Real World Computing

It's been five years since a decision was made to kill Notes and Domino at our organisation. Like many other organisations, we left for the Azure shores of Microsoft. Several changes of leadership later and Domino is still at the heart of our organisation and we're moving towards tighter integration with it than ever.  It occurred to me that now is as good a time as any to reflect on how our journey went.  The Low Hanging Fruit The low hanging fruit of any domino migration is mail. Email is an easily identifiable application which can generally be swapped out one-for-one. In our case, Notes client (and the lesser used Verse web application) for Outlook and Outlook Web Application (OWA).  We investigated several applications before finding one that worked and converted all of our .NSF mail files into .PSTs, then we imported these into outlook. Along the way, we discovered that Verse didn't safeguard our older mail quite as well as we'd hoped and we discovered that folder...

Teams or SharePoint Both! Teams IS SharePoint. (okay, so we know they're separate applications but I've had to labour this point for the sake of our staff).  Teams and SharePoint are two parts of the same thing and they can't exist without each other.  You'll find that sometimes SharePoint is more appropriate and sometimes teams is.  It doesn't matter. You can switch between the two as needed.  Teams is essential for meetings. SharePoint is best for browsing through files. Why Create a Teams Site? You should create a teams site for any of the following reasons; You want to text-chat regularly with a group of people (internal and/or external) You want to be able to share files regularly with a group of people.  You're collaborating on a project or working group.  You have a group that has regular meetings with, particularly online and ad-hoc meetings.  You want to create a SharePoint site for a group of people to use.  First Steps 1. Go to the Micr...

SharePoint's new Page Templates are awesome and everyone should be taking advantage of their features. I've been using SharePoint pages a lot to build our corporate intranet but the templates take this to a completely new level. Now I can use it for inventory purposes too.  Understanding Inventory Types When it comes to inventories, sometimes you want something complex that will let you do all kinds of computations and exports. Computer and phone hardware inventories are like that, and they're best done as SharePoint lists. Sometimes however, your inventory object means more simply by itself. Sometimes you need to be able to write a whole heap of "free text" around it.  Good examples of this could include domain name inventories and IT only contacts. These kinds of things work very well in SharePoint as templates. In this post, I want to show you how you can build your own inventory page. Create a Page I'm going to assume that everyone already l...

Why would you do this? Sometimes you need to exchange files with external parties who for some reason are unable to email them. This can happen if the files are too large or if they trip virus scanners. It's quite common for people to resort to third-party tools such as DropBox but these can be insecure.  There is an easier way.  In this post, I'll walk through a way to temporarily share a folder with an external party so that they can submit a file to you . How To 1. Open your Personal OneDrive on the web (there's a link at www.office.com ) 2. Use the Menu to create a New Folder, click New then Folder 3. Give the folder a sensible name  and click  Create . If you're planning on sharing lots of folders with different people, you might want to nest the folder a few levels down, perhaps below a folder called Shared . That way you'll be able to reduce clutter in the top levels of your OneDrive. 4. Right-Mouse click on your newly created folder a...

Office 365 Groups are No Longer Automatic Mail Groups Until recently, if you created an office 365 group (usually by creating a Teams or a SharePoint site), you would also be able to send that group mail directly via outlook. Unfortunately, with everyone having the ability to create teams and sites on demand -- and very few people following good naming standards, it's very easy to get your corporate address books cluttered. Microsoft received a lot of feedback about this clutter and as a result, they disabled the functionality. Existing Office 365 groups are unaffected but if you create a new one, you'll find that you can't locate them in the typeahead when you want to send mail. You can however, still have your cake and eat it too. You just have to use PowerShell. Procedure Since this is an admin feature and I'm presuming that all admins should be on Multi-Factor authentication now, the instructions are for MFA.  If you're not using MFA, you mig...

Recently I was asked to find a way for a HR manager to circulate a new policy and collect acknowledgements from staff members. In the domino world, we'd already have custom databases to do this (or we could whip one up in a matter of minutes) but I needed to find an Office 365 equivalent.  I put the idea to the excellent Office 365 facebook group  and got a number of good suggestions that I'll follow up later to see where they lead me. I was also reminded of the Voting Buttons in outlook which are certainly the fastest method, though not the prettiest. Since I'm determined to use mainly "the new things" in Office 365, I wanted to see if there was a really simple way to do this without getting too technical for my users. The way I found involves SharePoint and Microsoft Forms (but I'm sure that you could just as easily swap out Yammer or even Teams for SharePoint). Procedure 1. Go to a (Modern) SharePoint site that all staff members have access to...

I do a lot of reading on the Microsoft tech boards and I find the information that Microsoft provides around OneDrive to be both confusing and lacking in detail. I wrote this post as a means of clearing up some of the confusion.   So, here's my interpretation and opinions on what OneDrive and File Libraries in SharePoint (via a proper Office 365 E3 or E5 subscription) can offer; The Sync Client isn't all that Important SharePoint file libraries can replace all of your networked drive needs and these facilities have come a long way in the last few years. In fact, for the most part, SharePoint has finally eclipsed the need for the OneDrive Sync client.  There's a few minor exceptions to this rule. You still can't easily "link" files, so if you have an excel file which updates its data from other excel files, it a real pain to add and install those connections -- and it's much easier if you have a local synced connection. Saving files in Offi...

Attaching files from SharePoint has gotten a little easier of late. I'm not quite sure when the changes happened but they're very welcome.   The new functionality is available in the outlook client and outlook web access. It's available for most SharePoint groups right now, with SharePoint groups created via Yammer following at the end of May 2018. Attachments in the Outlook Client Use the following steps to attach a file via the Outlook client; Create a new Email On the Message Tab, click Attach, Below the list of recent documents, click Browse Web Locations When this expands to show a list, choose Group Files You should see your SharePoint libraries appear in a list. There's a few reasons why you might not see all of your libraries.  If this is the first time that you're using this feature, or if you're using a new installation of Outlook, it may take a while (up to 20 minutes) to fully populate the list of sites. You don't have to w...

It's just over 12 months since we made our first forays into the Office 365 space and I'm convinced that we made the right call at the right time.  Any earlier and it would have been wrong because SharePoint hadn't gained traction and OWA was undeveloped. Any later and we'd have lost our unique position.as innovators in this space.  It hasn't all been smooth sailing and many of our legacy systems are still on IBM Domino. The approach to migration was rushed and flawed but I'm looking forward to 2018 when the dust settles and we can begin to move forward in a more orderly manner.  All things considered though, I'm proud to have been part of the technological achievements of the year which included a complete revamp of the hardware and software in the office; including the replacement of all desktops with Microsoft Surfaces and Apple MacBooks, the replacement of our meeting room systems with Microsoft's Surface Hub technology, an office move, a rebrandi...