Blog
Chatting is hard but so so worth it
Back in 2020, I wrote a post titled "You know what, it's damn hard chatting to random people" encouraging people to chat more to others when they visit user groups and conferences. I was reworking my blog and came back to this post. It's now two years since Viva was released and that has truly changed my career. How? Through the people I chatted to.
Setting up Microsoft Syntex PAYG to process receipts
The new Microsoft Syntex Pay As You Go model is currently in public preview at no cost so this was a great time to set it up and try out the receipt model to process a few receipts that have sat around since the summer holidays.
The why of Viva Goals
With the general availability of Viva Goals at the start of August 2022, many people have been wondering what the benefits are. The honest answer is that the majority are to do with the OKR (Objective Key Result) framework that Viva Goals helps organisations to implement it but the tools are just part of the equation. This blog post looks into some of the challenges that OKRs along with Viva Goals look to address.
Viva Sales and what it means for the future of Viva
Viva Sales is the latest pillar announced by Microsoft but why is it there and what does it suggest to the future of Viva?
Reflections on Scottish Summit 2022
Beautiful city, great speakers, all the Microsoft content, plenty of drinks - that is the way to spend a couple of days. At the start of June, I was one of the over one thousand people who attended the Scottish Summit in Glasgow, a Microsoft Community event that has been running for several years now but was the first year back in person since the start of the pandemic. Here are a few of my thoughts as I head back home.
Transforming organisations with Viva
“In 2022, a crack community unit was sent to Microsoft for some contracts that they couldn’t commit. These people promptly got together, not escaping from Teams, to explore the world of Microsoft Viva. Today, still wanted by the community they serve, they survive as collaborators of fortune. If you have an employee experience problem, if no-one else can help and, wherever you can find them…maybe you can hear from the Viva Explorers.”
Ally.IO - the next Viva pillar
A few days ago, Microsoft announced that they were acquiring Ally.IO, an OKR company. Now Microsoft has made quite a few acquisitions over the years but what was interesting about this one was that it announced as the service that would power the next Viva module. It had been heavily hinted that the first four pillars (Connections, Topics, Insights and Learning) would not be the last ones and here it is, the focus for the next release.
Commsverse lookback
On 15th and 16th September, I spoke at my first in-person conferin almost two years and it was so incredible to be back with real people. The organising team have been through so many rollercoasters with this conference so seeing everything come together was so so heart warming. Here are my key takeaways from the event.
Samples for Microsoft Search
Do you know what Microsoft Search is capable of? It has so many options for Answers but it can often be hard to see samples of this. To help with this, I have created a GitHub repo of search samples that you can use to import and get started faster.
Toxic male behaviour - we can and must do better
I'm getting bored of some tweets. You know the ones. "Here's another unsolicited message". I'm bored of these because in 2021, these shouldn't be needed. The unsolicited DM should not be sent. End of story. People shouldn't have to share these Tweets, because we live in a world where we respect each other, especially women. But this isn't about everyone, this about how men treat women online.
Accessibility and SharePoint - welcome to the Immersive Reader
Have you heard, the Immersive Reader is now available to use with pages on SharePoint Online as part of Microsoft 365 so that you can improve the accessibility of content to readers of news and other content in your tenant. In this post, I will cover the importance of the Immersive Reader and what it can do for your users.
Improving performance for bulk PnP PowerShell scripts
I have been a little quiet on this blog recently and while the stress of the pandemic with lots of kids at home has played into that, another large part has been a painful migration project. I have learnt plenty about the scales of SharePoint Online and reminding myself of the limitations of SharePoint 2010 - I really had forgotten how painful it was considering servers! One of the biggest areas though has been the validation. While the migration tooling gives us some information, we have been running lots of PnP PowerShell scripts for both creating structures and also validating that content has migrated correctly. Having tens of thousands of sites and libraries brings its own challenges.