SharePoint Online Organisational Assets Libraries

A question I get asked a lot when designing and deploying SharePoint hosted intranets is “Can we have a central image library managed by the marketing team for all our approved corporate images for people across the organisation to use”. Until now that wasn’t possible without communicating the URL of the document library containing the images to content authors and hoping they remember it when authoring new pages and news posts.

Now, with the Organisational Assets Library feature of SharePoint Online you can define a central library, up to 30 in fact, that will be displayed when people add an image to a web part on their content page.

This means that the marketing team can manage the master library of approved corporate images and additional libraries can be published for specific teams, projects or promotions to help ensure the corporate brand guidelines for image use are followed.

SharePoint Organisation Assets Library

Deploying an Organisation Assets Library requires the Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary PowerShell cmdlet to be run by a SharePoint Administrator. The library to become and organisational asset library is specified and a thumbnail image can be used if required.

Administrators can get a list of existing Organisation Assets Libraries by running the Get-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary cmdlet and a library can be removed from the Organisation Assets list by running the Remove-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary cmdlet. The Microsoft Docs article describing how to manage the process is HERE.

NOTE: Adding an Organisation Asset Library will enable a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for your Office 365 tenant, and as Microsoft puts it: “The CDN may have privacy and compliance standards that differ from the commitments outlined by the Microsoft Office365 Trust Center. Data cached through this service may not conform to the Microsoft Data Processing Terms (DPT), and may be outside of the Microsoft Office365 Trust Center compliance boundaries.”

This relates to the images in the library that will be cached in the CDN, and not the content of the pages that display the images but you may need to check with your Information Governance team that this is acceptable, especially if images contain personally identifiable information.

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