Disable modern page comments globally for all sites in SharePoint 2019 and SharePoint Online

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Those of you with Office 365/SharePoint Online have a simple path to disabling modern page commenting via the admin center. But for those of you, like myself, who also work in SharePoint 2019, your method involves PowerShell and is a bit more laborious. In this post, I’ll cover both methods: Disabling comments via PowerShell for SharePoint 2019 (server) and then via the admin center for SharePoint Online (O365).

Firstly, why disallow commenting altogether instead of giving site owners and page editors the choice? Some organizations have compliance regulations that require any sort of conversational transaction to meet certain criteria. Perhaps you only need to disable commenting temporarily while you build a case to prove compliance. Or perhaps you’ve determined it’s not compliant or have some other reason for wishing to globally disable page comments.

No matter your reasoning, here’s the how:

Disable modern page/news comments globally in SharePoint 2019 via PowerShell

The script below will iterate through all site collections in a web application, and all of the subsites within each site collection, and turn off page comments for sites that haven’t already had them disabled. This does not delete page comments. If you re-enable the feature later, the comments that were there previously will be restored.

Log onto a SharePoint server and run the following PowerShell script, replacing the site URL with your own web app’s URL:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
Get-SPWebApplication "https://sharepoint.contoso.com" | Get-SPSite –Limit All | Get-SPWeb -Limit All | ForEach-Object {
    if($_.CommentsOnSitePagesDisabled = "False")
    {
        $_.CommentsOnSitePagesDisabled = $True
        $_.Update()
        Write-Host "Disabled page comments on " $_.URL -ForegroundColor Green
    }
    else
    {
        Write-Host "Page comments already disabled on " $_.URL -ForegroundColor Yellow
    }
}

If you want a read-out to validate current status (False = not disabled, True = disabled), you can run the following script (again, replacing the URL with the web app of your own):

Get-SPWebApplication "https://sharepoint.contoso.com" | Get-SPSite –Limit All | Get-SPWeb -Limit All | ForEach-Object {
Write-Host $_.CommentsOnSitePagesDisabled $_.URL
}

Disable modern page/news comments globally in SharePoint Online/O365

1. Go to the SharePoint admin center at yourdomain-admin.sharepoint.com and select Settings from the left navigation menu.

2. Select Pages.

3. Uncheck Allow commenting on modern pages and click Save.

Image thumbnails not showing in SharePoint Server 2019 modern/new library experience

One of the best perks of upgrading to SharePoint Server 2019 from previous versions is the introduction of the modern/new list, library, and page experience. Modern web parts and layouts become available, lists look sleek and closer to what users are seeing in O365 in hybrid environments, etc.

It recently came to my attention, however, that the new list experience in picture and document libraries doesn’t render image thumbnails. According to Mike Lee in this thread, thumbnails in the modern/new experience rely on a cloud-based microservice that is incompatible with SharePoint 2019. Users, instead, just see image icons where thumbnails should be:

The only workaround in SharePoint 2019 to see image thumbnails in picture and document libraries is to revert to the classic experience. Each user can do this for themselves if we leave the default experience setting, but we want to force all users to use classic and not have the choice of using modern if we want them to see thumbnails.

Go to User Voice and vote for this issue to be resolved, adding support for image thumbnails in SharePoint 2019 modern experience views. In the meantime, here’s how you can change a library’s default experience back to classic:

Set library view to classic experience

1. Go to Library settings (settings wheel in upper right > Library settings).

OR if you’re already viewing classic experience, Library settings is found in the Library ribbon menu.

2. Click Advanced settings.

3. Scroll to the very bottom and for List experience select Classic experience.

4. Click OK.

Now all users will see the classic experience and not have the choice of toggling back to modern where thumbnails cannot be shown.

New Modern Page Title/Banner Layouts in SharePoint Online/O365

Recently, SharePoint Online/O365 (and soon SP 2019?) released an upgrade to the page title area of modern pages. Previously, the header area of a page was restricted to a banner image and text. Then they released an update that allowed customizing the image. Then removing the image. Now we’ve leaped ahead and you can choose from four layouts:

First edit the modern page and click the “Edit” icon on the title area:

Select a layout & alignment

Image and title

Plain

Color block

Overlap

Add “tag” text above the title

Show published date

Don’t forget to save your changes and publish your page when finished.

The “New item” menu in modern SharePoint document libraries now allows adding templates

I happily stumbled across an update to modern document libraries I hadn’t noticed before. The modern document library “new item” menu now includes an option to “Edit New Menu” which pulls up this pane in-context:

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And also includes the ability to upload a new template directly from the menu, rather than through content type settings.

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Any new templates added via this method will use the default content type for that library, but provides a way to have multiple templates for a single content type.

How to give SharePoint link lists a professional look out-of-the-box using the icon library

In the modern SharePoint experience, you can clean up ordinary link lists with very little effort, thanks to SharePoint’s icon library.

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Whether you need a Teams icon (teams), dog (fangbody), tooth (teeth) or football (football), you can search for icons and use those for adding visual cues and iconography to your sites. Here’s how you can implement this on your page(s):

Continue reading “How to give SharePoint link lists a professional look out-of-the-box using the icon library”