Often times I get asked how to provision a document library in SharePoint Online to expose the Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote icons in the document library ribbon to allow users to fire up one of those document types right from within the document library.

There is two approaches – one of which is code free, one of which requires a sandboxed solution.

Approach #1

In approach #1 (the code-free approach) you create content types for each of the document templates and then add the document templates to the "New Document" button in a document library and save the document library as a template. I wont dive deeper into this approach here, since you can read the step-by-step guidance on how to do the above here.

Approach #2

In approach #2 you build a sandboxed solution in Visual Studio to add buttons to the "New" group of the "Documents" ribbon, and deploy it to a site collection as a .wsp application package.

I’m not providing the code here, but at the end of this article I’ve provided a link to the SharePoint Online Developer Course (online) in which you can learn the principles behind the solution, and a link to the Fabrikam Site Collection (accessible for Microsoft Partners) in which you can find the solution (wsp) shown below and implement it in your own customer engagements if so desired.

How to

If you download the wsp solution (or develop one yourself) this is how you put it to work

1. Open the solution gallery of the site collection ("Site Actions" > "Site Settings" > "Solutions")

2. Click "Upload Solution"...

... browse your way to the *.wsp file and click OK…

..click "Activate"

...and the solution is in the Solution Gallery

3. Once the solution is uploaded and activated, you can go to the site level features ("Site Actions" > "Site Settings" > "Manage Site Features")...

...and click "Activate" to activate the feature. The icons will now show up in existing and new document libraries in the site, but not other sites within the site collection

Using the solution

Create a new document library ("Site Actions" > "New Document Library")

The new document library has the four Office icons (buttons) in the "New" group of the "Documents" ribbon

To create e.g a PowerPoint presentation, you just click the PowerPoint button (the new presentation will open in PowerPoint Web App even if you have Office installed on your PC)

Provide a name for the presentation

Modify the presentation

When you close the presentation its automatically saved to the document library

Note

• The solution show above essentially derives its list of files from the New Document method and any content types associated to that specific doc library
• There are four blank default templates (one per Office Type), and then any you add will appear under the respective file type.
  

 Links

• Developing for SharePoint Online with Sandbox Solutions - link (Developer Course on MSDN, see the Exercise 2 - Customizing the Ribbon)
• Add multiple Office templates to a document library - link
• Fabrikam Site Collection - link - if you install this demo site collection you can download the wsp shown above from the solution gallery and implement it in your own solutions

To list the user profiles of all SharePoint Online users in your tenant you can follow these steps

1. Navigate to the User Profiles tab in the SharePoint Administration Center and click Manage User Profiles
   
   
    
   
   
2. In the "Find profiles" text box type i:0#.f|membership
   
   
   
   
   
3. Click the Find button to see the list of all user profiles
   
   
   

Note

• Currently there is no way to list external users (PALs)
• In case you wonder - the "f" in the search string means we are using forms based authentication

In case you missed TechEd 2012 North America last week - or had to prioritize sessions - here is a list of some of the recorded Office 365 sessions I'd recommend. Just click the link to see a streamed recording of the session and/or download the recording and the slides (may not be available for all sessions) if you prefer.

The first six recordings are on the (general) topics of overview, management, migration, identity a.s.o whereas the last four are focusing on SharePoint Online. Especially the last two comes highly recommended if you are looking for patterns of integrating SharePoint Online with Azure and/or On-Premises systems (e.g. your CRM application or your ERP application)

Introduction to the service plans

• Microsoft Office 365 for Enterprises
• Empowering Small Businesses: Microsoft Office 365 P-Suite
• Microsoft Office 365 for Education

Security, Privacy and Trust

• Microsoft Office 365 Security, Privacy, and Trust

Management, Migration and Deployment

• Microsoft Office 365 Management and Deployment
• To the Cloud, from the Trenches: Best Practices for Migrating to Microsoft Office 365

Identity

• Active Directory Integration with Microsoft Office 365

Hybrid

• Configuring Hybrid Exchange the Easy Way
• Building Microsoft SharePoint Online Applications in a Hybrid World

Search

• Making the Most of Search in Microsoft SharePoint Online

Development

• Building Integrated Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint Online, and Office Solutions Using BCS and LOB Data
• Why Microsoft SharePoint and Windows Azure are Just Plain Better Together

See also

• More TechEd recordings on Channel 9

SharePoint workflows are pre-programmed mini-applications that streamline and automate a wide variety of business processes — from collecting signatures, feedback, or approvals for a plan or document, to tracking the current status of a routine procedure.  

Built-in workflows

The following five workflows are pre-programmed (built-in) in SharePoint Online for Enterprises.

1. Approval (route a document or item for approval or rejection). An Approval workflow routes a document or other item to designated people for their approval or rejection. You can also use an Approval workflow to control content approval in a list or library. 
2. Collect Feedback (route a document or item for feedback) A Collect Feedback workflow routes a document or other item to designated people for their feedback. The Collect Feedback workflow consolidates all of the feedback from participants for the workflow owner and provides a record of the review process.
3. Collect Signatures (route a document, workbook, or form for digital signatures). The Collect Signatures workflow routes a Microsoft Office document to designated people for their digital signatures. Please note that the Collect Signatures workflow functions only with Word documents, Excel workbooks, and InfoPath forms.
4. Disposition Approval (manage document expiration and retention). The Disposition Approval workflow is designed to support records management needs within an organization. This workflow manages the document expiration and retention process by allowing participants to decide whether to retain or delete expired documents or items. When a Disposition Approval workflow starts, it creates Disposition Approval workflow tasks for specific documents and items in the tasks list for the workflow. Because it is likely that the Disposition Approval workflow may generate a high volume of tasks (especially if it is configured to start automatically when items expire), The Disposition Approval workflow offers support for bulk task completion, so that records managers or other authorized individuals can process a large number of items for deletion in a single step. You can configure your Disposition Approval workflow to operate in collaboration with the Expiration policy feature of an information management policy, so that the workflow starts automatically each time a document or item on a site expires. 
5. Three-State (track an issue, project, or task through three states or phases). The Three-state workflow is designed to track the status of a list item through three states (phases). It can be used to manage business processes that require organizations to track a high volume of issues or items — customer support issues, sales leads, or project tasks, for example. With each transition between states, the workflow assigns a task to a person and sends that person an e-mail alert about the task. When this task is completed, the workflow updates the status of the item and progresses to the next state. The Three-state workflow is designed to work with the Issue Tracking list template, but it can be used with any list that contains a Choice column that has three or more values.

Customize workflows using SharePoint Designer

If you need more flexibility with a built-in workflow, you can customize it further with a tool like SharePoint Designer (SPD). You can also create your own original workflow from scratch. Using the Workflow Designer, you create rules that associate conditions and actions with items in SharePoint lists and libraries. Changes to items in lists or libraries trigger actions in the workflow. Read more in the article "Workflow actions in SharePoint Designer 2010: A quick reference guide" - link

Comparing workflows in the E plans and the P1 plan

Workflows are supported in the P1 plan (Office 365 for professionals and small businesses) as well. Some differences exists when comparing workflows to the E plans to the P1 plan:

• Only one workflow is built-in to the P1 plan; the Three State workflow.
• P1 subscribers can build and extend workflows in SPD - but the following workflow actions are not supported: Start Document Set Approval Process, Capture a Version of a Document Set, Send Document Set to Repository, Set Content Approval Status of the Document Set, Start Approval Process, Start Feedback Process, Start Custom Task Process, Declare Record, Undeclare Record, Lookup Manager of a User, End Task Process, Set Content Approval Status (as author), Wait for Change in Task Process Item, Set Task Field, Rescind Task, Append Task, Delegate Task, Escalate Task, Forward Task, Insert Task, Reassign Task, Request a Change, Send Task Email (source)

See also

• About the workflows included with SharePoint - link
• Build Workflow Solutions for SharePoint Online - link

When you sign up for an Office 365 account, you automatically become an Office 365 global administrator and a SharePoint Online Administrator. This global administrator is added to the team site that is automatically created for you during your Office 365 account setup (for example, https://yourcompany.sharepoint.com), and is assigned the site collection administrator role.

One very important point to make here – and this is one of the most common questions on the communities – is that you cannot separate the roles of Office 365 global administrator and SharePoint Online Administrator.

In other words – you being the the Office 365 global administrator (aka the Tenant Admin) cannot redelegate the role of SharePoint Online Administrator  (aka SPO Admin) to another person. What you being the SPO Admin in an E plan *can* do delegation wise, is to delegate the admin rights for a site collection to another person besides yourself. This person in turn can delegate admin rights to sites in the site collection to other persons. But the Tenant Admin cannot delegate the SPO Admin role to someone else.

A site collection is the root of permissions for all the sites (known as subsites) underneath it.

Site collection administrators have permissions to manage SharePoint Online at the site collection level (or top level) of a SharePoint Online site, meaning that their permissions extend to all the content in the site collection that they administer. Also, those permissions are inherited down through all the subsites underneath the site collection, by default. This means changes that site collection administrators make at http://www.contoso.com/ are inherited in subsites like http://www.contoso.com/InformationTechnology.

It’s important to note that a new site collection is its own permissions root. For example, a new top-level site collection created at http://www.contoso.com/sites/Marketplace does not have the same permissions as http://www.contoso.com/.

For more info see the wiki post Permissions in Office 365 FAQ

See also

• SharePoint Permissions: A More Detailed Look

The Office Web App Service Description lists a max file size of 10 MB for Excel Web App.

If you ever tried to upload an Excel workbook to SharePoint Online, even if the file size is smaller than 10 MB you might have encountered the error “Your session has exceeded its limits and has been closed“. Perhaps you've even tried to upload the file to SharePoint Server and not gotten the error?

So what is going on with Excel Web App on SharePoint Online?

Before I explain let me illustrate the above

I have an Excel file with a Pivot Table sitting on my disk. On disk the file takes up less than 6 MB

Now if I open Excel without opening any files, I see that the Excel application itself takes up around 34 MB of memory on my PC...

...then if I open the Excel file, I see that Excel with the opened file now takes up around 232 MB of memory on my PC - in other words, the file itself takes up around 200 MB of memory.

If I then create a site collection on SharePoint Online and provision it with plenty of resources...

...upload the Excel file to a document library and try to view it in a browser

... I get the below error the moment I try to filter the Pivot Table

File Size vs Memory

To understand why this error is thrown, we need to distinguish between file size and memory size. Even if an Excel workbook (file) is listed as e.g 5 MB file size in Windows Explorer it might be consuming a lot of memory when opened in Excel, e.g. due to pivot tables in it.

On SharePoint Online we currently limit the users to 75 MB of memory. The session memory setting applies only to Excel.

In the above example the file consumes close to 200 MB of memory due to the pivot table, and Excel throws the error. This error has nothing to do with the size of the file but with the amount of memory the file consumes when a user opens it.

For the file to work on SharePoint Online you will need to reduce the size of the memory footprint by removing some of the elements in the file.

See also

• Getting Started with Excel Services and Excel Web Access
• Differences between using a workbook in the browser and in Excel

Say you require your SharePoint Online users to enter information about the intended audience for the document they are about to upload to a document library. If you leave it up to the user to come up with a term for audience of the document, you might end up with a bunch of documents intended for the same audience, but tagged with diffent terms, e.g. “CEO”, “Chief Exec Officer”, “Chief Executive Officer” a.s.o

Obviously having different terms in this scenario makes it difficult to categorize and discover your documents afterwards. You risk not finding a document just because a user tagged it with something you didn’t expect.

SharePoint Online out-of-the-box metadata management capabilities

As a content management system, SharePoint Online provides great out-of-the-box metadata management capabilities through the

• Term Store
• Managed Metadata column type
• Document Center site collection template

If your organization uses taxonomy to organize data, you can simply use what terms you have already by importing your custom taxonomy into the Term Store. The metadata can be applied to e.g. a document library through the “Managed Metadata” column type, letting users choose the correct term in a consistent manner.  The document library can reside in a Document Center, complete with hierarchical navigation providing easy navigation and filtering of your documents.

Example

To start helping yourself with managed metadata follow these simple steps:

1. Import a term set to the Term Store
2. Create a site collection based on the Document Center template
   - In the Document Center, customize the document library:
3. Add Hierarchical Navigation
4. Add Managed Metadata Column and (Optional) Hide unneeded columns

1. Import a term set to the Term Store

The Term Store for SharePoint Online is a global directory of common terms that can be used in your organization for tagging and navigation purposes. The idea behind the Term Store is that you want to create consistency in the way data is entered and managed throughout your SharePoint environment.

For this example I've already built a CSV file with a demo Audiences taxonomy (if you would like to follow along you can download the below file here)

Open the SharePoint Online Administration Center and click "Manage Term Store"

Right-click the "Taxonomy" header and click "New Group"

Name the group (e.g. "Audiences"), then right click the new group and click “Import Term Set”

Browse to your CSV file and click OK.

You now have a Term Set called "Audiences".

2. Create a Site Collection based on the Document Center template

Open SharePoint Online Administration Center and click "Site Collections"

Click "New" > "Private Site Collection"

Name the new site collection (e.g. "MyDocumentCenter") and pick the "Document Center" template on the "Enterprise" tab

You now have a Document Center. In the Document Center, click "Documents"

3. Add the Hierarchical Navigation

In the Ribbon click "Library Tools" > "Library" > "Library Settings"

Click "Metadata navigation settings" under "General Settings"

In the "Configure Navigation Hierarchies" sections click "Add" to add "Audiences" to the "Selected Hierarchy Fields"

While still in the Document Library Settings remove the columns you dont want to see in the document library view (optional) and then add a Managed Metadata column

4. Add the Managed Metadata column

Click "Create Column" and choose the "Manage Metadata" column type

Browse to your imported Term Set "Audiences"

You now have a document library with a managed metadata column, and can start adding and tagging documents

To tag a new document

Click "Edit Properties" and type/choose the term for the intended audience

To use the Navigation Hierarchy control

Using the Hierarchical Navigation control to the left of the document library you can now easily discover which hiearchies are available for filtering and e.g. filter your way to the documents tagged with the term "Chief Executive Officers (CEO)" under "Business Decision Makers (BDMs) - Additional"

See also

• Manage the Term Store and managed metadata
• Video: Document Center site template
• Configure metadata navigation for a list or library
• "The number of items in this list exceeds the list view threshold, which is 5000 items" error when you view a SharePoint Online list in Office 365 for enterprises