What is it ?
An organisation assets library is a document library that you designate for storing images & logos for use in your company. These images can be used in modern webparts added to SharePoint pages. This adds the obvious benefit of a central location for the storage of corporate media.
You can have up to 30 such libraries defined in your tenant but all libraries must reside in the same site collection. As such it’s a good idea from the outset to create a dedicated site collection for these libraries.
Until recently you could only create libraries to hold images etc. However, Microsoft appear to have silently added the ability to store Office templates and these templates appear for use in the Office clients when creating new documents. This post describes the steps required to provision these template libraries.
How to create one
- Create a dedicated site collection – eg branding – to store org assets
- Create one or more document libraries in this site collection.
To create an asset library you must connect to SharePoint Online as Global Admin or SharePoint Admin using the latest version of the SharePoint Online Management Shell.
Download and install the latest SharePoint Online Management Shell
Run PowerShell (as administrator) and login to SharePoint Online with ..
Connect-SPOService -Url https://mydomain-admin.sharepoint.com
.. where mydomain-admin.sharepoint.com is your tenant admin URL for SharePoint Online (you can confirm this by opening the SharePoint Admin center from the Microsoft 365 admin center)
Once connected, run the following ..
Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary -LibraryURL "https://mydomain.sharepoint.com/sites/OrganisationAssets/Office Templates" -OrgAssetType OfficeTemplateLibrary
where ..
–LibraryURL – location of your document library
–ThumbnailURL – location of custom image to replace standard folder image (not used in this example)
–OrgAssetType – indicates the type of content and currently supports two types ..
- OfficeTemplateLibrary – used to specify an asset of type Office Template
- ImageDocumentLibrary – used to specify an asset of type image
How to use it
If you create a new document from an Office client – Word in the example below – you should see a new entry that represents your tenant name for your organisation templates – KONNEXION LTD in my example below. If you select this you will see a folder that represents the document library you have provisioned for template storage “Office Templates” below.
Note, your Office client needs to be logged into your tenant for this to work.
Final word on templates
The procedure above provides templates visible to end users in the various Office clients.
We have an additional 2 ways to provide templates to end users when creating Office documents in SharePoint
- Content Types – you can add a custom template to a content type and add this content type to any document library. This adds an option in the library New menu to create a document of that type – which will include that template
- In modern document libraries the user can manually add templates under the New menu. Useful when the template is unlikely to be used anywhere else
The only thing missing for me is the availability of those image libraries from inside of the office applications. So it’s easy to add a pre-approved image to my document.
Good point, maybe we need a third type. I did notice that there is a third “undefined” place holder
Hi Ian! tried this and everything works fine in SharePoint for the Image Assets Library but when i set up a Document Library for Office templates they never show up in the Office Applications. I do not even see my tenant name for the template storage (in Word, Excel or PowerPoint.
I have uploaded “real” template files (dotx, potx etc.)
I have Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus
I am logged in
Can You guide me please?
Best regards, Magnus
Make sure your Office application – eg Word – is logged into your tenant
I have verified that and it is.
Also, it can take up to 24 hours – when did you run the PowerShell ?
That can explain the issue 😊 I ran it 5 hours ago. Time to get some sleep and perhaps it is solved tomorrow. Thanks for your help. 👍
Is there a minimum Office version that is required for this to show up? We are on 1909 and I am not seeing the organization templates I added for Word or PowerPoint.
The docs don’t make that clear. I’m using Office 365 ProPlus, Version 2003 (Build 12624.20086 Click-to-Run) Note that in my case it took until the next day for the libraries to appear in the Office clients.
What does Get-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary return ?
I upgraded my version of Office to Version 2002 and I am now seeing the templates. Not sure what version this was introduced in, but looks like 1909 was too old.
Now it works for me. I just had to wait a day before it showed up in the office applications. Thanks for the help Ian.
Good to hear Magnus
Ian, I added a OrgAssetLibrary and it showed up in Word (Yay! – great test). I then disconnected my test library and connected up the two official asset libraries of the organisation, they show for everyone else except for me my Office still only shows the original library (most likely cached somewhere). Any ideas how I can force a cache refresh on my organisation template libraries in the Office client?
William on the client (eg Word) try logging out and back in again to your account
Sorry for delay William – I assume you have this sorted but first thing I always try is to logout the Office client and login again
Hello,
this works great in the 3 desktop apps (Word, Excel, PP) and in PP Online, but not in Word Online and Excel Online. What can cause this?
TIA,
Peeter
Seeing the same Peeter – no idea, I’d imagine support has not been added. Odd that PowerPoint is supported before Word & Excel