This blog offers guidance on Microsoft 365 migrations, including the differences between key Microsoft 365 apps (OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams).

The purpose of this blog is to offer guidance on Microsoft 365 migrations, including the differences between key Microsoft 365 apps (OneDrive vs SharePoint vs Teams) and where to map content based on purpose, audience, and the tools needed to support that content.

Microsoft 365 Migration Planning

Before you start your Microsoft 365 migration, specifically your content migration, you must plan the outcome by assessing your current source environment. What you discover will influence your overall strategy and timing, including:

• The design of the target environment and the mapping between source and target systems.
• The amount of content you migrate. Determine if the content is redundant, out of date, or still relevant.
• The building of the user onboarding into your upfront planning. Communicate early and often with your users about the migration and how it will impact them. Don’t wait until the very end to start preparing them for the change.

Microsoft 365 Migration: OneDrive vs SharePoint vs Teams

When to use OneDrive

OneDrive is meant to be used to store files that are personal to you. Each person in your organization gets their own OneDrive, which includes at least 1TB of space.

The recommendation is that if you’re working on a file by yourself, save it to OneDrive. For example, use OneDrive vs SharePoint when working with personal files that shouldn’t be shared, or drafts of files that are not ready to be moved to a SharePoint library or Teams for collaboration.

While users will be able to share documents from their OneDrive site, they should not use OneDrive to store documents that should instead be stored on a SharePoint site. The following guidelines should be communicated to users regarding when to store something in OneDrive:

1. Documents that you personally need to do your job, but that would not benefit others. For example, documents like task planning spreadsheets that you use to organize your work.

2. Documents that you need to share with a few limited individuals for a limited amount of time. For example, you and a few others are planning a team celebration, and you post a pdf of the menu from a restaurant that the team is considering.

3. First draft documents that you are working on that you are not quite ready to share with others. However, if this document needs to be shared with a wider audience or needs to live on for a long period, it should be stored on a SharePoint site.

When to use SharePoint 

A SharePoint site is a container of information and data. Information can be stored in repositories such as lists, libraries, calendars, etc. When considering SharePoint as a destination for your files, it is important to first distinguish between the two types of modern SharePoint sites available and when is the best scenario to use them.

• Communication Sites – The primary goal of this type of site is to inform readers – mainly for them to read, not create. A typical use of a communication site is an Intranet. Used to broadcast information to a broad audience, in this type of site, only a small set of members contribute content that is consumed by a much larger audience.
  • Share content such as news, official documents, and reports that you want to share visually in a compelling format, an example is a human resources site with benefits information.
  • Inform and engage dozens or hundreds of readers (or the entire organization).
  • Showcase the services your group offers or tell a story about a new product launch to the entire organization.
• Team sites – Used primarily for collaboration among members of your team or with others on a specific project, team sites allow most members to contribute content to the site, and the information is limited to only the members of the team or project stakeholders. This type of site may or may not be connected to a Microsoft 365 group. Use this type of site when:
  • Content is meant to be shared with a small audience for specific goals and tasks that need to be accomplished.
  • Track and stay updated on project status.
  • Organize and co-author shared content.
  • Optionally connect to a Microsoft 365 group to access team resources (e.g., Microsoft Teams).

When to use Teams 

When thinking about the differences between SharePoint vs Teams, it’s important to note that a Microsoft Teams workspace is a SharePoint Team site (see the previous section) that is connected to a Microsoft 365 group. It is a collection of people, conversations, files, and tools all in one place. It extends the capabilities of a regular SharePoint Team site by offering chat options, real-time collaboration and communication, and meeting, file, and app sharing.

Use a Microsoft Teams workspace when you want to:

• Pull together a team.
• Communicate by using chat instead of email.
• Take advantage of rich chat with text, audio, video, and file sharing.
• Securely edit files at the same time.
• Provide transparency to the team by posting messages and starting threads.
• Have a private chat to develop an idea, then share it with the rest of the organization.
• Store all files related to a topic in one place.
• Integrate your favorite apps, such as Planner, Trello, OneNote, etc.

Looking for further guidance?

Now that you understand the key differences between OneDrive vs SharePoint vs Teams, we hope you feel better prepared to utilize these apps effectively. If your organization is beginning its Microsoft 365 migration journey and you’re looking for expert guidance, Quisitive can help.

Explore our Microsoft 365 Services

It’s March 2022!  We have some great updates this month for you to consider in your Governance and User Adoption Plans as well as share with your Admins so they can prepare for new functionality.

(Updated) Connected Templates

Microsoft is announcing the upcoming release of Connected Templates with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. The connected templates will offer a new way of combining Microsoft Teams templates with SharePoint templates. Prior to this integration, clients needed to deploy Microsoft Teams or SharePoint-specific templates.

• Microsoft Team Templates allow administrators to easily deploy consistent teams across their organization using predefined or customized team templates across their organization.
• SharePoint templates offer a straightforward way for admins to build sites with pre-populated pages, page templates, news post templates, and web parts that can be customized to fit the needs of their organization.

Through this integration, Teams administrators can create templates that include SharePoint components, bringing together the capabilities of the Teams and SharePoint templates.

This rollout should be complete by mid-March.

Today, when you create a team through “create a team from templates’ you get an automatically created SharePoint site that supports that template. We are adding SharePoint assets to the team you have just created with this new integration. In essence, all SharePoint applications that are associated with the new template will be automatically added, pinned, and displayed in this new team template.

• When you create a new team using a default template – for example, the “Manage a Project” template, the project management channels and apps, and the connected SharePoint template will get applied automatically. Now, the pages, lists, and Power Platform integrations from SharePoint will be automatically pinned as tabs in Teams and you can edit these pages and lists directly in Teams.

Workflows in Teams app store for messaging

Workflows lets you automate repetitive tasks and processes using Power Automate. Workflows can save you time and effort. Teams users will be able to browse, add, and manage this unified platform capability from the Teams store and from several other contexts within Teams. Many workflows run automatically without further user action once they’ve been set up; others can be run manually from the messaging area in Teams or from individual messages.

You can turn off Workflows for your organization in Teams using an app permission policy or through the Manage apps page by blocking Power Automate. This feature is turned on by default. For more information on Workflows, see Browse and add workflows.

This rollout should be complete by the end of March.

For more information about how to manage this policy, please see this information.

Audio Conferencing user enablement and disablement in Teams admin center

Beginning March 22, it will no longer be possible to enable or disable audio conferencing users in the Teams Admin Center.  This functionality will move to enabling or disabling of the Audio Conferencing license for the user in the Office 365 admin center.  For more information see Assign licenses to users.

Changes coming to phone number assignment using Teams PowerShell Module cmdlets

In April, Microsoft will be retiring the phone number assignment capabilities for Microsoft Teams users in multiple Teams PowerShell Module cmdlets:

When this change is implemented, administrators will no longer be able to assign and remove phone numbers from users and resource accounts using the following cmdlets.

• Set-CsUser

These cmdlets will be fully retired:

• Set-CsOnlineVoiceUser
• Set-CsOnlineApplicationInstance
• Set-CsOnlineVoiceApplicationInstance

Note: Instead, your administrators will need to use the new Teams PowerShell Module cmdlets:

Set-CsPhoneNumberAssignment and Remove-CsPhoneNumberAssignment.

These cmdlets support assigning and removing phone numbers from Microsoft Calling Plan, Direct Routing and Operator Connect and can be used for phone number assignment to both users and resource accounts.  Phone number assignment using Teams admin center is not impacted by this change.

(Updated) Shared focus plan in Viva Insights

Updated rollout plan – this should become available in late March!

Viva insights is releasing new capabilities to help teams protect time for focused work. The shared focus plan will enable managers and team leads with a Microsoft Viva Insights license to foster mutual productivity norms and drive a positive team culture by inviting teams to coordinate focus time for uninterrupted work.

(Updated) Data access governance reports in SharePoint admin center

This feature has been in public preview since November, but will roll out to all between mid-March and mid-April.

Data access governance reports help SharePoint admins monitor:

• Sharing activity
• The storage of files with sensitivity labels

As the number of sites in your organization grows, this information helps you maintain the security and compliance posture of your organization.

When this feature rolls out, SharePoint admins will be able to run reports to view sites in the organization that have the most sharing activity or the most files with sensitivity labels applied.

(Updated) OneDrive: Move your shortcuts in OneDrive

You can now move the shortcuts you’ve added using “Add shortcut to OneDrive” into any folders in your OneDrive – without the shortcut link breaking or changing permissions!

This feature allows end users to select a shortcut and move it to an existing private or shared folder within their OneDrive. When moving a shortcut to a folder into a shared folder, the short cut does not change its sharing permissions. People who don’t currently have access to the shortcut won’t be able to access its content, but can rename or remove the shortcut.

When a shortcut is moved, the shortcut will be shown in its new destination anywhere that you access your OneDrive—such as OneDrive Web, the sync client, Teams and Office.

Employee Experience

Have you seen the Employee Experience Hub? Log in as an admin to your M365 Portal and type in:

Aka.ms/eewizard

This tool will provide you a wizard which includes great set of steps to transform how your employees work together by utilizing ‎SharePoint‎, ‎Teams‎, ‎Yammer‎, and deploying ‎Microsoft Viva‎.

Next month, we hope to have some updates and announcements from the Microsoft 365 Conference.  Stay tuned!

First, please block your calendar for March 9th and plan to come to our Digital Workplace Strategy Summit!  It’s February, so we hope you will LOVE the updates this month!

Teams app setup policy group assignment

Teams App Setup policies allow you pre-install and pin your apps in Teams and assign them by policy to different groups of users.  Prior rollouts limited the assignment of the policy to individuals, but in late February, we will be able to assign the policy by security groups or distribution lists.  Or you can use my favorite functionality…dynamic groups.  The policy assignment will propagate to members in the groups.

If you give your users the ability to pin apps, then Admin pins will always take precedence over the user pin.

Updating default tenant-level tag management settings

Using tagging in Teams is a great way to save time for users and based on feedback Microsoft has received, they are updating the default tag policy.  The default policy allowed only Teams Owners to create or edit tags, but the updated policy will allow members to create and edit the tags as well.

There is a way for admins to override this policy if you need to do so.  Any existing teams will keep the policy that was previously set, but new teams created after this rollout will default to Team Owners and Members can create and edit tags.  This aligns with the default setting for channel creation.

(Updated) Records Management, Information Governance & eDiscovery– Optimized behavior of file versions preserved

This previously announced feature is now rolling out in early February and should be complete by mid-March.

To improve performance, any file with multiple versions that is deleted from SharePoint or OneDrive which is preserved to the Preservation Hold Library (due to its applicable retention label, retention policies or eDiscovery holds) will now be retained as a single file containing its full version history, rather than each version being retained as individual files as has been the case until now.

This update will change the behavior of deleted files that are set to be retained, and that have multiple versions of the file. They will be retained in the Preservation Hold Library as a single file with all versions as part of its version history just like they exist before being deleted. Previously, each version was retained individually as a separate file.

Additionally, this change will also affect your ability to search those versions in eDiscovery. Searching will now only work on the last version of a document by default rather than getting multiple matches for versions in between them which provides consistency for eDiscovery searches regardless of whether the file has been deleted or not.

If you have query-based holds configured in eDiscovery, there will be a change to how retained files are searched and retained as outlined above. If a file is deleted from a source covered by a query-based hold policy, it will no longer retain specific document versions that meet the query criteria and instead only hold the latest version of document if it meets the query criteria when the document is deleted.

You might want to notify your users or team responsible for eDiscovery, Information Governance and Records Management about this change and update your training and documentation as appropriate.

(Updated) Microsoft Editor Spellcheck and Grammar in SharePoint Pages

This update will add the Microsoft Editor service to SharePoint Pages and News and enabling their spellcheck and grammar capabilities. This will allow proofreading to take place in SharePoint without relying on the Editor browser extension. This feature changes the suggestion’s colors to monochrome when they’re shown on a themed background to increase visibility.

This feature is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 88534.

This rollout should be complete by late February!

(Updated) Add taxonomy columns from modern library views

Users will begin to see a new Managed Metadata column type when adding a column in modern library views!

This feature is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 88828.

This will begin rolling out in mid-February and should be complete in late March.

Microsoft Stream: Comment on a video or audio file in SharePoint and OneDrive

This feature allows you to have threaded conversations on a video or audio filed saved in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online through a cohesive and familiar commenting experienced like the one used in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

This feature is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 88521.

We expect this to begin rolling out for general availability in early February and expect that rollout to be completed by late February.

Users will see a Comments button in the upper right-hand corner of any video or audio file stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online.

Selecting this button expands a panel where users will be able to have threaded conversations through comments, for which file owners have full edit permissions over.

NOTE: The backend used for this feature is the same as the existing backend for comments found in the details pane of some files saved in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online:

Welcome to your source for the December Digital Workplace Updates!  Many of the updates have new release dates so watch your M365 Message Center for late-breaking changes.

New Microsoft Lists entry point in the SharePoint app bar

If you’ve got the SharePoint App Bar enabled expect to see the SharePoint Lists icon rolling out. The rollout should be complete in mid-January 2022.

Users will get the same experience in the app bar as if they navigated to Lists via the M365 App Launcher.

Multiple changes to Microsoft Search are being rolled out soon.  In mid-December, you should see changes to the Promoted Results experience.

Changes to promoted results in Microsoft Search

In order to improve the Microsoft Search experience, promoted results will no longer be supported in Microsoft Search for Organization level scoped searches and will be replaced by the Bookmarks and Q&A features.

Promoted results will continue to be supported for hub and site level scopes.

Promoted results will no longer trigger in Microsoft Search for SharePoint Home or office.com when this change is implemented.

What you need to do to prepare:

Microsoft Search provides an alternative to promoted results using either Bookmark or Q&A answers.

If your organization set up Promoted Results in SharePoint, you can import the Promoted Results into Microsoft Search and make the imported content available to your users. This is an easy way to quickly populate search results as soon as you set up Microsoft Search and make it more effective for your users. We recommend using promoted results from SharePoint as a reference to understand how to name and create relevant search results.

Microsoft Search allows a search administrator to import promoted results as Bookmarks. To import promoted results, in the Microsoft 365 admin center, open the Search & intelligence admin center and then select Answers. In the Answers dialog, select Bookmarks and choose Import SharePoint results to import promoted results from SharePoint.

Important note:  If you aren’t able to see the Search Administration in the M365 Admin Center, request the Search Administrator Role.

Create and manage verticals in Microsoft Search

This change should be completed by late January 2022 and was previously only available to individuals in targeted release.

You will be able to modify search verticals(tabs on top of search result page) and add new verticals with SharePoint content for your tenant search page.

For example, the Files vertical shows results classified as files and makes it easy for users who are looking to find documents. You can customize verticals in Microsoft Search to meet the needs of your organization or individual departments. Microsoft Search has two types of verticals, out of the box or default and custom verticals. The default verticals, such as All, Files, and People, create easy access to the most commonly used search results.

You can manage verticals at two levels:

• Organization level – A vertical at the organization level appears on the search results page when users search from their SharePoint start page, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Search in Bing
• Site level – A vertical at the site level appears on the search results page when users search on a SharePoint site. For example, you might want to enable your customer service employees to search for Severity 1 incidents directly from their department’s SharePoint site.

Microsoft has released documentation on managing the search verticals.

OneDrive Sharing Experience Updates

Users in standard release should be seeing these changes roll out in early December and changes should be complete by early January.

Instead of a Copy link button, you’ll see an entire section where you can set permissions for the link and then copy it to share it with recipients. If you need to update the link permissions, you can do it directly from the Link Created dialog box as well.

Users who interact with the OneDrive/SharePoint share control will easily be able to change their link permissions before creating a link and pasting it into the app of their choice. They will also be able to change the link settings post-creation directly inside the confirmation box.

Have a safe and happy holiday season, we look forward to guiding you through all the changes in the new year!

In October we are accustomed to seeing many new usability features that are showcased at Microsoft Ignite.

We highly recommend catching some of the Ignite sessions that interest you and we will follow up with our favorites next month.

Here are some important updates you’ll see rolling out to your tenants soon!

Microsoft Forms new App “Polls” in Teams

This is a current capability that is underutilized and is getting some needed attention.

Microsoft Forms has always focused on providing the best polling experience to customers. However, according to customer feedback and telemetry, Microsoft has determined that many people don’t know the “Forms” App provides polling capability in Teams.

To provide a better experience we are delivering a new Teams app specifically for polling capabilities. This new app will be discoverable in Teams meetings/chats as “Polls”.  Any forms you created previously will not be affected and no action is required on your part to preserve older forms or add Polls to your Teams

This feature is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 84567

This feature is expected to be rolling in in mid-October and complete by the end of November.

Viva Connections – Praise History

The Praise app in Microsoft Teams is designed to help recognize the effort that goes into the wide-ranging, collaborative work that Teams users do. Users can send Praise to their colleagues through the messaging extension pinned to the Teams messaging bar for most users or through the Microsoft Viva Insights app in Teams. With Praise history, users will be able to view their sent and received praise over the past six months. Praise history will be shown in Viva Insights and will include Praise sent from both the messaging extension and the Viva Insights app. Additionally, all Praise sent in Teams will include a link for users to view their personal Praise history in the Viva Insights Teams app.

This feature is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 85639

Rollout will begin in mid-November and complete by the end of November.

Improvement to the Text web part for SharePoint pages and news

Microsoft has added the ability to paste inline images into the Text web part so that images can be closer to the text and text can wrap around the images.  This is a great addition to the Text web part and should roll out everywhere by the end of October.

Authors of SharePoint pages and news will be able to paste images into the Text web part and align the images to the left, right, or center with text wrapping.

Microsoft is also addressing feedback they had about text line spacing by reducing the line spacing size between header and body text, and in between bullets points.

SharePoint Navigation Switcher

Another great new SharePoint feature is the ability to change the navigation in team sites. This rollout should be complete in late November.

This feature update will bring users a new navigation option feature for SharePoint team sites. Team site owners will be able to switch the team site navigation orientation from vertical to horizontal. Additionally, site navigation visibility can be turned off completely. This new navigation option allows site owners to customize their team site by changing navigation’s orientation and visibility to achieve a different look and feel, layouts, and alignment styles.

This feature is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 85568.

• The Vertical option displays site navigation on the left of the site content
• The Horizontal option displays site navigation on the top of the page just below the site header like on a SharePoint communication site

(Updated) Sharing Links for Microsoft Lists is now available, or will be soon!  Sharing links for lists rollout should be complete by the end of October.  

This release will allow users to now share Microsoft Lists using the same sharing links that they have been using for files and folders.

This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 81965 

OneDrive and SharePoint: Improved Move/Copy user experience

Microsoft is refreshing the user experience to make it easier to navigation to move and copy files and folders.

This should begin releasing in October and be complete in mid-November.

This feature is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 85567.

When a user moves or copies a file or folder within OneDrive or SharePoint, they will see a new dialog-based experience to choose the destination for their content. There is no change to the underlying Move or Copy capabilities—all limitations, errors and admin settings will be unimpacted.

Yammer: Official Communities

Official communities are designated communities to ask questions and get answers, to connect and learn from others. When communities are marked as official, they create legitimacy and build trust over the conversations and content shared. The interactions in official communities set the example within your organization’s network. Network admins designate the official communities in your organization.

Network admins will have the ability to designate the official communities in your organization.

To take advantage of this feature, network managers will need to:

• Get a baseline for determining what groups will be marked as official
• Determine official community guidelines
• Publish a request an official community form for community admins to fill if they’ll like their group marked as official
• Determine the official community review process
• Evaluate ongoing official community engagement
• Get the word out

This feature should be available by the end of October.

Have a great October and a Happy Halloween!

Its Oscars time again…well, Covid-19 Oscars anyway. If you love movies like my wife and I do, then you are making your own list of movies to watch.  For us, we try and see all of the Best Picture nominations and as many of the other nominations as possible.  One nice thing about this season is that so many of the pictures are already streaming.  The Academy decided to allow streaming movies to be nominated even if they never were in a theater.

The First Pass

Normally this process means either making up a list on paper, or printing a ballot and crossing off movies as we see them.  This year, I decided to use some tech to make this easier.  I created a list in Microsoft To Do list for the Oscars. It didn’t take too long. I got a printable ballot from the Oscars website, and then I manually entered each movie.  Originally I was putting the nominations into the title, but that was ungainly.  Then I hit upon the idea of adding a step in the To Do task for each nomination and To Do would automatically list the number in the title so it was easy to see.

I then shared the To Do list with my wife and we have been using it to track out Oscar viewing.  We favorited the Best Picture nominees and when we watch one, we complete the task.  This was all done on my phone which the only place that my wife uses To Do.

Sharing with Others

I showed this to one of my friends at work. She asked me to share the list with her.  Unfortunately I had created the list in my personal M365 tenant and you can only share a To Do list with someone inside of your tenant.  We then looked at how I could export this and they could import it.  You can export your personal tasks from Outlook, but this is in M365 so we cannot export it, and even if we could…To Do doesn’t have an import.  So, what is a guy to do (pun intended)?

Power Automate to the Rescue?

Power Automate has some To-Do activities, they put in a hyphen for some reason, so I will use that in this section.  I figured that I could:

1. Create a Flow in Power Automate
2. Build out the To-Do list
3. Share that with others

Attempt 1 – The Initial Flow

Creating the Flow is really easy.  I decided to create an instant flow since I only have to run this once to do the work.  <Insert Instant Flow 1 & 2>

There are some To-Do activities in PowerAutomate so I searched for them.

• Add a to-do (v3) – This is the one that I am going to use
• Create a to-do list (v2) – Good to know we can use this if we want to create a list…which reminds me…
• Delete a to-do (v2) list
• Get a to-do list – useful if you want to manipulate a specific list
• Get a to-do (v3) – if we need to manipulate or make decisions on an item
• Update a to-list
• Update a to-do (v2)
• Delete a to-do (v2)
• List all to-do lists (v2) – Could be useful in a lot of ways
• List to-do’s by folder (v2)

This made me realize that people will likely want to add this to new list for the Oscars so we need to add a new list.  Which also means that we need a name for that list.  I could hard code it, but instead, lets add it as an input to the Flow like so:

Open up the Manually trigger a flow action, <Insert Animated Image> add a text input, and prompt the user to give you a name for their list.

Next we use the Create a To-Do list (v2) to create a list using the name they gave us.

Now, when we add our To-Do item in the next step, we will use the list we created. <Insert Image of Movie Being added>

One thing to note, we use the ID of the List as opposed to the name when we add it.  That means select custom value and then you can get the dynamic content to add the id from the prior action.

Next we add the Title of the movie as the Title. The Due Date is set to Noon on April 25th (the date of the Oscars this year). We cannot add steps via flow, so I chose to add the nominations as a bulleted list in the Body Content.

Now we do that for the other 65 movies and…wait a second, I am all for a little cut and paste, but that is a LOT of cut and paste.  Yes we have the Clipboard in PowerAutomate now, but it would still require a lot of configuration.

Attempt 2 – Is there a better way to do this?

I decided that if I built an Excel workbook, I could create a table and add a row for each movie with the Title, and then a column for each nomination.  Yes, I could add them all in one column, but I figured there would be an easy way to get them to all concatenate in PowerAutomate.

So, I added an action to list the rows in an Excel table.

This allowed me to add the movie’s title to the To-Do Task

But, there are multiple rows in the table and that makes the Add Task Action get placed into an Apply to Each control.

NOTE: You might get a warning from PowerAutomate that you need to set the Concurrency Control on in the setting and turn the degree of parallelism down to 1 to ensure it runs properly.

So, the flow is all ready to run.  After saving it, on the main screen you can click the Run button

This will check your permissions on the first run and then prompt you to give us the name of the Oscars List you want to create.

Once you click the Run flow button it will execute the flow and build your list.  It works just fine and we have the Movie Name and the number of nominations for each one as the task name

The task itself has in the notes the list of nominations as an unordered list, but it didn’t quite work.  There are two things wrong here.  One is that the unordered list isn’t formatted correctly.  This is because we are mixing the HTML code and the strings and Flow doesn’t know which is which.  The solution is to build a single string with the body text.  Which brings us to the second issue.

Sound of Metal has six nominations but the list always will have 10 because that was what we created it to handle.  The bottom 4 are blank.  Is there an easy way to only display the right number?

I reached out to a few friends who are big with PowerAutomate and my co-worker Pontus was able to give me some advice.  There isn’t an easy way to do what I want here (yes, we could change the data, but we are often presented with data in a format that isn’t easy to work with and part of this exercise is to take data that isn’t in a normal form).  So two things need to be done.  First I need to create a variable (a string) for the body of the task that builds out the nominations, and then set that variable for the item with the correct number of nominations.

NOTE: The data pulled from the Excel workbook is a string, so in the Case statement we have to wrap the number in ” or you will get the following error. “An unexpected exception encountered when evaluating branching condition.”  Check out this post that talks about it and where I found this solution

Once we have all the cases built, then we can add that variable to the Add a to-do task

Wrap Up

So, that is it.  We built a PowerAutomate Flow to make this work, and now I will share that with you as well.

Here is a link to the Oscars.xlsx file from my OneDrive.  Download that and put it in your OneDrive or SharePoint where PowerAutomate can get it.

Here is the PowerAutomate Package for you to import into your environment.  After you import this. you will need to edit the Flow to point to the Oscars file where you placed it.

Last note, I only built the switch to handle 1-6 and 10 nominations.  IF we wanted to use this again next year we might need to update things.

Note after the last note: You then have to fiddle a bit with the connections and the location of the file in OneDrive.

Hello!  This month we have new major announcements from Microsoft, and several important updates in Plan for Change status.

First, did you hear about Microsoft Viva?

Microsoft Viva

This is exciting news! Teams is not just the place for collaboration anymore, it’s also the spot for communication, learning, knowledge, and culture.  Viva brings the whole employee experience into Teams.  Learn more about Viva here.  It’s all about empowering and engaging employees.

Topics:  Knowledge & Expertise

Viva Topics uses AI to:

• Empower people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day.

• Help people learn, develop new skills, and innovate faster while they work.

• Automatically connect, organize, and protect content across teams and systems

Insights: Productivity & Wellbeing – Available Soon  

Roll-Out:

• Insights app with “Stay Connected” and “Protect Time” tab will be available as a Teams Personal app in the Teams app store but will not be directly installed for your users.
• Starting March 08, 2021, unless disabled by admin, Insights Teams app will be pre-installed for users and available directly in the Teams left navigation app bar under “…”(More apps)

Learning: Skilling** and Growth

• 94% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development

Connections:  Culture and Communications

• Organizations with highly engaged employees have 21% greater profitability

We’ll be watching for more updates on VIVA!

**This is not a typo!  Microsoft mentioned skilling in the announcement video and this is now on the website.  I looked it up and the definition is “To make a difference:  matter, avail”.

Here are your important Plan for Change items this month:

Microsoft Teams: Custom layouts for meetings (FEB 2021)

Presenters will be able to customize how content shows up for meeting participants, including overlaying their video on content or moving their content box to a corner of the video view – allowing for a more dynamic content viewing experience where presenters can easily direct their audiences’ attention through hand gestures and facial cues, without making the viewer choose between the speaker and the content.

Microsoft Teams: Get a “Meet Now” Meeting link (FEB 2021)

Users can now copy a “Meet Now” meeting link without starting the meeting from the Calendar tab which can be used later.

Microsoft Teams: Meeting Recap (FEB 2021)

Meeting recap will help teams stay on track and keep their work moving forward after the meeting is over. Coming this year, a recap with the meeting recording, transcript, chat, shared files and more will be shared with participants in the meeting Chat tab and viewable in the Details tab for each meeting.

Microsoft Teams: Recording 3×3 gallery view for Microsoft Teams Rooms (FEB 2021)

View up to nine meeting participants during a Teams meeting recording in the 3×3 gallery view.

Microsoft Teams: Meeting attendee registration (MAR 2021)

Add a custom attendee registration page to any meeting to better manage attendance before and after any engagement. Following registration, attendees receive an email confirmation with calendar invite.

OneDrive: 250 GB file size support in Microsoft 365 (FEB 2021)

Users will be able to upload large file sizes up to 250 GB in OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams.

Microsoft Lists: rules – built on SharePoint (FEB 2021)

Create simple if/then rules based on changes to list information to set reminders and send notifications.

SharePoint admin: New SharePoint admin center home page (MAR 2021)

When you first land in the SharePoint admin center, we want it to be both familiar and useful at a glance. The idea is to provide a familiar experience, taking a similar design approach as the Microsoft admin center. You’ll see more and more cards and graphs appear over time – so you can see insights on files, usage security, recommendations, training and so on. Better see what’s happening, and then take the appropriate action.

SharePoint: new experience to add content types to lists and libraries (FEB 2021)

Custom content types that are available to your SharePoint sites can easily be added to lists & libraries that allow multiple content types. In those SharePoint lists & libraries that allow multiple content types, a new ‘Content type’ option will be available in the ‘Add column’ menu.

SharePoint: App Bar (MAR 2021)

The SharePoint app bar brings a consistent navigation experience to every site on your intelligent intranet, featuring quick access to important sites across the organization with global navigation, personally relevant sites, and the news feed.  Read More

MICROSOFT SEARCH

Microsoft Search: Semantic search (FEB 2021)

With intelligent, natural language search capabilities in Microsoft Search, you will experience improved search accuracy as the search engine can now understand intent and contextualize the meaning of the terms typed – leading to more relevant search results.

I recently ran into an interesting issue when deploying Office 2016 ProPlus on Windows 7. I discovered that the OneDrive application installs under the user context, and not to the system like the rest of the suite does. This is not a big deal if you are using Windows 10, as OneDrive client is built in, but I was deploying to Windows 7 machines. So on Windows 7 only the user who ran the installer would have the OneDrive client installed. If I added a new profile to the machine it would also receive the OneDrive client. But it would not be available to any users with existing profiles on the machine. So to work around this, I created an Active Setup registry key and pointed it to the OneDriveSetup.exe that is installed along with the suite.

Active Setup is used to execute commands once per user during the login process. In this case I am using it to run the OneDriveSetup.exe silently for anyone who logs onto the machine, regardless of whether or not they had an existing profile.

Below is a copy of the PowerShell I used to create the registry entry. I also includes the command line version in case you are using a batch file.

$activeSetupPath = "HKLM:SOFTWAREMicrosoftActive SetupInstalled ComponentsOneDrive" 
IF(!(Test-Path $activeSetupPath)) 
{ 
     New-Item -Path $activeSetupPath -Force | Out-Null 
     New-ItemProperty -Path $activeSetupPath -Name "Version" -Value "1" -PropertyType String -Force | Out-Null 
     New-ItemProperty -Path $activeSetupPath -Name "StubPath" -Value '"C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficerootIntegrationOneDriveSetup.exe" /silent' -PropertyType String -Force | Out-Null 
} 
   ELSE { 
     New-ItemProperty -Path $activeSetupPath -Name "Version" -Value "1" -PropertyType String -Force | Out-Null 
     New-ItemProperty -Path $activeSetupPath -Name "StubPath" -Value '"C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficerootIntegrationOneDriveSetup.exe" /silent' -PropertyType String -Force | Out-Null 
}

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftActive SetupInstalled ComponentsOneDrive" /v "Version" /d "1" /t REG_SZ /f
 
reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftActive SetupInstalled ComponentsOneDrive" /v "StubPath" /d "C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficerootIntegrationOneDriveSetup.exe /silent" /f