Teams Real Simple with Pictures: An Approval process for List Items using Lists, Teams, Power Automate, Outlook and the new Approvals App

It's been a bit of a frustrating day. I wanted to write a blog on something else - something new and ultimately it didn't pan out. Kind of like a gold rush except there was no gold, a lot of time was squandered and the opportunity cost of doing that was getting into the new approvals app - something that interests me quite a bit. Nevertheless after a borderline rage quit I decided to eat, go chill with the family then get back in the game - and so I am going to write about the approvals app - except I thought it would be good to do so in the context of Lists, since as mentioned in the last post I am using them a lot these days. Think of this scenario: I have an event, or an itinerary, and for every item on that List, I need approval to be able to do it, or to use it, or to even have it on the List since it's needs to be sanctioned. In my job when I roll in technical courses, these need ultimate approval from up on high to be run, a number of criteria need to be met. So bringing some of my favourite apps together - Lists, Teams and Power Automate, the approvals app and getting retro with Outlook, mmm a bit of late night cooking with apps

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Hyperlinked email addresses in Lists within Teams

The speaker circuit is getting ready to go this year. My speaking schedule is already loaded for January and February and then we'll go straight into Ignite in March. It's going to be a wild one. You know, like, boom. Now two areas I love speaking about - and spoke about a lot at the back end of 2020 - is Teams and Lists. It's pretty well known I love both apps and I use them a lot. However, one issue I came across this week was that I was building a list in Teams and wanted to have a column of email addresses which I could click on and then it would begin composing an email. The use case was this - as part of my job heading up an education practice I have a number of trainers I work with, and the list serves as both a skills matrix but has the trainers contact details too. Think of this as a way I - or any other team member who uses the list - can track the trainers who work for me whilst being able to easily identify and contact one should a specific course opportunity come up. Now, I wanted to send an email straight from the list. The hyperlink column didn't work: it threw an invalid URL and there is no email column option. So how can we make this work?

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Managing User Feedback to Microsoft with Powershell

It's a new year! A new start! And so much more to do! It's going to be another exciting year for Microsoft Teams and whilst I intended to publish 12 things I would like to see drop in Microsoft Teams 2021 on New Years Day, I just got too damn excited about it and ended up publishing it early. Now, Uservoice is a great way to suggest and vote up on features you want to see, but what many don't know is that it's also a great place to check out and submit bugs with its own defined bugs section. However, there is also an alternative to uservoice which is the give feedback section within the Microsoft Teams application itself

12 features I would like to see land in Microsoft Teams in 2021

Back when I attended Microsoft Inspire in 2019 I remember going to the pre-day at the Mandalay and being absolutely blown away by the numbers. Teams had hit 13 million daily active users (DAU), surpassing Slack for the first time. There was this nice chart which was unveiled to a lot of applause and fanfare - and that was before Gio Mezgec and the team rolled out the numbers they aimed for in fiscal 2020. Back then, they wanted to top 50 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) which constituted 275% growth over the following 12 months. Ambitious. Needless to say there was a lot of Teams sessions at Inspire 2019

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Hiding Presence

There are so many great conversations to be had about presence. Do we have the right to know that another person is available? Do others respect your availability when it explicitly shows as busy? If I am employed by an organisation who uses an application which utilises presence do I have the right to turn presence off during my working hours?