David Mitchell [00:00:01]:
Well, good morning everyone and welcome to From Chaos to Clarity. Hope everyone’s having a good morning. We’re looking today to just open everyone’s eyes a little bit about SharePoint and how you can use it a little bit better. It’s not a Super deep dive. SharePoint is an amazingly massive tool so we’re going to, we’re going to focus on the bits that I think are a little bit important. This is grassroots IT. As you probably know, we’ve been established 20 years and our goal is to help you thrive through proven technology. We don’t, we don’t subscribe to technology that is unproven.

David Mitchell [00:00:52]:
SharePoint’s an example of that. SharePoint’s been around for nearly 20 years now. Highly proven and that’s the sort of tool that we use. I’m David Mitchell, CEO of Grassroots it. I’ve been with Grassroots now for about seven years. Prior to that I have been in small and medium enterprise my whole life and my focus has always been on better use of technology in mid sized organizations. So today’s agenda, we’re going to start with the big picture only briefly, but start with the big picture of Microsoft 365, narrow it down a little bit to SharePoint Online and then the components of SharePoint Online that I think are important for today. So Microsoft 365, that in itself is a massive platform.

David Mitchell [00:01:47]:
Some of the main applications on Microsoft 365 Productivity apps of Outlook, Word, Excel and Teams, collaboration and storage which is SharePoint and OneDrive. For business then we have the security and identity and all of these are really important because they interlink with security and identity. There’s Microsoft Defender and Entra id. We have Device Management with Intune, Business Intelligence with Power BI, PowerApps and Power Automate, Communications and Employee experience with Viva. And for AI we have Microsoft Copilot. Today we’re going to be staying within SharePoint. Now, SharePoint, what is it? A lot of people are a little mystified or can’t really describe what SharePoint is and there’s probably a good reason for that in that unlike a lot of the Microsoft apps, it’s not there just to solve one problem. It’s actually a platform that can be leveraged, as I say here, to implement a multitude of business solutions.

David Mitchell [00:02:59]:
I like to think of it as it just gives users places and tools. That’s it. And although it’s like an onion and has lots of different layers and it’s very complex, it’s. If we could just think about it using Three building blocks. One is sites, one is lists and one is libraries. And another thing to call out is that it does have a really powerful search capability that can be tuned to your organization. And what I mean by tuned is that it can be customized to search in a particular site or for a particular type of information. And it can be security sensitive as well.

David Mitchell [00:03:42]:
So not going to cover too much search, but in today’s but Microsoft search you can look at it on, on YouTube or give us a call and it’s something that’s quite powerful. So starting with SharePoint Online, what are sites? SharePoint is really just a collection of sites. Now in their wisdom Microsoft have called a site a site collection. I call it a SharePoint site. They call it a site collection. So if you are looking at YouTube or any of the help and you see site collections referred to, it’s actually standard sites. So there are a couple of common types in fact 2. One is called a team site.

David Mitchell [00:04:32]:
Now again in their wisdom they’ve called this a team site. It has nothing to do with Microsoft Teams. But this is for your business teams and that’s for collaboration and working in like a project site or a site for HR or a site for finance for example. This is the type of site that you will have quite a few of. They’re the ones that proliferate in your organization. Another type of site that is common is called a communication site. And really this is a one way information flow generally towards employees or towards the users. So it’ll be communicating things like policies, news reports, announcements and strategies.

David Mitchell [00:05:17]:
And usually the business will only have one or two of these. A small business will only have one or two of these. And then there’s special types of sites. One of them is a hub site. And what that does is it brings together a group of sites called associated sites. This is mainly for larger organizations and they would be used for example if an organization had a production facility or a production arm of their business. But they had a number of large geographic instances of that. So you might have the geo.

David Mitchell [00:05:59]:
Each geo have their own site, their own collaborative site, but you have a central corporate hub site for production and that associates that. Those associated sites inherit the look and feel of the hub site. It inherits the navigation, it inherits or gets rolled up all the news feeds and announcements through the sub or associated sites. I don’t see too much of a use for hub sites in small business. We try to keep SharePoint as simple as we can and use it for use it as simply as we can. Without trying to overcomplicate it, the last special type is called a home type. This is actually just a communication site like the one of the common sites. But what it it has a.

David Mitchell [00:06:54]:
It just has a special tag on it. You can only have one in your organization and essentially it is probably going to be your landing page in small and medium sized enterprise. And it does things like defaults search to the entire organization. It again aggregates content from the entire organization and that’s what you can have automatically open in one of your browsers if you like. And then you can link to the rest of your organization like that. Now the other things we’re going to talk about, there’s two other things. One of them is called lists. Now a list is a table like container that stores information, columns and rows.

David Mitchell [00:07:41]:
So it’s a similar concept to Excel spreadsheet or those of you who have seen a database table. It’s like a database table with columns and rows. It contains information. One of the differences is that it. Once a list is created in a SharePoint in a SharePoint site, it doesn’t have to be shared unlike an Excel sheet. For example, if I create an Excel sheet and I want other people to see that I will generally share it unless I put it in a common folder somewhere. But a list can be in a SharePoint site with a navigation link to it and others have access to it. In general terms, the columns actually contain information about the rows.

David Mitchell [00:08:28]:
That’s probably something just to remember there. Now the column types. I’m going to go this and demonstrate this a few times throughout the morning. But these are the common types. Not expecting you to remember them all but you can have the standard type of text, for example but you can also have a choice. So it’s a pre canned choice of a couple of different statuses. For example, just skipping down the link there. There’s a person in Microsoft Identity I mentioned Entra id.

David Mitchell [00:09:01]:
Everyone in using the Microsoft tenant has an identification and that particular column type can utilize that identification. For e.g. who, who modifies a document has yes and no’s, can hyperlink out to different external or internal links and it has location, image, variety of things like that. So here’s an example of how we use a list inside Grassroots. It this is a list of what we call assets but it’s it’s tools that we use. Now this is a part of a quality system that we have there. So we formalize this. But you’ll notice here the rows, each of the rows which are the horizontal Lines, they’re the ones that have the list.

David Mitchell [00:09:59]:
Each of the assets, the columns to the right have information about those assets. So for example, if we look at Datto there, which is third from the bottom, what’s the supplier who supplies Datto? Well we can see there that it’s Kasaya and that’s the third column is a column type called a link and that gives a link out to their, to their website. Then we have status, we have classification. So these are important because we can actually track information about each of the assets on there. You’re not seeing all of the columns there. There’s quite a number of columns in this particular list. Like people for example. I will note here though that under supplier list there we’ve used the text field.

David Mitchell [00:10:56]:
Now what that shows me here is just out a bit of interest is that the supplier called Connectwise is actually spelled two different ways. So that’s a little bit of a flaw in our system there. So if we for example had used a selection that we had put in with Connectwise as a part of a selection or a, or a drop down list, then we wouldn’t have made that mistake. So that’s something that we will be able to go in and fix up. Here’s another example of a list. This is one of the Microsoft templates. This is an onboarding employee onboarding list. So basically what this shows you is that the down column A.

David Mitchell [00:11:39]:
It’s the, the things that we need to do to start onboarding a client. This is not our list. This is a templated list has description which is a multi line text. It’s a time to be completed by. That is a choice column. A complete question mark column is a yes no but the yes no can be represented as a tick. The completed on is a ticket, date field or date column. And that is just so we can for example sort by or check when something was done.

David Mitchell [00:12:20]:
Now a document library is the third building block that we’re going to talk about today. This document library really is a list. It’s a list that’s got a few extra things that it can do and it’s all around documents. So it can add edit, view and delete columns or sorry documents. It can have concurrent edits. So multiple users can concurrently edit and they can view each other’s edits in real time on the documents. So just a little bit of detail there. A document library can have virtually unlimited edits, types of documents, you know from PDFs to images to anything in it.

David Mitchell [00:13:08]:
However, the edits are for Microsoft type documents. That’s for example PowerPoints, Excel sheets and Word documents for example. A powerful feature of the SharePoint and the Microsoft Cloud system with of Office Online is the version control. So you can have major and minor versions. You can, you can wind back a version of a particular document. You can look and it’ll show you a list of all the different versions going back sort of on an hourly or on a per save basis and an automated basis. And it can go back a long way. In fact each of those versions is another copy of that document.

David Mitchell [00:14:02]:
So the version settings are something to have a look at in your business because if you’re running out of SharePoint space it possibly is that you’ve got some automated versions happening there, especially if they’re big files that can take up a lot of information. And a little bit of a tip too. If you make a complete mess of a document library you can wind back a copy of the whole document library to a certain time. So you can, you can, you can do that as well. So each documents has metadata. Now you noticed in lists then we call them columns, they are exactly like that in a document library. However we call them metadata. Now it’s I’ll show you next but it is the same, same columns, the same types of columns.

David Mitchell [00:15:01]:
You can use them for you know, approvals. You can have a workflow. We won’t talk about automations today but there are automations based in, in SharePoint as well. You can have reminders which are just dates with actions. You can have descriptions which is a multi line tilt multi line text relevant client could be text could be from a selection different status and relevant dates. So as I said this is metadata and it’s really the same sort of columns that we have in lists. Now here’s an example of a document library if it’s hopefully not too small for people to see. But one of the things you’ll notice there is that on the left hand side is the, is the document itself I suppose or the link to the document and you’ll see an icon there that just describes what sort of document is.

David Mitchell [00:15:57]:
The top one’s actually a copilot agent. We will be touching on copilot agents and how to use those in a future webinar coming up in a few weeks time. So I won’t do that today. But what you can see there for example is the metadata gives us information about the, each of the documents. So we, we use a document ID because you could call these, these are actually policies that we’ve Got here or parts of policies. A document, sorry a naming schema as they call it is a little bit important because otherwise you have, you have different people naming documents, different things, but they make it really hard to actually search by something meaningful. So you know, isms-14752 blah blah blah. I might forget what I did.

David Mitchell [00:16:55]:
So what I called it. So we have a multi text line or a single text line called a name that’s just a description. We also have a version so we can track what version a document is. I talked about version control in, in a previous slide. This is a little bit different. This is when we make an approved change to something, it changes the version. So you know, you’ll see there it’s a 1.3 or a 1.6. It’ll show you when it’s modified.

David Mitchell [00:17:31]:
So some of these were more recently modified, who it was modified by. And in terms of the section there, that’s actually a choice column and that’s nearly like having a folder except it’s in the metadata. So instead of having folder 04 point something, something that’s we just call that a section and where that’s important is we can actually search on that section. The certification, sorry, the classification is more of a security issue. And so that is a wider discussion point in Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft itself, Microsoft 365. But for you, you can have information security based on a classification that just calls out the classification. And we generally classify our information as confidential so it can’t accidentally be shared out of the organization. And for example the next review date, you can guess what that’s for is we can do a search and we can say show me any of the documents that need reviewing in the next two weeks or four weeks and that will give a smaller document that goes on a smaller list, a subset that goes on then to the the agenda for our next document review meeting.

David Mitchell [00:18:57]:
And that’s how we use this particular document library. Now we’re going to move over to a demonstration. Now I am in the lap of the demonstration gods here. A couple of things were broken a little this morning but we’re going to work through it and we are going to show you some things about SharePoint. So I am going to share a different browser now. Bear with me. Okay, so I’m hoping everyone can see the browser. Please Nav or Rachel let me know if the the chat board does light up.

David Mitchell [00:19:40]:
And feel free anyone to please put any questions in the chat. Nav from Grassroots is here to answer some some simple More simple questions. And we will also get back to you for the complex questions because they will take a little bit too much time. Now this is a. What they call a developer. A developer tenant. So really Microsoft has helped. Helped us here for demonstration purposes by by providing a tenant that we can demonstra.

David Mitchell [00:20:09]:
It puts people in the tenant and it does a variety of things that you can’t do with your own tenant for privacy reasons. So we talked about Sites. I’m not going to deal with sites too much, but just to demystify it a little bit. Very simply, if you. I’ve got three sites in here. So this communication site that I mentioned is one that came with the tenant, that will be the home site. And I’ve created these other ones. The way you create a site is literally from the SharePoint page.

David Mitchell [00:20:42]:
Now this is Microsoft 365 and if I click on SharePoint, it goes over to this SharePoint view here. I can go create site. Now, I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I just want to just be clear and demystify the fact that SharePoint is not this great giant that it’s difficult to understand. There’s lots of layers of it, but it’s not too hard to understand if you keep it simple. These are the two different sorts of sites that I highlighted earlier, a team site and a communication site. Team sites where you’re going to live. Communication site is probably a one or two per organization at most. So if I click on team sites very simply, Microsoft again has provided some templates.

David Mitchell [00:21:32]:
I can start with a standard team, which is just a really basic site, which is what I often do. But it’s really handy to actually create a couple of sites from a template to see what Microsoft thinks is a good SharePoint site. So I’m going to not. I’m not going to do that now because it takes a little while to actually provision. But something I did earlier was to use a template and call and I created this project management. In fact, I’ll go to this one here. This is the project management site. Now again, not going to deep dive too much in here, but just to demystify.

David Mitchell [00:22:18]:
This is pretty. It’s not as complex as it looks. So I have a menu over here and I have content here and sometimes I have a menu at the top here. That’s it. So if I want to change anything, I just come over here. As long as you’ve got permissions to change things, come over here to edit. And all of these things are just Called web parts. And the types of web parts are here.

David Mitchell [00:22:49]:
So for example, there’s, if I hover there, you can see that that is a news web part or that is a quick link web part. I don’t like that news web part. I can just click on it and go, Please go. And then it just goes. Now if I go, whoops, I didn’t mean to do that. I can discard changes as well. I can probably even undo. Yeah, but if I had saved it, I can discard changes.

David Mitchell [00:23:19]:
So I can do things like where you see the plus there, I can get rid of a lot of these things. So for example, let’s just get rid of some of these. I get rid of that, get rid of that. And that’s an activity. Get rid of that. Great. So now I’m starting to free things up a bit. I want to put a section in here.

David Mitchell [00:23:35]:
I want to do two columns and then I’m going to add in a text box over there and then I can start putting text in. So it is, it is as simple as that. So you can, you, you really can’t do too many things wrong here. If you muck something up, you can just undo it. There is versioning in here as well. So that’s our, that’s our basic sites. You can create a site and you can edit a site there. The reason why I’m just going to republish these this just so I get use of it again.

David Mitchell [00:24:14]:
So what I didn’t actually do there is to show you how to do a new page. So if you go to the new. If you’re on the homepage here or the basic page if you go to new. This is where we’re going to spend a little bit of time in this webinar with lists and document libraries. Just one more little thing I wanted to show you is you can create a page so you know you can do a training hub. I’m just going to do a training hub. It’ll show you there what’s in the training hub. This is again, all, all of these things are the web parts that they’ve just put together for you.

David Mitchell [00:24:45]:
So I’m going to use this template. It’s going to work on it. Sometimes you’ve got to be patient with SharePoint because it takes a little while to publish and do the things in the back end. I’m going to publish that. So the idea of publishing at a title page. So I’m going to go title, I’m going to cheat there you can see version history Here I’m going to click over there and go publish again and it should let me do it this time. Then it will probably say do you want to add the page to that navigation? Which it did. I can post the news on the side, I can share the page, I can send a link, I can send it to email.

David Mitchell [00:25:28]:
I’m just going to add the page on the navigation. Now what you’ll see over there on the left hand side is navigation. So if I add the page to the navigation, you’ll see over there it’s got the original name of title, which is why it’s probably important to actually be descriptive. But that’s okay. If I do that, what I can do is go and edit that navigation there now. And I can go, I really should have called this something else. I’m going to move that, I’m going to change that, I’m going to change that to better title and I can make it open in a new tab. So this one here is if I click on that, it will open in a new tab.

David Mitchell [00:26:08]:
I like to do that just so I don’t lose where I am and go, okay, and now I’m back over here. Oops, I’m going to go and save that. You need to save things. I’m fully published and if I go back up to home, that is my standard project management page that Microsoft is now thinking about. As I said, sometimes when you do make a change in the site, it just takes a little while to find itself. Okay, there’s no document. I just created this site so there’s no documents in there. What I will do though is I’m going to move on to lists.

David Mitchell [00:26:57]:
So that’s, that’s pages. Happy to help out at some point if you do need assistance to create some new sites or pages. But we’ll move on to list. So in that’s a document library. So I’m not gonna push this here. I’m gonna go back to home. Then I’m gonna go new and this is where I can add some things here. If I do a list, there’s a number of ways of adding a list.

David Mitchell [00:27:22]:
You can do it from a blank. Now talking these through that is just the standard list and I’ll show you those in a tick. You can do a form which is probably Microsoft Forms, but it comes into the content, comes into the list. A gallery is for media, a calendar. As you probably know, a calendar is really just a list of dates organized in a big square. So you can use, you can, you can have a lot of dates in your list and it can be represented as a calendar. A board is Kanban board. So you can, especially when you have statuses you can have instead of just a normal tabular list, you can, you can change the view of that and it can be described or displayed in a Kanban board.

David Mitchell [00:28:09]:
And just as an aside, if you do that, you can actually automatically change statuses and things like that import from. So this is an important one for some businesses because if you’re currently managing, for example assets in an Excel sheet, you don’t have to start again. As long as your sheet has some of the columns that you’re needing, you can import from Excel. You do have to go through the metadata and double check that everything is as it should be in a list. But it’s sometimes a head start templates. This is usually the best way of starting a list. So for example, an issue tracker. If I click on Issue Tracker there, it tells me what, what it is, what features there are and it shows me if I scroll across here, which columns it puts in there and what sort of columns they are.

David Mitchell [00:29:10]:
So I’m going to create this. I’m going to. I’m just going to call it Issue Tracker and create. And again, sometimes it takes a little bit. I’ve created some earlier just in case it didn’t work, but here it is. It’s already put a. A navigation link in there and it’s called Issue Tracker. So I’m just going to deal with a couple of things in.

David Mitchell [00:29:35]:
In list here specifically around columns. So what I can do is add a column. So it could be an issue. So if I wanted to add an issue, I’d go add new item. What is the issue? Issue 23 it’ll give me is it high? Is it a high priority? And these are the information columns we’re talking about and they get attached to each of the things. Each of the items I should say assigned to. I have a. I don’t have anyone else in this that I can remember their name.

David Mitchell [00:30:14]:
So I’m not going to put anything there related issue. So you can. That’s a link to another and associated files for each of the. For each of the items on a list you can actually associate a file. Not a great thing to do as a document library. That’s why document libraries are there, because they’re more functional. So there’s our list. Now I can, I can view this in a number of different ways.

David Mitchell [00:30:44]:
I’m going to show you a little bit more about this in Document Library. So I won’t do it both. But if I wanted to add a column here, this is where I get to see my column types again. So for example, I could have a yes or no and I might put that in. Let’s. Let’s put a yes or no in there and let’s call that complete with a question mark maybe. And is this complete the I will put a default as no it is. That’s the type we just said and save.

David Mitchell [00:31:27]:
Now what I can do is I can edit a list in a number of different ways. I can edit it with the information. So clicking there and then show me the details and I can edit it in here completed value and I can go yes or no in there. I’m going to say no. The other thing I can do is edit in Grid View. This is a little bit more like Excel. So if I click on Edit in Grid view there’s only one column but if you can imagine multiple columns there, I can actually select a number of different columns and update a field in a list in bulk which is pretty handy feature. Again, there’s a number of different things in here that I will show you.

David Mitchell [00:32:27]:
Oh, there we go. There’s our. There’s our Kanban view. So that is. That is new. I can move that across to in progress. For example it’s actually added interestingly enough. Oh no, it had a status of in progress.

David Mitchell [00:32:40]:
So you can see there when I move across it actually changes the status for me. So I can use a list as a Kanban board as well. And these are the different views here. Active lists will be the ones that have not been completed. For example, created by me is self explanatory all items again is self explanatory. And I can actually edit this view and then save it as a new view. But we’re going to do that in document Libraries which is the document version of this list. So I’m going to move along now to create each site comes with a document library called Documents.

David Mitchell [00:33:24]:
We won’t get into teams at the moment, but you’ll find that if you create a team based on this, where you save documents in, your teams will be in this documents library here. So if I wanted to add a new library, oops, it’s not where I do it. If I go back up to home and then add new go down to document library. Very similar experience to adding a new list. But for example I can add different. There’s some templates in there. I will move on. I have created another site and we’ve.

David Mitchell [00:34:13]:
We’ve put some documents libraries in there. Now you. I’ve just shown you how to create a library. So we’ve created two here. One’s a presentation library, one’s a campaign library. I’m. I’m basing this little demonstration around a potential marketing organization or a marketing department. You’re welcome, Rachel.

David Mitchell [00:34:36]:
If I want to create something new in the presentation library, I’ve got a couple of ways we can do it. I can. No, I’m going to come into the library first. So I’ve been into the. I’ve gone into the library. Now this is the way. This would usually be blank with a, with a blank library. But I have put some documents in here and I have made some metadata in here.

David Mitchell [00:35:03]:
So the metadata, as we know, is just the columns with information in it. When you put things in a library, you can put a variety of things in a library. In fact, what I will do is I’m going to show you a little bit more about that. I’m going to create a new library so you can see what a new library is looking like. I’m going to go new library and I’m going to show it in the navigation, which is that checkbox there. Now this does take a little bit. It’s speeding up. Now when I do that, I can create files directly in this library.

David Mitchell [00:35:47]:
I can create a file, for example, in Word, which is what most people do, or Office somewhere, and then I can upload a file or a whole folder or a template, multiple files if I need to. A good way of doing this, though, this is where you start to utilize the power of SharePoint is creating a document here so I can create just a standard Word document in Excel. All of these things I want to see what things I can. If I don’t want to give people permission to do everything, or if I don’t want it to be obvious, I can just unclick these or move them around and I will cancel that. I just wanted to show you what came with a brand new library. So if I go up to the presentation library, I just wanted to show you one thing here. So the question is, do we store documents in folders or do we just try to find the documents via metadata? The traditional way of doing it is in folders. A modern way of doing it is in metadata.

David Mitchell [00:37:03]:
I find, though, that folders are a good way of associating files together. Now, one of the powerful things about SharePoint is you can have the best of both worlds. So you can see in here, for example, I have Created a folder called Client Docs. In here there’s Client one, Client two, Client three Doc. I go back to the library. So I’d have to. If I had multiple clients, I’d have to go into each of these to find what I’m looking for. But what I can do and I look, I pre canned this.

David Mitchell [00:37:38]:
I could show you how to do it. You only need to do it once, so it’s not that complicated. But these are searches. So all. It comes general, it comes pre made with just an all documents I’ve changed. I’ve filtered the document library here in a number of different ways. So basically what I’ve done is said all docs, no folders. If I click on that, what that immediately has done is taken away the folders and just put all the documents into one view.

David Mitchell [00:38:13]:
What can I do with that? I can actually sort them. I can find all the clients. For example, if I add a filter, which is this funnel thing up here, it will play nicely with me, I’m sure. Or will it? Yep, it will now. So very powerful. In, in SharePoint you can filter by a few things. So if I just want to see the. The all the documents from client one, no matter which folder it’s in, I can just click on client one there and it just filters for client one.

David Mitchell [00:38:57]:
Or I might say I just want all PDFs so it’s just going to filter on PDFs. And again these are each of these. Each of these things here are a metadata and that’s the power of metadata. So you know, 2024, I put this in. So this is not reading it from the document. This is a very interesting accounting thing, accounting classification. So it’s a relevant year. For example, you can use it for documents, but for an accountant or for your own financial records, you can have all the documents in there.

David Mitchell [00:39:35]:
But if you in, in here have the relevant year and you just make sure that the relevant year is accurate, what that means is that you can have it all sorted and filterable and you can save the view to you to whatever you like. And I’ll just quickly show you how to do that. If I say for example, I just want all the PDFs, I then. So that’s, that’s the filter there. If I click up there, I can go save view now see what happens when I do that? It saved all docs, no folders. That’s right. I should have created a new view and saved that. But that’s fine.

David Mitchell [00:40:22]:
I can clear the filters and I should come back I can actually again do a filter and save that view. And same as what I’ve done here, it just comes the name there. For example, I could say I could have a filter and a view called All Docs 2025, 2025. And then when I come in here, I can just automatically go to a preset filter. Of course you can pre. You can go and filter anything you like each time, but it’s just quicker if you can pre. Pre organize that. All right, just as a, as a, a reminder, there’s all documents there.

David Mitchell [00:41:09]:
My recommendation now is to actually use folders, but then utilize them within a SharePoint list and then be able to sort that list without folders. Now, talking about folders, there is a super folder called a document set and it’s actually one of the last things I wanted to show you here. We could keep going for hours obviously on SharePoint, but one of the last things I wanted to show you here was a thing called a document set. Now but let me go here again, I can. When you look at this one thing I didn’t show you and I will show you now. See here it says add a template. Now what you can do here is rather than just having brand new blank form, blank documents being created, what you can do is upload the documents you would like to be created. So for example, I’ve got a couple here.

David Mitchell [00:42:09]:
What I did is I just added the template, I clicked on that and I found the file and then it came up to here. I can click on the edit the new menu and show which ones I want to see and which ones I don’t. I can also move them up or down to put them where I’d like and it cancel that. But for example, if I go new and then do grassroots, it presentation template and I click oops, it’s not what I meant to do. Hopefully you can hear me. What that’s done is created a brand new template, a brand new document and I can change the name of it. There is presentation demo. Click over here.

David Mitchell [00:43:04]:
You can see that it is saving and it is saved. Now I can get out of that and I have my presentation demo. So what I’ve done there is actually gone in and automated in a way the creation of the type of document that I should have in this document library. I’m hoping that everyone can hear me at the moment. Please let me know if you can’t. So I’m going to leave you with that. But just needless to say that you could have for example, a budget type you could have different sorts of presentations. You could have any sort of templated document.

David Mitchell [00:43:51]:
You know, one of the ones that I’ve got here is for example, the Grassroots IT Word document template. If I clicked on that, it would start a new template. I would give it a name and there we go. So onto campaigns. Now, I mentioned folders before. One of the types of templates that you can use is actually called a document set. It’s a type of content. In fact, it’s a content type in SharePoint speak.

David Mitchell [00:44:24]:
What that does is it actually let me demonstrate. So I’ve got a marketing campaign document set here. If I click on that, it prompts me for a few things. So I’m going to go Campaign one and I know Campaign Station, we have clients, but I’m going to go client one. A campaign might have a type. For example, it’s got, let’s call it email. I could specify my own value instead of email there, but let’s go email and then I go save. So what that’s done is in my campaign library, it’s actually created a document set called Campaign one.

David Mitchell [00:45:18]:
It’s created it with the metadata that I’ve asked it to create so that we set this up a little bit early. I’m not going to go into that detail at the moment. It’s a little bit more complex. Needless to say, it’s not hard to do. We just don’t have the time today to do it. But we go and create a document set type. If I click on that, what we’ve done is we’ve created kind of like a templated. It’s a templated folder with pre populated documents.

David Mitchell [00:45:49]:
Now what those documents have done of course though is they’ve actually inherited the metadata for the Campaign 1. If I click on Campaign 1 in there and I go, right, I want a new and because maybe I didn’t put it in there, but let’s just say I want a new document. This is a Word document, of course I would set up this as a template. So it’s. It gives me the document the way I want it. I’m going to call it document demo 1. You can see the saving there. So I can get rid of that there.

David Mitchell [00:46:34]:
So what it’s done magically, it has put it in the campaign library, which is not that magic, but the magic bit is it’s actually inherited the content. Sorry. It’s encoded the metadata of the parent library, the parent folder. Now that’s really powerful because this might be easy to find things with three documents, but if I have, for example, 40 campaigns and I have documents coming in all the time for these campaigns, I need to be able to upload quickly and I don’t want to have to go in and change metadata on potentially 10 columns each time. So this automatically does it. All right, what else is on my list? Views. Let’s have a look at the view here. This is a brand new one.

David Mitchell [00:47:35]:
So if I, if I. A view you get by a filter. Now I’m going to. Actually, I won’t go into that detail. These are those common ways of finding things. Filtering is not seeming to work very well for me today. You can, you can filter by modified, for example. Now these are all created today.

David Mitchell [00:47:58]:
I can also go into, into in here. So you know, site information. There’s a lot more I can do to a library and a site from the settings, but I’m not going to do that today. That’s where you go into site contents there. That is where you go to add content types, for example. But reach out if you need. If you can’t do things just on this simple interface. Now all I was going to show you here though, let’s see if we can find a library that’s got a few extra things in it again.

David Mitchell [00:48:35]:
Okay, this is a interesting one. Some files are missing, required metadata. Fix file issues now. So what we’ve done here is put some metadata in, but not all of it. But when I have, if I show you how to do that, if I go add a column and if I add a text column, for example, one of the things that I can do there in more options is to say, require that this column contains information. If I put that to yes, then I get this. I’m going to cancel that. I get this error up here.

David Mitchell [00:49:14]:
So what it does is shows me that I need to get in and fix things up a little bit. If you use the document sets as I just described, this actually doesn’t happen because it will inherit the. The metadata from your document set parent folder. Okay, I’m coming to the end of my content today and it’s probably good time because we’re 10 minutes before the hour. So I haven’t been watching the chat, so I’m not sure if there are anything in the chat that needs to be responded to. If there is, we’ve got a couple of AI assistants in there. Great. No questions at the moment.

David Mitchell [00:50:06]:
If you do have any questions, please put them in the chat here. Now if you would like to reach out, I would love to work with you or answer a few questions even on SharePoint. I reckon SharePoint is going to be a massive platform for the future. It is so powerful and so underused and we’ve only really just scratched the surface of it today. It doesn’t work on its own, it works along and with Microsoft 365, Power Automate, Power Platform, the whole Power platform and Copilot altogether super powerful. So thank you very much for coming today. Please feel free to put any more questions in the chat or send them along to Grassroots it I would be very happy to personally answer them. I hope we will gotten something out of today and enjoyed yourself.

David Mitchell [00:51:02]:
Have a great day.