A set of powershell tools to automate common and bulk tasks for those of us who have had Sharepoint Online administration dumped into our laps.
Quicklinks:
- Create a single subsite
- Create multiple subsites from a csv
- Get all subsites and export them to an HTML list
A set of cmdlets to be used in the Sharepoint Online Management Shell that will help you administer your institution's Sharepoint Online instance from the command line. These cmdlets have been designed with automation, efficiency, and hurry-up-and-go (HUG) administration in mind.
Using Powershell to interface with Sharepoint Online requires you to have a copy of the Sharepoint Online Management Shell installed on your computer.
Get yourself a copy of Sharepoint Sheriff by downloading the latest version.
As is normal in Powershell, you'll need to import the cmdlets into your script before you can use them. One easy way of doing this is to use the dot-source method.
Simply add the SPS-Suite.ps1 fullpath to the top of your script, like so:
."C:\Users\Roosevelt\SPS-Suite.ps1"
write-host "I've included a Sharepoint Sheriff suite cmdlet!"
Before you use the Sharepoint Sheriff suite, you'll need to bake in your credentials OR replace my email address with your own.
Example:
# Get user authentication
$Username = "your.email@yourcompany.org"
# Alternative: Comment out the explicit declaration and uncomment the below
# $Username = read-host -Prompt "Admin Email"
Sharepoint sites are organized under Site Collections. Sharepoint has a tool called New-SPSite, which is how you create a new collection from the commandline--but is not how you create a teamsite.
It's very common for an organization to have one site collection, and then off of that have a number of teamsites as part of that collection.
One way to organize a complex organization is to create parent teamsites off of the site collection, and then create subsites of those parent sites to account for the many teamsites you might have to deal with.
Here's a structural representation of what you can create, and what cmdlet you would use to create them:
| URL | Powershell cmdlet to create |
|---|---|
| https://yourorg.sharepoint.com/depts | New-SPSite |
| https://yourorg.sharepoint.com/depts/hr | SPS-CreateSubsite |
| https://yourorg.sharepoint.com/depts/research | SPS-CreateSubsite |
| https://yourorg.sharepoint.com/depts/research/bravoteam | SPS-CreateSubsite |
So in the above examples, we have a Site Collection called yourorg.sharepoint.com. Then, we have a teamsite called depts (which we can create with SPS-CreateSubsite and just pass along the root url of the site collection), two subsites of depts called research and hr (each of which we can also create with SPS-CreateSubsite), and a subsite of research called bravoteam. Notice the pattern? As long as you have already created your site collection, you can create a subsite.
The command to create a new subsite is as follows:
SPS-CreateSubsite -SiteUrl "https://yoursharepoint.sharepoint.com/aPrimarySite" -SubsiteUrl "MySubsite" -Title "My Special Subsite of aPrimarySite" The above will create https://yoursharepoint.sharepoint.com/aPrimarySite/MySubsite.
If you have many subsites you need to create on the fly, create a CSV file containing the subsite url and title of each one you wish to create, then use SPS-CreateSubsitesFromCSV to read the file and bulk create all the teamsites your heart desires.
For example, let's say I have a site collection called jessecollege.sharepoint.com, and in that site collection I have created a parent teamsite called Departments that will be the root site of all my instructional departments:
SPS-CreateSubsite -SiteUrl "https://jessecollege.sharepoint.com" `
-SubsiteUrl "Departments" -Title "Jesse College Instructional Departments"With my new root site, I now want to generate about six dozen teamsites, one for each of my departments. When you do this, be sure you set the permissions for the Departments site to whatever you want each of its subsites to be because the permissions are going to be inherited. For example, when I create a parent site, I'll add our Sharepoint Administrator, Sharepoint Technical Team members, and our User Support personnel as owners so that each site created can be fully controlled (and ownership can be delegated to a staff member in the future by) our techs.
I'll need to first create a CSV file of all the sites I want to create. It might look like this:
Url,Title
ag,Agriculture
addiction,Addiction Studies
anything,Anything Studies
bees,Beehive Replication Studies
git,Github Studies
law,Law and Policy
The format for this csv file is headerless and like so: subsite-url,Subsite Title. For this example, I've created a csv file called department-subsites.csv.
With that CSV file created, simply plug it into SPS-CreateSubsitesFromCSV like so:
SPS-CreateSubsitesFromCSV -SiteUrl "https://yoursharepoint.sharepoint.com/departments" -PathToCSV "C:\Users\Roosevelt\Documents\SharepointMigration\department-subsites.csv"Let's say you have a teamsite called TunaSandwichClub, and each state in the United States has it's own Tuna Sandwich Club Statewide Conference Center subsite.
Let's also say that your boss wants to have a page somewhere in Sharepoint that lists all the subsites of the TunaSandwichClub site. Are you going to make that list by hand? Hell no!
Simply use SPS-GetTabledSubsites.ps1 like so:
SPS-GetTabledSubsites.ps1 -SiteUrl "https://mysharepointsite.sharepoint.com/TunaSandwichClub" -OutFile "tunaclub-subsites.html"When you're done, check out the output file for some copy+pastable HTML code that you can slap right into a Sharepoint page. Yeehaw!