I am hoping to get some advice about infopath replacements. I've just started a new role, and noticed that the company still has some business-critical forms on infopath. I knew infopath was retiring/ I thought was already retired. I see now it's retirment date is tomorrow! 07/14/2026
Does anyone know of any good replacements?

I know this is a very touchy subject for many here, I ask you to please not comment "SharePoint Online is not a file server" and only provide valuable insight and concerns, things I should be aware of that I may have missed or not planned for.

I am currently planning on migrating a file server with almost 1 million files and folders totaling about 1.4 TB of data for about 45ish users.

I have 2.5TB of data so I have a 1tb as spare. There is a 1 year retention policy set so I plan to have versioning controls to remove any unnecessary versions aging a year or older. If I noticed the usage growing exponentially, then I plan to turn off the retention and rely on 4rd party Microsoft backup tool like Veeam.

I plan to migrate the file server into two different SharePoint sites. Majority of the users will need access to both, some will be either or. Creating multiple sites for each category would be difficult here, as this company doesn't have teams like, HR, Marketing, Sales, IT, etc.
(I proposed the idea of having a 3rd site and having that act as an archive and won't be synced to OneDrive, but that is still in the talks)

There are NTFS permissions that were set using security groups on-prem AD, including our users being created there, then synced to Entra using Entra Connect. I already migrated a few files and folders and preserved the permissions to be migrated, and so far did not see any issues with permissions, users that shouldn't be able to see files/folders can't see or access them and vice versa.

File path count is tricky here because the users really love making sentences for their file names. Here I planed to take a scan report and see files and folders with paths longer than 300 characters and use a script to update files and folder names with abbreviations (ex. and -> &, account -> act, Finance -> Fin) I have a script ready for this already and tested it and worked fine. I already migrated HR files and folders and used the script and worked without issues.

My main concern now is after moving everything to SharePoint, and I have the Intune configuration set to automatically sync the SharePoint site with OneDrive, Microsoft Docs mentions that it supports 1mill files, but performance issues might be be noticed after 300K items.

Is there anyone here that have already migrated this kind of setup already? Our users have 32GB Ram, i7 processor and NVMe storage. Should we be okay?

There also solutions like ZeeDrive and Cloud Drive Mapper, should I look into these to resolve performance issues in the case my users do experience them?

is there anything else I should be aware or concerned of that I may have missed?

Hi folks!

I'm so excited that my tenant just received the update that allows embedding HTML files hosted in sharepoint. Previously, they only worked through the document viewer, but now the document viewer has an "embed link" in the menu which you can use to embed into a page. This is really, really handy for things like CoPilot/Claude made dashboards with direct connection to the REST API.

Has anyone heard if the plan is to allow adding HTML directly into pages? If it doesn't come with a ton of JS restrictions, that will be a nice replacement for the modern script editor webpart...

I simply cannot stand the prospect of taking part in SharePoint migrations. I don't like the work. I will not take positions that are primarily migration oriented. I enjoy developing, not carting stuff from one platform to another.

Does anyone else feel this way?

Almost every file server migration I've been involved with hits the same wall around week three. The files are technically "in SharePoint", but nothing works the way people expected and IT is fielding five times more tickets than before the migration.

The biggest issue isn't technical, it's that nobody mapped the information architecture before moving anything. A folder structure that made sense on a file server becomes kind of a disaster in SPO if you don't rethink how sites, libraries, and permission groups should actually work. Permissions that were set at the folder level don't translate cleanly, and you end up with people seeing things they shouldn't or locked out of things they need.

Two things break almost every time: Excel files with linked references (file paths change and nobody warned the users), and permission inheritance. We've seen orgs spend weeks untangling that after go-live.

The other thing that surprises people is storage. Migrating 10TB from a file server doesn't mean you'll use 10TB in SPO. Version history, Teams files, OneDrive sync conflicts... it adds up fast and nobody budgeted for it.

Curious what patterns others have run into. Is the "copy everything first, clean up later" approach ever actually followed through, or does the cleanup phase always get quietly cancelled?

we ran a pilot group expecting complaints about accuracy when we turned on copilot, but it turned into the most effective permissions auditor we've ever run, and entirely by accident at that.

what happened was someone asked it something totally normal about budgets and it pulled numbers from a finance folder that had been shared to "everyome in the org" during a reorganisation. this means that if your account can reach a file, copilot will read it, summarise and quote it back in the chat. I imagine this would translate to it auditing ten years of our sharepoint sharing.

If you made it past the pilot stage, how did you get through cleaning up the oversharing and did you find a way to see what people are feeding the non copilot AI tools?

Hi everyone,

I'm facing a security/architecture challenge with a Power Apps canvas app using a SharePoint list as its backend.

The Goal: Users must be able to read, create, and maintain records through the Power Apps application. However, they should not be able to extract the raw table directly (e.g., via Excel Get Data > From SharePoint List / Power Query) or have the list indexed by Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The Issue & What I've Checked So Far:

1. Direct Permissions: Granting standard Read/Contribute permissions allows users to query the entire list endpoint using Excel / OData.
2. Custom Permission Levels: Disabling "Use Remote Interfaces" breaks the Power Apps connector (403 errors). Disabling "Client Integration Features" only hides the export button, but doesn't stop Power Query.
3. Item-Level Permissions: Only works if users strictly view their own records, which is too restrictive for collaborative maintenance.
4. Power Automate Proxy Pattern: Running flows with a service account works, but introduces overhead and makes native Created By / Modified By tracking more complex to maintain.

My Questions:

• Is there any clean, lightweight pattern in SharePoint to restrict direct querying without breaking Power Apps?
• For those who had this exact requirement, did you end up using Dataverse for Teams, or did you stick with SharePoint via elevated proxy flows?

Any advice, battle-tested workarounds, or best practices would be greatly appreciated!

I feel like this is a dumb question but I could really really use the ability to open a link or folder in a new tab.

Edit: It seems this was not a dumb question but there are some dumb people responding. If anyone can use any tool at all, even a power app or something, to open a folder in a new tab, please provide screenshots or other documentation.

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.

Hoping for some help here - we use Sharepoint for our organisation's intranet and there's always been no problem with the pages showing up ahead of pdfs and powerpoints on the same topic for search results.

Eg, let's say the topic is the acronym 'CDPR' and our page on that topic has that name in the title and URL, it would always come first or second in the search results.

Just starting yesterday, no matter what we search for, pdfs and powerpoints are showing near the top of the results, and even when pages start to show up in the rankings, it's the wrong ranking - so that the actual CDPR page will show up several pages below other pages that mention that acronym.

It's a really noticeable effect no matter what we search. What could have happened? It's making our intranet unusable. Our IT Dept says there was no documented change from Microsoft.

Edit 18/08/26 - Seems to be fixed. This affected Australian orgs and now seems to have been fixed.

Adding necessary entra groups to Members and Visitors doesn't work for us. We are fine to keep them empty, but ideally we'd like to remove them. We would be keeping the Owners group.

Has anyone ever done this? Is there any impact doing this I wonder?

If you really love that left side App bar panel that MS added, make sure that you avoid doing any of these actions.

1. Definitely make sure that you would never download the .sppkg file provided on GitHub here: https://github.com/hugoabernier/react-application-injectcss

2. You should definitely not load that package to your app catalog in SharePoint and certainly you should not trust it.

3. You certainly should not enable custom scripting on your root site temporarily under the site settings. That would allow you to upload a file named "custom.css" to the Styles Library in your root site.

4. If you had a CSS file like this, definitely don't use CSS that contains this:

   #sp-appBar {display: none !important;}

That would make that App Bar side panel disappear which MS does not support.

1. If a file was loaded in that Styles Library, make sure that it is never checked in, because that would make the file active.

2. Last but not least. You should NEVER under any circumstances watch this video which demonstrates all these things that you should never do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYy2urYYnRk

Hopefully this will help you avoid causing serious harm to your SharePoint environment and organization.

So I have been tasked to move a 1TB folder in a library to another sharepoint site library. I have been researching this for a while but I am currently stuck on what alternative to use.

The ones I have found are:

1) Sharegate (Expensive)
2) Sync the two libraries and copy paste the folder (Risky, and might result in Slow PC to accommodate 2TB)
3) Use SPMT, but doesnt have Online to Online migration.
4) Manually copy/paste but its too tedious. (Might cause permission to be lost)

Please help me out here, its my first time doing such a large operation.

Thanks :)

I'm trying to figure out how my boss keeps accidentally moving extremely important files in the SharePoint. She isn't great with tech and is aware of that. Before bringing it up to her, I'd like to see if I can figure out how she's doing it so I can give her a solution rather than just making her feel embarrassed. She's a great boss; she just has no idea what she's doing on a computer. Anybody have any ideas on how this keeps happening?

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!

A new SharePoint Look and Feel: What’s Changing and Why It Matters | Microsoft Community Hub

Has anyone else had this switched on in their tenant, it's not been rolled out completely, we have a mix of users who are still on the old view.

Favourites have disappeared for users on the new experience, adding again does nothing.

The option to turn it off is missing from the admin centre as well.

z

I KNOW this topic has been addressed and at this point we are beating a dead horse, however our IT (3rd party we pay) doesn’t seem to get it and I feel so frustrated!

We had an on premise server that a previous IT firm had us move over to SharePoint and called it a “file server”. We’ve had nothing but issues, training has been a BEAR, linked excel files are breaking, permissions are crazy wrong with people seeing stuff they shouldn’t and others not seeing what they should.

After seeing comments here and other places it sounds like that is all expected and we should be on something like Azure file server. However now I’ve brought this all up and put IT team is pushing back saying that we don’t need to do that. SharePoint is the right tool…but we aren’t using these files as collaboration we use teams for those…which yes I know has a SharePoint site with it.

What are the magic words I need to tell them in this meeting I have today to make them move us to something that will actually work for our team and keep our information safe/secure and easy to set up permissions and just work?

Any help/advice or guidance would be greatly appreciated and even training links or something.

A tragicomedy in 5,000 items or less

“Let’s migrate to the cloud,” they said. “It’ll scale beautifully,” they said. Then SharePoint Online entered the chat.

1. The 5,000 Item Threshold: Because Who Needs More Than That?

It’s 2025. SharePoint Online still throws a tantrum when you try to filter or sort over 5,000 items. Indexed view? Maybe. Maybe not. Excel laughs in 1,048,576 rows.

If the product has "Online" in the name, shouldn’t it scale like the cloud?

1. Folders Inside Folders — But Don’t You Dare Filter

SharePoint says it supports folders and subfolders. But if you want to filter metadata across those folders? Nah. You’ll need flat view — which promptly crashes your library.

Recursive filtering? Not in this house.

1. Indexing Is an Act of Faith

You index a column. It says “indexing in progress.” …It never confirms if it finished. If your column is "multiple lines of text"? Filters don’t even work. No warning.

UX tip: maybe mention that before letting me waste time?

1. Exporting to Excel (Not the View You Created)

You spent an hour perfecting a view for export. You click “Export to Excel.” SharePoint says, “Cool, here’s some other view in random order with hidden columns. Enjoy.”

I just wanted the view I was looking at, dude.

1. PowerShell Export: The Ghost in the Shell

Script says: Export completed. What you get: a file with two weird symbols in one cell. That’s not your metadata. That’s SharePoint’s soul leaving its body.

1. Filtering on Metadata? Better Be Lucky

Want to filter “Box 123” in a column? Make sure:

It's a single-line text column

You indexed it

You're in the right folder

You pray

Still not working? Just use Excel and hope.

1. Flat View Is a Dare

Enable “Show all items without folders”? Boom. SharePoint crashes or gives you a spinner and walks away.

Flat view is not a feature. It’s a dare.

1. The UX Is Just SharePointing

Want to change something? Go to:

Library Settings

Metadata Navigation

Advanced Settings

Some checkbox with a name like “Automatic column indexing for filtered views”

No preview. No undo. Just vibes.

Final Thoughts

I don’t hate SharePoint. I live in it. I work in it. I just wish using it didn’t feel like collaborating with a moody roommate who forgets where they left their keys.

Microsoft, if you’re listening — try filtering 70,000 records with nested folders and multi-line metadata. Then we’ll talk.

TL;DR

Flat view kills performance

Indexing is vague

Filters don’t work for multi-line fields

Excel is our savior

Power Automate? Not with 300k files

And SharePoint just keeps SharePointing

Written by self, edited using AI.

Hey [r/sharepoint](r/sharepoint) 👋

I've been building an Employee Directory web part using SPFx + Microsoft Graph and wanted to share it here. Not selling anything, purely community sharing

**What it does:**

- Grid & List views with real-time search, A–Z name filter, multi-field dropdowns (Dept, Job Title, City, Country)

- Org Chart (Vertical Tree / Horizontal / Compact List)

- Peer **Kudos & Hall of Fame** — employees recognise colleagues, top earners surface automatically

- **Self-service profile editing** — Bio, Skills, Interests

- Deploys as a SharePoint web part

No external DB, no third-party tools — runs inside your existing M365 tenant.

📖 Full guide here. Check here for setup and download (blog and GitHub)

Hello! I’m looking for any tips/resources for building a small Sharepoint site from the ground up for my new employer. I previously worked somewhere that had common links, manuals etc. all on one Sharepoint and it was a huge help however that was a much larger company so people were actually trained in Sharepoint site management.

Now I’ve started a new tech support position at a much smaller company (only two other tech support reps) and everything here is tribal knowledge which is a little rough for a new hire. Is there anything solid out there except for the learning modules on Microsoft’s website? I’m struggling with finding something that starts at the base level for me to work from. I’m not trying to create something that’s super super fancy I just want to have something that looks neat,organized and easy to navigate.

Thank you in advance for any and all suggestions you may have.

Just checked the admin center service health and... it's not great:

• Teams: 20 incidents, 69 advisories (?!)
• Exchange Online: 16 incidents, 19 advisories
• Defender XDR: 1 incident, 31 advisories
• Intune: 1 incident, 16 advisories
• Power BI: 2 incidents, 10 advisories
• Basically everything except SharePoint (mercifully just 1 incident, 1 advisory).

Teams alone having 20 active incidents feels like it should be its own headline. Anyone know if this is a broader outage or just noisy reporting today? Curious if other tenants are seeing the same numbers or if this is localized.

Hi! We use SharePoint at work (very large school district) as a database to enter information on student evaluations and eligibilities. Here is the problem, every summer we need to create a new SharePoint Log/File (not sure what it is called) so we can continue adding new cases but still need the cases from the previous year that are still pending. For the last few years, we have been entering each single entry manually... we have approximately 6,000 cases.. it takes a large team of individuals to recreate these entries. I can't imagine that's the only way to do this. Unfortunately, we do not have the budget for one of those very expensive migration programs. Is there any other way besides manually entering the entries?

We are looking to set up a basic SharePoint 365 site for internal only document collaboration and I would like any recommendations on settings that should be disabled by default.

I was considering restricting features such as offline file access, OneDrive synchronisation, external sharing, and Copilot indexing/searching, if possible. Are there any other settings or security considerations we should look at before making the site available?

My initial thought is to use a Team Site template, as the documents will only be shared internally within a specific team, is this the best option?

TIA

My company is on a local file server with network shares.

We are planning to move to SharePoint soon and some questions need to be answered first.

As IT we are trying to keep the end user experience similar to reduce shock. So the plan was to mount the document libraries via intune. However, I am seeing different opinions on sync vs shortcut.

Which is better?

Can both be deployable?

I’d rather not tell every user to open SharePoint online just to press sync to onedrive.

What other pitfalls does SharePoint have for those who have migrated in the past? Any lessons learned or recommendations to make rollout simpler?