SharePoint Stuff

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OneDrive

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🚂 ROLLING OUT

Microsoft Stream: Add chapters to help viewers find the right part of a video – Users with edit access to a video uploaded to SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Yammer can now add chapters to help viewers identify information in the video. For each chapter you can specify a point in time in the video and title of that chapter which will show up in the table of contents side pane for the video as well as on the video timeline. Roadmap ID: 88525

⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT

Release – July 2022

OneDrive: Sync app- Automatic Account Configuration – The OneDrive sync app will automatically sign in if there are existing credentials available to Microsoft applications (Teams, Office, Edge, Windows). Roadmap ID: 93242

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How to convert SharePoint pages into PDF files

June 15, 2022May 24, 2022AnthonyLeave a comment

In this post we step through how you can use Power Automate to convert modern SharePoint pages into PDF files and save them to a document library.

Intro

Recently I got asked to come up with a way to turn SharePoint pages into PDF files for use in an offline scenario. The converted SharePoint pages didn’t need to be formatted as it was only the body content of a SharePoint page that was needed. Also part of the brief was that when the SharePoint page is updated, the corresponding PDF file also updates.

There are several posts online that cover very topic this that I’ll reference at the end, but they didn’t quite do exactly what I wanted – so here’s my take on how to convert SharePoint pages into PDF files!

What you’ll need

A modern SharePoint site pages library (these come with every SharePoint site!)
A OneDrive location to temporarily store the SharePoint page outputs
Power Automate to build the automation
A document library to store the output PDF files

A note on the site pages library

In my example I didn’t want all the site pages to be converted into PDF files, so I added a choice column to ‘tag’ all the pages that should be converted. I set the default value of the choice column to be ‘Site Page’, so that the only pages that get converted are the ones I’m interested in. This is reflected in the flow below with the condition step.

*Add a choice column to ‘tag’ the pages you wish to convert to PDF.*

Building the flow

The trigger action for our flow is when a file is created or modified (properties only). This allows us to re-run the flow when SharePoint pages are updated to also update the PDF files.

Select the site you are using to create the SharePoint pages in site address (If you don’t see it listed just press enter custom value and paste the URL in)
Select the Site Pages library under library name

Next, I’ve added a condition to only convert pages that have been tagged ‘Runbook’ to PDF.

*Condition: if Document type value is equal to ‘Runbook’.*

Note: make sure you select the Value dynamic content for your choice column, rather than the choice column itself as that will break your flow.

If yes, next is a send an HTTP request to SharePoint step. Here I’m using a REST API call to get the body content of the SharePoint page.

*Use a send an HTTP request to SharePoint step to get the body content of your page.*

Set the site address to the site in question
Set method to GET
Enter the following in Uri:_api/web/lists/GetByTitle('Site%20Pages')/items('ID')/CanvasContent1
Replace ‘ID’ with the dynamic content ID from the when a file is created or modified step

Note: The output of this step generates some additional stuff you probably won’t want in your PDF like this:

 "d": { "CanvasContent1": "}}

I used the parse JSON step to remove the unwanted mark up and just get the plain text from the body content.

I added the body dynamic content from the send an HTTP request to SharePoint step in the content field in the parse JSON step
I copied the the output body from send an HTTP request to SharePoint of a successful run in flow history and pasted it into the parse JSON step

*Output body from send an HTTP request to SharePoint to paste into the parse JSON step from a successful flow run.*

I then pressed generate from sample, which output the following:

{
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
        "d": {
            "type": "object",
            "properties": {
                "CanvasContent1": {
                    "type": "string"
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

*Parse JSON step with generated schema.*

From this I then used a create file action to create a temporary HTML file in OneDrive (more on this later), with the following config:

Folder path: / (root of the OneDrive account)
File name: Name from when a file is created or modified step
File content: CanvasContent1 from the parse JSON step

*Create file action to create temporary HTML page in OneDrive.*

Next, a convert file step to convert the HTML page into a PDF file:

File: ID from the create file step
Target type: PDF

Now we can use a create file action to create a PDF in our output document library in SharePoint:

Set the site address to the site you want to store the PDF files in
Set the folder path to the document library, or navigate to the relevant folder within that library
Set file name to file name from the convert file step
Set file content to file content from the convert file step

*The create file action creates the PDF file in the destination document library.*

I then used an update file properties action to pass metadata from the site pages library to the destination document library – this step is optional. Finally, a delete file action to delete the temporary HTML file from the OneDrive we created earlier:

*Delete file action to remove the temporary HTML file.*

Here’s the flow in it’s entirety:

Issues & troubleshooting

Formatting issues with the send an HTTP request to SharePoint

As mentioned above, when just using the send an HTTP request to SharePoint action, the output contains mark up that isn’t going to make sense within the PDF. The parse JSON action cleans this up and just leaves the body content of the page.

Create file action creates corrupt PDF files

When testing this flow out I originally didn’t have the convert file action in place. In the file name I added ‘.PDF’, but every time the output PDF was corrupt and errored like this when trying to open:

The flow also failed on this step and the error said that “Conversion of this file to PDF is not supported. (InputFormatNotSupported / pdf)”. I decided to scrap this approach and create a HTML page and add in the convert file action which worked around this issue.

Overwriting existing PDF files causes flow to fail

During testing of this flow I also noticed that when triggering the flow based off updating a site page, the create file create file action would error with a status 400 error saying “A file with the name [file name] already exists”.

I’ve wrote a separate post on how to overwrite files using the create file action, but basically the answer was to turn off chunking within the actions settings.

References

Microsoft 365 roadmap roundup – 13th June 2022

June 11, 2022AnthonyLeave a comment

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OneDrive

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OneDrive: Easily navigate to all your Teams files from OneDrive – In OneDrive, we are adding a “Your Teams” section to the “More Places” page to allow you to easily find and work with all your files in Teams. Roadmap ID: 88912
OneDrive: Quick Access – pin and reorder shared libraries – Improved ways to manage the list of places you’ve recently accessed or opened a file from. You can pin these places so you can easily and predictably get back to what you’ve been working on. Roadmap ID:82165

🚂 ROLLING OUT

OneDrive: Rename Add to OneDrive shortcuts – We’ve added the ability to rename shortcuts you’ve added using the “Add to OneDrive” feature within OneDrive web. Roadmap ID: 93279

⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT

N/A

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Microsoft 365 roadmap roundup – 6th June 2022

June 6, 2022AnthonyLeave a comment

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How to change the expiration time for meeting recordings in Microsoft Teams

June 2, 2022May 24, 2022Anthony1 Comment

In this post we detail how to change the default expiration time for meeting recordings in Microsoft Teams.

In this post:

Intro
Where to find the meeting expiration settings
How to update the default expiration time
Additional information

Intro

Microsoft introduced a meeting recording auto-expiration feature in Microsoft Teams in January 2022, which eventually became generally available (GA) in March 2022. The auto-expiration feature automatically deletes Microsoft Teams recording files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint after a pre-set period of time.

At the time of the announcement, Microsoft said:

“New recordings will automatically expire 60 days after they are recorded if no action is taken, except for A1 users who will receive a max 30-day default setting. The 60-day default was chosen because, on average across all tenants, 99%+ of meeting recordings are never watched again after 60 days”.
How to Manage Microsoft Teams Meeting Recording Auto-Expiration

The latest Microsoft documentation says that all newly created Teams meeting recordings (TMRs) will have a default expiration of 120 days. This means that by default, all TMRs created after this feature was turned on will be deleted 120 days after their creation date. However, I’ve tested in two different tenants and the 60 day expiration is set as default.

You will know that the auto-expiration feature is enabled by observing a yellow banner appearing underneath all Teams meeting recordings like the below:

*Auto-expiration banner notification in Microsoft Teams.*

Where to find the meeting expiration settings

The easiest way to find the meeting auto-expiration settings is within the Teams admin center. The auto-expiration settings are a part of the recording & transcription settings:

Open the Teams admin center
Navigate to Meetings > Meeting policies
Select the meeting policy in use in your Teams environment (Global) > press edit
Scroll down to recording & transcription

*Auto-expiration settings are accessible via the recording & transcription section of meeting policies in the Teams admin center.*

The recording & transcription settings of meeting policies also has the following features you can control:

Transcription: This setting controls whether captions and transcription features are available during playback of meeting recordings. The person who started the recording needs this setting turned on for these features to work with their recording.
Cloud recording: This setting is a combination of a per-organizer and per-user policy and controls whether the meetings can be recorded.
Meetings automatically expire: This setting controls where you want meetings to expire at all. If enabled, you can then set a number of default days before the meeting recordings expire.
Default expiration time: This setting specifies a a number of default days before meeting recordings expire between 1 and 99999.
Store recordings outside of your country or region: This policy controls whether meeting records can be permanently stored in another country or region. If it’s enabled, the recordings can’t be migrated.

How to update the default expiration time

Follow the steps below to update the default expiration time for meeting recordings:

Open the Teams admin center.
Navigate to Meetings > Meeting policies.
Select the meeting policy in use in your Teams environment (Global) > press edit.
Under recording & transcription > default expiration time > set the default number of days between 1 and 99999.
Press Save.

Update via PowerShell

You can also update the auto-expiration in PowerShell by setting the attribute NewMeetingRecordingExpirationDays. If you use PowerShell, set the attribute to “-1” to never auto-expire, or set it to a specific number of days (min: 1 day, max: 99,999 days). Example PowerShell cmdlet:

Set-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy -Identity Global -NewMeetingRecordingExpirationDays 30

Additional information

Here is some additional information provided by Microsoft regarding how auto-expiration works and what products/ services it affects:

The expiration setting is not a retention setting. For example, setting a 30-day expiration on a file will trigger an auto-deletion 30 days after the file was created, but it will not prevent a different system or user from deleting that file ahead of that schedule.
Any retention/deletion/legal hold policies you have designated in the Compliance center will override this feature. In other words, if there is a conflict between your designated Compliance policy setting and the expiration setting, the compliance policy timeline always wins.
When a recording is deleted due to the expiration setting, the end user will be notified via email. The SharePoint tenant or site admin, or the end user with edit/delete permissions will be able to retrieve the file from the recycle bin for up to 90 days.
The admin does not have the ability to override end-user modification capabilities.
This will not impact any existing meeting recordings created before the feature is deployed. Also, any changes to the default date in the admin console will only apply to newly created meeting recordings after the change is made.
The min number of days that can be set on NewMeetingRecordingExpirationDays is 1 and the maximum is 99,999 (e.g. 273 years) or it can be set to never auto-expire.
This feature does not impact meeting recordings stored in Microsoft Stream (classic Stream) but will affect recordings stored in the new Stream (built on OneDrive and SharePoint).
This feature is only available for Teams meeting recordings created by the Teams service in OneDrive and SharePoint. It is not available for other file types in OneDrive and SharePoint.

Microsoft 365 roadmap roundup – 30th May 2022

May 30, 2022AnthonyLeave a comment