Posts by Joaoferreira

What 25 Years of SharePoint Meant for My Career

My story with SharePoint didn’t start at the beginning. It started in 2012, at a moment when the platform was already well established but still surprisingly open to experimentation.

In those early years, my work was largely about SharePoint branding. The thing I heard the most back then was: “don’t make SharePoint look like SharePoint.” So I didn’t. I worked with all versions since SharePoint 2007, stripping away default visuals, rebuilding layouts, and reshaping the experience through custom master pages and heavy customization!!!

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By João Ferreira Feb 26, 2026 SharePoint 0 Comments

How to Rename a SharePoint Site and Change Its URL Without Breaking Everything

For a long time, renaming a SharePoint site was treated as a mistake you paid for forever. Pick the wrong name, live with it. URLs were fragile, links broke, and the safest advice was simple: don’t touch it.

That advice is outdated! SharePoint supports renaming sites and changing their URLs in a controlled, supported way. The risk today is not the platform. It’s the assumption that nothing has changed.

This article explains why renaming a SharePoint site matters, what actually happens when you do it, and how to do it safely.

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By João Ferreira Feb 24, 2026 Administration, PowerShell 0 Comments

How to Block File Downloads in SharePoint and OneDrive (What’s Possible, What Isn’t, and What Actually Works)

Blocking file downloads in SharePoint is one of those requests that sounds simple and turns complex very quickly.

It usually starts with a reasonable concern. Sensitive documents. External users. Unmanaged devices. A clear instruction from security or legal: ‘People should be able to read this, but they shouldn’t be able to download it.’

For years, the honest answer was uncomfortable. You could make downloads harder, but you couldn’t truly block them without workarounds, custom permission levels, or conditional access gymnastics. And even then, the guarantees were weak.

That changed with the introduction of the Block download policy for SharePoint and OneDrive, part of SharePoint Advanced Management. This is the first supported, platform‑level way to enforce browser‑only access to files, without redesigning your permission model or relying on unsupported UI tricks.

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By João Ferreira Feb 20, 2026 Documents 0 Comments

How to Build a SharePoint Contact List with Internal and External Users

When I wrote about building a project index in SharePoint, I intentionally focused on structure and discoverability. A single place to see all consulting projects, understand what they are about, and navigate to the right site without friction. In practice, though, every time I implement that pattern, I end up adding one more list almost immediately: a contact list built specifically to store the contact information of everyone involved in the project.

Projects are defined as much by people as they are by sites and documents, and in consulting those people are rarely all internal. Customers, partners, and external stakeholders need to be visible in the context of a project, even when they are not and should not be part of the tenant.

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By João Ferreira Feb 15, 2026 Microsoft Lists, Solutions 0 Comments

Quick Steps in SharePoint Document Libraries: Why This One Actually Changes the Experience

When I published my article about the new Quick Steps column type in Microsoft Lists, the focus was on how Microsoft is slowly reshaping the way users interact with data. Not through big announcements or radical redesigns, but through small, practical touches that remove friction from everyday work.

The same Quick Steps column type is also available in SharePoint document libraries. That detail matters, because libraries are not just another container. They are where real work happens, where files move, get reorganized, shared, duplicated, and increasingly questioned. Seeing Quick Steps land here feels less like feature reuse and more like intent.

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By João Ferreira Feb 12, 2026 Documents 0 Comments

Relearning the Basics: Getting Comfortable With the New SharePoint Document Libraries

Microsoft has been rolling out a refreshed look for SharePoint Document Libraries, aligning them more closely with the new OneDrive experience. Visually, it’s clean, modern, and unquestionably consistent with Microsoft’s current design language. Functionally… well, things have moved. A lot.

If you’ve been following my Pulse updates, you already know I’m not exactly the biggest fan of these changes, not because they’re bad, but because they’ve forced me to retrain my own muscle memory. After years of going straight to the same corner of the screen to create files, switch views, or open filters, suddenly realizing “oh… it’s not there anymore” is incredibly frustrating.

That said, change happens, and once you understand where everything went, the new experience is usable, even if it comes with extra clicks. So in this article, I want to walk you through the basic functionality that has moved, hidden itself, or changed behavior. If you’re still learning your way around the new libraries, this guide will save you a bit of time (and annoyance).

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By João Ferreira Feb 9, 2026 Documents 0 Comments

Build a SharePoint Project Index for a Cleaner, Connected Intranet

If you work in consulting, or any environment where multiple projects run in parallel, you’ve probably felt this pain: every project gets its own SharePoint site, every team stores documents in different places, and every time someone asks, “Where can I find the project site for X?” you either open Teams to search for links or end up adding another item to the Quick Links web part.

In this article I’ll show you a simple saolution to create a clean, visual, centralized index of all project sites using one SharePoint list and one formatted view.

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By João Ferreira Feb 8, 2026 Solutions 0 Comments

How to add a custom card to Viva Connections and why it matters

Adding a custom card to Viva Connections is one of those small changes that quietly transforms how people use SharePoint and Microsoft Teams day to day. Technically, it’s simple: Viva Connections dashboards support personal Quick Links cards that any user can add, reorder, and maintain without waiting for an administrator. These cards live side‑by‑side with the standard dashboard experience, but with a personal twist that finally gives users a sense of ownership.

This guide walks you through everything you need to know to get this working in your tenant.

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By João Ferreira Feb 4, 2026 Microsoft Viva 0 Comments

What’s new for SharePoint – January 2026

January started quietly but picked up pace as the weeks went by. It wasn’t the busiest month for SharePoint news, but it still brought a few solid updates worth your attention.

Two changes to core web parts stood out. The Power BI web part is reaching the end of its support lifecycle, and the Maps web part is shifting from Bing Maps to Azure Maps—a change that will influence how we build pages going forward. On the AI side, the Knowledge agent keeps getting smarter, now supporting listening to page content in more languages, making your existing info even easier to consume.

And beyond the usual product updates, Microsoft dropped the new SPFx roadmap—the biggest update the framework has seen in years; and also announced the plans for the SharePoint 25th anniversary celebration happening on March 2nd. You’ll find all of this and more in the full post.

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By João Ferreira Feb 1, 2026 What's new 0 Comments

What’s new for SharePoint – December 2025

December is usually a quiet month for Microsoft 365 updates, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing important happening. In fact, this month proves that quality matters more than quantity. A few key changes stand out and deserve your attention.

First, Copilot continues to make its way into SharePoint with the new list agent, allowing you to create lists using natural language and structured content. This is a big step toward simplifying everyday tasks for users. Then, there’s a critical update for admins: Content Security Policies (CSP) will soon be enforced in SharePoint Online, and if you have custom SPFx solutions, you’ll want to review them before March 2026 to avoid disruptions. Finally, SharePoint Catalog Management is here, giving admins a smarter way to organize and govern sites at scale without impacting end users.

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By João Ferreira Jan 2, 2026 What's new 0 Comments