As I’ve alluded to before, I spend a lot of time in PowerShell, and most of it in the loving embrace of the PnP.PowerShell module. From time to time I find myself wanting to include logic in my scripts based on who the script is being run as, who connected to Microsoft 365. The majority of my connections where with the good old username and password combination. When that’s the case, I could use this to find how who I had connected as:
That worked great, right up to the point where I didn’t just log in with username credentials. For instance, the Sympraxis tenant requires MFA so I have to connect with the –Interactive parameter:
Old Faithful let me down. Back to the drawing board. Poking around the Internet I saw some smart folks were using this method:
I haven’t tried it yet with Certificate authentication, so I’m not sure how it reports that. The good news is that method also works with a username and password login:
I’ve created a Function, Get-TKPnPCurrentUser, to make that short and easy to use. I’ve added it to the TKM365Commands module I published in GitHub.
I recently got a fun email from a client. Their tenant had run over its storage allocation. After some quick investigation they realized that they had a few dozen files with a lot of versions, the average number of versions was over 1200 per file. Some files had over 3000 versions. The kicker is that these files were big, dozens or hundreds of MBs each. Thousands of files, 100s of MBs a piece? Pretty soon you’re talking about some real storage space! His question to me was how he could easily delete these unneeded versions quickly and easily? PowerShell, of course!
Before we get to the golden PowerShell nuggets at the end, how did they end up here in the first place? Versions have been around forever in SharePoint but in the last couple of years there was a change. As part of their strategy to protect us from ransomware, Microsoft turned on versioning for all Document Libraries in SPO, and set the maximum number of versions to 500. That way if malware encrypted your site you could just roll your documents back to an unencrypted version. Pretty clever approach. The bad news is that if you don’t know this is in place, like my customer didn’t, you can chew up a lot of space by frequently uploading large files. Back to our story…
My mancrush on the PnP PowerShell is well documented, so of course that’s the first place I looked for a solution. Sure enough, there it was, shining like a beacon of hope on a foggy night, Remove-PnPFileVersion. Do you hear angels singing? I know I do. I sent that off to my customer, dusted off my hands, and leaned back, put my hands behind my head and basked in self satisfaction. It was glorious. Until the customer replied…
He didn’t want to delete all of the versions of a file. He wanted to something like delete all except the last 5 versions. Remove-PnPFileVersion has 2 parameter sets. One that deletes a single version (by its ID number) and one that deletes all versions. No middle ground. While my previous victory was short lived, I knew PowerShell would come through for me here too.
Long story short, I scribbled down a quick PowerShell script that will delete the file versions beyond the number you wish to keep. This customer had a CSV file of the files they wanted to prune, so I added support for that. I have posted the files on GitHub (DeleteOldVersions.ps1 and VersionDelete.csv ) and I’ll go over the mechanics here.
Here is what the CSV file looks like, if you want to use that:
The Remove-PnPFileVersion cmdlet natively handles URLs in the forms of lines 2-5. I added support for the URL having the tenant name as well because a report the customer had included that and I wanted to make it easy for them to read. I’m good like that.
You’ll need to adjust those to your own situation. Then I load up the CSV file. If you don’t want to do this with a CSV file you don’t have to. You can manually put the file name in.
$FileList = Import-Csv .\VersionDelete.csv
Then I pick how many file versions I want to keep:
$VersionsToKeep = 5
Next I walk through the $FileList.
foreach($File in $FileList) {
If the FileName property has the $SiteUrl in it I take it out.
$Filename = $File.FileName.Replace($SiteUrl,””)
Then I grab all the FileVersions of the file:
$FileVersions = Get-PnPFileVersion -Url $Filename
Get-PnPFileVersion does not show the Current Version, so it will always show one fewer version than what you see in the UI. If the number of versions is greater than the version we said we wanted to keep in $VersionsToKeep then I create a list of versions in $DeleteVersionList to delete:
if ($FileVersions.Count -gt $VersionsToKeep) { $DeleteVersionList = ($FileVersions[0..$($FileVersions.Count – $VersionsToKeep)])
With that list in hand I walk through it and run Remove-PnPFileVersion against it. In the code in GitHub I have commented out the line (Line 33 as of 9/14/21) that actually deletes the version. You’ll have to uncomment that to do anything.
foreach($VersionToDelete in $DeleteVersionList) { Remove-PnPFileVersion -Url $Filename -Identity $VersionToDelete.Id –Force
To make piping easy I output the versions deleted as a CustomObject:
That’ll get you the files in the Document Library. You can use this command to touch them and create 6 new versions:
0..5 | foreach {Set-PnPListItem -List $Doclib -Identity 4 -Values @{“FileLeafRef”=”Building materials licences to budget for Storytelling.docx”}}
It is also possible to filter versions by date. That way instead of deleting all but the last 5 versions, you would be able to delete all of the versions older than 30 days. That’s a blog post for a different day though.
I’ve done a few articles about the new PnP.PowerShell module. One of the biggest changes from its ancestor, SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline, is that it requires the registration of an Azure Application before you can connect with it. In this blog post I’m going to explain how to get that Azure App registered if you’re not a Tenant Admin in your tenant.
You don’t need to be a Tenant Admin to use the PnP.PowerShell cmdlets. You don’t even need to be a SharePoint Admin or a site collection admin. There are plenty of cmdlets you can run, like Add-PnPFile if you’re only a Member of the site. However, before you can run the most import PnP cmdlet of all, Connect-PnPOnline, the PnP Azure Application has to be registered in your tenant by a tenant admin. If it’s not, you’ll get a sad message that looks like this:
Here’s the text:
Connect-PnPOnline: AADSTS65001: The user or administrator has not consented to use the application with ID ‘31359c7f-bd7e-475c-86db-fdb8c937548e’ named ‘PnP Management Shell’. Send an interactive authorization request for this user and resource.
In most cases the person introducing the PnP.PowerShell module is a tenant admin, so it’s not an issue. They run Register-PnPManagementShellAccess and Bob’s your uncle. But it’s not uncommon for an organization to be large enough that the SharePoint or Microsoft 365 Admin team is not a tenant admin. In that case the Tenant Admin, who likely doesn’t know what a PnP.PowerShell is, has to register the Azure App before the SharePoint Admin can enjoy the bliss that is PnP.PowerShell. Fortunately, there’s an easy enough solution, the Consent URL.
The Consent URL is the URL to a web page your Tenant Admin can go to to consent the PnP.PowerShell Azure App without needing to install anything, or really know anything about the PnP.PowerShell. There are a few ways to get the Consent URL. It doesn’t matter how you do it, they all get you to the same place.
The easiest way to remember is to run Register-PnPManagementShellAccess –ShowConsentUrl after installing the PnP.PowerShell. You’ll be asked to log in, but you don’t need to be an sort of admin. It’s only logging in so it knows when tenant you’re in. Then it will give you the Consent URL. It looks like this:
The part in the red box is your tenant’s ID.You had to log so the cmdlet could get that number. The Client_id refers to the PnP.PowerShell, so it’s the same everywhere.
You can also specify your tenant’s name instead of its ID. This works as well:
Whether you get the URL from running Register-PnPManagementShellAccess –ShowConsentUrl or by copying it out of this blog post and putting your tenant’s information, send that URL to your Tenant Admin. When they browse to the page it will look like this:
All they need to do is click Accept and you’re ready to go.
That’s a pretty long, scary list of permissions, and it might spook some admins. Accepting this does not give everyone in your tenant all of those permissions. The PnP.PowerShell Azure App uses Delegation, which means any user using it to access objects in Microsoft 365 has to have permission to access it. The PnP.PowerShell does not allow anyone access to anything they don’t otherwise have access to. If they don’t believe you, have them try. Have someone that cannot open up a SharePoint site in the browser try to connect to it with Connect-PnPOnline. They won’t be able to.
If they want to check out what the Azure App has permission to, or heaven forbid, remove it, you can browse to the Azure AD Portal and find it in the Enterprise Applications.
The Permissions blade will show you all delegated permissions the app has. Feel free to poke around, but resist the urge to change any, even if you’re positive you’ll never use them. I promise it’ll only hurt you in the future.
After your tenant admin has done all of that you should be able to get back to all that PowerShell and PnP goodness.
Throughout my IT career I have had to create tens (or hundreds, or thousands) of objects to test something. It could be a bunch of Windows Users, a bunch of folders, files, etc. It seems like every time that happens I end up starting from scratch on the process. To stop that silly cycle I decided to make the process official by blogging it. Let’s stop this madness!
This time it started with my friend Michal Pisarek posting this tweet:
Orchestry needs to test their lifecycle features and he wanted to stress test it real good!
As is often the case, I see a tweet like that and my first thought is “Challenge Accepted!” The mechanics of how to create Teams with PowerShell is pretty simple but where this really gets tricky, at least for me, is the names. Especially if you’re looking at creating 20,000 like Michal is. In the past the way I’ve handled that is the old tried and true “Adjective Noun Number” formula. To get near 20,000 I wanted a long list of nouns and adjectives to pull from. I scoured the Internet and pulled together two files, nouns.txt and adjectives.txt. You can find them in this GitHub repo. Then I tack a random two digit number at the end to reduce the chance of collision. I put those files in the same directory as this PowerShell script and let ‘er rip!
You can find the file CreateLotsofTeams.ps1 in that same GitHub repo.
You can alter the nouns and adjectives files as you see fit. Set the the $NumberofTeams variable to how many Teams you want and you’re set. This script uses the venerable PnP.PowerShell module. You’ll need that installed and its Azure Application registered before you can run this. Be sure to change the Connect-PnPOnline line to reflect your tenant’s name, unless you actually work for Contoso.
Because of some weird timing, the current version of the PnP.PowerShell, 1.6.0, won’t work with this script as there is a bug in New-PnPTeamsTeam that prevents it from actually creating a Team. Ironic, I know. I put notes in the CreateLotsofTeams.ps1 file on how to handle that. But if you’re running it and it looks successful but no Teams are being created, look there first.
Also, for whatever reason, when you look at the Groups Sites in SharePoint they don’t show up as being Teams enabled, but they really are.
<broken image>
You can see in this crudely mocked up screenshot that the Teams are in the Teams client even though SharePoint Admin Center swears they don’t exist.
And while this script’s purpose in life is to create lots and lots of Teams, it could be easily modified to create lots and lots of anything. If you just need Groups, swap out New-PnPTeamsTeam with New-PnPMicrosoft365Group. If you just need SharePoint sites, use New-PnPTenantSite. Folders? Add-PnPFolder. I think you see where I’m going with this.
If you’re like Michal and you’re going to create 20,000 Teams, or anything, I hope you have a comfortable chair. It’s going to take a while. Michal is seeing about 1 Team a minute. It’s going to take him a couple of weeks at that pace. Almost certainly PowerShell is the bottleneck in this situation. If you’re looking at a similar situation, my advice is to open up another PowerShell window and run another instance of CreateLotsofTeams.ps1 there. And maybe run a few instances on another machine entirely. In the past that has helped me speed this things up considerably.
My fellow Sympraxian Julie Turner recently published an outstanding blog post on what a Microsoft 365 Dev Tenant is and why you should get one. I’ve been a long time user of Dev or Demo tenants and I find them to be an invaluable resource both for people trying to gain skills in Microsoft 365, but also grizzled old veterans like myself. Like the old saying goes, “The question isn’t whether you have a Test Site, it’s whether you have a Production Site.” If you don’t have a Dev or Demo Tenant to test things in then you’ve just demoted your Production Tenant to a Test Tenant. Don’t be that person. I did a session on the PnP PowerShell today for Petri.com. One of the people there was hesitant to try out PowerShell on their tenant. I recommended they get one of these Dev tenants and hone their skills there.
As of January 19th, 2021 the new and improved PnP.PowerShell module is no longer prerelease and is ready for the masses. You can also find it in a GitHub repo. It replaces the venerable SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline module we all know and love. The new module has a lot changes, but here are a few of the highlights:
PnP.PowerShell only works with online products like SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365. It does not work with SharePoint Server platforms like SharePoint 2013, 2016, or 2019.
It is built on .NET core 3.1 so it runs on non Windows platforms like Linux, Mac, and Azure Functions. SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline is built on .NET 4.6.1 and only runs on Windows.
PnP.PowerShell is focused on all of Microsoft 365, not just SharePoint. SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline started out focused on SharePoint and other things have snuck in over the years, but were never supported as well as we would have liked.
Authentication relies on App Registrations. To facilitate the cross application support the module relies on Graph API permissions as opposed to straight up usernames and passwords. SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline uses App Registrations as well, but it’s not built on that premise like PnP.PowerShell is.
If you can, you should uninstall the SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline module and install PnP.PowerShell everywhere. You should also stop using Windows PowerShell 5.1 and move over to PowerShell 7.x. There are a couple of legit reasons why you can’t though. I have a whole blog post, “Using both PnP PowerShell Modules with PowerShell 5 and PowerShell 7” that covers how to have both modules and both shells available to you. For those of you with short attention spaces I’ll give you the tl;dr:
Open PowerShell 7.x in Administrator mode and uninstall all the modules:
For good measure I close down the Windows PowerShell 5.1 host and open a new one before I install the new version. That might not be necessary, but it feels like cheap insurance. Either way, in a Windows PowerShell 5.1 Administrator shell install both modules:
I added a little chocolate to the install commands to make them go down easier. First, I added -Scope Allusers to make sure Windows PowerShell 5.1 installs the module in a place that PowerShell 7.x can find it. I think any modules installed in an Admin window are installed there by default, but I’m not sure. Again, cheap insurance. Second, to the second (and any subsequent) module I added –AllowClobber. This tells PowerShell that it’s okay to install a module that has cmdlets that collide with cmdlets already on the system. This is okay because of the difference between installing a module and importing a module. You can read more about that in my previous post.
If you need one of the on-prem SharePoint Server modules use a line like this:
You can have as many of these modules installed as long as you install the later ones with –AllowClobber.
Once you’ve got the modules installed you need to tell PowerShell which one to load. That’s done with the Import-Module cmdlet. When you open a new PowerShell window, or at the top of any PowerShell scripts, you can specify which PnP Module you want PowerShell to use. For instance:
Import-Module PnP.PowerShell
or
Import-Module SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline
or
Import-Module SharePointPnPPowerShell2019
Then you know you’ll get the version of Connect-PnPOnline (or whatever) your code is running. In theory you could swap them in and out by using Remove-Module, but in reality there are some fiddley PowerShell things in the background (the AppDomain) that keeps this from being successful. My previous blog post does show you how to have multiple versions of the PnP module imported in the same window or script at the same time.
But really, stick to PnP.PowerShell and PowerShell 7 if humanly possible.
I hope you find that all helpful. I don’t know about you, but I’m really excited about this new module.
I recently was working on a customer project and I was trying to find the name of a certain SharePoint list item property. (Spoiler, it was “_ModerationStatus”) I knew it was hiding in the item’s FieldValues property, but I wasn’t sure where. To get you up to speed, here’s the PowerShell that got me to this spot:
Not only is the list of FieldValues as long as my kids’ Christmas Lists, also like those lists, it’s not in alphabetical, chronological, numerical, or any other order I can conjure up. To say it’s random seems to be giving it more order than it really has.
While I didn’t know exactly was the name of the property I did have a few ideas. Trying to find those random property names would make swimming upstream look like a piece of cake. Fortunately I’ve fought this battle before and I have the scars to prove it. I’m hoping I can save you all the pain I went through, over and over.
The secret is the GetEnumerator() Method of the Hash Table. This got me what I was looking for:
I’ve been saying for years that you can’t be a good SharePoint or Office 365 admin without having a firm grip on PowerShell. I don’t just say that so you’ll come to my PowerShell sessions at conferences, I really believe it. In the last couple of days there have been a flurry of PowerShell updates and in this blog post I’m going to call them out, in no particular order.
I was recently dealt a fun task from a customer. They had a site in SharePoint that had a few links in the Quick Launch (left nav, quick nav, whatever) and they wanted to copy the Quick Launch from another site to it. They wanted to keep the existing links below the new ones. Here are some pictures to help it all make sense:
I want to copy these links:
and put them on top of these links on another site.
Of course I immediately thought of your friend and mine, the PnP PowerShell for this task. Sure enough, there are cmdlets for that, Get-PnPNavigationNode and Add-PnPNavigationNode. Just what the doctor ordered.
Add-PnPNavigationNode is pretty basic and I had to work a bit to get exactly what the customer wanted. When you add a Navigtation node with Add-PnPNavigationNode it puts it at the end of the list, which makes sense. You can also throw the switch parameter, –First, to put it at the top. In most situations that probably is fine, but mine was tricky. I didn’t want to put the copied nav nodes at the end, I wanted the existing ones to stay there. I also couldn’t just add them all as –First because then they would end up at the top, but in backwards order. When I get the old nav nodes with Get-PnPNavigationNode it returns them in their correct order, so as I walked through them with Foreach the first one would be added on top, but then the second one, also with the –First switch, would end up on top, and so on. Enter [array]::Reverse.
The Array class in PowerShell has quite a few tricks up its sleeve in the form of operations, and Reverse is one of them. If you want to see the rest, go to this page, or type [array]:: in a PowerShell host and tab through the list. It’s quite impressive.
There’s a lot of foundation there, but you can see where the Array reversal fits in. Here’s how it looked when I ran it:
And here’s what it looked like after I ran it:
There’s a lot more tweaking I can do, like make sure “Home” is still on top, stuff like that, but finding Reverse was an important step in the beginning.
PowerShell does a pretty good job handling dates and times due to its good foundation with .NET and its focus on being cool to use PowerShell users. For basic DateTime formatting the help for Get-Date shows some great, easy to use examples.
help Get-Date –Examples
There’s –Format, –UFormat, and –DisplayHint, and those are all before we get to the flexibility that is .tostring(). There’s a lot of options, sometimes it’s too many options. Sometimes trying to string together exact combination of time and date information I’m looking for is a lot of work. Once again, PowerShell is there for me in the form of .GetDateTimeFormats()
(Get-Date).GetDateTimeFormats()
It lists out a collection of precanned DateTime formats you can select from:
You can use one of those formats just by selecting its index number:
That’s the good news. The bad news is that you have to specify which number you want, and there are 133 formats in the list. If the one that really tickles your fancy is #87 you have to count the lines until you get to it.
Until now.
I had danced this dance a few times, squinting to find that just perfect DateTime format I was looking for and counting the lines leading up to it. Then I put my PowerShell mojo to good use and came up with this little gem:
