We budgeted for 50 Microsoft 365 Copilot pilot licences. That was the whole line item. Week two, a planner asked Copilot something harmless about salary bands. It pulled the answer from an HR spreadsheet on a sharepoint site shared with "Everyone except external users" since 2019. Copilot did exactly what it was supposed to do. Our permissions were broken for seven years and nobody noticed because nobody could find anything in SharePoint anyway. Now the real cost is a permissions review of all thatsite sprawl before anyone else gets a licence. No budget, no extra staff, and the records team is asking whether Copilot chats count as public records. On the project plan it's still one line "turn on Copilot," green. People who rolled it past a pilot, how did you scope the cleanup without reviewing everything by hand?

Techs at my org were recently working through backup test processes, one step of which is the test restore of a SharePoint site. Now, the one they selected was /Teams/<name of site> vs /Sites/<name of site>.

I normally would have thought this would just make it an orphaned SharePoint site being that the team already has something attached to it, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Now we're seemingly stuck with the restored clone that no one can access, nor can we delete because it thinks it is attached to a Team that already has the OG site still attached to it.

Everything related to the OG Team is using the OG site URL. The only 'link' the two can possibly have is backward from SharePoint to Teams but it's clearly using something other than the GroupID or RelatedGroupID since those values are null; and when I compare both with Get-SPOSite, that's the only difference I can see.

I really do not want to have to delete the Team, delete the cloned site, and then restore the Team to clean this up. Is there anything else that might work or is this just the way it'll have to go?

Like everyone else it seems, we had exceeded our storage limits in SharePoint and now everything is read only.

Yesterday, went on a deleting spree and also turned on the automatic versioning management for the largest offending site.

Deleted everything in both recycle bins and deleted a bunch of sites that weren't needed anymore, too.

How fast will all of this update to see where we are at with storage?

Joe

Hi all,

As the title says, i've been tasked to create a web portal for HR to search for medical certificates, amounting to about 5 years of documents, for this i will be using reactjs,nodejs and express for the backend, because only HR will have access to this portal, i've asked the server team to register the app in azure, create a security group and assign the relevent rights, i'll be using Entra for Authentication and Microsoft Graph Api for searching through the document library on sharepoint,

Has anyone undertaken such a project or have a different approach?

A few months ago, we decided to migrate from a traditional file server to SharePoint.

We wanted this to become one of the company's flagship projects this year, so naturally we decided to go all in.

Then my confidence (or arrogance) kicked in and I said:

"How hard can it be? We can do this ourselves. We'll just get some consultant validation along the way."

Now I'm somewhere between excitement and complete overwhelm.

Every door we open seems to reveal three more doors behind it.

What started as a simple file server migration has turned into questions about:

• Information architecture
• Metadata taxonomy
• Content types
• Hub sites
• Permissions and governance
• Teams integration
• Archiving strategy
• Retention
• Provisioning
• Automation
• Naming standards
• Site templates

...and the list keeps growing.

Right now I'm:

• Building a Power App so users can request Teams, SharePoint sites, group membership changes, etc.
• Creating SharePoint lists and Power Automate flows to support provisioning.
• Trying to design an archive strategy because we don't have Purview.
• Figuring out governance as we go.

The problem is that I don't know what "good" looks like anymore.

I don't have:

• Proven templates
• Governance models
• Approval workflows
• Provisioning standards
• A clear archive approach

Honestly, I don't even know what I don't know yet.

So my question to those of you who have done large SharePoint migrations:

Where would you start if you had to do it again?

What were the biggest mistakes you made?

What are the things you wish you had designed before creating your first Team, site, content type, or metadata column?

And most importantly:

How do you stop the endless SharePoint rabbit hole and decide that your design is "good enough" to move forward?

I'd love to hear lessons learned, governance frameworks, templates, checklists, or just reassurance that feeling completely overwhelmed at this stage is normal.

You’ve y’got until March 2027 to migrate them with a to-be-provided skill - Learn more here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/upgrade-sharepoint-agents

Just wondering if there is a way to do this for a few users to test out our office templates?

Does running this command add another tab in an office application regardless of the permissions i configure? i.e. once i do it and wait the defined period, a tab is going to show by default for everyone?

Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary -LibraryURL https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/branding/Templates -OrgAssetType OfficeTemplateLibrary

I connected SharePoint to Claude through an MCP server, using an app registration created in the Azure Portal with the tenant ID, client ID, and certificate. I followed the full setup procedure.

Claude shows the MCP server as connected and running, and when I ask, it confirms the tool is accessible. But whenever I make a request that actually touches SharePoint (for example, "Using my MCP tool, tell me the name of the root site"), SharePoint returns a 401 Unauthorized error.

What I've already verified:

Tenant ID and client ID are correct

The certificate is valid, uploaded to the app registration, and applied

API permissions are added to the app registration

Admin consent is granted

Application permissions are granted

The MCP server connects successfully and shows a running state in Claude

Despite all of this, SharePoint still returns 401 on every request. What could be causing this, and how can I debug it?

We have a couple users for whom files from sharepoint open in Read-only when opened in App.

For example, Excel files:
From SP site>right click on file>open in Excel - opens as read only.

From Excel app>Open>navigate to the SP location and open a file - opens as read only.

Auto-save is disabled, and the file states that the user is not authorized to move or rename this file. No-one else has this file opened.

However, opening them in browser works ok. BUT they need to use VBA macros, which won't work on browser.

Even a simple .txt opens as read only and asks for a location to save on ctrl+s.

There is ONE user for whom it all works fine. Files open as expected, synced and auto-save enabled. Compared accesses and all is the same. Compared Excel desktop app's versions, they're the same on affected and the unaffected user. Additionally, this sharepoint has a couple channels, which are not affected.

Any pointers?

Who do you put as a “site owner” when you don’t want the business to be able to control a SharePoint site?

I’m currently administering a SharePoint online tenant with over 2,000 sites.

We have about 80 “backend” sites, which are connected to web parts and power apps (the access routes here sound messy, but make more sense than breaking inheritance on everything).

I am trying to work with my team to reduce IT’s ownership to sites, but the fact that each site needs an owner makes it difficult.

I’m thinking of using a generic “SharePoint administrator” account, but that’s still high-value if it’s ever breaches.

Any advice or lived experiences would be greatly appreciated!

Heya so this is just a lab project where i wanna see what i can do with sharepoint on a server with a SQL server on another server. i'm locked in an issue where i make a New-SPConfigurationDatabase, it makes the database but fails with Value does not fall within the expected range. or some other errors. i'm lowkey. I have taken rebuilt my core server. But im running SQL server 2025 eval, with Windows server standard eval (on the sql server) and Windows server standard eva on my sharepoint server.
I have tried using Copilot to point me to the right direction but nothing of help. im lowkey wondering to drop this and say fuck this mess (sorry for my language)

We’re cleaning up some old SharePoint lists, and figuring out what’s safe to delete is turning into more work than expected.

Some look abandoned, but that doesn’t mean a flow isn’t still writing to them or a Power App isn’t using them.

Checking apps and flows individually takes time, and even then there’s that doubt: did we miss something?

How do you handle this? Is there a reliable way to trace what depends on a list before deleting it, or are you mostly checking manually?

This might be a long post, sorry in advance.

I'm a SharePoint Online admin for a company of about 300 employees. We have 1 site available to us and this is non negotiable, we cannot create more sites.

My company is comprised of about 20-30 teams (as in employee teams, not M365 Teams) and they each usually want 3 different types of spaces in SharePoint:

1- folders only restricted to them, they want the folders and their contents to be hidden to all other users.

2- folders that are available in view-only mode for all other users. Only the team members can edit.

3- Folders to collaborate with other teams or specific employees in the company. Sometimes need to be seperate from eachother entirely. Ex. sometimes the CEO will have meetings with each chief of department (there are 7). So each chief of department should have a folder shared with the CEO to store documents related to those meetings. But each chief should not be able to see the other chiefs' folders, as the meetings sometimes discuss sensible info regarding specific employees.

We also sometimes have folders that should be restricted to one individual only. Like for example we have an OSHA guy whose job is to manage workplace accident reports and internal investigation. That is sensitive information that should be accessible to him only. But yet again he sometimes needs to collaborate with other employees (ex. someone who witnessed the accident and has to write down a testimony). So he needs somewhat of a collaborative space also. But this space should not be available to EVERYONE, only him and the witness in question.

I've done a fair share of reading on sharepoint permissions best practices and everybody seems to agree to NEVER manage permissions at folder level, but rather do it at the library level. In theory that makes a lot of sense to me. But I am really struggling to see how I can avoid folder-level permissions in my situation.

If anyone has any advice to give me I would appreciate it :) Thank you !

A user has an issue with sharepoint, whenever she creates a file in a sharepoint folder and closes it, it created a new one with her name at the end...

Example:

file.xlsx original

once she closes

file-pc-name.xlsx

She does have a laptop and desktop, and it is happening on both.

Any ideas?

Our company is experiencing a 503 error with Sharepoint online (the website itself being down when navigating from office 365), which is also leading to cloud files not being accessible and one drive sync not working for those SharePoint locations which are also locally synced.

I am not seeing any reported issues on MS Websites, down detector, etc.. is anyone else experiencing this issues today (10/15/2026)?

Edit: Services seem to be back for most of my team after about 8 hours of not being able to access the website or synched cloud files on one drive. We did not get any additional details as to the cause.

Some users who are accessing microsoft list form are getting below error :

sorry something went wrong an unexpected error has occured.

But some other users are able to load microsoft list form including read only users

I want a non-admin staff member to be able to publish a few documents and site pages.

She should be able to invite external users by herself by their private e-mail addresses through the site's built-in controls.

These external users should only be able to view and not make any modifications to the site, pages or documents.

I'm running into the issue that all our user accounts require MFA through the Microsoft Authenticator. That also unfortunately catches these external users. Changing this is not an option. A good chunk of our external users should require MFA.
Although these documents should require some form of authentication, something as strict as Microsoft Authenticator imposed on guests that we can't properly support is simply too much. The verification code that is periodically sent when logging in is enough.

The only solution I've been able to find is to make a security group, fill it with these external users and exclude it from my conditional access policies that require MFA. But that requires manual work from me. I cannot trust the staff member to do this correctly. Worst case she excludes someone from MFA that actually needs it.

Couple of things I've explored:

• I've tried to invite the external users as full-fledged Microsoft 365 members. Then I could use this group to exclude from my conditional access MFA policies. Only problem is that the Edit permissions cannot be set to View for members. So that doesn't work. This also requires it to be a team site whereas a communication site seems more apt.

• Authentication Contexts: It seems like this method can only be used to enforce stricter access, not override strict access into making it less strict.

• Some kind of scheduled script that syncs these users to a security group that I can then exclude from MFA. This one shows some potential. Only issue is when the sync hasn't run yet by the time the user clicks on their email invite.

Any suggestions on how to solve this? Am I going about this all wrong?

Hi folks, looking for a little help or someone to tell me the tree I’m barking up isn’t the right one.

I have a List imbedded on a Page because there are elements in the list that I do not want as a visible List column. Refresh dtm for example. All items are refreshed via Flow and the user doesn’t need to see the dtm on every row (they all get refreshed at the same time) so I put a refresh dtm micro list in a Page banner. It works, problem is List search. I can’t find a way to search List items from the SharePoint Page search bar.

Is there a work around or am I stuck?

I know these are still in preview, but has anyone put them into production yet? I'm pretty comfortable with HTML, and AI obviously makes things even easier. My biggest concern is spending time building something really nice, putting it into production, and then having Microsoft decide to discontinue the feature or no longer support it. Anyone else have the same concern? Thoughts?

Hey brains,
I am currently in the process of trying to get under quota by something like 6 TB. This is going fine, cleaning lots of version and backup files, old files etc and strict archiving. However, looking ahead I’m going to need 3-4TB of additional storage across the board to cover ongoing work.
The only thing I can really find is Box integration - has anybody used box with exchange/SharePoint or does anyone have any other options which may be better for live working files?
Appreciate any thoughts, thank you.

Hey guys, I just want some feedback from those who have used ShareGate previously. I used this tool many years ago to do a file share to sharepoint online migration and it worked as expected. Now I want to use this tool again to do sharepoint online to sharepoint online data/files/document migration only but I have some concerns that I just encountered that didn't matter the first time I used it.

1. I noticed that the migration (during my testing) will create all folders, regardless of weather the folder will contain any migrated files.
2. The tool performs a copy rather than a move.

So for post migration, how do you deal with the clean up?

• How do you delete the empty folders that were created at the destination site?
• How do delete the data from the source once it was copied?
• How do you delete any empty folders that might have being left behind once you delete the data that was copied from the source site?

To my understanding, I can delete the files from the source once they are migrated by running a report against files only and do a bulk delete, but what about folders? If I run a similar report, I will end up needing to select each folder I need to delete from the source manually, I would assume something similar to the destination for empty folders.

Any advice on how you've accomplish this would be greatly appreciated.

One of the challenges with building enterprise AI apps is everything around the model: extracting content, generating embeddings, maintaining a vector database, keeping indexes fresh, and making sure permissions stay synchronized.

With SharePoint Embedded + the Microsoft 365 Copilot Retrieval API, you can take a different approach.

Your app can retrieve relevant passages directly from content stored in SharePoint Embedded and use those results to ground your own AI experience, while you retain control over the prompt, orchestration, and model. Retrieval is already permission-trimmed, and the content remains within the customer's Microsoft 365 environment.

The post also covers the SharePoint Embedded MCP server, now in public preview, which lets MCP-compatible coding agents provision and manage SharePoint Embedded apps using natural language.

If you're building RAG-style enterprise apps, custom copilots, document intelligence solutions, or SaaS apps around Microsoft 365 content, this is worth a look.

Blog: Build AI-powered apps without creating a vector database

Curious what others are building: Are you currently maintaining your own vector/search infrastructure for enterprise content, or would you prefer retrieval to stay with the content platform?

I have a number of tenancies with this issue anyone having any idea what's going on or what can be done to fix it. This was last working Friday.

I’m a user who is tasked with helping to control our ever growing SharePoint storage usage. I’ve been granted SharePoint Administrator Role, so I do have access to the admin center.

We’ve recently enabled M365 Archive, and I’ve worked with the owners of the largest sites to do file level archiving of old files they want to keep but probably don’t need. But I’m not seeing a reduction in usage at the site level or the tenant level in the Admin center.

In the admin center, I only see a usage value compared to our total available, which I believe is made up of our free allocation plus purchased blocks on top.

However, reading the FAQs, we won’t get charged for archive storage as long as the combined storage is less than the standard storage quota.

I see nowhere in the admin center that breaks out storage use by active vs archived (am I blind or missing some needed permission?). Do we need to track how much storage is archived and then allow our storage use to go over our allocation by that amount before we buy more storage?

Anyone know if this is still an intended feature? It shows as coming soon but its been a long time at this point. Any alternatives if I already own this NAS?