You missed a trick: instant user-benefits!

#SharePoint, #Office 356, #Office

Author: Jonathan Stuckey

A missed opportunity with SharePoint and Office 365 desktop apps was introduction of "Organisation wide asset libraries".

While most of us dealing with Content Publishing were aware we could finally have a centralised model for publishing Corporate digital assets (stock imagery, iconography, logos etc), which you get when you add an image to SharePoint page, or as a thumbnail in tool:

Not many have cottoned-on to the fact that we have exactly the same facility for document templates.

By labelling the library for our approved templates in the same controlled (resource) site, we can make magic happen and everybody's lives easier…

By bringing in organisation templates to our desktop apps*

* even coming to the webapps in near future too!

Now, yes you do need someone to drive PowerShell, and they need to have a SharePoint Admin access role for about 10 minutes, and yes - your documents do need to be in the Office template format in order to show-up in the picker-view in Word (or Excel, PowerPoint...) - but this is minimal overhead for a massive deployment and adoption enabler

Steps

Business decision required:

1. Where are you going to store these items? (name of a site)

e.g. https://<your_org>.sharepoint.com/sites/resources

2. Create libraries on the site which relate to items being presented to users

e.g. Digital assets: Images, Photography, Icons, Logos etc

e.g. Office templates: Templates and forms

3. A techie is needed here…

• Launch PowerShell on desktop

• Connect to your Office 365, tenancy with SharePoint Admin credentials

PS C:\> connect-sposervice

• Run PowerShell to specify Organisation Asset site and Office Template library

PS C:\> Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary -LibraryURL https://org.sharepoint.com/sites/branding/OfficeTemplates -OrgAssetType OfficeTemplateLibrary

note: this one sets up the site for the first-time if you've not already got images published this way

• Run PowerShell to set additional libraries for use as Digital Asset store

PS C:\> Set-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary -LibraryURL sites/branding/DigitalAssets -OrgAssetType ImageDocumentLibrary

The money-shot

Go talk to your users!

Reference

Set-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary (SharePointOnlinePowerShell) | Microsoft Docs

Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary (SharePointOnlinePowerShell) | Microsoft Docs

If you want to talk about enabling your business to get more from Office 365 and SharePoint Online, drop us a line: hi@timewespoke.com