Finally Microsoft is releasing much anticipated feature in SharePoint online – Collapsible sections on modern pages. This new feature will allow users to create rich, information-dense SharePoint pages with sections that can expand and collapse. As part of this release, Microsoft will enable the page authors to configure sections within the modern SharePoint page to be able to expand, collapse and set the default page-load state for the section.
Users will have the ability to show collapsible page sections in an accordion view (collapsed or expanded) or as tabs (future release). The accordion view will be collapsed by default, but can be set to show expanded. This feature will help users to quickly navigate between the page sections and consume the page content more easily.
Release Timeline
Microsoft will begin rolling out this feature to Targeted release tenants (selected users and organization) in early July (complete) and expect to be complete for Standard release in late September (previously late July).
How this will affect your organization
This feature will give page authors new ways to build rich and interesting SharePoint pages with collapsible sections – accordion or tabs.
Collapsible Sections in SharePoint Online modern experience
When you will edit a section on modern page, you will see collapsible group options like below:
Collapsible Sections settings in SharePoint Online
Note: Tabs layout will be rolled out with future releases.
Set Expand/Collapse icon alignment & show divider line between sections
Starting from September 2021, you have two more settings on Edit section panel as shown below:
You can set Expand/Collapse icon alignment to Left or Right
You can show divider line between two sections
Set Expand/Collapse icon alignment & show divider line between sections
Anchor links on collapsible section heading
On SharePoint online modern pages, anchor links are automatically added to H1, H2, and H3 headings when you add those in Text web part. Similar anchor links are now available on collapsible section headings as shown in below image. When you hover over collapsible section heading, you will see a link symbol. Clicking this link will give you the full URL of modern page, including the anchor in browser URL bar. You can also right-click on the link to copy it.
Anchor link on collapsible section heading on SharePoint modern page
What you need to do to prepare
You might want to notify your users about this new capability and update your training and documentation as appropriate.
We have updated the rollout timeline. While in Targeted Release we received valuable feedback around the behavior of anchor links when used in collapsible sections as well as some formatting issues experienced by users of right-to-left languages. We feel that both of these issues are important for us to address prior to making the feature generally available. We are actively addressing these issues now and expect the solution to reach General Availability with all fixes in place by the end of September 2021. Thank you for your patience.
Updated September 30, 2021: As shared previously, the new collapsible Sections was deployed to 100% of Targeted Release customers. We held the solution at the Targeted Release phase while we addressed some issues that were reported with the solution. The issues have now been addressed and we will be resuming the global rollout to all customers. It is now our expectation that we’ll complete the rollout of the feature by the end of October 2021. Thank you for your patience.
A frequent request for company intranets is to display and share information about the Team Members. This could be a Welcome New Team Members Page on a Human Resources site, welcoming new employees, or a page to display a roster of external users, say a list of Board Members for a nonprofit organization. So in this article, I want to show you a few ways to display department or team Members on a SharePoint Site.
Option 1: People Web Part
The first option involves the use of the People Web Part. I blogged about it previously. The idea is that it automatically displays information from your Active Directory and shows you the user’s name, photo, role, contact information, etc. In addition, you can switch the layout to large and add additional information about the user. Once again, I covered it all in this post.
Pros
Nice and easy to set up
Cons
It only works for users in your Active Directory (internal users, it does not work for external users)
This option assumes that Active Directory is maintained by IT and contains user photos and other relevant information
Limited area to add a description about the user (255 characters max)
Limited display options
Option 2: Image Gallery Web Part
If you want more control over the layout, you may try using the Image Gallery web part. This way, you are getting a nice visual photo of each employee and an area to add some text below the photo.
Pros
Nice and easy to set up, visually appealing
Multiple layouts available
Ability to manually upload user photos or dynamically display them from the document library
Works for both internal and external team members (since we are not relying on Active Directory)
Cons
The Name and additional information (Title and Caption, respectively) do not appear under the photo unless you choose the Carousel layout. With the other two layouts, they will only appear after you click on a photo/image.
Option 3: SharePoint Pages and Quick Links
OK, this is my favorite option, because it delivers the best experience for you and the users. It does take a bit more time to set it up, but, hey, at least you will not need to pretend in front of your boss that you are doing some actual work 😊. Plus, your boss will think you are smart. Let me walk you through this option.
The idea behind this option is that every member gets their own page containing a photo and text/description of them. On the homepage, there will be a Quick Links Web Part to link to each and every team member’s page. I documented step-by-step instructions on how to set it all up in this article.
Pros
Looks amazing. Visually appealing.
Works for both internal and external team members (since we are not relying on Active Directory)
Cons
It takes a bit of time to set up, but totally worth it
Option 4: Gallery View on a List
Believe it or not, there is another cool option that exists to display department/team members, and this one involves Microsoft Lists. The idea is that you would maintain the users in the Custom List and then present the data using the Gallery view. The setup is pretty simple, and I actually documented how to create a Gallery View in this article.
List View
Gallery View
Pros
Looks amazing as well
Works for both internal and external team members. If you just have internal members, you can rely on the People Column to draw the name of the members from the Active Directory. If you have external members, you can create a Text Column to capture their names.
Ability to add additional information/metadata to a user “card” (by adding extra columns to a list). For example, you can add the date of birth or city/town they are from.
Good options in terms of changing the order of the fields/format via the Gallery Card Designer
Cons
It takes a bit of time to set up
Limited area for the text on the cards; you have to click on the photo to get more information
It’s a reasonable suggestion. Dynamic distribution groups are part of base Exchange Online functionality and don’t require any additional licenses. Dynamic Azure AD groups require Azure AD Premium P1 licenses for every account covered by dynamic membership. In both cases, the trick is to make sure that the query used by Exchange Online or Azure AD to determine group membership finds the new account.
Dynamic Group Membership for Exchange Online Mailboxes
It’s possible to create a dynamic distribution group based on a simple query like “all mailboxes” that will automatically include new accounts (if they have mailboxes). Figure 1 shows the UX in the Exchange admin center (EAC) to define the membership of a new dynamic distribution list.
Figure 1: Dynamic membership settings for all mailboxes
The list works and email sent to it arrives in the inbox of every mailbox in the tenant, including shared mailboxes. This is because the recipient filter generated by Exchange Online for the dynamic distribution group selects all mail-enabled objects with a recipient type of ‘UserMailbox’ and only filters out some system mailboxes.
A dynamic distribution list like this is said to use a “canned” recipient filter because Exchange Online generates the filter based on the choices the administrator makes when they create the new list. You can only edit canned filters through the EAC. Exchange Online gives greater flexibility through the support of custom recipient filters. These filters can only be created using PowerShell, but they’re much more flexible in terms of selecting the set of mail-enabled objects to address through the list. A simple custom recipient filter to find just user mailboxes is shown below together with a test with the Get-Recipient cmdlet to prove that the filter works.
Dynamic Group Membership for Azure AD User Accounts
Dynamic Azure AD groups can be used with Microsoft 365 groups and Teams. These groups use different membership filters (query rules) to find the set of target objects. Instead of mail-enabled objects like mailboxes, the query against Azure AD focuses on user accounts rather than mailboxes. However, the same capability exists in that it’s possible to create a dynamic Azure AD group that includes all user accounts, including those newly created.
Again, the key is to construct a query rule that finds all user accounts – of the right type. When Azure AD is used for a Microsoft 365 tenant, there are many non-interactive user accounts created to give identities to objects such as shared mailboxes and room mailboxes. These are all considered “member” accounts and it’s easy to build a rule to find all member accounts. However, you probably want a more refined version that finds just the accounts used by humans.
Azure AD doesn’t have a human filter, so we need to construct something that Azure AD can use to find matching accounts in its directory. One approach is to use licenses for the check. You could look for accounts assigned Office 365 E3 licenses but would have to check for accounts with F1 or E5 licenses too. An easy change is to look for accounts that have any license that has at least one enabled service. For instance, accounts with Office 365 E3 or E5 licenses with the Exchange Online, Teams, Planner, or SharePoint Online service would all match. Figure 2 shows a test of the rule against a “real” user account and some other user accounts belonging to room and shared mailboxes. You can see that the real account passes the validation test while the others do not.
Figure 2: Testing the membership rule for a dynamic Azure AD group to find all user accounts
Azure AD accounts used by shared mailboxes must be assigned licenses when they need more than 50 GB of mailbox storage or an online archive. These accounts satisfy the membership rule, but that’s perhaps not important. If it is, some tweaking of the membership rule is necessary to remove the shared mailbox accounts.
Dynamic Group Membership of Org-Wide Teams
If your organization is smaller than 10,000 accounts, new Azure AD accounts automatically join the org-wide teams in the tenant (a tenant can support up to five org-wide teams). Org-wide teams are a special form of dynamic Microsoft 365 group whose membership is controlled by Teams rather than Azure AD, so Azure AD Premium P1 license are not required.
The PowerShell Alternative to Manage Dynamic Group Membership
If you don’t want to use a dynamic object, it’s certainly possible to use standard distribution lists or Microsoft 35 groups. In this scenario, the tenant takes the responsibility for maintaining group membership. Usually, PowerShell is used to add new accounts to group membership. You don’t have to worry about removing deleted accounts from the group as this happens automatically following an account deletion.
To add a new user to a distribution list, use the Add-DistributionGroupMember cmdlet:
Add-DistributionGroupMember -Identity "All Tenant Mailboxes" -Member Lotte.Vetler@office365itpros.com
To add a new user account to a Microsoft 365 group, either run the Add-UnifiedGroupLinks cmdlet (from the Exchange Online management module) or the New-MgGroupMember cmdlet (from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK):
Add-UnifiedGroupLinks -Identity "All Tenant Accounts" -LinkType Member -Links Lotte.Vetler@office365itpros.com
New-MgGroupMember -GroupId "107fe4dd-809c-4ec9-a3a1-ab88c96e0a5e" -DirectoryObjectId (Get-MgUser -UserId Lotte.Vetler@office365itpros.com).Id
If the tenant creates user accounts programmatically with PowerShell, these commands can be added to that script. If not, a background scheduled job could find accounts that don’t exist in group membership and add them. See this article for more information about group management with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.
Many Possibilities to Ponder
A simple question required a long answer. That’s because the questioner didn’t specify what type of group that they wanted to add new accounts to. In any case, it’s nice to be able to debate the possibilities and then settle on the best course of action to take.
Insight about the various options to manage dynamic group membership for new accounts doesn’t come easily. You’ve got to know the technology and understand how to look behind the scenes. Benefit from the knowledge and experience of the Office 365 for IT Pros team by subscribing to the best eBook covering Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
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