Covid-19 has drastically shifted the way we balance work and living. Businesses have had to quickly adapt and adopt new technologies and initiatives to guarantee employee safety whilst maintaining productivity and efficiency in the workplace. At Adepteq, we know that adapting to the new norm of working from home whilst navigating work-life balance is essential for business stability. Therefore, our Resource Booking App can help prepare your organisation for hybrid working and returning to work.
We will be running TWO Webinars showcasing our Resource Booking App.
Thursday 22nd July 2021 11:00 to 11:30 BST
Click here to register for this webinar
Tuesday 27th July 2021 14:30 to 15:00 BST
Click here to register for this webinar
* An exclusive offer is available to those who register and attend our webinar, a FREE discovery call, and if you decide to sign up for our Resource Booking App before the end of July 2021, you will receive 50% off deployment and training!*
It’s important that after more than a year from working at home, and safety being the number one priority- it’s done right. With our Resource Booking App, ensure your safe return to work.
Melanie Hoskin from Mount Green, a successful user of the Resource Booking App, shared their experience of the app in hand with a safe return to work:
“With the pandemic upon us we have had no choice but to work differently and that of course means keeping safety of our staff as the focus. The app ensures we do not exceed the maximum number of people in the office at any one time. It also ensures that we can ‘track and trace’ staff should we need to if the unfortunate should happen, and we need to trace staff following a positive Covid-19 case".
We look forward to having you join us for our Resource Booking App webinar, if you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with us for more information.
Microsoft 365 subscriptions allows businesses to link devices and data across platforms, from any location, all with a single login. Giving your company greater agility and your first steps towards a fully connected workforce. It brings Microsoft’s leading business applications and combines them into one integrated productivity suite. Familiar programs allow your workforce to use their existing skills and leverage your investments in the world’s number one business suite.
Covid-19 has forced businesses globally to work from home, therefore helping your workforce stay connected is important now more than ever. Get useful resources to learn about monitoring, reporting and decision‑making tools to help everyone stay connected, productive and secure. Find timely advice for whatever stage your organisation has reached in returning to the workplace.
Resilience is safely returning back to work. As you move toward bringing employees back, give your teams the tools to help them stay safe and productive on the job with solutions from Microsoft. Explore These Microsoft Resources Today
The new home site app in Teams gives you global navigation across sites, communities and teams, plus a personalised news feed. This allows you to tailor your interests so that you get access to the things you like. Read the blog and watch an on‑demand video session featuring demos and more.
Learn About The App >
Learn how to use Microsoft SharePoint to meet your organisation's needs by integrating modern concepts into the design of your intranet, portals and sites. Adepteq have an extensive library of SharePoint designs and layouts for you to customise what's best for your business.
Explore options for creating an environment where your team can share files and folders with unauthenticated users. Ensure your company are utilising safeguards to help protect your organisation's content.
Working from home calls for strong and coordinated protection across all user touchpoints with sensitive data. Endpoint DLP integration in Microsoft Edge adds native awareness of sensitive content classification in Microsoft Information Protection, and DLP policies to online activities.
As Microsoft Gold Partners, we have the knowledge and skills to help assist you with your Microsoft 365 subscriptions. If you would like to assess and build resilience throughout your workplace, get in contact with us today to discuss how we can provide personalised support.
Adepteq are pleased to share with you the latest Microsoft announcement. Introducing Microsoft Viva their new brand and product suite. Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform (EXP) that is visually engaging and supports your employees needs.
What is Microsoft Viva?
It's a special digital platform designed with the new world of remote working since Covid-19, in mind. Building on key elements of Microsoft 365, such as Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. Viva brings together communication, knowledge, learning, resources and insights into an effective, yet integrated employee experience. With a strong and growing ecosystem of partners and an open extensible platform, Viva empowers people and teams to be their best from anywhere, at any time.
Microsoft Viva is a grouping together of new and existing Microsoft 365 capabilities that support employee experience and addresses a number of organisational priorities around people, defined by Microsoft as:
Viva is experienced through Microsoft Teams, although some elements can also be experienced through Outlook.
To start, Microsoft Viva will have four modules:
Viva Connections built on SharePoint and Yammer provides a curated and branded gateway to your digital workplace. Leaders can connect with employees via company town halls, and employees can access everything from company news, policies, and benefits to employee resource groups or communities they want to join.
Viva Insights helps individual employees stay connected with their colleagues and protect time for regular breaks, focused work, and learning. It brings new personal wellbeing experiences, insights, and recommended actions from Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics into the flow of people’s work in Microsoft Teams.
Viva Learning is a central hub for learning in Microsoft Teams, with AI that recommends the right content, making learning a natural part of the day. It aggregates content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, and other leading content providers, as well as your own custom content. Easy sharing, assigning, and tracking of course completion.
Viva Topics uses AI to automatically organize company-wide content and expertise into relevant categories, putting knowledge to work. Viva Topics automatically surfaces topic cards as people work in apps like Office, SharePoint, and Teams. When employees click on a card, a topic page appears with documents, videos, and related people.
We're certainly excited about the roll-out of Microsoft Viva in 2021 with new and updated versions being released constantly. If you're interested in building on your Microsoft 365 bringing together communication, knowledge, learning, resources and insights into an effective, yet integrated employee experience then get involved and contact us today to see how we can help you.
Is Microsoft Viva a fit for your business? Let Adepteq help you make an educated decision. Contact us today to explore your options further.
Many users sadly become victims to cyber attacks due to not knowing that Microsoft aren't actually protecting their valuable data. Adepteq SaaS Protection makes it easier and more cost effective than ever to safeguard all of your Microsoft 365 data- putting your mind at ease.
So, what is Adepteq SaaS Protection?
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is an intelligent way to deliver applications over the internet. These SaaS apps have revolutionised the way we do businesses. It allows companies to limit installation and maintenance of software by accessing applications with a click of a button. Adepteq Datto SaaS Protection helps you to remove the risk of losing any or all of your data with a simple, automated and secure backup of your Office 365 Data.
Feeling unsecure and want to know how we can protect your data?
We're holding a FREE Online Webinar on 'Protecting your Microsoft 365 data with Adepteq SaaS Protection'!
Our Webinar takes place on Tuesday 2nd February 2020 from 10:00AM - 10:45AM GMT.
The following topics will be covered:
There will also be a short Q&A where our experts and presenters- Ian Loman and Adam Salley will be able to provide additional support.
This webinar is free of charge and is held in English. You can participate using Microsoft Teams in web browser, desktop app or mobile app. If the date and time is not suitable, sign up anyway and we will send you the presentation and a recording of the webinar.
If you want to know how to Secure and Protect your Microsoft 365 Data with Adepteq SaaS Protection, REGISTER NOW to our Free Webinar to avoid missing out!
October 2020 brought some great new offerings: SharePoint Syntex, Organisation Chart web part, new IT controls for Microsoft Lists, Microsoft Lists - commenting, OneDrive widget for iPhone, Task in Teams GA, and more. All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of October 2020 (possibly early November 2020).
Build your intelligent intranet on SharePoint in Microsoft 365 and get the benefits of investing in business outcomes - reducing IT and development costs, increasing business speed and agility, and up-leveling the dynamic, personalised, and welcoming nature of your intranet.
SharePoint Syntex
this is the first product to come from Project Cortex - a broader Microsoft 365 initiative, that applies advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to empower people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day.
Syntex amplifies human expertise, automates content processing, and transforms content into knowledge. Syntex mainstreams machine teaching, enabling your experts to capture their knowledge about content in AI models they can build with no code.
Your experts train Syntex to understand content like they do, to recognise key information, and to tag content automatically. For example, a contract processing expert can teach the service to extract the contract's value, along with the expiration date and key terms and conditions.
Organisation Chart web part
Visibility on hierarchy answer many questions on who's who and who knows what. This web part allows page authors to generate an organisation chart based off of a specific individual - just type in their name. The page author will have the option to determine how many levels up this org chart goes, and as you navigate, you'll see who reports to who.
IT control setting for Microsoft Lists
Governance depends on who can do what and what they can do. Based on Microsoft 365 admin feedback, we added new IT capabilities, along with new documentation, on how you can better manage *Microsoft Lists* via #PowerShell. This means you can:
Microsoft 365 is designed to be a universal toolkit for teamwork - to give you the right tools for the right task, along with common services to help you seamlessly work across applications. SharePoint is the intelligent content service that powers teamwork - to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organisation - with integration across Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream, Planner and much more.
New Teams file sharing experience
Share files on your terms. You can now create a shareable link for any file stored in Teams and directly set the appropriate permissions. Additionally, you can also set permissions for files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive while composing a private chat or starting a channel conversation.
The copied link can then be shared with others, by pasting it into a chat or channel. On pasting the plain lengthy link, this feature converts the link into a visual file chiclet/image. The sender can also set permissions on the file link that they are sharing, at the time of composing the message itself, so that the recipients do not run into access issues.
Microsoft Lists - commenting
Have something to say? Say it. And say it in a native, natural way without breaking privacy or compliance policy. You will be able to add and delete comments on list items. Users can view all comments on a list item and filter between views that show comments or activity related to an item.
Note: comments follow the permission settings inherent in SharePoint and Microsoft Lists. Users with read-only permission can only view comments. Those with list edit permission can make comments as well as delete comments; editing comments is currently not possible.
A few FYI notes on "where and how are comments stored":
OneDrive widgets for iPhone
Now, when you run iOS14 on your device, you can add a OneDrive widget to your iPhone home screen. The widget displays your photo memories "on this day" across previous years. And, if you don't have any On This Day photos for today, you'll see your most recent photos that you've saved to the cloud.
Note: this feature is only available for personal OneDrive account (home and family)
Tasks in Microsoft Teams is now generally available
Tasks in Microsoft Teams desktop and web is now 100% rolled out to everyone with a Microsoft 365 subscription across all non-government tenants. Tasks in Teams lets you manage your team tasks for Planner and individual tasks from To Do in your hub for teamwork.
Embed Visio files, stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, into pages in Atlassian Confluence
We're excited to announce our first-ever non-Microsoft integration for Visio with Atlassian Confluence, a remote-friendly team workspace.
Alongside embedding Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files, you can also easily add Visio diagrams to your confluence pages - to then open them directly in a new browser tab - keeping the files where they are in Microsoft 365
Your data remains secure - Confluence respects all privacy settings set in OneDrive and SharePoint, so no unauthorised users can access your content.
We would be happy to explain any of the above features in more detail and how they could benefit your organisation.
Adepteq are experts in developing and deploying SharePoint solutions, alongside training and on-going support. Call us on 0800 644 365, email info@adepteq.com or complete our Contact Form.
During Microsoft Ignite 2020, Microsoft announced several innovations for SharePoint administration and migration and security. In addition to this news, they produced three on-demand videos to provide a clear first look at these announcements plus showcase how to better manage and secure your productivity cloud investment.
SharePoint and OneDrive in Microsoft 365 enables enterprise-grade content security in compliance with privacy and legal requirements. Beyond innovation, take a moment to learn more about the SharePoint admin role in Microsoft 365 to best manage sites, secure content, control external sharing, move content into Microsoft 365, manage metadata, and more.
1 | "Monitor and manage SharePoint in Microsoft 365" by Dave Minasyan, Rk Menon, and Trent Green
SharePoint admins, this session is for you. The intelligent intranet is personal, collaborative, and ever changing. This session focuses on upcoming enhancements to the SharePoint admin center - an updated home page, new site management, content services reporting, combined OneDrive admin settings, and more. Join in to see what's coming next to monitor and manage the state of your organisation's intranet get informed of all the latest enhancements, and utilise the new experiences to stay productive:
Learn more how to get started with the SharePoint admin center in Microsoft 365
2 | "What's new to easily migrate your content to Microsoft 365" by Eric Warnke and Yogesh Rat naparkhi
This is a demo-driven session on how to migrate your organisations content into Microsoft 365 with ease and speed! They focus on three areas: moving off legacy file shares, content from SharePoint Server on-premises, and other clouds storage providers like Box, Dropbox, and G Suite. Learn what's possible with our comprehensive set of first-party tools, services, and partner ecosystem to successfully migrate your content to Microsoft 365:
Learn more about Migration Manager, the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT), and Mover.
3 | "What's new in Security & Compliance in SharePoint and OneDrive [lead SPIN session]" by Sesha Mani
Microsoft runs on trust, as digital data grows exponentially in your organisation it is super critical to safeguard your sensitive corporate data. Microsoft is leading the way in enterprise-grade security and comprehensive compliance solutions. This session showcases what's new and upcoming for SharePoint and OneDrive services in Security & Compliance areas. It also covers how Microsoft helps you achieve zero trust security with existing controls/policies in SharePoint and OneDrive:
Learn more about the value and features of OneDrive and SharePoint security and compliance.
Bonus related session | "Microsoft Teams Administrator Updates for Compliance and Migration" presented by Jeff Teper and Jeremy Chapman.
Keep your users and data safe wherever they're working from and take a tour of all the recent upcoming updates for Microsoft 365 admins. As people work remotely or in hybrid work environments, potentially on unmanaged devices or less trusted networks, information protection is more important than ever. Jeff and Jeremy talk about and show a simple environment for everybody - from end-users to administrators, in a way where the data is secure and able to be access from any device, in any location:
Learn more about security controls in Microsoft 365 and migration options.
Contact us today if you would like us to discuss any of these topics in more detail.
Adepteq are experts in SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams. Call us on 0800 644 365, email info@adepteq.com or complete our Contact Form.
Throughout 2020, as we've navigated the equivalent of a year of digital transformation every month, it's IT pros who've led the way. When COVID-19 caused a sudden shift to remote work, IT pros brought entire organisations online - sometimes over a single weekend. They trained individuals and teams on essential new tools, quickly deployed custom apps, and vigilantly protected organisations from increasingly complex security threats. Now, as business leaders look to build resilient organisations and find new opportunities for expansion, they're looking to IT pros for sustainable solutions to support them for the long haul.
We are experiencing digital transformation at epic speed. COVID-19 has accelerated secular trends in the ways we work and live, jumpstarting durable new habits that will persist well past the pandemic.
Microsoft are reimagining meeting and workspaces to unlock new forms of collaboration, help people and teams stay connected and engaged, and ensure fluid communication across organisations.
Better meetings for everyone
Microsoft Teams offers an end-to-end meeting solution that scales to support your meeting, calling, and large-scale needs. Announced this summer, Together mode is a new meeting experience in Teams that helps participants feel closer together even when they are apart by placing them in a shared background. This makes meetings more engaging by showing participants' faces and body language, making it easier to pick up on the non-verbal cues that are so important to human interaction. At Microsoft's recent Ignite event, they announced new Together mode scenes, including auditoriums, conference rooms, and a coffee shop - all available later this year. Presenters will be able to select a scene from the gallery as the default for all meeting attendees. We're also introducing the use of machine learning in Together mode to automatically scale and center meeting participants in their virtual seats, regardless of how close or far they are from their camera, creating a more realistic visual experience.
In July, Microsoft announced new ways for meeting participants to control what they see in Teams with Dynamic view. Custom layouts has now been announced, coming later this year, and will allow presenters to customise how content shows up for participants during the meeting. For example, when a presenter is showing a PowerPoint slide, participants will be able to see the presenter's video feed transposed onto the foreground of the slide they're showing.
Breakout rooms, one of the most requested Teams features, will be available this month. Meeting organisers will be able to split up participants into smaller groups to facilitate brainstorming sessions or work group discussions. Presenters can then hop between breakout rooms, make announcements to all breakout rooms, and close the rooms to return everyone to the main meeting.
More than 20 partners including HireVue, ServiceNow, Range, Buncee, and PagerDuty are using new Teams meeting extensions, which will move to general availability in October, to integrate their apps and enable custom meeting experiences in Teams. Meeting organisers can access apps from either AppSource or the Teams store and add them as they schedule the meetings.
After a meeting in Teams, a recap with the meeting recording, transcript, chat, shared files, and more will be automatically created in Teams. Meeting recaps help move work forward for both meeting participants and for those who were unable to attend a meeting. The recap will also be available in your Outlook calendar by going to the meeting event. And soon, meeting recordings will be automatically stored - like other files are today - in Microsoft 365 so they can be shared, easily and compliantly, with external participants.
For customer presentations including webinars, we're announcing Teams support for attendee registration with automated emails to make it easier to manage attendance and view a reporting dashboard after the meeting to help understand attendee engagement. Attendee reporting and scheduling APIs will also be available, so customers can bring this data into their CRM and marketing automation apps, and more.
A number of enhancements are coming later this year for the Calling experience within Microsoft Teams, including a streamlined view that shows contacts, voicemail, and calling history at once, making it easier to initiate or return a call with a single click.
Also, Teams meetings are growing to support up to 1,000 participants with the full meeting experience by the end of the year. For larger meetings and event that require additional control, Teams will soon seamlessly scale to support 20,000 participants in a view-only meeting experience that includes the ability to use live captions. These new capabilities will be available to customers with the new Advanced Communications plan.
Tools for a connected employee experience
The new home site app brings the power of your SharePoint home site, along with the rest of your intranet, directly into Teams. This gives employees an easy gateway to their organisations intranet, with customisable naming, branding, and multi-level navigation to teams, communities, and resources. Coming later this year, you'll be able to customise the app name and icon to match your organisation's branding and pin it to the app bar in Teams for quick access to search and a personalised view of news and important sites.
We're also announcing a set of new tools for workplace communications that will enable organisations to boost the visibility of news and announcements, better connect employees to their leaders, and foster a tighter workplace community.
Devices for the workspace of the future
To help create work spaces where people can collaborate effectively and safely both remotely and from the work site, we're designing experiences where every attendee, remote or in-person, is a first-class participant. As organisations continue the transition back to the office, shared space devices like Microsoft Teams rooms and Surface Hub will be critical tools in delivering the ultimate hybrid work place experience.
Microsoft have announced Microsoft Teams panels, a new category of devices that can be mounted outside of a meeting space to notify participants of scheduling and occupancy and to assist with wayfinding around the office. Teams panels can also use information from other connected certified Teams devices, like cameras that support people counting, to show room capacity information and help everyone follow their organisation's safety guidelines for shared spaces.
Microsoft are also enabling additional ways to engage with in-room devices without touch. Later this year, Microsoft Teams Rooms devices will support new touch-less meetings capabilities like the Room remote app, Teams casting, and voice assistance with Microsoft Cortana.
As the in-office, nine-to-five workday gives way to fluid work models and flexible hours, we're spending more time communicating with one another digitally, and often outside of traditional work house. In Teams, for instance, the number of chats and meetings per person continue to grow, especially after hours. Meanwhile, workdays around the world are increasing in length. While it's great to connect with our teammates, we all need reminders to take time to detach from work in order to preserve our well-being. Research from Microsoft's latest Work Trend Index underscores just how important this is. In a global study, over 30% of Firstline and information workers said the pandemic had increased their sense of burnout at work. And one-third of remote workers said the lack of separation between work and life is negatively impacting their well-being. To help leaders prioritise well-being for every employee, Microsoft have introduced experiences to help structure the day, make space for breaks, nurture relationships, and stay on top of tasks.
Wellbeing experiences in Teams
We may not miss that hour of traffic bookending our days, but studies from Microsoft Research show that commutes can serve as meaningful transitions at the beginning and end of the workday - and that the reflection we do during that time can increase productivity by 12-15%. Available in the first half of 2021, new features in Teams will make it seamless to structure your day by scheduling a virtual commute that helps you have a productive start in the morning and mindfully disconnect in the evening. Our global study also found that 70% of people think meditation could help relieve their work-related stress. The science backs this up. Studies show meditation can reduce stress and burnout and improve your ability to react to feedback. Microsoft have partnered with Headspace to bring a curated set of mindfulness experiences and science-backed meditations into the flow of work in Microsoft Teams. Whether you're a remote worker looking to find focus before a big presentation or a Firstline Worker hoping to de-stress after a long workday, this experience makes it easier to find time to relax and recover.
A new stay connected experience in Teams helps individuals strengthen relationships with their colleagues by making it easy to praise top collaborators for key achievements and to schedule 1:1s to catch up. It also helps you stay on top of your commitments by intelligently surfacing suggested tasks and emails from Outlook - plus @mentions in Teams - that might require follow up.
Near the start of the day, individuals will also receive a daily Briefing email from Cortana - including key personal productivity insights and suggested tasks for that day - right in their Outlook inboxes. This feature will become generally available beginning in September.
Manager and leader insights in Teams
Managers carry the life preservers for their teams in periods of disruption, helping them prioritise and protect their time while staying connected. Beginning in October, Microsoft are bringing Workplace Analytics into Teams to give managers line of sight into teamwork norms like after-hours collaboration, focus time, meeting effectiveness, and cross-company connections. These will then be compared to averages among similar teams to provide managers with actionable insights.
Currently, Workplace Analytics offers manager-initiated change programs to bring the team together around an action plan for improving health and effectiveness. Suggestions remind individuals to unplug at the end of the day, reclaim time to focus, and reduce meeting overload. Weekly summaries allow the team to monitor progress and celebrate successes. In 2021, Microsoft will integrate these features in Teams as well.
As organisations face uncertainty and change, company leaders need visibility into how work is evolving and how changes are effecting the people whose creativity and innovation will propel their business into the future. Powered by Workplace Analytics, new insights in Teams allow leaders to ask questions like "Are employees at risk for burnout? Are people maintaining strong internal connections? Are relationships with customers being maintained?" Operating like a health monitor for organisational resilience, this feature helps leaders track indicators of employee wellbeing, respond to irregular rhythms with research-backed best practices, and measure the impact of change over time.
Finally, Microsoft are refreshing the business continuity report, part of the Microsoft Productivity Score, to help customers measure how the move to remote work has affected collaboration norms for their organisations.
A lot was announced at Microsoft’s recent Ignite event, and we are looking forward to sharing more with you very soon.
Adepteq are experts in SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams. Call us on 0800 644 365, email info@adepteq.com or complete our Contact Form
During Microsoft Ignite 2020, Microsoft announced the new home site app for Microsoft Teams. The app gives employees a gateway to your organisation, starting with the app's name and icon, which you can customise to reflect the identity of your organisation or your intranet. The app's multi-level navigation lets people find sites across the organisation, including portals, teams, communities and application.
This blog gives you a great first look at the app, an on-demand video session packed with demos and a set of common questions and answers below.
The home site app for teams brings the power of your SharePoint-based intranet home site seamlessly into Microsoft Teams.
Bring the power of your SharePoint-based intranet home site directly into Microsoft Teams - seamlessly. The home site app in Teams gives your users global navigation across sites, communities, and teams; quick access to sites they use regularly; and a personalised news feed.
Many questions have been asked for additional information. As part of Ignite Microsoft have produced an on-demand video focused on the new home site app in Teams - showcasing how it works and the value of empowering users to discover, consume and collaborate on content like never before.
Q: Can any site be pinned as a Home site app in Teams?
A: Communication sites designated as Home Sites are eligible for pinning in Teams as the Home site app using our default configuration flow.
Q: Where are global navigation links curated?
A: Links for global navigation are managed through the home site, by home site owners, freeing global admins from having to play the role of curator.
Q: Can my classic site be pinned in Teams?
A: Only home sites are eligible to be pinned as the home site app in Teams with our default configuration flow. Home sites must be modern SharePoint communication sites.
Q: What is the difference between Home site app and Home page pinned as tab?
A: The home site app provides organisations to pin company branded entry point to their intranet as a top level app in Teams. It provides an immersive site consumption experience, complete with navigation, mega-menus and support for tenant wide search. It also provides quick access to company curated resources, important sites and news similar to those provided by the SharePoint App Bar in the web. Home pages (or any other SharePoint pages) pinned as tabs in Channels provide ways to bring content directly into Team collaboration scenarios, and these pages have navigation and search elements removed to facilitate focus on the page content itself.
Q: Do I need a Home site app for the Global navigation to show up in Teams?
A: Yes, the global navigation links are stored in the home site of a tenant, and is required in order for the navigation panel to appear in the home site app in Teams
Q: Can a SharePoint team site be a Home site?
A: No. Only communication sites can be made a Home site in a tenant.
Adepteq use Teams ourselves and have successfully planned, deployed, trained on and are supporting Microsoft Teams with many of our clients.
If you would like to know more about Microsoft Teams or SharePoint, or would like to to discuss how Microsoft Teams Apps can improve your communication and collaboration, then please contact us or call 0800 6444 365.
Phil Cave - Technical Director Adepteq
We received a request to offer a solution to collect confirmations when a new starter has read and understood the company's policy documents. The policy documents are currently emailed to the new starters personal email address as they do not yet have an account in the organisations' Office 365 tenant and they then need to be printed, signed, scanned and returned. This is not a good solution because many people do not have access to a scanner.
My first thought was that either DocuSign or Adobe Sign would be the best tool for the job, but that would mean additional costs and training. They already have Office 365 and would like to use if possible.
To minimise administration and to avoid any security implications I do not want to offer a solution that includes adding the new starters as guest users to the tenant. This would mean that the user has to create a Microsoft account if they don't already have one and this can cause support issues for non-IT literate users. It would also mean that there would end up being a lot of guest accounts in the Tenant that need to be removed at some point.
The solution that I put together is quite simple and uses Outlook, Forms, PowerApps and SharePoint.
The first step was to create the form. This has only a text box for the user to type their name and a submit button. The form must allow anonymous users because the new starters will not have an Office 365 account. The form settings are shown in the image below.
For simplicity the form that I created only collects the name of the new starter to use as their confirmation that they have read and understood the policies. You could collect as much information as you require, for example, there could be a tick box for each policy included in the policy pack.
Below are images showing how the form looks on a PC and on a mobile phone.
When you create a form using the Forms App it will work great on both PC and mobile without you having to do any extra work.
Next, I created a list in SharePoint. This will probably be in the HR team site and will serve as a register of all policy read confirmation. You can see from the image below that I am only using two columns to store the name and date. If the form was collecting more information, then a column would be required for each field on the form.
Next, I created a Flow using Power Automate. The Flow needs to run whenever a response to the Form is received and then add the Form data to the list in SharePoint.
First, create the trigger
Then get the response details
Then create a new list item in SharePoint using the form response(s)
This is one of the simplest Flows that I have had to create, but it does exactly as is needed. I could easily add some additional steps to enhance functionality, for example, a notification that the response was received could be sent to the HR team.
Now that everything is in place all that remains is to send out the email with policies attached and a link to the Form.
Go to your form in the Forms App and click Share and then copy the link.
The link will look like this:
https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=XCrnyHAiJ0uwaTIC3qHxQBx5jwCDZ4JJtd6NGALo3kNWVlZCTlBSWVdQNlA0Ti4u
You can add the link to the email using the insert link options in Outlook.
If you would like to learn more about Forms, SharePoint, Power Automate, or any products related to Microsoft 365 please visit our website. We are also available to speak to on 0800 6444 365 or via info@adepteq.com.
Microsoft Teams can help people and organisations stay productive in hybrid work environments, and Microsoft Power Platform provides low-code custom development tools. the powerful Teams + Power Platform integration allows anyone to create the tools they need to get work done and bring them into their digital workspace. We are excited to share some new ways that it is becoming easier to build, deploy, and manage these custom solutions so you can be more productive!
A new Power Automate app is coming later this year, will make it easier than ever to build automated workflows. The new app will include a robust set of easy-to-use templates for some of the most common automation scenarios for Teams. A simple building experience will allow users to build these flows with drop-down menus and pre-populated dynamic text. Users will also have the ability to start building flows from scratch or edit flows that they've already built.
Nearly every industry and every business department needs to manage approvals in some form, so Microsoft have announced that Teams users will soon be able to easily create, manage, share, and act on approvals directly in Teams. Users can start an approval from a chat, channel conversation, or from the Approvals app in Teams. These easy approvals are powered by Power Automate and will become generally available in October.
Coming later this year, Microsoft will have integrations with Adobe Sign and DocuSign, to get legal consent or approval of electronic documents from people inside or outside the organisation. Additionally, approval flows from across the organisation can be integrated in Teams with over 350 systems using Power Automate, including ServiceNow, Dynamics, and GitHub.
Microsoft have announced that the Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents apps for Teams, powered by CDS Project Oakdale, have entered public preview allowing Teams users to build custom apps and AI-powered bots right inside Teams, then easily deploy them to their teams.
The new embedded Power Apps studio allows users to create custom apps with a simple drag and drop approach to add app elements, and these apps can be connected to existing CDS Project Oakdale data tables or new data tables that can be created right inside the studio. These apps can be used on desktop or mobile devices, so everyone can be more productive, wherever they are working.
Microsoft have also built several Power Apps solutions for common use cases like equipment asset inspections and employee ideas, and made them available in the Power Apps app as well as the Teams app store, so anyone can open and use them right away. Since these solutions are build on Power Platform, they are also highly customisable and can be edited to meet an organisation's specific needs.
It is important to keep in mind that Power Apps can also help professional developers accelerate their app development process. To that end, Microsoft have announced that professional developers will soon be able to build Power Platform connectors with Azure API Management and Azure Functions to any Microsoft hosted third-party, legacy, or line-of-business apps. Apps built with Power Apps that utilise these new connectors can then be deployed to users in Teams at no additional cost. These capabilities will be available for preview in October 2020.
The new Power Virtual Agents app for Teams provides a low-code authoring experience to create custom chat-bots. Bots can be built simply by adding questions for the bot to ask, and messages for the bot to send back to the user. While these bots can be simple to build, they remain very powerful. New features such as the abilities for bots to recognise which user they are chatting with can provide a personalised user experience. For example, an employee who queries a bot about company HR policies could be provides with policies that are specific to their region or country.
An enhanced Power BI app, available in public preview later this year, will make it easy to discover data and quickly create visualisations from Excel datasets within Teams. The app also provides users with quick access to their frequently used reports, example reports from the Power BI community, and commonly used organisational datasets. The app also allows users to send a report that they're reviewing to a chat or channel quickly, even maintaining the filtering and slicing of the report so it is easy to start a discussion with data. Also coming later this year is the ability to search for Power BI content through the search bar. These new features in the Power BI app provide a centralised place for users to collaborate on data and more effectively and make decisions based on real-time insights.
These innovations will make it easier for anyone with an idea to build a solution. To get started, open the Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, Power Automate, and Power BI apps in Teams. Check out the Microsoft Teams + Power Platform Virtual Hub to learn more about this Power Platform integration and the innovations discussed here, including CDS Project Oakdale. The following information sessions also provide an overview of the integration, as well as details on how to start building custom solutions.
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