Managing Organizational Assets in SharePoint

A well-organized collection of SharePoint sites improves productivity by shortening the time it takes to find or create content. But there isn’t just one way to organize your content. One organization may create a site collection that acts as a central repository; another might store templates in department sites based on content ownership; another might create an automated site-provisioning solution that includes copies of file templates in the site; and another may use content types—with the templates associated with each content type. In the first three scenarios, you’ll need to know where the templates are stored. In the content-type scenario, you’ll need to configure each document library to use that content type and make sure that changes are properly synced. An alternative to these are Organizational Assets. These are libraries that contain corporate-approved images or file templates where you can make a library accessible to all without having to provide a location.

In the following scenario, our fictitious marketing department wants to allow everyone to choose corporate-approved images on any SharePoint site. The images will be managed within the marketing site and they want to make those images available to all sites but don’t want to clutter the marketing site with resource links. IT recommends setting up Organizational Assets.

They create a simple document library which will store these images so with a few simple PowerShell commands, IT can easily make the contents available to all sites.

With the SharePoint Online Management Shell, they simply establish a connection to SharePoint Online and run the Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary command.

Connect-SPOService -url https://{your tenant}-admin.sharepoint.com
Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary -LibraryURL https://{your tenant}.sharepoint.com/sites/{your site/your library}

Here’s a shot of the command for this example. As you can see, the Assets library is setup to be a private CDN:
Once completed, they’ll see a message that the library was added. At this point, they may need to wait a few minutes before it becomes available to the other sites.

Soon, the images are accessible and the team responsible for the Product News site wants to add an image to their page.

When they attempt to add an image, the left-hand menu includes a new option: “Your Organization.” Clicking it displays the asset library that was just setup. Clicking “Assets” reveals all of marketing’s images stored in that library.

Now, what about document templates? You may have invoice templates or contract templates that change occasionally. In these situations, some users will download a copy of the file locally, and may miss changes if they don’t come back often for the latest file. We can make document templates available directly in the Office suite by using the same commands, with one additional option:
Connect-SPOService -url https://{your tenant}-admin.sharepoint.com
Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary -LibraryURL https://{your tenant}.sharepoint.com/sites/{your site/your library} -OrgAssetType OfficeTemplateLibrary
Once the command is run and becomes available, users will be able to create a new file directly from the Office products, using templates provided by the organization. In the example below, when I create a New file in Word, I can choose templates from Office, Personal, and my tenant (the 3rd option, which is obscured in the screenshot). After selecting my tenant, I can see the libraries that were made available to me, along with a template preview. I can click the template and get started with the latest version of the file without having to know where the template is stored. One important thing to note about these templates is that the file must be in the template format. Word templates need to be in the dotx format. A docx file will not appear as a template.

Organizational Asset Libraries are the latest way to put content at the end-user’s fingertips. They enable users to get the latest approved content quickly, without needing to know where it resides. Image assets are a great way to maintain a standard of image quality and provide a simple way to access templates to reduce the chance folks are using old versions of the files to create new contracts, presentations, etc. We hope you found this information helpful. For more ways to manage content and improve productivity, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’d love to help you get started.