I frequently come in to organizations that refer to every instance and version of SharePoint as simply “SharePoint”. This makes it difficult to know if they are referring to on-premises or online, and if on-premises which major and minor version of SharePoint. My being a solution architect responsible for how SharePoint fits within the organization’s enterprise architecture, it is critical that I know precisely what version of SharePoint they have so that I know what capabilities are available. As an information security professional, I also need to know that if they have SharePoint Server that they have the latest security patches installed.
Jeremy Thake has shared this neat trick, simply append /_vti_pvt/service.cnf after the base (root site) URL of a SharePoint. For example, https://mytenant.sharepoint.com/_vti_pvt/service.cnf. This works for SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online. An example of the output is shown below.
vti_encoding:SR|utf8-nl
vti_extenderversion:SR|16.0.0.20015You do not need any special permissions to visit the above API endpoint. If you have Farm Administrator access to SharePoint Server, you can visit the Manage Patch Status page within Central Administrator using the path /_admin/PatchStatus.aspx. Unfortunately the patches are not listed in an easy to understand order and the listing is not sortable within SharePoint.
If you are interested in Microsoft Graph, you may want to follow Jeremy Thake on Twitter.
