Saturday 8 September 2018

How To Bulk Publish in SharePoint (without using Site Content and Structure)

Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash

Back in June 2018, Microsoft announced that they were removing SharePoint Online's Site Content and Structure page in October 2018.  This had some useful features in it, some of which are being replaced, some of which are not.  

One of Site Content and Structure's popular features is the ability to bulk publish all of the documents in a library to a major version.  This is particularly useful if you only allow people with edit rights to see minor versions, and you want to publish a large number of documents at the same time, for example on the launch date of something.

How can this be done once Site Content and Structure is no longer available?

Let's go through the steps.

  1. Create a view that filters items based on "Version contains .1" OR Version contains .2 OR [all the way up to] "Version contains .9":
  2. Open the list, select this view and click Return to classic experience.
  3. Select all of the items in the list, open the Files tab and click Check Out.
  4. Select all of the items in the list, open the Files tab and click Check in.
  5. In the Check in panel that opens, select the Major version (publish) radio button and click OK
Once you've created this view you can use it whenever it's needed.  

You might think it would be easier to just create a view that says "Version does not contain .0", and you'd be right.  Unfortunately, SharePoint views don't support "does not contain", so you have to create this filter the long way round, so to speak.   If this is a common requirement for your users you can add this view to the libraries in your site template so you don't have to keep reproducing it by hand every time whenever you create a new site.