Welcome to our September Round Up. In this edition, we cover some small, but extremely useful, changes as well as covering a little bit more about the Power Apps Academy.
Microsoft Teams – reply to messages on desktop
Whilst we’ve had the typical ‘swipe’ functionality to reply to messages on the phone version of Teams for a while, Microsoft have finally given the ability to reply in a similar manner on Desktop.
Microsoft Forms grouping for better organisation
You can now group Microsoft Forms for better organisation, its currently on its way to all tenants however often small updates such as these often go under the radar.
Your SharePoint Intranet into MicrosoftTeams – with navigation
I’ve covered this one previously, but I ended up seeing a few bugs when installing intranet apps however, having successfully placed it into a client’s Teams recently it’s looking like it’s becoming as available as we’d hope!
It does require some PowerShell, and a little bit of knowledge of the admin centres, so if you’d like some assistance let us know and enjoy the fantastic functionality to make your Teams that ‘one-stop-shop’.
Power Apps Academy
With Power Apps, both canvas and model-driven, becoming more and more necessary to keep afloat in the fast-paced modern world we live in, we’re finding organisations are being given two choices:
1. Take on a third-partySubject Matter Expert (SME); be that a partner, contractor, or a full-time employee specifically hired for that role
or
2. Up skill internally
As a business, obviously number 1 suits what we do the most but, in all honesty, with our love of helping people, it makes more sense for us to start promoting number 2. Quite literally following the typical adage:
“Give a person a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a person how to fish and they’ll eat for life.”
Training internally is vital, not just for better ownership but because your internal employees know and understand both the business and the processes and so who better to be building automation than the stakeholders themselves?
On that, there are plenty of “app in a day” courses and Microsoft has lots of training material but, based on feedback from both clients and some of our partners, the actual skills you need to build complex process automation isn’t something you can pick up in 6-8 hours – especially if you’ve never touched it before.
I was recently installing a return-to-work solution for a client, and they’d highlighted they wanted to be able to take the future development on internally as they had a specific team of developers already in the business. With this, I was able to draw a quick-fire course into 1 day, but it was intense... The team being developers already certainly made it easier, but Canvas Apps are so unique in their development that even for developers, 8hours just wasn’t enough.
And so, what we have created instead is an academy-style package. Taking people of all skill-levels from Power App newbies to Power App developers and, I must admit (whilst also trying to remain humble), so far, it’s going great! There are obviously some challenges for those who have never experienced electronic, ‘logic-gate’ style logic, but overall, the feedback is nothing but positive.
The current course we have running through is once a week, for 90-120 minutes, after which they’re set homework to complete before the next session as we then break down what they’ve done, what the group agrees with and what we’re going to do moving forward. It’s obviously much easier and more beneficial to run these on-site, in person, but it just goes to show that it’s possible remotely too.
If this is something that sounds of interest, get int ouch! The time is nigh to take hold of all those pesky processes. Here is my current bunch of newbies (albeit far from industry newbies, one of them is anAzure architect, can you guess which one?)
If you like what you see, there’s more out there! Check out our offerings or get in touch to find out what your company could achieve with Power 365 Solutions.
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