backup and restore could involve multiple approaches and strategies:

• If the content databases are growing too large, consider policies that sweep old, unused, or archive content out of the SharePoint content database, but retain accessibility and search-ability of that content from within SharePoint.
• Ensure that your backup/recovery solution can use both traditional, streaming types of backups and snapshot-based backups, so you can capture quick snaps of the data periodically and then offload to backup media less frequently.

As for the security in SharePoint always use SSL certificate in your SharePoint because not only it will protect your login but also your content.