Use mailto: and other link types with the Quick Links Modern Web Part

More link types, more flexability

The SharePoint Online quick links webpart is a great webpart. It lets you quickly and easily put a variety of nice graphical links to other related resources throughout your intranet or even the internet.  

The issue is however the links are limited to only https URLs and sometimes you may want a link to send an e-mail, chat or place a call to someone such as the helpdesk. Since these link types are not supported you really don't have much of a way to accomplish this and it is a fairly common ask I've seen on the Microsoft Tech Community over the months. 

**Update. Quick Links now support mailto: as a link type, so you no longer need to use this for mail links. However it still holds true for other URL types like SIP etc. 

URL Shortening to the Rescue

So when I see this come up, I let people know the best way around this is to make use of a URL shortening service. There are a whole host of them out there. Make sure you find one that supports any type of link translation. The only I found and got working is TinyURL Setting a URL is simple and straight forward. Just type in for the e-mail link mailto:youremail@domain.com and click the Shorten button. 

Copy the returned URL and use this URL on your quick links webpart on your SharePoint page. 

Now clicking the quick link will open a new e-mail message using your default mail client! 

Quick Links for Chat

Creating links to chat with a chat contact is handled pretty much the same way as using mailto: e-mail links. To setup a chat use SIP:user@domain.com for your link to shorten. This will open the default chat app and chat with the person with a click of the mouse! For all your Microsoft Teams Organizations this is a great way to have an article with a call out link to chat with someone instead of sending an e-mail! 

I know it's a simple task but sometimes the obvious doesn't show up for us, when an easy solution is there for the taking! Hopefully this helps a few folks out to get desired results! 

Cannot set users or Tenant to Teams Only upgrade mode in Teams Admin Center

Edit: 1/11/2019 - Seems that Teams Only mode is starting to appear in the admin center again. 


I've been seeing a few posts around the community that they cannot upgrade their Tenant to Teams Only mode through the admin center and at first I believed that it might be just an update that needed to take place on the back end for this ability to show up, but now I believe it's an admin center issue and the best way to set these items is through PowerShell.

At some point about a month ago I was able to set my own upgrade policy to Teams Only in the new Teams admin center UI and even had the option to set it for the tenant, but recently discovered both these options have magically vanished from the UI in the new admin center.


Wanting to set my tenant now to Teams Only mode I figured I would check PowerShell and sure enough you're able to easily do this using the Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy commandlet. 


There is a great article touching over all the interoperability operations and settings at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/migration-interop-guidance-for-teams-with-skype 




If you want to set a single user set to Teams Only or one of the other upgrade policies you can by using the following. The example upgrades user@user.com to Teams Only mode. 

Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy -PolicyName UpgradeToTeams -Identity user@user.com

Once ran you can look at your user and you will notice the user has the policy now assigned. (This no longer is the case, it will just show blank now, until they update the GUI to support TeamsOnly again)

To set your entire tenant to Teams Only you can use the following command
Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy -PolicyName UpgradeToTeams


How to access and use these commands If you don't know how to access these Powershell commands you need to do the following. 
1. First Install the Skype for Business Online powershell module from here
2. Says a reboot is required after installation but I don't think it is, try if it doesn't work, then reboot ;). 
3. Now open powershell and run the following to connect: 
Import-Module SkypeOnlineConnector
$sfbSession = New-CsOnlineSession
Import-PSSession $sfbSession

After you enter your password to connect, you will now have access to all the commands to manage this and many other items with Skype/Teams.