This continues a short series about a movie directory personal project exploring Power Apps and Dataverse. In the first two posts, I’ve laid out the data structure in Dataverse and the gallery and filters screens in the Power App. This post will tackle viewing and editing a single movie record in the app.
Continue Reading Movie Directory Part 3: View and EditIn Movie Directory Part 1, I described what I was aiming to achieve with this personal project, as well as the Dataverse structure.
In this post, I’ll describe at a high level the design of the Power App and the gallery view and filters. Most of it I’ll keep at a high-level, not step-by-step, as I used a lot of the out-of-the-box functionality.
Continue Reading Movie Directory Part 2: Gallery and FiltersI’ve been asked the question before: when should I use Microsoft Excel and when should I use SharePoint lists? At first I didn’t have a great answer, but I thought about it, looked into it a bit more, and this is what I settled on:
Excel is better when you need to do operations on the whole data set. SharePoint lists are better when the list items stand more-or-less as independent objects.
Continue Reading Microsoft Excel vs SharePoint ListsHave you ever taken part in a non-profit fundraising event where you get your own personal webpage that you can direct people to as a way for them to sponsor you directly in the event? Personally I am happy to participate in the Coldest Night of the Year every year, which does have this type of system (not in CiviCRM).
In the language of CiviCRM, these are Personal Campaign Pages. While CiviCRM does offer this functionality, it has some major holes in it. Like a few areas of CiviCRM, it feels like somebody threw it together quickly and then mostly forgot about it. Consequently, I had a hard time ever recommending it as a good solution, even if a client was already heavily using CiviCRM happily. Here’s the official documentation.
Continue Reading CiviCRM: Personal Campaign PagesI recently decided to do more experimentation with Dataverse (formerly Common Data Service) in the Power Platform. I did this by making myself an app to solve a need I have myself: a movie directory app. I wanted to be able to:
Email migrations are one of those tasks you won’t have to do often, but you’ll really want to make sure you’re doing it correctly when it does need to happen. As much as collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack have taken over a lot of communication, email is still a central component of many organizations.
Continue Reading Considerations Migrating IMAP to M365This post continues a series on SharePoint site provisioning, unpacking some of the problems I’ve faced and overcome in building SharePoint site provisioning solutions.
At this point in the series, we’ve now created new SharePoint sites and applied temporary site scripts and site designs. There is one big feature missing from site scripts and site designs, though: templating the home page. You can’t simply say that a project site design should always contain a home page with these specific web parts. This may not be true forever – Microsoft is steadily improving site templating – but as of working on this project a few months ago, it required a bit of a workaround.
Continue Reading SharePoint: Overriding a Site’s Home PageIf you’re an IT admin, do you know what apps users are putting on devices alongside company data? Do you know all the apps that they are directly putting company data into, thinking it helps solve a problem for them? This is the problem of “Shadow IT.” If it’s a personal device, it’s even worse, as they might be installing all kinds of insecure apps without IT approval and it wouldn’t take much to make a mistake like copying and pasting company data or uploading a file into the wrong app.
Continue Reading Microsoft Cloud App SecurityYammer is often the forgotten piece of Microsoft 365. Some people would even argue that Microsoft has largely forgotten about it. It’s an enterprise social network. It feels a lot like using Facebook, but it’s restricted to your organization.
Several years ago I was tasked with planning an intranet based on SharePoint. A significant portion of the goal was to further enhance communication across the organization, including more casual conversations and not just strictly work conversations. The assumption going in was that SharePoint was the solution for that as well as sharing resource files.
Continue Reading The Time I Recommended YammerI recently learned about a new framework for a fully HTML and CSS implementation of Microsoft’s Fluent Design system. This can make your life a lot easier when designing web apps that stick to that design. I haven’t tried it out yet – I’m hoping to get a full SharePoint Framework experiment together soon – but it looks very promising.
Continue Reading HTwoO in SharePoint Framework