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How can I contribute to help in the time of COVID-19
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)
The post How can I contribute to help in the time of COVID-19 appeared first on François on SharePoint, Office 365 and more technologies.
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) |
A different viewpoint from Microsoft Ignite conference 2020 (The Tour #London)
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.
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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) |
How do I know if a SharePoint folder is also a Teams channel?
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
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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) |
Microsoft announced to remove Facebook connector from its platform
As consultants on Microsoft technology, we are keeping up with what is coming and what is going.
Microsoft just announced:
I have seen this connector in use on many intranet landing pages since it was a quick win to bring a social media feed onto SharePoint.
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
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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) |
Why there is no such thing as a free lunch (with Microsoft Flow;-)
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
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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) |
Try not to kill a SharePoint deployment before it starts
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
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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) |
Office 365 Products Visio Stencil & Icons available (updated for 2019) #o365 #visio
Just a quick post to say that I have uploaded a new Visio stencil for Office 365 products that I created to aid my own solution designs and I hope you find them useful too.
Link on Technet Galleries: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Office-365-Products-Visio-ec6512de
I have also included the original image icons used to create the stencil which is useful for PowerPoint etc. too
Below is an example of the images used in the stencil. I have updated them to be inline with the new Office 365 Icon Re-Design that rolled out recently.
All images are available either in PNG format as part of the download and in some cases, the original SVG files.
Converting taxonomy field into cascading drop down fields using PnP Branding.JsLink
Managed metadata fields don’t provide the same look and feel as choice field type. It is quick clunky specially when there are a lot of terms displayed.
The requirement cropped up to display the managed metadata fields as drop downs. After googling for a while, stumbled on PnP sample Branding.JSLink solution which had an example how to achieve it. The solution is a no code sandboxed solution with different examples how to enrich fields. I wanted only the taxonomy to cascading drop down feature.
I copied the file TaxonomyOverrides.js and ManagedMetadata.js only into the “Style Library” library in my test SharePoint Site Collection. I modified the TaxonomyOverrides.js file to refer to the field “DocumentType” I wanted transformed in the fields section.
Type.registerNamespace(‘jslinkOverride’)
var jslinkOverride = window.jslinkOverride || {};
jslinkOverride.Taxonomy = {};jslinkOverride.Taxonomy.Templates = {
Fields: {
‘DocumentType’: {
‘NewForm’: jslinkTemplates.Taxonomy.editMode,
‘EditForm’: jslinkTemplates.Taxonomy.editMode
}
}
};jslinkOverride.Taxonomy.Functions = {};
jslinkOverride.Taxonomy.Functions.RegisterTemplate = function () {
// register our object, which contains our templates
SPClientTemplates.TemplateManager.RegisterTemplateOverrides(jslinkOverride.Taxonomy);
};
jslinkOverride.Taxonomy.Functions.MdsRegisterTemplate = function () {
// register our custom template
jslinkOverride.Taxonomy.Functions.RegisterTemplate();// and make sure our custom view fires each time MDS performs
// a page transition
var thisUrl = _spPageContextInfo.siteServerRelativeUrl + “Style Library/OfficeDevPnP/Branding.JSLink/TemplateOverrides/TaxonomyOverrides.js”;
RegisterModuleInit(thisUrl, jslinkOverride.Taxonomy.Functions.RegisterTemplate)
};if (typeof _spPageContextInfo != “undefined” && _spPageContextInfo != null) {
// its an MDS page refresh
jslinkOverride.Taxonomy.Functions.MdsRegisterTemplate()
} else {
// normal page load
jslinkOverride.Taxonomy.Functions.RegisterTemplate()
}
The DocumentType is a taxonomy field which has SharePoint OOB look and feel
After referencing the files TaxonomyOverrides.js and ManagedMetadata.js on the editform page of the document library using a script editor webpart using tags as below.
/Projects/EDRMS/Style%20Library/OfficeDevPnP/Branding.JSLink/Generics/ManagedMetadata.js
/Projects/EDRMS/Style%20Library/OfficeDevPnP/Branding.JSLink/TemplateOverrides/TaxonomyOverrides.js
Voila, the taxonomy field is transformed into cascading drop downs.
from reshmeeauckloo http://bit.ly/2qwao8c
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Migrate data from one SQL table to another database table
Sometimes you may have to migrate data from one SQL database to another SQL database on another environment, e.g. Live to test and dev environment and vice versa.
You may argue the easiest solution is a migration of the backup of database. Unfortunately it does not work well in environments where data in Live is classified as sensitive and are not allowed to be copied across into a dev / test machine where the security is not as strict as a live machine. There are some data from live which are not classified as sensitive or restricted and might have to be migrated to Test and DEV for testing or development purposes, for example list of values.
A copy of the data can be exported as a csv or dat file from the SQL Table using “select * from table_value” statement from source database.
The data can be bulk imported into a temp table and MERGE statement can be used to insert missing records and update records. The sample script which you can use is below.
The script can be downloaded from TechNet.
from reshmeeauckloo http://bit.ly/2qsdHJC
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Delete all list Item and file versions from site and sub sites using CSOM and PowerShell
The versions property is not available from client object model on the ListItem class as with server object model. I landed on the article SharePoint – Get List Item Versions Using Client Object Model that describes how to get a list item versions property using the method GetFileByServerRelativeUrl by passing the FileUrl property. The trick is to build the list item url as “sites/test/Lists/MyList/30_.000” where 30 is the item id for which the version history needs to be retrieved. Using that information I created a PowerShell to loop through all lists in the site collection and sub sites to delete all version history from lists.
The script below targets a SharePoint tenant environment.
Please note that I have used script Load-CSOMProperties.ps1 from blog post Loading Specific Values Using Lambda Expressions and the SharePoint CSOM API with Windows PowerShell to help with querying object properties like Lambda expressions in C#. The lines below demonstrate use of the Load-CSOMProperties.ps1 file which I copied in the same directory where the script DeleteAllVersionsFromListItems.ps1 is.
- Load the Load-CSOMProperties.ps1 file
Set-Location $PSScriptRoot
$pLoadCSOMProperties=(get-location).ToString()+”\Load-CSOMProperties.ps1″
. $pLoadCSOMProperties
- Retrieve ServerRelativeURL property from file object
Load-CSOMProperties -object $file -propertyNames @(“ServerRelativeUrl”);
You can download the script from technet.
from reshmeeauckloo http://bit.ly/2ozAHFb
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SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans 
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