News
Microsoft To Combine SharePoint and OneDrive Admin Portals
- By Kurt Mackie
- January 27, 2021
Microsoft plans to merge its OneDrive and SharePoint Admin Center management portals, with a consolidated portal expected to arrive for Microsoft 365 subscribers "through February," per an announcement this week.
Microsoft has plenty of management portals, so much so that there's an MS Portals project in existence, set up by Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Adam Fowler, that's dedicated to tracking them. Microsoft is consolidating its OneDrive and SharePoint management portals to "enable a smoother admin experience across the Microsoft 365 admin suite," and to give IT pros "increased centralized control over content across the organization," the announcement explained.
The new combined portal, which wasn't named, will provide controls over the following OneDrive aspects:
- Internal and external sharing by end users
- Access controls for end users
- Default storage limits for end users
- Information retention policies
- Sync controls
IT pros will have access to OneDrive "cards," as well as SharePoint cards, which show statistical details on things like app use and file activity, including end user content sharing. It's possible to block the uploading of specific file types, if wanted. IT pros also can adjust the default storage limits for end users. They can set retention times on content, both for OneDrive and SharePoint, which might be done after an employee leaves.
Content uploads also can be blocked "based on device or network location" as a security precaution.
Also coming with the portal change will be a Global Reader role, which permits a person to view, but not change, Microsoft 365 administrative settings.
Microsoft Lists Adoption Page
Microsoft has also created a one-stop landing page to get best-practices advice, guides and templates for end users of the Microsoft Lists list-creation service. The Microsoft Lists Adoption page appears to have been launched this week, per a Microsoft announcement.
Also this week, Microsoft published some advice for customizing rules that get used in Microsoft Lists templates, which can be found in this announcement.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.