The SharePoint Administration Center serves as a central hub for managing and configuring SharePoint Online in the Microsoft 365 environment. Through the administration center, IT administrators can create and manage sites, control settings and policies, manage storage and permissions, enable external sharing, integrate hybrid infrastructure with local farms, and much more. In this article, we will dive deeper into the functionality of the SharePoint Admin Center by exploring the various options it makes available to all users who use it to administer their SharePoint ecosystems.
Manage Microsoft SharePoint can be a challenge, as it offers so many features. For larger companies, with a larger number of employees, implementing policies can be complex. Fortunately, SharePoint has an integrated administration center that helps IT teams manage these environments, monitor budgets, usage statistics, overall organization, and more.
The SharePoint Online admin center is a web-based interface that administrators can use to manage the SharePoint Online environment. It allows you to create and manage sites, configure permissions, and customize SharePoint Online within the Microsoft 365 environment. This admin center is accessible to administrators who have an Office 365 subscription that includes SharePoint Online.
This centralized interface provides tools for managing user access, supervising sites, and implementing global settings, ensuring a harmonious balance between collaboration and security. Administrators can configure permissions, adjust sharing settings, and oversee the structure of site collections, ensuring that users find the right balance between collaboration and control.
As the core of file management in more than 400,000 organizations, effectively managing SharePoint should be a priority for IT departments. However, with so many things to consider, it can be difficult to know where to start or what steps to take, especially for smaller teams.
So let's see in the next sections to provide a complete overview of its main features to begin to orient itself in its complex world and begin to understand something about it.
The SharePoint Online Administrative Center is accessible only for administrators with an Office 365 subscription, which of course includes SharePoint Online.
Global administrators within the Microsoft 365 enterprise tenant hold the highest level of permissions, having access to all the functionality offered in the SharePoint Administration Center. However, they can also grant access to the Administrative Center to other users, assigning them the Administrator role to:
To assign the Administrator role in SharePoint, global administrators must:
Users added to the list will then be enabled to manage SharePoint Online and its sites, through the configurations available in the SharePoint Administrative Center.
At this point, admin users simply need to:
By clicking on the “SharePoint” item, administrator users are redirected to the SharePoint Administrative Center, where they will find all the tools to better manage the corporate SharePoint environment.
To successfully implement business processes within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, the following skills are needed:
Dev4Side Software has the vertical technical skills to provide you with a single, transversal point of contact for all the elements of your subscription.
The effective management of Microsoft SharePoint consists in knowing where to focus your energy. Exploring the vast expanse of your organization's intranet won't get you anywhere quickly.
So let's take our time and explore each section of the SharePoint Administration Center for Microsoft 365 to clarify which settings can be configured and what effects these settings have. You can find these sections in the left panel of the web interface, but first let's take a look at the Dashboard that will welcome us on the homepage.
The SharePoint Administration Center collects all the necessary statistics and updates in a central dashboard, offering a complete overview of your environment.
Here are some of the key features from the main SharePoint Admin Center dashboard:
There are two subcategories of sites: active sites and Deleted sites.
As an alternative to the search bar on the homepage, administrators can view the list of active SharePoint sites in the corporate tenant from the “Active Sites” entry (present on the left, under the “Sites” section).
However, this page isn't just useful for viewing active sites. In fact, each listed site is accompanied by a set of useful information to learn about its' history 'and its main configurations.
A list of active sites (including team sites and communication sites) appears, with information about the site name, URL, storage usage, and primary administrator. In the upper right corner, there is a graph that indicates the storage usage for all sites. There are two buttons for creating a new site and exporting the list of active sites to a CSV file.
Active sites are sites where users view pages, download/upload files, and make changes to files. Click on the appropriate column heading to sort the list by site name, URL, space used, etc. Use the search field to find the necessary site. Click on the button located to the right of the search field to filter the sites you want to see in the list.
Click on the site for which you want to change the options to open a window with site settings. There are four tabs: General, Activity, Permissions, and Criteria.
These sharing settings are used to control sharing at the organization level and can be modified by a SharePoint administrator. Site owners can't change these sharing settings.
Immediately under the heading 'Active sites', we find 'Deleted sites', which provides access to the SharePoint Administrative Center page dedicated to deleted (but not irretrievably) sites.
The feature to highlight on this page is the command “Restore”, which can be used to restore deleted SharePoint sites. Very useful, especially when a site is removed by mistake. But beware: administrators have a limited time to restore a site. After this period, the SharePoint sites in the area are permanently deleted.
The time available for recovery varies depending on the type of site. With the exception of SharePoint sites linked to a Teams channel (which must be restored within 30 days of deleting them directly from Microsoft Teams), team sites and communication sites can be restored in this area of the SharePoint Administrative Center within 93 days since their elimination. Here's how:
Once 93 days have elapsed, the sites are completely removed from the SharePoint Online environment. To avoid losing important data, the advice is to back it up or rely on third-party solutions to store the information of a site that, although not used, could be useful in the future.
Under 'Policies', you will find two very important areas of the SharePoint Administrative Center. These are the areas that bring together the sharing and access configurations, respectively.
Starting from the area “Sharing”, administrators have the option to define limits for sharing content in SharePoint and OneDrive. Specifically, the following four levels are available:
Administrators can then choose the level, from the most permissive, for sharing links and files without requiring access, to the most strict, for sharing with those who have business accounts.
The second area of interest under 'Policies' is called “Access Control” and offers more advanced settings than the 'Sharing' area to protect SharePoint and OneDrive files. Under 'Access Control', there are then four main categories of settings for managing access to content:
The areas two areas therefore offer a wide range of options for deciding who can access what in the corporate SharePoint environment, customizing the platform permissions to the organization's security policies in a flexible and detailed way.
Under the generic voice “Settings” in the SharePoint Admin Center, there are settings for:
Basically, here are the settings for customizing the corporate SharePoint environment.
The settings for the new SharePoint admin center on this page are:
I Content Services they help users to enter data in a consistent manner and to organize it using metadata.
Selecting the voice “Term store” In the SharePoint Administrative Center you can access the page where you can manage the metadata of your sites.
Metadata is the information that supports the system for searching and storing content on SharePoint Online sites. The settings on the page “Term store” are therefore essential for the proper management of SharePoint and the business data it hosts.
Administrators can create or modify the local taxonomy of a SharePoint site, acting at the level of tags, term sets and individual terms that can be customized with properties such as name, description, and usage designations.
You can also assign a person or group of users to a specific set of terms. In this case, the assigned tags do not grant additional permissions, but they help to identify (or rather track) users through a set of terms, such as a professional title and a department.
Create different content types, assign a category, and associate a template with the appropriate content type. Configurations can be set up to require users to use a standard document template. For example, when a user creates an Excel document using a template, and the template is associated with a “Timesheet” content type, the user uses a correct, standardized template to regularly create the same type of content.
Optionally, a content type can be added to a SharePoint list or library. The content type gallery helps you better categorize content.
This section provides options for using the migration manager And it SharePoint migration tool to migrate local file shares to Microsoft 365. You can copy content from a standalone SharePoint Server to SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365.
The SharePoint Administrative Center offers a tool designed to manage migration processes: the Migration Manager, which can be found under the heading 'Migration' in the left navigation bar.
Migration Manager brings together the settings for migrating to SharePoint Online, supporting the transfer of data from platforms such as Microsoft Stream, Dropbox and Google Workspace.
Also in this area, the download of the SharePoint Migration Tool, a useful tool for migrating content from previous versions of SharePoint On-Prem or from files from network folders.
In the section “Advanced” of the SharePoint Administrative Center, administrators are offered a series of advanced configurations that are used, among other things, to manage the permissions required by custom applications installed in SharePoint Online.
These are settings that contribute to the management of the possibilities of extending the platform, allowing you to intervene on the permissions that custom components have to interact with data in SharePoint or, more generally, in the Microsoft 365 business environment.
As we could see in the section above, the options provided by the SharePoint administrative portal are multiple and aimed at covering every type of need for IT administrators who will have to use it, allowing them to have the most extensive and rigorous control possible over their SharePoint tenant.
Explaining all the ramifications of each of the individual options offered by the SharePoint administrative portal would require several separate articles for each one and would go against the purpose of this article, namely to offer a complete general overview of the options made available in such a way as to have a general direction to follow to understand where is what.
Fortunately, there are many other articles available on our blog, which we strongly invite you to read, dedicated to the functionality of SharePoint, with which you can learn more about several of the elements mentioned here and discover how they work in more detail.
The SharePoint Admin Center is a centralized web interface designed to allow IT administrators to manage and configure SharePoint Online within Microsoft 365. It allows you to create and manage sites, control settings and policies, monitor storage, manage permissions and enable external sharing, as well as supporting hybrid configurations with local infrastructure.
Access is reserved for administrators with an Office 365 subscription that includes SharePoint Online. Microsoft 365 global administrators have full access, but you can assign the SharePoint Administrator role to other users to delegate specific responsibilities.
To access the SharePoint Admin Center, you must visit admin.microsoft.com, log in with your Office 365 credentials and select the 'SharePoint' option in the left navigation panel. It is important to have the necessary permissions to access this section.
The SharePoint Admin Center allows you to manage site collections, configure internal and external sharing settings, monitor storage usage, assign roles and permissions to users, and integrate local environments with SharePoint Online in hybrid configurations.
Yes, it's possible. Global administrators can assign the SharePoint Administrator role to other users to allow them to manage sites, permissions, and policies. This allows responsibilities to be distributed more effectively.
To assign this role, you must log in to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, search for the desired user, select the 'Roles' option and assign the SharePoint Administrator role. After confirming the assignment, the user will have the necessary permissions to manage SharePoint Online.
Key benefits include the ability to manage all SharePoint Online settings from a single point, greater efficiency thanks to integrated and intuitive tools, detailed permission control to ensure security, and scalability to adapt to both small organizations and large companies with complex needs.
More information is available in official Microsoft documentation or by consulting specialized partners such as Dev4Side, who can provide personalized support and advice for managing SharePoint.
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