Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Viva Connections – News Posts into the Activity Feed

This one is for my good friend Amanda Sterner. I have known Amanda since I started out in the tech community. Like Vesku, and others such as Chirag Patel, Laurent Carlier, Rick Van Rousselt and Karoliina Kettukari she was there at the very beginning and always right behind what Adam and I were doing regarding Oktoberfest (what would become TeamsFest, then Teams Nation). I don't think we ever talked about it - but she was the very first speaker to sign up for that first conference. And when we all went to Ignite later that year at the OCCC I remember Amanda, Vesku, Michael Plettner and I all went out for dinner in a time before the word covid had entered our language. She is part of the team which runs Dagen - Teams Dagen - and what a success that conference is! But when I saw today that Amanda called out on Twitter how could we get a news post into the feed in Teams I couldn't resist.

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Applying to access a Blocked App. Built in and Custom.

Teams now has over 1,700 apps which are integrated and available to manage via the Teams Admin Centre. This is scary because - to me at least, I can measure the passing of time based upon that number. I can remember saying in one conference that Teams has over 300 apps. In another, Teams has over 500 apps. 700. 1000. You get the picture. And in that time, we've seen functionality introduced such as permissions and app setup policies, the ability to block apps, the ability to control custom apps. We've seen attestation, app settings, the ability to buy subscriptions for apps via the TAC and a complete facelifting of the store to which you can now customize. This week I am going to look at a new functionality for users needing to request use of a blocked app. Back in the day - when an admin blocked an app - that app would simply disappear from the app store altogether. Microsoft changed this experience because if the apps disappear completely, they posit it actually encourages Shadow IT and self-sign up outside of the ecosystem leading to sprawl, data leakage and issues with data sovereignty. So, the current experience as it stands is that users can now see the blocked app; but request it from the admin. The admin then has to permit it use. Now, the new functionality we are concerned with allows the admin to set a workflow to direct the user to an external system to perform the request as opposed to it running through Teams. With such a detailed explanation you may think this sounds like niche functionality, but actually this is quite an important part of governance. We are fixing one problem with visibility, but we also need to make it easy for admins and organisations to make a judgement call on the use of that app

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Using Power Automate and Keywords to ad-hoc pull feeds and videos into channels

So a few weeks back I did a piece on the Teams Keyword trigger in Power Automate and how it can be used to build a command list for repetitive communications which could be used to cut down on workload. I've started using this myself. But also, I have started using keywords to pull info I need within the flow of my work. This includes RSS Feeds and Videos off YouTube. There are, of course, other ways you can get these things. One example for RSS Feeds is connectors. However, I don't want to necessarily have an RSS Feed repeatedly pull into a channel. I only want it when I need it as in ad-hoc, on demand. Whether we want the latest updates to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap, or the latest video on a YouTube channel, keywords pull that information and we can get it as we need

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Enforce comments for Approval Requests

Most recently - mainly the last six months or so since Covid - I feel that I like I have kinda pinballed around in the Teams ecosystem having no real sense of focus. Life is busy. Work is busy. I have been up to my eyeballs in Azure Plan, the New Commerce Experience (NCE), CloudBlue Connect, Catalogues, Packaging, JTA's, writing new courses. Teams Nation. The latest project - or should I say the latest shipped in an ever spinning batch of projects - has been expanding operations and edu out into the MENA region. All fun. All for the greater good! Yet I'll be the first to admit that I've taken a bit of a hit on the community end. I haven't talked so much this year. I haven't blogged or done social as consistently. I've sloped off a few things like the Microsoft Tech Community. I'm well aware of it - and as a marathon compared to a sprint it'll no doubt self adjust and correct given time. But also I find I am in one of those periods when I am genuinely in a quandary about what to focus on given there is just so much exciting stuff out there at the moment. I am really interested in learning more on KQL and doing more in Azure. I am doing loads and want to do more with Power Automate. Same with Compliance. Same with Azure AD and Identity. With Teams? I've always been one for the little things. Sure, I may get around to the fanfare and hoopla that is Shared Channels, but whilst I could say that twenty MVP's have already done this, it's the little vital things that delight me. And so after discussing a range of, I guess, niche subjects the last few weeks, like hiding file sync, and disabling shortcut to OneDrive, and the ability to trigger flows with keywords, and audio conferencing, and app setup for messaging extensions, I am going to talk about enforcing comments in the approvals app. Yes, I wanted this. I wanted this bad. Because generally speaking I have never really liked blind approvals. I like context. I like to give context. This will be a short one because really it's an awareness piece as much as being a technical blog.

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Flows triggered with Keywords; Commands through the front end

Hands up! There was a time when I was dead against automation. Early in my IT career I was a provisioner and back then all the setups and the migrations were done manually. Can you believe there was a time when we used to move mailboxes by Exmerge and via SFTP servers? That's right, 5 hops of live data. Or when we used to login manually into DNS servers to manually add DNS records to zones? A record by A record CNAME by CNAME. Yeah I remember it. But why was I dead against automating that? Because I am human. I thought that automation wasn't having faith in people. I thought it would ultimately lead to us all being done out of the job. So here I am. 14 years in. It never gets any less busier. It is, by all accounts, the myth of Sisyphus. But I get automation now. I got it when I went through a period a few years back where I was so busy that I practically couldn't cope anymore with the volume so needed to learn Power Automate to save minutes, minutes which turned into hours. Now? I use it extensively. I've blogged previously on some of the ways that I use it in my job. How I use it with Lists, and Forms, and Approvals. I use it with Dynamics. So I was excited to see, having been away a while, that Power Automate released a trigger for Teams which uses keywords