SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

Who could have predicted the current weird?

Certainly not politicians, right?

Some of us are grateful that we were already used to working from home, and therefore the current situation, although not ideal, is still manageable. I just had to wait a couple of weeks to receive a desk and swap my ironing board and improvised desk to a more long term environment than my living room table.

After sorting out our home schedule, such as distributing home-schooling and client’s work, I was frustrated not being able to help with the “current weird” situation like the amazing frontline medical staff that are saving lives.

• I made myself available for a few hours each week, to answer any of your working-from-home challenges, solve your technical challenges with Office 365 and SharePoint.

When I posted this on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, a couple of people joined me and I hope that I was useful since they managed to progress with the questions they had. I just didn’t post it on my own blog yet.

There was never a better time to learn something new, so come on and hit me. Anything from being Excel pivot tables, chart, preparing an amazing presentation and mastering Zoom ro Microsoft Teams, becoming a master in productivity with Outlook, kicking arse at ticking tasks and finding your documents in seconds, to backing up your pc the right way.

Click here to book time absolutely free, and booking can be repeated if you wish.

(the times I reserved for us will not impact my current commitment so don’t be embarrassed, just come to say hello)

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via François on SharePoint, Office 365 and more technologies https://bit.ly/2yJ5IBC

French native Sharepoint Consultant living in London. A crossway between a designer, developer and system architect. Prefers stretching the limit of out-of-the-box features rather than breaking them into code. When not working with Microsoft Sharepoint François is often found on Web2.0 News sites and related social networking tools. This article has been cross posted from sharepointfrancois.com (original article)

Last week I attended #MSIgniteTheTour in London #ExcEl, it is always a great opportunity to learn and catch up with some community friends. Although a lot of sessions were techy, including some I admit that went well above my head… that is until I realised that I was in the wrong room 30 minutes later ;-).

As always the amount of partners stands and various products was overwhelming, but they must exist in the Microsoft eco-system so that they accelerate and improve the products. I was thrilled to discover the latest UX of Project on the Web thanks to a fast-paced live presentation by my ex-colleague MVP Paul Mather and enjoying watching his mastering in both the topic and the public speaking.

Yet, amongst the heavy loaded bag of knowledge and futuristic (yet nowadays) approach to tech, that I was listening to, the topics that struck a chord to me was actually the non-tech sessions, part of the #humanofIT stream. Is it because I am getting old, and the tech is interesting but I am not more interested in understanding people and myself(? open question).

I am listing below the sessions related to #HumanofIT that I went to, so that anyone in quest of how to create a more diverse and inclusive tech environment can dig up the slides and videos when they are made available (the videos next to each session are not of the session but were shown, referenced or serve as an introduction, just to make you willing to research some more! You won’t be disappointed!):

“Practising kindness in Tech” (link), by Dux Raymond Sy, explaining to the giving the science and numbers that we now have to prove the benefits of practising random acts of kindness daily.

“How Heathrow’s security officer launched 12 PowerApps” (link), with no code, with Dona Sarkar & Dux Raymond Sy, who “grilled” Samit Saini with some great questions, leaving the room inspired to go away and create a PowerApps app in minutes.

“From Geek to Chic: Build Your Brand & Elevate Your Career in 5 Steps (link)”. Where the pair share their own personal experience on what it means to them to develop a personal brand, which is very much what I always believed: “share a skill for others to use”, whatever that SuperPower is.

I also learnt about the new coined term of “OnlyNess”, used by Nilofer Merchant in her book “The Power of Onlyness“, which is the thesis that ideas born of an ‘only’ can scale and make a dent in the world. The audiobook is already in my listening list.

So thanks again to Dux & Dona, both are fantastic speakers, yet with different styles, they are both authentic enough to show their vulnerability and driven by a common thirst to share their life experience to us and the world, all to make it a better place! 

Within my career which has very much been in IT since I left Uni in 97, I always had issues to feel that I belonged in a work or social group and I ended to “blend in” if not “fit in” but not always as being myself, especially when younger and fresh out of Uni. This kind of #HumanOfIT sessions was what I needed 15 years ago. I feel hopeful and trusting that the world of corporations and businesses can change for better and that we can all contribute to this change because they need us to do that.

Truthfulness, be yourself, lead with empathy, whole-heartedness, onlyness …

in 2020 I want to see more of those.

The communities I frequent like the Happy Startup School and conversABLE are all about fulfilment in business and life are leading the movement, now joined by corporations like Microsoft with this #HumanOfIT and many more are showing that we all need more humanity and what I called “H2H and not just B2B”.

In 2020 I will continue to deliver more Tech sessions as part of my current enjoyment this year as being a trainer for various organisations. I will also continue to deliver non-tech presentations to help Humans to be themselves in the workplace and beyond, just like the #IamRemarkable workshop and more workshops.

The post A different viewpoint from Microsoft Ignite conference 2020 (The Tour #London) appeared first on François on SharePoint, Office 365 and more technologies.

via François on SharePoint, Office 365 and more technologies http://bit.ly/38m70yH

French native Sharepoint Consultant living in London. A crossway between a designer, developer and system architect. Prefers stretching the limit of out-of-the-box features rather than breaking them into code. When not working with Microsoft Sharepoint François is often found on Web2.0 News sites and related social networking tools. This article has been cross posted from sharepointfrancois.com (original article)

Simple… Now SharePoint will show it! It seems that this feature took just over a year and a half to be released, but well… it’s here finally! So stop moaning (that includes me who thought it was a must requirement from day 1 of Teams)!

Roadmap Featured ID: 30686
Added to Roadmap: 5/30/2018
Last Modified: 8/12/2019
Tags: Online, SharePoint, Worldwide (Standard Multi-Tenant)

The post How do I know if a SharePoint folder is also a Teams channel? appeared first on François on SharePoint, Office 365 and more technologies.

via François on SharePoint, Office 365 and more technologies http://bit.ly/2IzJgg5

French native Sharepoint Consultant living in London. A crossway between a designer, developer and system architect. Prefers stretching the limit of out-of-the-box features rather than breaking them into code. When not working with Microsoft Sharepoint François is often found on Web2.0 News sites and related social networking tools. This article has been cross posted from sharepointfrancois.com (original article)

As consultants on Microsoft technology, we are keeping up with what is coming and what is going.

Microsoft just announced:

Microsoft is justifying the removal because “our telemetry indicates limited use of the connector to Facebook“.

My guess or hope is that it may be in preparation of leveraging their LinkedIn platform and making it co-exist better with Office 365? Currently, there is no simple feed between LinkedIn posts and SharePoint without involving coding, I would not be surprised if this is coming in the next months.

via François on SharePoint, Office 365 and more technologies http://bit.ly/2NMStoO

French native Sharepoint Consultant living in London. A crossway between a designer, developer and system architect. Prefers stretching the limit of out-of-the-box features rather than breaking them into code. When not working with Microsoft Sharepoint François is often found on Web2.0 News sites and related social networking tools. This article has been cross posted from sharepointfrancois.com (original article)

Creating a flow for a client recently, where we have to loop through 8,000+ Excel rows, check the values in some columns and import them or skip into a SharePoint list.

The issue was the … well, Flow doesn’t let us read more than 5,000 entries by default. And increasing that limit is not allowed.

Except, that one of our developer accounts was able to break that limitation(!).

It turns out that the free Flow license limits the threshold to 5000 whereas buying a Flow Plan 2 license allowed us to go over the threshold.

Here you go, now you know how to break one limit: buy the license!

This blog post is also useful to highlight some other limitations:

Microsoft Flow – This is the limit! – My Microsoft SharePains

via François on SharePoint, Office 365 and more technologies http://bit.ly/2MejfXR

French native Sharepoint Consultant living in London. A crossway between a designer, developer and system architect. Prefers stretching the limit of out-of-the-box features rather than breaking them into code. When not working with Microsoft Sharepoint François is often found on Web2.0 News sites and related social networking tools. This article has been cross posted from sharepointfrancois.com (original article)

I also thought of another title for this blog post like “Trying to build the roof before the wall?”.

Not sure what I am referring to? Keep reading.

SharePoint is huge and SharePoint Online is a even bigger beast! Agreed?

Over the past few weeks I have been training users in an international organisation, they have just released their Office 365 tenant to the whole organisation and realised that they need to show the users how to actually use it ;-).

This is not even the point of this post, as this happens quite often at the moment, unfortunately we are quite used that customers get a professional in when it’s nearly too late.

During the training preparation, I have been told that users do “not have the time to get trained”, but that “they have lots of appetite for advanced features”. Not knowing quite sure what this meant but confident that the content may be customised, we agreed on several condensed overview of 1.5 hour per group.

The reality was just as expected: 95% of the training attendees never opened the Office 365. So I adapted the training during the short training, being more like a coach on what they can do with SharePoint and the tools in Office 365.

Here is my shout-out and the reason behind this blog’s title:

Having spent enough time with the business users of the various departments, it turned out that all of them would have been very keen to work on a content strategy, data migration plan, departmental site layout if IT had approached them.

Instead, they are now seeing SharePoint as yet another tool that is being imposed at them. A lot of them are not so keen on this idea, and already thinking to not use it since they still have access to the to-be-retired-one-day other cloud storage.

Basically, a big failure of internal communication.

So please! please! Get your users on-board before you even release anything. SharePoint Adoption is a major key to success.

Some ideas:

• Before deployment:
  • Get your CEO on board and make him/her announce the upcoming platform
  • Invite employees to”15 min drop-in session” (with food provided) to demo 2 or 3 key features, and stay for 30 min Q&A
  • Speak to your comms department.. a lot! IT and Comms need to be best friends as one provides the structure, the other will provide the content.
  • Interview and get a genuine interest in how the other teams work, like HR and Ops … It will be easier to offer them solutions that they didn’t think about later.
  • Let users know that their data will have to be migrated and organise workshops to show them how the migration will work and when you will need their input. This will make the user valued and responsible and it will pay back in the long term.
  • Organise a competition for finding the intranet name.

• During and after deployment:
  • It’s still not too late, we discussed before many ways of facilitating users engagement.

Or again and obviously, call the professional SharePoint guy early in your deployment project. (hang on… when there is such project plan!;-)

via François on SharePoint, Office 365 and more technologies http://bit.ly/2J44vI1

French native Sharepoint Consultant living in London. A crossway between a designer, developer and system architect. Prefers stretching the limit of out-of-the-box features rather than breaking them into code. When not working with Microsoft Sharepoint François is often found on Web2.0 News sites and related social networking tools. This article has been cross posted from sharepointfrancois.com (original article)

Helping people to automation their workplace is my passion and lucky for me I also get paid to do so !

This week I was finishing working with a partner to improve the (poor) automation steps required by Matter Center, which no-one can really complain because Microsoft made it open-source.
Matter Center documentation requires to create each client as a new site collection in PowerShell, but this is not quite possible if the users registering these new clients on a daily basis are regular Office 365 users and not SharePoint Administrators.Thanks to a few Nintex Workflows we managed to do all the configuration in the background.

Thanks to a few Nintex Workflows we managed to do all the configuration in the background.
Today’s post is not about the site collection creation so I will spare the details, but in summary and very high level, I developed 4 workflows, 1 CSOM Javascript to be executed on the browser, and 1 Nintex Form of course for submitting the new client on desktop or mobile.

Now this quick blog post is regarding the challenge that we had to add the user as a Site Collection Administrator of that newly created site collection.

Since there is no mention of the sort in http://bit.ly/1TUw4AY it may useful for someone, so here it is:

1. Create a new Nintex workflow in an Office 365 site list.
2. Download and Import the .NWP workflow file available here to replace the blank workflow
3. Edit a few of the actions at the beginning of the workflow to set the variables (I never hard-code UserName and Password for instance, so you will see a few Lookup to a different list to get the value, which you can replace since they will be showing an error once imported into your list)

Note: In this workflow, the “user” I am adding to the Site Collection Administrators group is actually the “CreatedBy” of the list item, which may sound strange since the user running that workflow may be the CreatedBy. However this is NOT the case (refer to above point: we do not want all users to be SharePoint admins!), here is how you should sequence the workflow to start:
1) After the List Item is created, a first workflow (run by CreatedBy) i.e. called “Start and Call workflow 2” and in the workflow we just add a “Start Workflow”

2) then within that first workflow we just add a “Start Workflow” making sure that this action is bein executed in an “App Step” in order to use “elevated privilege”.

3) finally all the actions are happening in Workflow2 (which you imported in step 2)

Hope this helps someone.

François.

via François on SharePoint & more http://bit.ly/1TUwgjP

French native Sharepoint Consultant living in London. A crossway between a designer, developer and system architect. Prefers stretching the limit of out-of-the-box features rather than breaking them into code. When not working with Microsoft Sharepoint François is often found on Web2.0 News sites and related social networking tools. This article has been cross posted from sharepointfrancois.wordpress.com/ (original article)

After the first funny quotes started some years back with the 404 not found pages showing “oops… something happened”, making them more friendly and less scary, it seems that the whole IT industry is trying to have humour, even on “serious” screens like Office 365 Admin center…

I think I like it!  better have fun at work, right? (and with all the TV geeks in SharePoint, it makes sense…)

Office 365 has humour

via François on SharePoint & more http://bit.ly/1NbbPyF

French native Sharepoint Consultant living in London. A crossway between a designer, developer and system architect. Prefers stretching the limit of out-of-the-box features rather than breaking them into code. When not working with Microsoft Sharepoint François is often found on Web2.0 News sites and related social networking tools. This article has been cross posted from sharepointfrancois.wordpress.com/ (original article)

Over the past days several Office 365 client users reported a OneDrive For Business synchronisation issue, and I have to say that I usually just direct them to the IT Helpdesk but yesterday I decided that there was one too many so I went to troubleshoot it at a user’s desktop myself.

Nothing could be done to fix the random “red” icon when adding a SharePoint library to sync with user’s windows, remove the folder from OneDrive, uninstall and re-install OneDrive, none. And literally random, some files were also synchronising but still marked as red, and the Errors logs showing “please enter your credentials” but no option to enter them…

I was in a dead-end, until I found out that it is a current issue reported on the 15th October 2015 (5 days ago) and is actually clearly showing in the SHD (Office 365 Service Health Dashboard in the Admin center, see below post on Office 365 community).  The resolution is to update Office 2013.

But my main take away from this is that as much as I thought that no-one would seriously read the SHD every morning (and you can’t receive them by email!), I now realised that I should have started searching through the various incidents list, so I will pay more attention in the future when an user issue comes up.

I believe we have had so much frustration over the years of not finding the answer in Microsoft provided sources that we (I) have the reflex of Googling (binging..) an issue straight away and not actually checking the official source.

Now go on your mobile device and make sure you have the mobile app to see SHD installed !

Office 365 Service Health Dashboard

This issue is now reported at Service Health Dashboard (SHD) as incident SP31654 starting at Thursday, October 15, 2015, at 3:00 PM UTC. The user experience of this incident is: Affected users are unable to sync files with OneDrive for Business. Users may see repeated prompts to enter their credentials, but entering them will not result in a successful sync. Tenant administrators can view current information and updates on SHD at the link here .

Source: Onedrive Business Sync – Credentials Required | Manage Office 365 | Microsoft Office 365 Community

via François on SharePoint & more http://bit.ly/1M7wYsZ

French native Sharepoint Consultant living in London. A crossway between a designer, developer and system architect. Prefers stretching the limit of out-of-the-box features rather than breaking them into code. When not working with Microsoft Sharepoint François is often found on Web2.0 News sites and related social networking tools. This article has been cross posted from sharepointfrancois.wordpress.com/ (original article)

So nice to be on Office 365 and not having a weekend downtime to upgrade a third party tool.

(read my comments on each item below)

We’ve made some changes since last time…

• Workflow Gallery

  • Complete the work faster and with fewer clicks. When opening Nintex for Office 365, you’ll now see an entry page instead of the design canvas. From this entry page, you can create new workflows, modify existing workflows and delete unwanted workflows. Depending where you are in a workflow design when you open Nintex, it will display the relevant actions for that context first and then a secondary set for other workflows. Read more…

[FS] Opening an existing workflow was a bit puzzling vs. on premises Nintex because it would always open blank until we open it manually as if opening a previous version. Now it doesn’t feel like we have lost them, they are visible.

• Task Escalation

  • We’ve now introduced the option of escalating a task to someone else or completing a task after a set period of time. Find this capability within the Assign a Task and Start a Task Process actions. Read more…

[FS] This is excellent. We already had it on premises for a long time, now on Office 365.

This means that we can build something like: if a task is still awaiting a Manager who has not completed it within 5 days then Nintex Workflow will escalate automatically to another person to approve such as the manager of that last task assignee. Real business value !

via François on SharePoint & more http://bit.ly/1Jmw98e

French native Sharepoint Consultant living in London. A crossway between a designer, developer and system architect. Prefers stretching the limit of out-of-the-box features rather than breaking them into code. When not working with Microsoft Sharepoint François is often found on Web2.0 News sites and related social networking tools. This article has been cross posted from sharepointfrancois.wordpress.com/ (original article)