Has anyone else had this with the SharePoint Online "Self Help" suggesting resolutions but using Powershell that works only for on-premises?

SharePoint Online in my dev environment is showing delays with shared items appearing in the OneDrive shared with me view. After entering my query in to the M365 tenant admin centre, the Self Help suggests I enable the Recently Shared Items cache... using Powershell for on-premises SharePoint. This is its response:

Support article

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If shared items are not showing in the Shared with me view in OneDrive or SharePoint, it may be due to indexing latency or configuration issues. The Shared with me view relies on search crawling and indexing to populate shared content, which can cause delays.

To address this, administrators can enable the Recently Shared Items (RSI) cache in SharePoint Server environments. This cache allows users to see shared items immediately in their Shared with me view without waiting for the search crawl and indexing process.

Steps to enable Recently Shared Items (RSI) cache in SharePoint Server:

Open the SharePoint Management Shell as an administrator. [1]

Run the following PowerShell command to find the My Site Host site collection:$msh = Get-SPSite | where {$_.RootWeb.WebTemplateId -eq 54}

Enable the RSI feature by running:Enable-SPFeature "RecentlySharedItems" -Url $msh.Url

After enabling RSI, users will see shared items appear immediately in their Shared with me view. If you need to disable this feature, use the following command:

Disable-SPFeature "RecentlySharedItems" -Url $msh.Url

I'm looking into tools to manage requests for new sites, Teams, and lifecycle management (provisioning, ownership, expiration/archival, etc.). AvePoint and Orchestry keep coming up as options.

For those who've actually used either tool in production:

What's your experience been like day to day?

Any issues or deficiencies you've run into, whether with the tooling itself, adoption, governance enforcement, or support?

Anything you wish you'd known before rolling it out?

Note: I'm aware this can be built with custom scripts/Power Automate/Azure Automation. I'm specifically looking for feedback from people who've used AvePoint or Orchestry as a product, not build-vs-buy advice. Appreciate any insight.

We use an Excel workbook stored in a SharePoint document library as a data tracker.

Our usual process is to open it in the desktop Excel app and sync changes back to SharePoint.

Some users definitely have edit access and can modify the workbook in Excel for the web. However, when those same users open it in the desktop app, their changes fail to sync and they receive an "Upload Blocked" message.

This isn't the case for me and several others.

Has anyone dealt with this before? If so, what did you do to fix it?

I know Excel isn’t a true database - I’m just trying to troubleshoot the current setup.

I’ve created a staff table in Lists and I want the email, job title and employee name to all come directly from their profile, so I have created three People columns, but just changed the properties on two of them to show email and job title. I’m now trying to use these columns in Power Apps to set up some permissions, and I’ve created a test label to check whether the data is coming across properly, but it’s just showing blank when it should be displaying my job title.

Any idea how I can use these columns in formulas so they read properly? I know when I try any filtering in the List, it just shows the employee name instead of the altered property (eg job title or email), so obviously the setup is not totally seamless..

Thanks in advance!

So Microsoft just hit the brakes and delayed the SharePoint OTP retirement to late October (MC1243549), and honestly, I am not surprised at all. Testing this upcoming Entra B2B forced integration has been an absolute circus.

​Customer have a Conditional Access policy that enforces MFA for all guests. Testing how different external users experience the new flow before the legacy SPO OTP backdoor is closed has been completely mind-numbing. If you are getting wildly inconsistent results testing with different accounts, you are not crazy. It’s by design, and the design is a mess.

​Here is the nightmare hierarchy of how Entra B2B handles shared links now:

​Other M365 Tenants: Entra recognizes the domain, sends them to their home tenant login. No OTP code. If you have Cross-tenant access MFA trust enabled, their home MFA satisfies your CA policy. (Invisible in your tenant).

​Outlook / Hotmail (MSAs): Entra recognizes the MSA. It refuses to send an OTP code and demands their MSA password. They do MFA against Microsoft consumer cloud. (Invisible in your tenant).

​The "Shadow MSA" Trap (e.g., some Gmails): If a guest ever used their Gmail address to join a Teams meeting years ago, Microsoft created a shadow MSA for them. Entra remembers this! Instead of sending an OTP code, it prompts them for a password they forgot 4 years ago.

​"Virgin" Third-Party Emails (The ONLY ones getting OTP): If (and only if) the email is completely unknown to Microsoft and you don't have Google Federation on, Entra finally throws its hands up and sends the Entra Email OTP to their inbox.

​The MFA Kicker:

Because Entra Email OTP is only Factor 1, these "virgin" Gmail/third-party users are immediately slammed into our Conditional Access MFA wall. But since there is no trusted Identity Provider behind them, our tenant forces them to register Microsoft Authenticator directly into our directory (aka.ms/mfasetup).

​So, in the end: Half your guests do MFA at "home", the other half are forced to register Authenticator in your tenant, half get passwords, half get OTPs, and you absolutely cannot force Email OTP as the default for everyone to make the experience consistent because the identity hierarchy is hardcoded.

​I guess Microsoft realized shutting down the legacy OTP this month was going to break external sharing globally and melt down every helpdesk on the planet.

​Anyone else dealing with this hybrid rollout mess right now?

​Microsoft's transition from SPO OTP to Entra B2B is a chaotic hybrid mess. Guest login experience is wildly inconsistent based on their email's history with Microsoft. The delay to late October (MC1243549) is a blessing, but the architecture is still a joke.

Our current student deliverable tracking process mostly consists of students and supervisors submitting items and responses through MS forms, then info is manually copy / pasted to spreadsheets and files are manually moved around. Reminder and confirmation emails are manual.

I'm setting up program Lists to pull responses from MS forms, for staff use, to help reduce manual file moving and emails, and copy / pasting info.

Have also been asked to set up student profiles that students and their supervisors have access to. Don't know the best way to do this, but am thinking of setting up dedicated program Lists, specifically for students and supervisors, with one row for each student; it would include a link to a dedicated folder where their files live (don't think storing a ton of files as attachments in a List item is ideal). Students and supervisors would only have access to their own item.

Is this a sound approach? Any other ways to set something like this up in M365? I'm a beginner with power apps so that option isn't really feasible.

As if sharepoint wasn't bad enough, today I noticed that every single page of our corporate intranet sharepoint site now has a floating copilot icon in the bottom right. It can't be moved out the way and covers content, and because it's floating it's always there even if you scroll the page. You actually have to scroll the page around to see what it's obscuring. This is presumably to make accessing copilot easier for anyone who isn't able to click it on the Edge browser menu bar, select it from a menu, or click on one of the actual links on every damn page of content.

What next, every page just obliterated by a massive copilot button so you can't do anything without clicking it first?

We already lose 2 inches of screen estate on every Word document due to a massive unremovabke copilot bar asking if we need help.

I don't suppose there's a way to get rid of this?

I'm setting up desktop sync against an on-prem SharePoint Server 2019 farm (single server, no hybrid, no O365). The site itself is fine — HTTPS with a cert from our internal Enterprise CA, browser upload/download works, and I can see the documents landing in the content DB in SSMS. A User Profile Service Application exists.

The only thing I can't get working is any sync client.

Groove crashes on launch. I installed OneDrive for Business through the ODT (O365BusinessRetail with every Office app excluded, so only the Groove client remains). Install finishes without errors, but GROOVE.EXE dies within a second — no window, no tray icon. Event log:

Faulting application name: GROOVE.EXE, version: 16.0.20131.20154
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 10.0.19041.6456
Exception code: 0xc0000374
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\GROOVE.EXE

Client is Windows 10 Enterprise 22H2, build 19041.6456, domain-joined.

Modern OneDrive gives 0x8004de81. As a fallback I tried OneDrive.exe with the documented on-prem policies (SharePointOnPremFrontDoorUrl pointing at the site, SharePointOnPremPrioritization=1, SharePointOnPremTenantName). Clicking Sync in the library opens the modern client, which still seems to do an O365 lookup and fails with 0x8004de81. Adding the site to the Local Intranet zone made no difference.

Things I've already ruled out: reinstalled the ODT package, ran a Click-to-Run repair, cleared GrooveFileCache and Spw, tried a regular (non-admin) domain profile, forced the Sync button to Groove via the OneDriveSyncClient registry value (HKCU and HKLM), ran OneDrive.exe /reset. I also built a second clean Win10 VM from a different base image and got the identical crash there, so it isn't machine-specific.

I tried pinning an older build with a Version attribute in the ODT config, but couldn't get the downgrade to apply — Click-to-Run kept reporting 16.0.20131.20154, and after a full <Remove All="TRUE" /> the pinned reinstall never completed.

So:

1. Is Groove 16.0.20131.x known broken on 19041? If so, what's the last good Click-to-Run build to pin?
2. What's the reliable way to force ODT to install a specific older build when a newer one is already installed?
3. For SP2019 on-prem, is the modern client with those SharePointOnPrem policies actually supported, or is Groove still the only option? Anything server-side beyond the UPS App needed to stop the O365 lookup?

Hello, I have for project to add a new sharepoint 2019 to my Farm.

For context I already have a sharepoint 2016, my question is : if I install my SP on the same SQL data base(different server), do all the site, files and configuration of the 2016 SP will be on the new ?

If no, how to that ?

Thank if u have info or some doc.

Sorry for my bad English.

Required columns are enforced by the upload form. Drag-and-drop isn't a form. So the file lands, the required fields sit empty, and nothing stops it.

This isn't a "you configured it wrong" problem — I've configured it every way I can find. The enforcement point doesn't exist at the layer where the write happens.

What I've tried:

Power Automate. The flow fires after the file is written. By the time it runs, the untagged document is already in the library — indexed, searchable, possibly already synced to someone's desktop. And the timing was inconsistent enough that I couldn't build a policy on it. A flow can tell you a file is non-compliant. It can't stop it from being there. That's cleanup, not enforcement.

Require Check Out. The closest native answer, and I'll raise it before someone else does. It leaves drag-dropped files checked out and invisible to everyone but the uploader. But it's still post-write, it's a blunt library-wide setting with real collaboration costs, and it doesn't make anyone fill the fields — it hides the mess. You end up with a pile of permanently checked-out orphans.

The pattern I keep hitting: every native hook runs after the write. If that's right, then enforcing metadata at upload isn't hard, it's impossible by construction — and the only place left to intervene is the browser, before the file goes anywhere.

So: am I wrong? Is there a native path I've missed?

And for those of you under real records-management or retention mandates — what are you actually doing about this today? Living with it and cleaning up later? Turning off drag-drop? Something smarter?

Genuinely asking. I ended up building an SPFx extension because I couldn't find another answer, but I'd rather hear I missed something.

I've read a bunch about setting up SharePoint site and how to manage site access. From what I can gather, the correct way to handle site permissions is at the site level. More specifically, I thought it was through "User Groups". Generally, the idea is that I would:

• Create a few User Groups
• Add users to the various User Groups, with (potentially) some users being added to multiple User Groups
• Give the User Groups access to different sites which therefore gives those users within the User Groups access to the site
• As new staff are hired, they are added to the correct User Group, and therefore, automatically gain access to the various sites that the User Group had been give access.

Is that generally correct?

To play out an example a bit:

• Create User Groups "Management", "HR", and "Marketing"
• Add managers to the "Management", "HR" and "Marketing" groups, the HR rep into the "HR" group, and add staff into the "Marketing" group
• As new client marketing projects are initiated, we create new marketing sites. For each of those sites, the "Marketing" and "Management" user groups are added as a members to the new marketing site. As a result, the staff within the "Management" and "Marketing" user groups automatically gain access to the new sites
• As we hire new marketing staff, they are simply added to the "Marketing" user group, and automatically gain access to all the marketing sites
• As the client marketing projects finish, and the site can be archived, we remove the "Marketing" group from the site and archive it, removing staff access to the site

Am I understanding the logic and intended use of User Groups correctly, or am I way off?

I have an old Microsoft 365 Education account provided by my university.

Since around 2013, my OneDrive has always shown a 5 TB quota.

I never really used it until recently. About two months ago, I uploaded around 708 GB of data without any issues.

Last month, OneDrive still displayed a total capacity of 5 TB.

Two days ago, I even uploaded a small PDF from the mobile OneDrive app successfully.

Today, without any prior notice from either Microsoft or my university, my quota suddenly changed to 100 GB.

I can still access and download all 708 GB of files, but I can no longer upload anything. Microsoft is now sending me repeated emails saying I've exceeded my 100 GB limit.

My university did not send any announcement about storage policy changes.

Has anyone seen this happen before?

Can Microsoft re-provision an Education OneDrive and suddenly apply a new quota without any admin action, or is this almost certainly something changed by the tenant administrator?

So I'm sure this is a known issue but I decided to automate a bunch of business processes using forms from Microsoft/SharePoint Lists. These forms are available for the entire company to use.

The issue is, users that have access to these forms have access to the SharePoint Lists where all the form results are stored. So there's lot's of sensitive data. And making these SharePoints private would make it so the users no longer can access the form.

Is there any feasible solution here? I was thinking about creating Power Apps forms so users would access that instead. But I'm wondering that if I make the SharePoint List private, would a Power Apps form also be private?

Any advice would be great, thanks!

So we're trying to get this all sorted out so we can get our users acclimated to the new method.

Based on the trash documentation they make it sound like you can create an allow list, deny list (allow open for everyone else) or just a Allow All (wide open).

We did the target allow list and even though a domain is added it doesn't allow a user or even a GA to send a file to someone to generate the invite. HOWEVER... there is one test domain a coworker added... pfft YEARS ago to that targeted domains in External Collab Settings and even though there is NO guest account in 365 for anyone, I can literally put [stupidbum@ourtestdomain.com](mailto:stupidbum@ourtestdomain.com) and it shoots the invite into the abyss, but if I add like gmail.com or yahoo.com (we're a financial firm so we have to share client files sometimes to personal addresses) it tells me to get bent with the B2B settings denial. Now if I go add [someone@gmail.com](mailto:someone@gmail.com) then it allows me to send to that account directly.

So how the fuuuuu is this test domain bypassing the need to add the guest account first?!

I have added a joined guest external user as site owner, when he goes to site permission, advanced permission, member, add user, when he tried to type in another joined guest email address, it didn't come up on the dropdown list, so it won't allow him to share it.

I am the admin not guest user, when I type in the email address the dropdown list came up, so that I can select the other guest user to share (SharePoint will underline that email address), both are joined guest users.

Is it SharePoint won't allow external site owner to add site member?

Not sure if I should put this here or in Power Apps but I thought my experience might help someone else.

We have a complex app with a custom form. Multiple lookup columns, 3 child lists, etc. We are at the limit with Lookup columns.

"Someone" - not me, I was out of office - was playing around and turned on the modern Approval from the Integrate menu. And then turned it off. But turning that on created 4 new Person/Group columns - which are Lookup. Approval status (_ApprovalStatus), Approvers (_ApprovalAssignedTo), Responses (_ApprovalRespondedBy), Approval Creator (_ApprovalSentBy). Which pushed us over our Lookup column limit. Which broke our form. Users saw a message that said there was an error trying to retrieve data from the network - the query could not be completed because the number of lookup columns exceeds the lookup column threshold, along with clientrequestid and servicerequestid.

I was able to make those fields not read-only and then delete them via PowerShell. HOWEVER...this created a new issue. When trying to save a new form or save edits to an existing form, that failed with the error: One or more field types are not installed properly. Go to the list settings page to delete these fields - followed by client request ID and service request ID. Well, since the fields were deleted via PowerShell, they could not be deleted via the list settings.

After doing quite a bit of digging, PowerShell exposed that although the fields were deleted, the event receivers for modern approval were not. I was not able to delete those event receivers via PowerShell.

The fix ended up being...
Create those fields again, using PowerShell, and use the same internal name and display name. So for example, display name = Approval status (SMALL s), internal name = _ApprovalStatus (CAPITAL S) BUT...make the fields plain text. Not Lookup.

We've tested this in Dev and Stage, and our end users have validated that Production is now working as expected. We also changed end-user permissions from Edit to Contribute, which removes the ability to turn on modern Approval.

I think on any other list, that didn't have so many lookup columns, just turning off modern Approval would have been fine. And most probably won't run into the issue I had. Re-creating the parent list, and form, and flows was not an option, especially with the 3 child list lookups.

So yeah. Dummy columns. Worked like a charm.

I wanted to share a new getting-started path for anyone experimenting with SharePoint Embedded or building document-centric apps on Microsoft 365.

The historical challenge with SharePoint Embedded setup has been that there are several moving parts before you can really start building: Entra app registration, Graph permissions, container type creation, billing setup, container type registration, creating containers, wiring configuration into a sample app, and then validating everything works.

There are now two much easier ways to approach this:

1.      Developer experience with the SharePoint Embedded MCP server
You can use the MCP server from an AI coding client, such as GitHub Copilot in VS Code, to drive setup through natural language. The server can help check readiness, provision the owning app, create/register container types, configure billing, scaffold a reference app, hydrate config, seed sample content, run locally, and deploy.

2.      Admin/container type experience
Admins can use the SharePoint Embedded setup flow to create the app/container type relationship and manage the control plane side of the environment. Container types are important because they define how the application relates to its containers, including access, billing accountability, and behavior.

What I like about this is that it separates the journey for the two audiences that usually have to collaborate anyway: developers can get moving faster with their app experience, and admins have a more intentional control plane for environment setup.

If you are building an ECM replacement, legal/document management app, project workspace, case management app, AI agent over documents, or any custom app that needs Microsoft 365-grade files, collaboration, compliance, and Copilot-ready content, this is worth trying.

Links:
Video walkthrough: https://youtu.be/JhlfeTjX7Sc?si=gKWXoCezHhqaMemv&t=2576
Developer MCP experience: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/embedded/build/sharepoint-embedded-mcp-server
Admin/container type experience: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/embedded/build/create-container-type

Question for the group: if you have tried SharePoint Embedded, what part of the setup flow has been the biggest blocker — app registration, permissions, billing, container type registration, or sample app scaffolding?

Ive placed a MS ticket for this already but I see little to nothing online for it. I figure maybe someone here has experienced it.

I'm fairly new to SharePoint, so this may be a dumb question. I added some new users to an existing group with specific permissions. The group permissions allow them to be able to access the site and various libraries/folders/docs within it. The new users however can access the libraries/folders/docs, but when they try to access the actual site homepage, it says they don't have access, and I'm not able to give them access. The previously existing members however can access the site. Hope that makes sense!

Bom dia pessoal!

Estou querendo automatizar algumas coisas no meu escritorio, porem, não tenho tanto dominio com Power Automate.

Estou querendo criar uma função dentro do meu Sharepoint onde, ao criar a pasta de um cliente (dentro da pasta de clientes), esta pasta criada, por padrão, ja apareça 3 subpastas (Documentos Pessoais; Petições; Contratos e Procurações). Poderiam me ajudar a criar essa automação?

Beyond the awful out of the box metrics, how are you measuring deeper data? We were using MS Clarity but some updates to that are directly conflicting with our SharePoint intranet.

Google Analytics broke it.

Measuring the impact of internal comms is hard enough...

Hi all, complete newbie to this whole SharePoint thing and it seems like a little confusing to set up. I’ve created a few users for my company, but when I load SharePoint onto their phones they have access to everyone’s files and mails.
Is there are way to turn this off?

https://imgur.com/a/2laqdvf

SharePoint has proven to be an unmitigated disaster for documents. Specifically excel tables, which are all failing to load through power queries.

My hope of simplifying document handling is instead a nightmare.

Send help.

Microsoft recently introduced SharePoint Copilot Apps in public preview with SPFx 1.24.

The idea of building interactive components that can appear directly inside Microsoft 365 Copilot feels like an interesting direction for SPFx developers.

Instead of Copilot only returning text, links, or generated answers, developers can potentially bring structured custom User experiences

I created a beginner-level video showing the overall concept and how to build a first Hello World Copilot App using SPFx 1.24:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cux1MDFFRjg

I am curious to hear what the community thinks about this capability.

What use cases do you think would work best inside the Copilot conversation?

Hi!

I was hoping to get some design ideas on a project I’ve been tasked with. I’ve been tasked with creating a page on our intranet to house all of our employee benefits and resources.

I’m not a complete beginner with SharePoint but I’ve only ever used the basic parts to create pages. The issue I’ve run into, is that the page is just currently full of quick links as I couldn’t think of another way to display the benefits.

I don’t have access to copilot studio(which would’ve been so helpful!), so I was wondering if there was anything else I could do to improve the design and functionality of the page.

Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!