At CPS (www.cps.co.uk, @CPS_Solutions), we have been extremely lucky to have been able to adjust our ways of working to accommodate the restrictions that have resulted from the Covid 19 pandemic. As a consultancy with staff located all over England, we have worked and collaborated remotely for many years and so for most staff it has been a seamless transition. All in all, as an organisation, we have supported each other to continue working effectively.

Last week I threw a question out on Twitter and I guess I hit a nerve! I have long been of the belief that if you want me to attend a meeting then you really need to let me know what you need from me so I can do you the courtesy of fully committing or letting you know that I may not able to meet your expectations. To do this I generally ask for information that sets out the following:

Challenge Within Microsoft Teams meetings, there is a chat capability visible to all attendees (those invited to the meeting) and participants (those added to an instance of a meeting). After a meeting has ended, participants can still see the meeting chat Roles There are three roles in a meeting Organiser The person who creates the meeting. They have full access to edit the meeting in every way. Attendee A person who has been invited to attend the meeting and has either accepted or declined the invite.

The Microsoft Business Applications Summit is THE conference for Power Platform and Dynamics enthusiasts. This year, like many other conferences it had to adapt to the current global situation and go online. The format that they went for was different from many other conferences and I think it worked exceptionally well! Each session was 30 minutes long, and included 5 minutes to address questions. This did have the side effect of sometimes feeling like the sessions were being played at double speed.

Microsoft Teams is being used for a lot of meetings at the moment and depending on the number of attendees there are a few features that may be missing or not obvious to use. Following on from a thread on a community forum I wanted to share the solution to a couple of features: Raise Hand Quick Poll Raise Hand This is a feature that is coming to Microsoft Teams.

I was with a client this week and we were discussing the Power Platform and identifying potential projects that would be both beneficial to the business and that would demonstrate the power of the platform. Finding the scenarios to automate was not a challenge. The primary challenge that we identified was preparing the organisation and the production tenant so that Power Apps environments could be used for development, testing and eventual use in production.

Last week I was asked rather late in the day (over dinner the night before actually) to contribute to the introduction to a hackathon at the Scottish Summit on the subject of de-mystifying the Common Data Service. As a subject, it is a fantastic area to talk about, but it is also critically important that it is understood. I had the honour of participating with the other hosts, Lucy Bourne (@LucyAliceBourne), Chis Huntingford (@TattooedCRMGuy), Lee Baker (@LeeMBaker) and Nick Doelman (@ReadyXRM) all of whom have a wealth of knowledge and experience in this space, but, all of whom have primarily approached CDS from the Dynamics direction.

Site Designs have made the deployment of repeatable customisation of sites much easier, and in my opinion are the starting point for any SharePoint deployment for communication or collaboration. While the capabilities of Site Designs are well documented and continue to evolve, I see many environments where the deployment of the Site Scripts and Site Designs has been done in a way that allows for multiple versions of the same Site Script and Site Design to exist.

Microsoft recently launched Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways as a solution that will allow an organisation to provision a learning site into their tenant which can then be used by their employees to learn about Microsoft 365. To quote Microsoft, the solution will provide A fully customizable SharePoint Online communication site- The learning pathways training portal can be customized to add your organization’s help, support, and community content Easy provisioning- Provision learning pathways from the SharePoint Online Provisioning Service with just a few easy steps The ability to create your own training playlists- with learning pathways, you can create targeted training playlists to meet the unique needs of your environment Up-to-date content- Learning pathways provides content through a Microsoft online content catalogue, so the content at your site is regularly updated From https://docs.

It’s the end of the year, you’re on annual leave to enjoy the holidays, rest, recharge your batteries and then get back to work in January with a tons of energy and enthusiasm, and no outstanding tasks. Wait a minute. That last part! That’s not true, I have a ton of stuff left in To-Do and Planner plans, and those emails I received in the last week, well they haven’t all been dealt with!