Introducing: SharePoint Online Public CDN Manager

Update 24th March 2017: This post was updated since the general availability of the Office 365 Public CDN. The SPO CDN Manager now supports the GA version of the Office 365 Public CDN.

The Office 365 Public CDN recently reached General availability. It allows static assets like images, JavaScript, CSS etc. to be hosted in a globally available CDN. Find out more about it here.

With the general availability, the Office 365 PowerShell and SharePoint Online CSOM were also updated with APIs which could be used to manage the Public CDN.

Although the APIs are handy, what was missing was a nice and simple GUI to manage the CDN settings. So I set out to create an app which would give a nice overview of all the CDN settings including folders in the tenant which have been configured as Origins, file types which have been set to be pushed to the CDN and finally a way to enable/disable the CDN.

Introducing the SharePoint Online Public CDN Manager:

Check it out now: https://spocdnmanager.azurewebsites.net/

Checkout the code on GitHub: https://github.com/vman/SPO-CDN-Manager

As you can tell, the SharePoint Online Public CDN Manager can be used to:

1) Add/Remove CDN Origins i.e. SPO Libraries which will be used to store static assets.

2) Add/Remove File types. Which files will be pushed to the CDN.

3) Enable/Disable the CDN on a tenant.

4) Create the default CDN origins specified by the Office 365 Public CDN

The Implementation:

1) It is an MVC app which is Multi Tenant and hosted on the Azure App Service. It uses the March 2017 Release of SharePoint Online CSOM to talk to SharePoint.
https://dev.office.com/blogs/new-sharepoint-csom-version-released-for-Office-365-march-2017

2) For the UI, the Office UI Fabric core styles are used together with the Office UI Fabric JS Components

3) The app requires "Office 365 SharePoint Online" Full Control permissions on all site collections. This is because the CDN is a tenant wide setting and can be modified only by Tenant Administrators or SharePoint Administrators.

The app uses Delegated (User) authentication for every call to SharePoint so that only Tenant/SharePoint Administrators can access the CDN Properties:
So even if a user who is not an Admin lands on the page, they are not able to fiddle with the CDN settings.

Tenant vs Office365Tenant

Something interesting I came across while working on this. There are 2 classes available in CSOM now to manipulate tenant settings:

Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.TenantManagement.Office365Tenant

Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.TenantAdministration.Tenant

Both these classes have the Public CDN properties which can be used to manage the CDN. But the interesting this is that the Tenant class requires the Tenant Administration Url (https://yourtenant-admin.sharepoint.com) to instantiate but the Office365Tenant class can be instantiated by a regular site url in SharePoint Online. (https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/publishing)

If a regular SharePoint site url is used to instantiate the Tenant class, you get an exception saying:

Current site is not a tenant administration site.

This is why I have used the Office365Tenant class. Checkout the code on GitHub for more details.

Workaround for Internet Explorer "Quirks":

The SPO CDN Manager has been tested on latest version of Chrome, Edge and IE. It works without any issues on Chrome and Edge.

But, to get it working on IE, you will have to add the remote site https://spocdnmanager.azurewebsites.net to IE's trusted sites.

Thanks for reading! Hope you find the SPO CDN Manager useful.

Add a Site Collection administrator to all Site Collections in a Tenant (including OneDrive for Business sites)

I have come across this scenario many times where even if I am the tenant admin in my SharePoint Online tenant, it is not necessary that I will be the site collection admin of every site collection by default. This is by design and makes perfect sense as there might be some site collections where sensitive data might be stored and I might not have rights to see that data despite being the tenant admin. However, in some scenarios you might feel the need to give a user site collection admin rights for all the site collections in the tenant.

Also for OneDrive for Business site collections in the tenant, the user who is owner of the site collection is the only person who has site collection admin rights on it by default. This can be a problem for compliance and e-discovery reasons. You might be in a situation where you need to give site collection admin rights to a compliance manager or a global administrator on all the OneDrive for Business sites in a tenant.

In this post, lets have a look at how you can make a user a site collection admin on all the site collections in a tenant as well as on all the OneDrive for Business site collections in the tenant.

Some notes:

1) For now, this only works with SharePoint Online/Office 365.
2) You will need the SharePoint Online Client Side Object Model Nuget package
3) By changing a parameter in the SetSiteAdmin function, you can also remove a user from the site collection admins of all site collections.
4) The user who runs this code will need Tenant Administrator rights on the Tenant.

1) Add a site collection admin to all site collections in a tenant:

This is the easy part, all you need to do it get the urls of the site collections in the tenant and add the desired user as a site collection admin to it using the Tenant.SetSiteAdmin function.

2) Add a site collection admin to all the OneDrive for Business site collections in a tenant:

This takes a bit more work. Here are all the things we need to do:

1) Get the account names of the users in a tenant using People Search. Now bear in mind that search has a limitation of returning a maximum of 500 rows on SharePoint Online. That will be 500 users in our case. So if your tenant as more than 500 users, you will need to call search in batches of 500 to get the account names of all the users.

2) Once we have the account names of the users, we need to get the url of their OneDrive for Business sites. We can do this by querying the CSOM UserProfile API

3) After getting the OneDrive for Business site urls, all we need to do is use the same Tenant.SetSiteAdmin function as above.

Here is the complete code for that:


There is also another way to do the same thing where you get the OneDrive for Business site urls from the UserProfileService.asmx and then use the Set-SPOUser SharePoint Online PowerShell cmdlet to set the user as the site collection admin. Here are the details for that https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn765092.aspx

Hope you found this article useful!