☕ SharePoint Tip #7 — The SharePoint Admin Center: your command centre
Good morning! Here is your 15-minute SharePoint tip for today.
Day 7 | Week 2 — Administration & Security
The SharePoint Admin Center
The SharePoint Admin Center is your command and control for the entire SharePoint tenant. As a Product Owner, you won’t manage every setting yourself — but you must understand what’s there so you can have informed conversations with your IT team and make product decisions confidently.
How to get there
Go to: https://admin.microsoft.com → expand Admin centers in the left menu → click SharePoint. You need the SharePoint Administrator or Global Administrator role.
The key sections every PO should know
Home — shows active sites, storage usage, and recent activity at a glance.
Sites > Active sites — a full list of every site collection in your tenant. You can see storage used, last activity, owners, and hub site association. This is where you create, delete, and manage sites.
Policies > Sharing — controls the external sharing settings for the entire tenant. This is the master switch: can users share files with people outside your organisation? If yes, how — anyone with a link, or only specific people?
Policies > Access control — restrict access from unmanaged devices, set idle session timeouts, and configure network location policies.
Settings — controls defaults like default sharing link type, storage limits, and whether users can create their own sites (self-service site creation).
Migration — the entry point for Microsoft’s Migration Manager tool, used for file server to SharePoint migrations.
Storage management
Your tenant has a storage quota (typically 1TB + 10GB per licensed user). Each site collection uses a portion of this. In Active Sites you can see who is consuming the most storage and set per-site limits.
Try it today (5 minutes)
If you have admin access, open the SharePoint Admin Center and click Active sites. Sort by Storage used (descending). You’ll immediately see which sites are consuming the most storage. This is one of the first things to review as a new Product Owner — it tells you where the activity is.
As a Product Owner
The Admin Center is your evidence base for product decisions. Storage trends, site activity, sharing policy violations — all of it is here. Make it a habit to review Active Sites and the usage reports monthly as part of your product health check.
See you tomorrow at 6:00 AM with Tip #8 — External Sharing and guest access!