SharePoint and OneDrive Panels Merged into Single Admin Portal

The proliferation of cloud-based technologies and services has had a side effect – the proliferation of admin portals for each different cloud service including, at times, multiple portals within the same cloud service rather than one centralized pane of glass. For any company that runs a multi-cloud enterprise, the potential exists to need access to even more service dashboards just for day-to-day operations.

Addressing this proliferation of portals, Microsoft announced the rollout of a single admin portal to bring together the administration tools and analytics for what had formerly been two separate admin portals for Microsoft 365’s SharePoint and OneDrive for Business.

In a posting on the Microsoft Tech Community OneDrive Blog, Ankita Kirti, a OneDrive Product Manager, shared details of this enhancement confirming that admins need more centralized control of content across an organization.

“Aligning to our coherence and modernization efforts, we are working hard to unify these experiences by brining consistent design, naming conventions, look and feel to enable a smoother admin experience across the Microsoft 365 admin suite,” said Kirti.

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This rollout, which has already begun and will continue through February, will bring these key tools together in one admin portal:

The new Global Reader Admin Role, which also recently shipped to the Microsoft Azure portal, is also available for the new SharePoint and OneDrive portal. This provides the organization flexibility in assigning admins to keep situational awareness high but doesn't limit the ability to make changes.

Following the mode of other Microsoft 365 portals, these modern web-based interfaces are fully customizable and allow each administrator to select the service data cards they need to focus on and then show them by default in the admin portal’s main page. Full navigation is still available in the SharePoint and OneDrive portal for other areas of the service’s administrative settings.

According to Christian Buckley, AvePoint’s go-to-market (GTM) manager for the company’s global relationship with Microsoft, the consolidation of dashboards is quite logical from an infrastructure and service perspective.

“OneDrive for Business is SharePoint under the hood. From an organizational standpoint, it is essentially a container within the larger SharePoint infrastructure, so aligning SharePoint/OneDrive management capabilities makes sense,” he said.

In addition to these changes, Microsoft also recently raised the file size limit for Microsoft 365 cloud storage and sharing to 250GB. With the increase in 4K/8K video files, 3D models, CAD files and large data sets, this increase will make adoption of cloud storage even more accommodating.