Second entry of this series, a rough mock-up for another Power App. The first recreation was an Intagram-esque app created using two galleries. Likely an oversimplification, but Netflix is also two galleries at its core; although the galleries are used differently. For this Power App, the horizontal gallery is nested within the vertical gallery: Figure … Continue reading Power Apps: Recreating… Netflix
Author: Charles
Microsoft Teams: Auto-Record Gotcha!
Meeting recordings in Microsoft Teams are owned by whomever initiates the recording; usually the meeting organizer. However, Microsoft recently introduced an auto-record feature for scheduled meetings... To enable auto-record, open the Meeting options as the meeting organizer: Figure 1 - Microsoft Teams meeting options link in Microsoft Outlook. Within the meeting options, Record automatically is … Continue reading Microsoft Teams: Auto-Record Gotcha!
Power Apps: Recreating… Instagram
Software Engineering is more than writing efficient and reusable code. An underutilized discipline of the field is user-centered design. This area of Software Engineering focuses more on building beautiful and intuitive interfaces. Unfortunately, I don't often see Power Apps with clear investments into their UIs. Though, with a bit of effort, Power Apps could easily … Continue reading Power Apps: Recreating… Instagram
Power Automate: SPO Item Version Delta
[SharePoint Online] is a well known document management solution. Baked into this Microsoft solution is metadata and versioning. In simplest terms, metadata is document tagging. Versioning is an audit trail of document changes - including document properties... Figure 1 - Version history of a SPO list item. Working with SPO, Power Automate has an action … Continue reading Power Automate: SPO Item Version Delta
Power Automate: Populate SPO User Claims (multiple claims)
Power Automate can add user accounts to SharePoint Online list items. If the person column accepts a single account, then the assignee claims are passed as a string. But for multiple accounts, the assignee claims are passed as an array. Illustrating this, loop through a list of approvers, then add them all to a list … Continue reading Power Automate: Populate SPO User Claims (multiple claims)
Microsoft 365: MS Lists v SPO Lists
Microsoft Lists has been released to the wild. Is this different than SharePoint Lists? Kind of, but not really... Microsoft has a history of surfacing elements of SharePoint and creating "new" standalone solutions. Though not direct successors, but... Power Automate replaced SharePoint Designer workflows. Microsoft Forms became a substitute for SharePoint Surveys. However, things are … Continue reading Microsoft 365: MS Lists v SPO Lists
Microsoft Forms: Field GUIDS w/ Power Automate
Microsoft Forms is great for quickly collecting responses. Simple forms are created in a few minutes, but even more robust forms are created in maybe half an hour. Though, once the data is collected, what's next? Someone could process the form results with Power Automate. And mapping most fields is straight-forward. Yet, it's important to … Continue reading Microsoft Forms: Field GUIDS w/ Power Automate
Graph API: Process SPO Folders w/ Special Characters
Microsoft Graph is a RESTful web API. With these APIs, I can access many of the Microsoft 365 resources. But for now, I need to query the contents of a folder with a special character in the name. Why is this an issue? Document management systems like [SharePoint Online] will often support special characters that … Continue reading Graph API: Process SPO Folders w/ Special Characters
Power Automate: Microsoft’s “Rube Goldberg Machine”
The Microsoft 365 suite is a collection of cloud-based solutions: Outlook Online,SharePoint Online,Microsoft Teams,etc. Also included in this ensemble is Power Automate, Microsoft's workflow solution. Power Automate flows can use dozens (and dozens) of connectors to link both Microsoft and non-Microsoft solutions into automated processes: TwitterAsanaMailChimpYouTubeSalesforceetc. Essentially, an action triggers the process, then a series … Continue reading Power Automate: Microsoft’s “Rube Goldberg Machine”
Power Automate: Object Properties
Using connectors and actions, Power Automate can CRUD data from different sources. Often enough, the returned data is simple text and/ or numerical values, but can sometimes be complex data objects. Represented in a JSON format, the properties of these complex data objects can typically be retrieved with key-value pairs... E.g., storing SharePoint list items … Continue reading Power Automate: Object Properties
OneDrive: Data Recovery Options
[OneDrive for Business] is individual cloud storage for Microsoft 365 work and school accounts. Because of the cloud infrastructure, it also facilitates file sharing and collaboration. But as a bonus, there are several ways to recover OneDrive content... #1 - Recycle Bin. Deleted content is moved to the site's Recycle bin. Similar to a local … Continue reading OneDrive: Data Recovery Options
SharePoint Online: File Metadata w/ Graph API
Microsoft's Graph API has endpoints for [SharePoint Online] lists and libraries. Worthy of note, document libraries are /drives when using the APIs. And although libraries are technically lists, the two resources will return different properties for the same SharePoint object. Additionally, some actions can only be performed using the /lists resources. An example of this, … Continue reading SharePoint Online: File Metadata w/ Graph API
SharePoint Online: Metadata Scopes
[SharePoint Online] has a number of features and functionalities. Among these, there is robust support for metadata. But why support metadata? Because metadata helps flatten files, index content, and improve search results. And with this robust support, metadata can be created at several different levels. One way to visualize these scopes... Local Regional National Global … Continue reading SharePoint Online: Metadata Scopes
SharePoint: List Views (CAML Queries)
Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) is a schema used in SharePoint to query list data. Viewing, sorting, and grouping columns, that's straight-forward. One or two filter conditions, also straight-forward. But when three or more conditions are applied, the logic may get a bit murky. Because the UI hasn't really changed over the years, it still … Continue reading SharePoint: List Views (CAML Queries)
Azure Runbook: Task Logging
PowerShell is a scripting language great for task automation. The framework has gone through a number of iterations and Microsoft supports it in Azure. These cloud-hosted scripts are created as Azure Runbooks. Contrasted against the PowerShell ISE and Visual Studio Code, there are some logging differences with Runbooks. Locally run scripts typically write their logs … Continue reading Azure Runbook: Task Logging
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