The Etiquette of Microsoft 365 - a GreyHatBeard initiative

Have you ever sat there listening to a podcast and wondered if you could do that? Did you think that you could share some of your experience with others who might be interested?

After a few weeks of trying things out, I am very happy to announce that [Alan Eardley](https://www.twitter.com/al_eardley), [Garry Trinder](https://www.twitter.com/garrytrinder) and [myself](https://www.twitter.com/kevmcdonk) have released our first couple of shows for [GreyHatBeard - a modern workplace podcast](https://www.greyhatbeard.com). We'll be releasing new episodes in bite-size chunks every couple of weeks and the general format will be:

- Garry, Al and Kevin discuss what they've been up to and the latest news
- Three parts on a topic every fortnight

So far, we've covered our thoughts on what the year ahead will bring and a deep-dive in to Project Cortex but we're planning over the next couple of months to cover topics like:

- Problems with Dev Ops in a "non-agile" world
- The etiquette in Office 365
- How you work and staying focused
- Governance and the Power Platform
- Contributing to open source projects

Soon, we'll start opening up for guest appearances so let any of us know if you think you could help contribute to any of the topics. We're all new to podcasts so we're bound to hit some teething issues as we go through the first few episodes but would love to hear your feedback.


GreyHatBeard - a Modern Workplace Podcast is now live

Ignite - The World Tour. London. January 2020. Microsoft brings along some of its biggest names in the Power Apps world to the Excel Centre.

In the morning, [Dona Sarkar](https://twitter.com/donasarkar), principal advocate for the Power Platform promises a brand new [Power Platy](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23powerplaty) sticker for anyone who shows a Power App to her or [Brian Dang aka 8bitclassroom](https://twitter.com/8bitclassroom). I'm a sucker for a sticker so showed my [kitchen calendar app](https://www.mcd79.com/2017/03/20/i-do-not-like-green-eggs-and-ham-sam-i-am-2.html) and now my Surface has a little less space. It didn't stop there though.

The Ignite Tour is great as it helps those of us who struggle to afford the trip over to the US and shares some of the best of the sessions. I was a little disappointed with the range of talks this year but there was a heavy sway towards AI and also Power Platform. As I had breakfast on day 2, I was hatching a plan. Could I write an app in a day that combined the best of both? The answer turned out to be not quite - a combination of too much chatting to the community (always worthwhile) and wobbly wifi for most of the day meant that I had to finish it off this morning but I think the end result was worth it.

## Share Their Tweets

The main aim of the app was to integrate the [Face API](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/face/) and possibly some other [Cognitive Services](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/). The rest of it slowly evolved from there. As I was among many MVPs and other knowledgeable people who share much of their learnings on Twitter, I thought that it might be good to introduce some of that. So how does it work?

The home page lets the user take a photo and it will try and recognise a face in that photo (just the one at the moment). If they are in the list, then it will show a list of their tweets with the option to show any that they are mentioned in. Then if you click on two of the icons along the top, the app will now extract either a set of key phrases from the last thirty tweets or the entities used by running them through the [Text Analytics Cognitive Service](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/text-analytics/).

![Homepage](/images/2020/01/ShowTheirTweets-Home.jpg)
![Tweets](/images/2020/01/ShowTheirTweets-Tweets.jpg)
![Entities](/images/2020/01/ShowTheirTweets-Entities.jpg)

The rest of the app is about setting up the people who can be searched for. From the homepage, you can click on the people icon to see a list of people. There you can also add another person by taking their photo, adding their name and Twitter handle. The app also allows you to add additional photos to help train the face list for a person further.

![People](/images/2020/01/ShowTheirTweets-People.jpg)
![Add Person](/images/2020/01/ShowTheirTweets-AddPerson.jpg)
![Add Person Face](/images/2020/01/ShowTheirTweets-AddPersonFace.jpg)

Want to see a live demo?

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I promised at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MSIgniteTheTour?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#MSIgniteTheTour</a> in London yesterday a new <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/PowerApp?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#PowerApp</a> out - didn&#39;t quite manage it then but finished it off this morning. Using FaceAPI, match the person to their Twitter profile and show their tweets. Writing up for blog soon! Thanks to 2yr old for co-commentary... <a href="https://t.co/fSKqUrtBAH">pic.twitter.com/fSKqUrtBAH</a></p>&mdash; Kevin McDonnell #MSIgniteTheTour London (@kevmcdonk) <a href="https://twitter.com/kevmcdonk/status/1218533436572545026?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 18, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

## So how does it actually work?

In a simple summary, the app stores a list of people in a SharePoint list, the photos are uploaded to Azure Blob Storage and a Power Automate Flow is used to process the photos using Azure Cognitive Services. It would be great not to need the Blob Storage as that pushes the need up to the more expensive tier but the Face API Connector requires a public facing URL holding the image to be processed - strangely, the Face API itself can be called with a streamed image but that capability is not available in the Connector.

The Face API requires a Person Group to hold a list of people that can be matched against. An image can be processed to detect faces that are then added to a Person Group Person. Each of those Persons can then have a face compared with them to identify the likelihood that the face matches one of those. This is a little complex at times and using the [Face API documentation](https://westeurope.dev.cognitive.microsoft.com/docs/services/563879b61984550e40cbbe8d/operations/563879b61984550f30395236) to test the different calls can really help. This is especially true during testing as the Power Apps and Flow connectors don't allow you to delete a Person Group or Person.

## What's next?

There are still areas that need improving. Most notably, there is little error handling and support for things like the photo not detecting a face or the API calls failing for whatever reason. The list of people should also set up checks against the Person Group Persons to ensure that they exist and how many trained faces have been set.

It would also be interesting to try and pull out photos of someone from their Twitter handle so it could learn from Twitter rather than live photos. It would need a mechanism to pick whether the person was in the photo but that is possible. A little more work will be needed to check the media URLs held for the tweet which is why it hasn't happened yet.

This post has been kept as a high level overview but I will spend a bit of time to run through some of the details such as how to upload a photo as a blob, how to call detect face on that and how to link it to a Flow in later posts.

Finally, it's always nice to hear some feedback so let me know what you think. The PowerApp and Flows have been exported to GitHub at [https://github.com/kevmcdonk/ShowTheirTweetsApp](https://github.com/kevmcdonk/ShowTheirTweetsApp).

Image by [Song Zhen](https://www.flickr.com/photos/songzhen/) from [Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/songzhen/16983146399)


Show Their Tweets - A Power App using Face API to show tweets based on photo taken

Ignite, Build, ESPC, Future Decoded, Collab Summit, SharePoint Saturday - you might be like me and look at that list and think “I wish I could have been at all of those, I’ve seen the superstar speakers attending and know they’ll be my drinking buddies forever if only I had the chance to go cos they love the same things I do”. And then you get to go. And the events are great. The sessions are amazing, you learn so much…from afar. You see those people who go up and ask a question at the end and consider it but decide that your question isn’t quite worth it. So you head back to the expo floor and consider chatting to someone but think that maybe you don’t have enough to say. And someone might find you out. Then you see your favourite MVP over there, maybe Karuana Gatimu, Christian Buckley or Andrew Connell. They liked your tweet once so you should say hello. Bit you worry about interrupting them. You don’t want to spoil their day. So you go and have another coffee and head back to wander round the expo floor.

I’ve done this. Quite a few times. Then a couple of years ago, I thought this was silly and at Future Decoded, I said hello to someone. At the Ignite Tour, I chatted with Gregor Suttie after being some impressed by his blog and then Penny Coventry, Chirag Patel and Tony Pounder. Then I submitted to speak at a few user groups. At this ESPC, I finally felt comfortable and said hello to all the MVPs and Microsoft people I’d tweeted before. It felt weird. It felt completely out of my comfort zone. But it felt great too.

I also chatted to random people sat near me. I spoke to people in the queue for the party. I joined a meet up and watched some football together before carrying on for more beers with the two people I was with. We spoke about Brexit, the Everton manager, kids growing up and Harry Styles. For a little while, we spoke about work too. But that wasn’t the whole aim. It was just nice to get to know someone. And that is what a lot of these events are about.

Those people who seem unapproachable will be jet lagged, be missing their wife and kids, be hungover, be thinking about work, probably the same way you are. But they aren’t here for the money, they are here to chat. So ask that question. Say hello. Get to try and know them. Say thank you for what they do. Appreciate them.

But also chat to the people next to you. Join that spare table at the party and chat to new people. I did. I met someone who was so happy that she had rolled out a new Teams instance in a Google heavy company. I met someone who helps with European telescopes in Chile. Turns out they have the same worries about what to do as their kids grow up as I do.

These are the chances to learn more from people and make new connections. Take that chance. Be that friendly person. It could change your whole career. Or it could just make you feel happy for the rest of the day, safe in the knowledge there will always be a bit of your heart devoted to it...

Image by [Christine Sponchia](https://pixabay.com/users/Sponchia-443272/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=627031) from [Pixabay](https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=627031)


You know what, it’s damn hard chatting to random people

2010 - that feels a lot longer than ten years ago. I was not long back from Singapore, still adjusting to non-expat life, fighting the ever-worsening commute from Kent up to London, juggling childcare duties with wanting to be out drinking. My twenties had just gone and responsibility had hit in a big way. At home with a 3 year old and at work as I took on more and more running of the whole SharePoint farm for a 30k seat investment bank that was the only company I’d ever worked for. One of the things I was learning more and more about was how to run things in an agile way effectively and my favourite things that have come from almost twenty years of the Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/) is:

> At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

What better way to reflect on my decade and come up with some plans for 2020.

## How I run the retrospective

As an overall process, I like to run retrospectives by:

- Capturing feedback
  - What went well
  - What went badly
  - What should I do more of
  - What should I do less of
- Identify key topics and match captured notes
- Create tasks for 3-5 of the key topics

This lets you look at the past but also use those items to plan for the future too.

Usually, I would use post-it notes on a wall with a group of people but as this was all about me, I decided to try a more technical and environmentally friendly approach. I like post-it notes for the concise nature of what is captured and ease of moving things around so I wanted something like that. I liked the ability to have handwriting rather than the more formal text as well.

This time, I decided to use [Microsoft Whiteboard](https://products.office.com/en-gb/microsoft-whiteboard/digital-whiteboard-app) for this as you can have your own notes and also your own Note Grid (currently in preview) which you can use to group the notes.

## Capturing feedback

Starting with the notes, I spent 30 mins thinking back over the last ten years. I scribbled thoughts as they came along so some were high level, some were very specific, some are obvious to all and some won't make sense unless you know me well. The important thing is to capture that stream of conciousness and to be honest with yourself.

![Capturing feedback](/images/2019/12/post-its.png)

## Identifying key topics

To determine the topics is much more of an art than a science. Look across each of the feedback sections and aim for areas of commonality. For my feedback, there were some obvious topics like Homelife and Learning in there but then I went a little more creative with Quality not Quantity. Quite a few of the feedback items were about doing too much and so I wanted to look in to how I could get more quality. I also noticed quite a few things about travel and grouped this with conferences. After a few more tweaks, I had my groupings.

![Feedback grouped by topics](/images/2019/12/grouped-by-topic.png)

I'll delve deeper in to each area.

#### Quality not quantity

It was interesting here that I found no things that had gone well! Not sure that this is strictly true as one of the benefits is that I have a very broad understanding of topics. However, this is balanced by the fact that I take on too many different things and have too many unfinished products. I also have a tendency to read lots of different things (articles, tweets, books, blogs) but in a quick way rather than choosing my quality topics and spending time on them. Similarly, I watch TV in the background without concentrating fully and end up only half doing whatever I am usually doing on the laptop. These are all areas that I can do more on, focusing on two or three things in a day rather than picking up too much. Also, keeping a routine and consistency, especially with the blog and sharing content - picking up key stories rather than a scattergun approach.

#### Productivity and planning

Similar to the previous topic, I tend to deviate and not focus. While I always aim to plan what I work on, I will also drift on to topics that interest me instead or areas that I feel work well for me at the time. Sometimes I am in the mood to do some dev, sometimes to create a PowerPoint, other times it's blog writing. I work best when I fix to this but that's not always the work that needs doing.

#### Volunteering and open source

It feels great that I have contributed one thing back to the PnP programme but it is nowhere near enough. I have had various aims of incorporating some of the projects I've done back in to one of the programs but now would like to look at what others need doing instead and work on that. I'm happy that my blog has had a good gradual uptake although I do need to focus on this more to get consistent content. Meanwhile, the community is an amazing aspect to Office 365 and I would like to look at how I can better help rather than being a net taker from the community.

Outside of the Microsoft world, I am also a Cub leader and love the work I do there. Being able to see the children develop while having fun is a real balance to the day job, the chance to get outside more and enjoy real life. Having said that, my aim for this year is to help teach coding to the Cubs and get together something that others can use as well. Building a new generation that understand the tech is very important to me, giving the opportunities for those to thrive who love getting fingers to keyboards and giving more experience to those who haven't seen it.

#### Homelife

Looking back over ten years, there has been a huge change on this side. I was still getting used to being back in the UK and we didn't know many people nearby. Since then, we have moved in to a slightly bigger house and have some amazing friends locally. We've added two more kids and two more cats to the family (sadly losing one cat who came over from Singapore) and my son earned a place at one of the best schools in the areas. My personal highlight of the decade though was putting on my own festival for my wife and I's 40th birthday back in May. Around 150 people, three different bands, 5 different zones, crafting, games, decorations and our own festival logo.

![Squadgefest](/images/2019/12/Squadgefest.png)

What hasn't been so great is that the friends I so missed when in Singapore still feel as far away now we're in the UK. We just don't make enough time to travel and see them as much as we'd like. I also need to get better at making mental space when things are busy at work as juggling that, three kids and a cub pack can too easily get on top of me.

#### Learning

Learning has always been key to me, always important to keep on top of the latest news and be trying new things out, not just reading them. Over this decade, I have very much become cloud first and make use of a wide range of Azure items. What I haven't done though is convert that in to an actual qualification and so one big focus for 2020 will be to put that in place.

#### Travel and conferences

Luck has been with me this decade as I have been able to attend several big conferences and not just in the UK with Vienna and Prague for ESPC. I haven't yet hit one of the really big US Microsoft conferences but there's still time and I have enjoyed many of the UK smaller ones like Future Decoded and the Ignite World Tour. Seeing people speaking there has inspired me to speak at user groups in the past year and the conversations with those have been great - definitely an area I want to continue into the 2020s.

This has given me a chance to travel a little and changing from being on the client side to the consultant side has allowed me to see even more of the UK, from Falmouth up to Newark so far. Previous roles have taken me to New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo among others but I haven't seen as much in my own time as I'd like. As the children grow up, this is something I would like to do even more and hopefully use the SP Saturdays to do this too.

#### Worklife and management

Looking back at some of my achievements since 2010, I can't help feeling proud and a little smug here - sorry. The SharePoint Farm for over 30,000 users was a pleasure to manage and the stories of how it was being used in ways I never imagined (usually a good thing...) really drove my love of SharePoint being an enabler. As the cloud world kicked in and I moved to consultancy, I saw even more of what people could achieve with the tools that were there.

Having said that, I am certainly not where I thought I would be. I imagined being at the Director level for a Financial Services company, leading a large team and I am in a very different place to that. I am though, happier and less stressed and enjoying a lot more being able to help people in many different places, with the chance to help at charities too. Something I have also dreamed of is winning the lottery and putting in place a consultancy to offer low cost help with being more collaborative and productive in a modern age. Having had the chance to do that to some degree, it has only strengthened that dream.

## Turning a retrospective to actions

After that reflective look back, it's important to look forward to and so I am now the lucky owner of a Planner board with tasks for several of those key topics. Let's see in twelve months how they are all looking!

![Tasks for 2020](/images/2019/12/Tasks.png)


2010s - my retrospective

Blimey - it’s almost 2020. All those 2020 visions now need to be reviewed and likely refocused. All those visions of the past can be checked and realisation that we still don’t have flying cars or our own jet packs (most of us anyway). So will the world change massively next year? Probably not. It will carry on but those small changes we don’t notice will continue their trickle in to our daily lives. The ease that AI is starting to bring, the emergence of voice interfaces will continue, Internet will be everywhere and the ability to consume what media you want, when and where you want will keep the diversity of content at a high. What about in the world of Microsoft 365?

## Microsoft Search will become the one search to rule them all

Microsoft Search was first kicked off in 2017 with Bing For Business but formally became Microsoft Search at Ignite 2018. It promised one place to get all your Search and by Ignite 2019, it is really starting to deliver on that with the ability to include custom sources and customise how the results are returned using Adaptive Cards. Combined with more endpoints being made available in Microsoft Graph, this means more ways of getting access to your content.

But it’s certainly not there yet. It is often confusing in SharePoint as to when you are using plain SharePoint Search and when Microsoft Search kicks in. Tools like Teams have their own search. It can also be hard to bring back results from across different systems in one go.

This is all changing though and being a viable solution to use. With the custom connectors, it can truly form a hub to your whole organisation and power one place to go to find information. 2020 will see the final updates that mean it can be your one search and allow control over how those results are displayed and auctioned.

## Here come the robots

Bots have been around for a while in the Microsoft ecosystem but the recent changes are in how they are created. The tooling is opening up as people better understand which areas are working well (access to existing knowledge, answering questions, support) and focussing on those areas. Making it easier to structure the conversations mean more helpful Bots and better handling of the often unstructured nature of chat.

Power Virtual Agents (which I spoke about before as Dynamics Virtual Agents) were a great way of structuring the trigger point for a conversation and the flow of each part of that. They are limited in what they can do and, in my opinion, now an expensive way for most people to benefit from Bots but with Bot Framework Composer, there is a similar feel for building those conversations but with a more technical backing in the Bot Framework leading to more control over exactly what you want.

These will help understand what is possible and drive more realistic implementations. Smaller Bots for specific purposes, working together to give an improved digital workplace.

## Cortex will dazzle but…

When Project Cortex was announced at Ignite, it quickly became the most talked about topic. The ability to easily but intelligently tag content and make it easy to find that content with knowledge hubs. Soon though, the most takes about topic became about licensing and how much it would cost.

My prediction is that it will be seen as a great tool, much like MyAnalytics when it came out. Then the same issue that MyAnalytics had will kick in - it will be too expensive for most organisations to justify. Large multinationals will start to embrace it and it will find a well loved niche but it won’t hit mainstream.

The areas that will take off though are the accompanying tools such as the new term set admin and other metadata related content. This will position organisations to structure their content and then hopefully, in a few years, Cortex will start to branch in to the E3 world without add-one and gain wider acceptance as a central tool that all use.

## Spaces will remain quiet

When SharePoint Spaces was announced in 2018, it became a very Marmite product - people loved it or hated it. Many couldn’t see the point but for me, as one of the lovers, I could see Microsoft positioning themselves for the augmented reality future. This was about the time when glasses would show content and about building out for a new way of interacting with that content.

Sadly since the announcement, not much more has appeared. There were some details at Ignite about a public preview coming in 2020 but nothing else. Even more sadly, I see this slow movement continuing as people still don’t have enough content to show and there isn’t enough momentum in AR to drive a big marketing push yet. However, keep watching as I believe that it's time will come and it's a worthwhile investment.

## Custom dev in Microsoft 365 will grow and grow

For any who attend the regular PnP calls or seen Vesa Juvonen speak at a conference this year know, the growth of SPFX has been phenomenal - the fastest growing development framework in Microsoft's history. In my experience though, I still see an overwhelming push to use out of the box with SharePoint Online and avoid the pain that many have felt over the years with highly bespoke SharePoint implementations. There have been small occasions where a small request has been met with SPFX for customers but more often they want to not have to manage custom code.

However, with the use of SPFX for Teams custom tabs and the upcoming expansion across Microsoft 365, I see increasing demand for those custom apps. Not just using PowerApps but building single page applications (SPAs) to give exactly what is wanted. Power Automate and Power Apps will definitely make a difference but dev teams will be able to do more in a deployable and manageable way with SPFX. This will increase the amount it is seen and hopefully raise the profile of custom dev.

Another big driver will be the news that [AppSource will support SPFX](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/office/blogs/sharepoint-framework-community-call-recording-5th-of-december-2019/) since organisations can start to monetise SPFX web parts. When companies can make money from it, there will be a bigger push for third parties to modernise their stack to make the most of this. This will lead to more SPFX happening and be accepted as supportable too.

## There will be more license fights with big backtracking by Microsoft

2019 saw several big license changes, especially around Power Platform and I think 2020 will see this continue. I feel that the early Satya days of moving to a friendlier and open source Microsoft are still there but the reality hits that it is a large company and does need to monetise on this. This will always lead to overstepping the mark that customers are comfortable with and upsetting partners as they did when they said they would remove Internal Use Rights. In some cases, we will see backtracks again as we did with the Self-Service purchasing not being able to be disabled. However, expect to be disappointed with licenses and prices in the new year still. That way, you'll be less disappointed.

## A new decade, same push to productivity and collaboration

So it will be a new decade but don't expect to feel a massive change suddenly to the way things work. Don't expect a massive leap in to the future. Why? Because we are already there.

The desires that we had at the start of the decade to be able to work better together wherever we are and have more intelligence in what we do and really being recognised. Getting to work you do faster and with the ability to better focus are all in place, helping you find the right content is getting there soon and being able to access from anywhere now feels natural.

This won't feel like a big leap because everything is moving forward at a constant pace of an improvement. Look back at where we were ten years ago with little automation, huge amounts of manual processes, little remote access and silos throughout an organisation and then look at many places now and see the change. Not everywhere, I agree but the momentum is well and truly established and it is easier than ever to do. That ongoing change with continue in to the 2020s and 2030 will see us all feeling the new way of working as being the only way to be. We might even have some jet packs.

Image by [annca](https://pixabay.com/users/annca-1564471/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=1637396) from [Pixabay](https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=1637396)


Some thoughts for 2020

Almost since SharePoint Communication Sites were first announced, the clamour has been there to be able to have the root site be a Communications Site. An image driven, good looking site at the natural place for an Office 365 tenancy. Then, at this year's [SharePoint Conference](https://sharepointna.com), Microsoft [announced](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-SharePoint-Blog/Updates-to-SharePoint-security-administration-and-migration/ba-p/549585) that the PowerShell commandlet [Invoke-SPOSiteSwap](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/invoke-spositeswap?view=sharepoint-ps) was coming and would allow admins to swap out the current root site with another one (with a few provisos that I'll let you read in detail).

Awesome, I thought, my shiny Communications Site can now be shifted to be where most people would expect it. I fired up PowerShell and connected up to the site. Ran the command. Boom. Nothing happened except an error.

![Swapsite not supported](/images/2019/08/swapsite-not-supported.png)

Humph. Turns out that the tenancy was on standard release so I could be waiting some time before I got my shiny Communications Site I had stupidly promised. The good news was I remembered a [workaround](https://hangconsult.com/2017/06/29/change-sharepoint-online-root-site-collection-to-use-the-new-communication-site-template/) involving saving a Communications Site as a template, deleting the root site and then setting it with a custom template. Not perfect and not supported but it would work. As I didn't want to try out deleting the root site on the main tenancy without being certain what would happen, I used my [Office Developer subscription](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev-program). I copied the url for saving the template, plugged it in and...

![No access](019/08/no-access.png)

Oh. I can't access that any more. That's a pain. But I can be a stubborn beast so wanted to make sure that there was definitely no way round it. I took the plunge in the dev subscription and deleted the root site, safe in the knowledge that I would be able to recreate one...I hoped. I used the new admin centre to delete, making sure to permanently deleted it and clear all record of it.

![Delete current site](019/08/01 Delete current site.png)
![Permanently delete site](2 Permanently Delete it.png)

I tried out using some of the PnP commands like [New-PnPSite](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-pnp/new-pnpsite) and [New-PnpTenantSite](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-pnp/new-pnptenantsite) but neither worked unfortunately. So I decided to try and create a blank site where I could choose the template later, as the earlier post recommended. It was a risk as I had no Communications Site template saved but I thought it was worth a look. Why did I think that? Well, I had seen that there was a Communications Site template listed when I ran [Get-PnpWebTemplates](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-pnp/get-pnpwebtemplates) so I was hoping I might be lucky.

![Create new site using other options]( a new site using other options.png)
![Select more templates]( more templates.png)
![Create site with select template later]( site with select template later.png)

So I now had a site but without a template. I tentatively browsed to that site and started looking through the template options. Oooo, what is that there?

![Select publishing](/images/2019/08/06 navigate to created site and select publishing.png)

Under the publishing tab, there was Communications Site. I selected that, created the default groups and there it was, a Communications Site at the root.

![Communications Site at root](/images/2019/08/08 comm site at root.png)

Fantastic, I was done! Except it occured to me that this tenancy was on targeted release. I took the risk to follow the same steps on the main site (it wasn't in active use yet) and thankfully I found the same thing. I had a working Communications Site.

## Caveat Emptor aka be careful using this

So here is the large disclaimer. This is not a supported method. My recommendation would still be to either wait for Invoke-SPSiteswap to reach standard release or change the tenancy to use targeted release. This method may suddenly stop working (in the way that Save Site As Template is now blocked) and it could impact the live running of your tenancy.

But if you are wanting to put a Communications Site at the root while on Standard Release, then I can confirm that on 13 August 2019, it does work.

Header Image by Susanne Jutzeler, suju fotografie from Pixabay


Creating a SharePoint Communications Site on the Office 365 root without Invoke-SPOSiteSwap

Stepping away from the Daily Bing Challenge Bot [overview](/2019/07/06/daily-bing-challenge-bot.html) and [setup](/2019/07/09/installing-daily-bing-challenge-bot-copy.html), this post covers the processes to go through when designing a Bot. This won't be too much of a technical post as it is targetted at the analysis side of the solution but will point towards where you can find out more about the Bot Framework elements themselves.

For this blog, I will use the example of a Bot to work with Microsoft Project Server, something that is of big interest for [CPS](https://www.cps.co.uk). It is intended to make some of the more tedious tasks a little easier.

## Getting started

The first steps are to work out what you want your Bot to do. That may sound like an obvious thing but the range of things you can do with a blog is huge so getting down on paper what the aims are is key. Start with which user types you think will be involved, then move on to the sort of tasks they will do, focus on a few of those and map out the journeys that those tasks will take.

First, let's think about the key groups of users. As with many application designs, my initial design was using OneNote as a whiteboard so I have taken those sketches here.

![Bot Design User roles](/images/2019/07/Bot Design User Roles.png)

The roles shown cover the three main groups that would be using Project Server at a basic level. What sort of tasks would they do?

![Bot Design Tasks](/images/2019/07/Bot Design Tasks.png)

Chatting through the different options with a CPS colleague, we thought through the more tedious tasks that there are and what would be useful. Project Managers and the PMO often live in Project and Project Server so wouldn't get too much benefit but team members are far less likely to be in there. Having responses in Teams means that they will be in the tool they live in more often so the focus should be on asking for and providing status updates.

We also use Project Server to determine where staff are as they are allocated to projects and so you know where they will be. This can also be important for knowing where you are meant to be too.

Once we had a list of all the tasks, it was important to pick a few tasks to focus on initially to get an MVP.

![Bot Design Tasks MVP](019/07/Bot Design Tasks MVP.png)

## Creating a user journey

Given these initial tasks, we talked through what the journey would be for the user. How they would start, the questions they would be asked, the expected responses and the completion part. Some of these would take multiple paths but others would be more basic.

![Bot Design DPU journey](/images/2019/07/Bot Design DPU journey.png)

![Bot Design DPU assignments](/images/2019/07/Bot Design DPU assignments.png)

![Bot Design DPU chase updates](/images/2019/07/Bot Design DPU chase updates.png)

## Designing the bot structure

We have a good idea on how things should flow as an app now. How should we think about that as a Bot? The key is to think about the blocks of chat which are known in the Bot Framework as a dialogue. Each of the journeys above could be thought of as a dialogue. You would want all in the same Bot but need a way of transferring between those conversations.

The main dialogue will be the entry point to the Bot, the start of the overall conversation. This should be like the centre point of the mind map above and needs to know what the initial aim of the user is. There is a great service in Azure which can help this called [Luis (Language Understanding Intelligent Service)](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/language-understanding-intelligent-service/). Within this service, you can define a set of intents i.e. buckets that you would like the conversation to move in to. For each of these intents, you can create some phrases that the user might type and then the AI built in to the service will expand on these.

If each of our journeys above becomes an intent then the phrases could be:

    - Chase timesheets for all staff
    - Chase overdue tasks for project Phoenix
    - Where will I be on 15 March
    - Can I provide my DPU

Each of these will be analysed and the objects extracted (e.g. Timesheets or the project name) and the details then passed on to the dialogue for each journey.

![Chatting](/images/2019/07/chatting.jpg)

## Designing a dialogue

The dialogues work exactly like the flows above. Either a question is asked to start the dialogue or it receives the details from the main dialogue via Luis. The Bot will react to the responses as they are due, retrieving data from other services like Project Server as required. Once the Flow has finished, the dialogue is ended and the conversation returned to the main conversation.

The dialogues could be treated like a screen or set of screens in a traditional application where you consider which buttons the user will press and what text they will enter. If you consider the UI to be like a wizard then the Bot fits that design well.

So that's pretty simple, right? Mostly, yes, it is but where the complication can appear is all the exceptions to that simple flow. With a standard UI, it is easy to add a close or cancel button that will always be there. With a Bot, you need to ensure you consider these and build them in to the code.

For example, in the Whereabouts example, what if they decide to change the day halfway through? Or if they disagree with the assignments there? Or perhaps just want to have a general update not related to a specific assignment. You may say that they can't do these things but you need to design the Bot to make sure they don't try. Otherwise you end up with someone's daily update saved as "No, I don't want to bloody provide an update on that ridiculous project, give me MY project" or something similar. People are inclined to write sillier stuff in response to an automated Bot than they might in a standard UI due to the chatty nature so it is something to be aware of.

## Managing state

One other thing to consider is that people do not always reply straight away. Especially in the case of the chase task update dialogue, people are likely to come back to it later and your Bot will need to consider that.

The Bot Framework manages this through the [state providers](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/bot-builder-concept-state?view=azure-bot-service-4.0) for the dialogue. By default, this is held in memory but this should be changed for live use to be held in something like Table Storage or Cosmos DB. This will then held the current state of the conversation indefinitely.

However, there can still be some confusion when you have a Teams Bot with multiple people replying, with some replying within the thread and some creating a new thread. These can have different impacts and so you need to think of the inputs that are possible at each of these states and what to do if the user replies with something you are not expecting.

![Adaptive cards](/images/2019/07/Bot design adaptive cards.png)

## Adding a little UI

While the focus is on text based responses, you can also make use of adaptive cards within your Bot that are supported by most of the end channels. This allows you to return images and elements of structured text as well as introducing buttons that can guide the user to a response. It may not always be appropriate to use adaptive cards as they are larger and so can fill the screen and hide the bulk of the conversation. However, they add some elegance and uniqueness to the user as well as adding additional guidance to the responses that can be made.

## Wrap-up

To summarise the steps from above, the key is to treat the design in a similar way to a standard application with your user roles, journeys and similar screen design. Where things differ is that you need to consider a lot more about how the user may step away from the standard journey. You need to build in ways for them to exit this journey when required and make it obvious to the user how that can be done.

Make use of cards where appropriate to help with the user guidance and bring a little bit of a visual element to the mostly text based interface. remember that these are often called chat bots so be prepared to design responses in a chatty way while balancing the risk of becoming increasingly annoying - yes Clippy, I'm thinking of you.

Header Photo by Med Badr Chemmaoui on Unsplash
Chatting Photo by Ben White on Unsplash


Designing a Bot - Bot Series Part 3

The [previous post](/2019/07/06/daily-bing-challenge-bot.html) in this Bot Series covered what the Daily Bing Challenge Bot is and where it came from so now I will cover how you can use it. This is a technical post and there are quite a few steps at the moment. I may look to create an ARM template and remove the need for Google API at a later date but for now, here is how you can have your very own Daily Bing Challenge Bot.

In a few areas, I point to other documents or blogs with how to do things (like create a Bing Maps API). The reason for that is they can often change so I want to ensure that it has the latest info.

## What has to be done

To get the Bot in place, the following steps are needed:

- Create Azure Bot Service including the App Insights
- Create an Azure Storage instance
- Create a Bing Maps API Key
- Create a Google Places API Key
- Clone the code from Github
- Update the app settings
- Test locally
- Publish to Azure
- Add to Microsoft Teams instance

So let's go through those step by step. These steps do assume a working knowledge of Azure but [send me a tweet](https://twitter.com/kevmcdonk) if you have any questions.

If you just want to take a look at the code, you can find it [here](https://github.com/kevmcdonk/DailyBingChallengeBot) - there will be a later post describing the code itself.

## Create Azure Bot Service

To deploy the Bot, you will need an [Azure Subscription](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/free). I have used free services as much as possible or low cost for low usage such as Azure Storage. However, I cannot guarantee the costs involved.

- Create a new Resource Group
- Add a new service to the Resource Group, searching for "Web App Bot"
- Fill out the details as in the image below - you can use free pricing tier

![Web App Bot creation](/images/2019/07/installing the bot 1.png)

- Choose the default Bot Template

![Web App Bot creation](019/07/installing the bot 2.png)

- Create a new Service Plan but note that it defaults to S1 - this can be reduced to the free tier.
- Include App Insights
- Let the App ID and Password be autocreated
- You may need to enable some Resources which can be done by:
  - Selecting Cost Management + Billing from the left menu (or under All Services if not available)
  - Select your subscription
  - Select Resource Providers from the left menu
    - Search for the resource that requires registering and select Register
- Wait for the resources to be completed

## Create an Azure Storage instance

- Return to the Resource Group and add a new service
- Search for "storage account"
- Choose Standard performance
- Choose Storage V2
- Choose Locally Redundant Storage (unless you want to pay more for extra redundancy)
- Choose Hot Access Tier

![Web App Bot creation](019/07/installing the bot 3.png)

Once created, you need to create a table called DailyBing (or if you call it something else, note it down for later)

## Create a Bing Maps API Key

To get a Bing Maps Key, follow the instructions [here](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bingmaps/getting-started/bing-maps-dev-center-help/getting-a-bing-maps-key) and then keep hold of the key for a later step.

## Create a Google Places API Key

- Click on Get Started at https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/intro (you will need to sign in with a Google account)
- Select the Places API

![Web App Bot creation](/images/2019/07/installing the bot 4.png)

- Add a project name and agree to the terms of service
- Sign up to a free account - you will have to enter a debit or credit card but no charges will be made unless account upgraded to full account

Keep the API key for later steps.

## Clone the code from Github

Clone the code from [https://github.com/kevmcdonk/DailyBingChallengeBot](https://github.com/kevmcdonk/DailyBingChallengeBot) in whichever way you like.

## Update the app settings

In the code, there is an appsettings.json file that should be full of empty strings - if it isn't, please let me know so I can remove any keys I have left in!!!

Here are where you get the settings from:

- Add the Microsoft AppId Microsoft App Password, Luis API Hostname, Luis API Key and Luis App Id created for the Bot Service
  - In the Azure Portal, go to the Web App Bot created
  - Click on Configuration on the left menu
  - Show Values and then copy the values across
- Add the storage connection string
  - In the Azure Portal, go to the storage account created earlier
  - Click on Access keys in the left menu
  - Copy the Connection String for Key1 to appsettings.json in DailyBingTableConnectionString
- Add the Table name
  - In the Azure Portal, go to the storage account created earlier
  - Click on Table in the left menu
  - Copy the name supplied in to appsettings.json in DailyBingTableName
- Add the App Insights Instrumentation Key
  - In the Azure Portal, go to the App Insights instance created
  - From the default Overview page, copy the Instrumentation Key
  - Paste it in appsettings.json under the INstrumentationKey area
- Add a Bing Maps API Key
  - Copy the key created earlier in to appsettings.json under BingMapsAPI
- Add a Google Maps API Key (yes, at the moment it uses both! The photos were better in Bing)
  - Copy the key created earlier to appsettings.json in GoogleMapAPI

## Test locally

At this point, everything should be working. Now is the time to test that theory!

- Build the code and confirm that it compiles without errors
- Run the web project
- Use the [Bot Storage Emulator](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/bot-service-debug-emulator?view=azure-bot-service-4.0) to test the results locally

At the moment, it will still write the results to Azure Storage but you could update the appsettings to use a local storage emulator instead. You can test by following some of the steps in the [previous post](/2019/07/06/daily-bing-challenge-bot.html) and can even debug each step to understand what is happening.

## Publish to Azure

If all is working well, right click on the project in Visual Studio and publish to Azure, following the wizard instructions

![Web App Bot creation](/images/2019/07/installing the bot 5.png)
![Web App Bot creation](/images/2019/07/installing the bot 6.png)

You can then test with the emulator again or proceed to deploy the bot to Teams

## Add to Microsoft Teams instance

The final step is to deploy the Bot in two Microsoft Teams. The simplest way to do this in order to test is to click on the edit icon next to the Teams search box and enter the Microsoft App ID for the Bot

![Web App Bot creation](/images/2019/07/installing the bot 7.png)

To deploy for a Channel to test, you first need to add the app [App Studio](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/get-started/get-started-app-studio) by clicking on Apps in the bottom left and searcing for App Studio

- Once added, select the Manifest Editor Tab then Create a New App

![Web App Bot creation](/images/2019/07/installing the bot 8.png)

- Give it a short name like BingBot and a Long Name of Daily Bing Challenge Bot
- Paste your Microsoft App ID in to the App ID field and give it a suitable package name and version e.g. com.me.myapp.bingbot v1.0.0
- Think up a suitable short and long description (note that they must be different!)
- Enter our name and website in the developer info
- Enter the App URLs with details of privacy and terms of use policy (if internal, a SharePoint page would work well)
- Upload an icon, a transparent icon and pick an accent colour
- Slightly confusingly, you then need to select Bots from the left Menu under Capabilities
- Click on Set up and choose Existing Bot
- Give the name and the Microsoft App Id and then tick Personal, Team and Group Chat, leaving the others blank
- If you want to, you can add a command to make it easier to ask for the start
  - Click Add under Commands
  - Enter the text "Check Daily Bing" in Command Text and "Trigger the Bot to start the daily challenge" in Help text
  - Tick all three Scope boxes and click Save
- On the left menu, select Test and distribute and then Install your app in Teams for Testing
- Search for a Team in "Add to a team or chat"
- Pick the Channel and then click Setup
- It is now set up to Test in Teams but for it to respond, you also need to enable Teams as a channel
  - Navigate to the Azure Portal and go to the Bot
  - Click on Channels in the left menu
  - Select the Teams logo from "Select a featured Channel"
  - Click on Save
- It can sometimes take a few mins for the first response

## Wrap-up

After all that, you should have a working Bot! If you don't, the first ports of call are the App Insights logs in Azure or the Web Service logs - these should give an indication of what is wrong. Feel free to log an issue in the Github repo if you are having any other issues.

Header photo by Xi Wang on Unsplash


Installing the Daily Bing Challenge Bot - Bot Series Part 2

Have you ever looked at the daily background on [Bing](https://www.bing.com) or the version on your desktop? Did you stop and wonder where that beautiful landscape or haunting castle is? Perhaps you turned to a colleague and said "I wonder where that is? Where do you think". Then you did the same the next day and perhaps another colleauge joined in. This then turned in to a game amongst the team. Then it got bigger and bigger and bigger and soon the whole company was playing. Suddenly, a little bit of fun was taking up loads of time for the poor person who first came up with the idea.

## Automation with Bots

This little tale inspired me to take a look at making a Bot in Teams that could do the same thing but with more automation. What would a Bot look like that could ask someone to choose an image and then send it round to the team, allow them to guess where it is, work out which guess was closest and then set a winner. Well, you will be happy to know that I can tell you now. It looks like the Daily Bing Challenge Bot.

![Bot Demo One](/images/2019/07/Bot demo 1.png)

## Triggering the challenge

To trigger the challenge, someone just needs to @mention the @BingBot and say Check Daily Results. This wakes up the Bot to choose the first Bing image. I say first because there are actually seven different regions I have found for the Bing images and will they are sometimes the same, they can often be different images. As you can see in the image above, an adaptive card shows the Bing picture with the region it is in. There are then three actions:

- Choose image - this tells the Bot that you are happy with that image and the game can be triggered
- Try another image - if that one doesn't quite work for you, try the next Bing image
  ![Bot Demo Two](019/07/Bot demo 2.png)
- Switch to Google - let's cover this in a bit more detail

## Adding a little Google Places

We found that many of the Bing images were a little too easy to guess so I added an alternative using Google. The Bot would pick a random number for longitude and latitude and then look for any places with photos in a 50km radius (the maximum that Google can choose). If it didn't find anywhere (e.g. somewhere in the middle of the ocean), then it would try another random point. This would happen forty times before it confessed to the user that it couldn't find anywhere. Then it's up to the user to try again or switch back to Bing.

## Time to guess

Once a suitable image has been chosen, the Bot will save the image details and then start asking for guesses.

![Bot Demo Three](ot demo 3.png)

As you can see in the image above, the Bot knows how many users are in the Team and how many have responded so far. The guess is validated as a real location and it can handle slight typos as well e.g. Lundun for London or Rio de Janeero for Rio de Janeiro.

## Choosing a winner

Once all the results are in, the winner is calculated and a new card is shown with the winner. If you don't want to wait for all the guesses to come in (for example, someone is on leave) then you can reply "Check results" to trigger the results checking.

![Bot Demo Four](/images/2019/07/Bot demo 4.png)

## What next?

So the winner has been told and everyone knows where the actual photo was and how far the guess was. The challenge is complete for the day. So what does that mean for the longer term? Time for some Power BI.

![Bot Demo Five](/images/2019/07/Bot demo 5.png)

To drive some competitiveness, a Power BI Report is set up and hosted as a tab in Teams. It shows the top guessers as well as a map of the last 30 days of results. The team can keep a track of their results and the most successful winners over time.

## Driving adoption for Microsoft Teams

Most importantly though, they can use Microsoft Teams to do it every day. The Team members don't just have to chat to the Bot, they can chat to each other, laugh at bad guesses or just generally be impressed by the quality of the photo. Then they can start discussing their projects in another channel, adding their own Power BI tabs for project status or other tabs. Driving adoption of Teams through experience.

Robots Header Photo by Craig Sybert on Unsplash


The Daily Bing Challenge Bot - Bot Series Part 1

One of the areas that classic SharePoint sites still have over Modern SharePoint is the ability to target audiences. I had heard that this had changed so I decided to do a little investigating. The video below runs through that little trip, with the bumps along the way.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rvtxUOqZS2I" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

What I found was:

- For any of the targeted content to work, you need/will need to be on Targeted Release for your tenancy.
- I hope this will change but it only appeared that you could set the Target Audience on a Communication Site not a Teams Site.
- You can create audiences but they don't compile so don't get tricked - you will need to use [Azure AD Dynamic Groups](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/users-groups-roles/groups-dynamic-membership) which requires a P1 license
- If you change the order of news articles, remember to delete the custom order if you delete an article or the stub remains but the link breaks

Looking forward to more updates on this to close the final loops.

## Useful Links

- [Details on using the news web part](https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/use-the-news-web-part-on-a-sharepoint-page-c2dcee50-f5d7-434b-8cb9-a7feefd9f165?ui=en-US&rs=en-GB&ad=GB)
- [Audience Targeting](https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/target-content-to-specific-audiences-33d84cb6-14ed-4e53-a426-74c38ea32293)
- [What is coming for audience targeting](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-SharePoint-Blog/April-2019-Updates-to-SharePoint-News/ba-p/481718)
- [Microsoft 365 Roadmap Entry for audience targeting](https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/roadmap?rtc=2&filters=&searchterms=30695)


The current state of targeted news and approvals in Modern SharePoint

It has now been 15 years since I first started working with SharePoint. My journey started with a project to roll out Project Server 2007 at a large financial services company. Naturally, we couldn't just go with a little configuration and so a consultancy with expertise in Project Server and SharePoint was brought in.

At the time, I was a cocky mid-20s graduate and couldn't work out why we couldn't just spend a couple of weeks with the manual and a dev server to meet all the requirements. I probably wasn't very nice to the consultants as l took on the arrogance of working in financial services in the early 2000s. However, I was won over completely by the expertise and leant a lot about how to work sustainably with SharePoint. The project went well and we soon had hundreds of PMs tracking their templated project documents in SharePoint with risks and issues in custom lists for each project.

## A bit of reality

Soon the pain of development with SharePoint 2007 hit. These were days before established PowerShell so we had hoards of text files to copy StsAdmin commands from. Deployments frequently went wrong with sites being customised so that our shiny new updated templates wouldn't load. We had constant support tickets from Project Managers who couldn't work out how to create a page with an image on it showing their latest RAG status or asking why so-and-so couldn't see a document. We felt their pain.

## The power of SharePoint Self-Service

Through this pain though, I also saw PMs creating their own custom lists to track assumptions and dependencies. l found users who had discovered email alerts on specific documents so they could make sure their project team knew as soon as something was published. After a couple of years of this being a project, a dedicated SharePoint team was set up and I moved over to this. People across the business saw the benefit of collaborating with SharePoint so l met with teams from legal, risk, operations and trading and helped them to set up basic systems to help automate their processes and make them more productive. But even more teams helped themselves and we only found out when we saw usage peaks in the stats for new sites. People were helping themselves to solve their problems in ways we wouldn't have thought of as we didn't live these processes day in and day out.

There were certainly pain points with allowing people the freedom to do what they wanted. The Nintex Workflow with 5000 actions that breached the maximum file size for a work was a new one even to the Microsoft Support team at the time! Quite how that person had the patience to manually drag and drop that many actions was beyond us. We also found business critical systems running from SharePoint lists that had no version history and limited ability to restore if someone deleted them accidentally. So we engaged with these teams and publicised the help we could offer as well as people being able to help themselves and where it made sense to move things out of SharePoint, we helped with that. We became the prototypers, creating simple applications to help teams build out better ideas of what their requirements were.

## Was it really that easy?

The biggest problem was to get people started with SharePoint. As the Web 2.0 movement was accelerating and social networks were being established, SharePoint felt very antiquated. Getting people started with editing pages and negotiating publishing was a problem for many years. Giving people access on mobile devices and outside the core network took million pound projects.

All of this reduced a lot of that self-service benefit as only small groups who were happy to invest the time to learn were really getting the benefit. The starting hurdle was too high. The appetite for people to give it a go started to reduce after the initial excitement. We had 97% of the organisation using SharePoint on a monthly basis even though it wasn't the core intranet but the grumbles were growing. I worked at more organisations and saw similar things. We worked hard to improve that introduction to SharePoint but it was rarely easy.

Then Jeff Teper rejoined the SharePoint team and Modern was born.

![Lookbook](/images/2018/12/building-blocks-hero-p-1080.jpeg)

## The new SharePoint

OK, I probably skipped a few years but this is a blog post and not a history of SharePoint. In May 2016, Jeff Teper launched an event called the Future of SharePoint and a vision for modern looking pages that would work across devices began. Suddenly, adding an image to a page was easy. For SharePoint Online, external access was a case of logging in for many people (with Multi-Factor Authentication recommended too!) and it would look good on all types of devices. It has taken a few years but the modern experience now covers the vast majority of the old functionality (yes, there will always be some things easier in classic pages before anyone starts).

Back to the point of this post, this has re-ignited the joy of SharePoint for me. The development model feels far more modern as well and more aligned to other ways of developing web applications. Extending SharePoint feels like you are actually extending and not just working another way to do similar things. The engineering team are engaging and open to discussions which is a huge shift to the earlier years.

## Time for me to make a change

All of this has made me want to look at a more Office 365 and SharePoint focussed role and so I am sad to say that I will be shortly leaving [Ballard Chalmers](https://ballardchalmers.com/) but very excited to announce that I will be joining [CPS](https://www.cps.co.uk/). One of the big reasons for this is I hope to get more engaged with the community and have more time to attend user groups, conferences and work on community projects. I have been following a lot with PnP and other initiatives but hope that this will be give me more headspace to focus on the Office 365 and SharePoint world more and not the broader Azure and cross Microsoft that I have been doing in the last two years.

So why did I open with a story about a consultancy that helped to teach me the right way to develop on SharePoint? That consultancy was Corporate Project Solutions, now known as CPS so I really have come full circle in the world of SharePoint. I can't wait to get started and get out to meet people to help deliver solutions that help people to help themselves.

p.s. If you are following the Cricket World Cup, keep an eye for my household reviews at [https://www.instagram.com/the_household_worldcup_reviews](https://www.instagram.com/the_household_worldcup_reviews).

![Happy!](/images/2019/06/happy.jpg)

Images courtesy of Hien Nguyen via [Flickr](https://flic.kr/p/62rJsK) and my own


Why I still love SharePoint

Blog

My involvement in the Microsoft Community