Microsoft 365 is a suite of products.
These products are identified as workloads,
and we've spent quite a bit of time in this course looking at the
Exchange Online workload. And in my opinion,
it is the key workload in Microsoft 365,
certainly the first workload that was introduced as part of the
product when it was first released.
But there are other products as well that are quite noteworthy
that we need to look at.
And the first we'll look at is SharePoint Online.
So all of the workloads are accessible through the admin
centers that are available on the left-hand side in the Microsoft
365 admin center.
And I'm going to go down my list and go to SharePoint.
And when I click on "SharePoint", I am opening up the SharePoint
admin center.
The SharePoint admin center has a URL that is customized
for my organization, and that is blurred out for
you on your screen.
But essentially, the prefix before SharePoint.com is a name that you
defined when you first create your first site in SharePoint Online.
So here I am in the SharePoint admin center and in SharePoint I
will be creating what we call SharePoint sites. Now SharePoint
and OneDrive,
which are two technologies used to store and share files,
have sort of been consolidated for the purpose of terminology within
the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
And when you store files in SharePoint,
you can access them using your OneDrive client.
So the client for SharePoint is OneDrive
or, of course, we also have the web client.
There's also a SharePoint mobile app that you can use.
There's different ways of accessing the files,
and you can access your files in SharePoint through custom
applications that you would build out.
And those applications can utilize metadata that's assigned to files
to be able to localize and expose files as necessary.
So first, let's take a look at this navigation in the SharePoint
admin center.
First, I have my sites here.
When I click on "Active sites", I see all the sites that exist
in my SharePoint tenant, and the various sites are
organized with URLs.
They have a site name, a URL, some of them Team-associated,
which means they are associated with Microsoft Teams.
I see the amount of storage that are being used,
as well as who the owners of these are.
I can create sites as well, which I will do in a later
video in this course.
But before I go through this, I want to take you back to the
homepage where I have my dashboard,
and here I gain additional information about my sites through
these great little dashboard cards.
You can add cards, by the way, by clicking on the
"Add cards" button.
And these are very useful ways of exposing the information
that you have.
For example, here under my SharePoint file activity,
I see that I have 99,000 SharePoint files, and it shows
which files are shared internally, which files are synced,
which files have been viewed and edited over the last week.
If I go down here, I'll show you that I have
also seven percent of my sites are actually active,
which is an interesting number.
It's a good way of seeing how much of SharePoint is actually being
utilized. As well here, that I have only two percent of my storage
that is being used, about 50GB of data that is
being stored in SharePoint.
And you see here that I have a total of 2.1TB that is
available to me, and so I'm only using about two percent
of my available storage.
So that's another interesting point as well.
Here I have some messages from Microsoft about service updates
and various updates to the environment.
Something else interesting here is I have my active users
in Microsoft 365, and I can look to see how many of
my users are active in SharePoint versus active in other
applications.
My most used application is Exchange,
and SharePoint is a bit less than that, with Teams landing somewhere
in the middle.
So it's a good way to see which workloads are used more often by
your users in your environment.
Again, there are many cards that you can add in your dashboard to
see different sets of data and expose the data to allow you to
make business decisions based on that data.
Something else I can do here from this navigation is specifying some
policies around sharing.
How can my users share their content?
Are they allowed to share only to internal users,
to external users?
Who can those external users be?
I can see also how they can create links to specific files
or folders,
and who will be able to gain access to those files and folders
if they are provided with the link.
So there's a lot of control that I can set to how my users
share data externally,
share my internal
files.
If your files need to be very secure,
and if your files contain confidential data,
you may want to change these sharing settings to more
restrictive settings.
And you can see that you have a scale here for more or less permissive.
As well,
under access control, we can specify the access to
SharePoint files and how we can limit that.
A good example of that is network location,
where you can actually specify if only a specific range of IP
addresses are allowed to access your SharePoint data.
By default, we do not restrict to only a specific range
of IP address,
but that would be a great way to segment an intranet,
an internal network, and specify that only users that
are physically located on your internal network are allowed
to access your files
in SharePoint. Organizations that are dealing with more
secure content,
government organizations as well usually use these types of
settings to restrict users to access their data only when they
are physically on the network.
There are a number of other settings also to configure the
various SharePoint sites, pages, and limits around
all of those, and they're all available through
this settings page
here.
There are several courses that deal strictly with SharePoint that
will allow you to dig in to a lot of those options.
You'll notice that my OneDrive settings are here below.
As I mentioned before, the two services are managed
pretty interchangeably. As well,
you have some great reporting available to you from the
SharePoint admin center that will allow you to generate reports and
see how your data is being used,
and who's accessing and managing your data in the SharePoint
admin center.
So SharePoint; Microsoft 365 workload that is used to manage,
store, and share files within your Microsoft 365 infrastructure.