SharePoint Online

SharePoint Online, the cloud-based version of SharePoint, is now available to colleagues across the University. This is part of the Nexus365 suite of applications and replaces the current SharePoint on-premise.

Moving to SharePoint Online

SharePoint on-premise is being switched off in April 2023, so we strongly encourage you to move your content to SharePoint Online well before this deadline.

The content of SharePoint on-premise sites cannot be automatically moved over to SharePoint Online. Setting up new SharePoint Online sites and moving content over will be the responsibility of Site Owners and administrators.

Roles in SharePoint Online

There are two top-level roles in SharePoint Online:

  1. Business Owner – a non-technical, senior manager who is accountable for the content in SharePoint Online for their part of the University, and responsible for appointing an SNA
  2. Site Network Administrator (SNA) – a technical role that replaces the Site Collection Administrator (SCA) in SharePoint on-premise, who will manage and provide support for SharePoint Online in their part of the University

Setting up a presence in SharePoint Online

Departments, colleges and other parts of the University first need to go through an onboarding process with the Nexus team, for which you will need to provide the name of your unit and the name of your Business Owner and at least one Site Network Administrator (SNA).

Getting ready for SharePoint Online

Once your unit has onboarded, you can request new SharePoint Online sites, but first please consider the following:

  1. Review your current SharePoint on-premise site, if you have one, and determine what content needs to be moved and what can be deleted or archived, given retention and GDPR considerations
  2. Consider whether Microsoft Teams or OneDrive might be more suitable for some site content
  3. Contact your new SharePoint Online SNA before requesting a site to discuss how your site will fit into your unit’s new network

Get SharePoint Online

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    SharePoint Online uses Microsoft’s "modern experience" and offers many improvements over SharePoint on-premise:

    • It’s mobile friendly
    • It’s user-friendly and has a clean, modern look
    • It’s much better for collaboration and co-authoring documents
    • You can search for documents across all your SharePoint Online sites 
    • It’s more straightforward to share content securely with people external to the University
    • It has a simpler, flatter structure that replaces the current hierarchical site collections
    • It’s much simpler to move content around within sites
    • You have much more storage, up to 1TB, rather than 25-100Gb for each site collection
    • It integrates well with other Microsoft tools such as Power Automate (formerly Flow)
    • Permissions are much easier to handle

    • SharePoint Online is now available across the University
    • We are currently finishing the committee template for SharePoint Online

    Content of SharePoint on-premise sites will need to be moved to SharePoint Online as soon as possible, with a hard deadline of April 2023, when SharePoint on-premise goes out of support from Microsoft. It will be the responsibility of site owners and Site Collection Administrators to carry out these moves.

    • SharePoint is available as part of Nexus365
    • Content of existing SharePoint sites have been successfully and appropriately moved to SharePoint Online
    • Once the above have been achieved, services that are no longer required - such as on-premise SharePoint and WebLearn - can be considered for decommissioning.

    Help

    If you have any questions about SharePoint Online: