Microsoft 365 is ever changing. Released many, many months ago, Add shortcut to OneDrive remains a mystery to some people. This is different than Sync, right? Figure 1 - SharePoint Online Contextual Menu options. Somewhat different, but a lot of the same. Even so, the shortcut link delivers on its promise. Shortcuts link to specific … Continue reading SharePoint Online: Sync vs OneDrive Shortcut
Office 365
Power Apps: Recreating… Office App
User-centered design should really be at the core of all app development. Functionality is essential, but a poorly designed interface can sink any app. With this in mind, more time should be invested in designing Power Apps... Next in the series, recreating the Office App with SharePoint Online as a data source: Figure 1 - … Continue reading Power Apps: Recreating… Office App
Azure AD: SharePoint Online User Cache
[SharePoint Online] sites can use [Azure AD] security groups to manage user access and permissions. Noteworthy, these security groups can be applied directly to sites, lists, and/ or items. And every security group used on the SPO site is saved to the site member list. This member list roughly functions as a site cache and … Continue reading Azure AD: SharePoint Online User Cache
Power Apps: Recreating… Netflix
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
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
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