Help me customize Azure Access Review emails

SysAdmins find it a lot of work to keep giving people permissions to resources like Azure.

I wanted to say that we’re now really enjoying using Azure Access Reviews. We’ve written about how we use it on ssw.com.au/rules/entra-group-access-reviews.


At SSW we have so many Teams and Groups – almost all set to public. Since people can join so many, they poke around, join a group, and never leave. That means they are included in every calendar appointment and every team email and the noise was reported as an employee dissatisfaction.

Access Review has been invaluable because it effortlessly removes users when they no longer need access. We have set it to run every 3 months and they need to say they are still a member.

❌ The Access Review email does not look like anything SSW SysAdmins would send, so it gets deleted mistakenly by many people in our company.

Having the ability to customize the email is important.

Suggestion:

  • Email subject – Give the ability to edit
  • Email body – Give the ability to edit text
  • Email body – Give the ability to add an image
  • Email body – Having placeholders for significant fields, like Group, would be ideal (see ‘SSW SugarLearning’ in the image)
  • From address – Currently employees think it is ⚠️spam from Microsoft, not from SSW SysAdmins. So it would be a big bonus if we could send the notifications from our own email address to prevent any confusion.
Figure: ❌ Bad example – Email shows limited context and looks just like a lot of other notifications that we get

Microsoft Forms and Delve – Help me find the Forms Responses (aka surveys) I have answered

When I fill in forms for my company, I should be able to find each one (just like I do a Microsoft Word doc I created).

I understand that a Form is not a file stored in a Document Library like other Office docs, but I do think you could hack something so it could be surfaced.

Figure: In this view I should be able to see the Microsoft Forms responses I’ve submitted

TinaCMS – Help overcome the limitation for open-source projects?

TinaCMS is awesome and has the best editor. It can be used on a public site like www.ssw.com.au where the users are known and will be added to the database.

However for a public site like SSW Rules www.ssw.com.au/rules where users are _any_ github users, then the problem is each user needs to be added to the database _before_ they can make any changes.

FYI – TinaCMS also has the issue of not allowing GitHub users to directly contribute to the content repo like what NetlifyCMS and Keystatic allow. This means no more GitHub green squares!!

Note: Similar products such as NetlifyCMS (aka DecapCMS now) do not have this limitation, nor does Keystatic.

Figure: See my green contributions to SSW.Rules.Content under Contribution activity https://github.com/adamcogan

Microsoft Teams Approvals App – Help me allow users to be in multiple approver groups

Video: Rick Su explains the issue (2 min)

The Approvals app is great for simple scenarios like purchase approvals and event attendance approvals.

There is a problem with more complex approvals. Say you need approvals from 2 out of 5 designated people, then validation stops this from being done.

The current validation does not allow the same person to be in multiple approver groups. This validation should be removed.

Figure: ❌ It is a problem that the same individual user cannot be assigned to multiple approver groups.

There are other solutions that allow this such as www.KissFlow.com and www.integrify.com

Suggestion:

The Microsoft Teams Approvals App should allow the same individual user to appear in multiple approver groups.  

This modification would give the flexibility to allow more complex approval scenarios.

Microsoft Teams – Help me forward chat history

I work in the China office, and we keep reverting to WeChat because it offers this feature which is super useful. It is missing from Teams.

I want to be able to forward a group of messages in my private chat with someone else not in the chat. This often happens when a problem comes up in the discussion and I realized I have already discussed a similar issue. Therefore, I want to share a section of my chat history to them quickly.

❌ My current workarounds:
Option 1: Copy + paste the messages one by one to the other chat.
Option 2: Take a long screenshot of the chat history and share the image.

✅ Suggestion:
Allow people to cherry-pick messages in their chat and forward them in a bundle.

❌ Figure: I want to forward just the section in the red box to someone else (but I don’t want to share irrelevant information about my annual review)
✅ Figure: WeChat lets me combine and forward selected messages

Help me use full screen mode in Outlook

When screen sharing in Teams or other applications, you want to be able to reduce noise as much as possible. One way to do this is by using full screen mode.

✅ Chrome – F11 works

✅ Edge – F11 works

❌ Outlook new email – F11 doesn’t work (does nothing)

❌ Word – F11 doesn’t work (does nothing)

❌ Excel – F11 doesn’t work (goes to Charts)

❌ Figure: F11 key goes to Charts in Excel
Figure: Full screen in Edge with F11

Help me know instantly what Tracing Mode is via a rename

Today I showed at NDC Oslo how to build a bot manually with C# and Blazor using the Azure OpenAI GPT services.

Then I showed how to do the same thing automatically with the new PVAs.

At the end I did a poll of the audience (about 300 people) – the Norwegians vote was about 80% saying they preferred the PVA solution.

Well done – the 1st impression is awesome ⭐

Keep the $ attainable please… it is the danger point for adoption.

Little UX suggestion… Regarding this “Tracing Mode” screen.
I reckon I would rename it to “Query Execution Plan” or maybe just “Execution Plan”

Then you keep the same name as you have in SQL Server:

SharePoint App – Help Solve Readability Issues

There are accessibility problems.
E.g. I am having some of the 50 year olds in SSW reporting that they cannot even use the SharePoint app.
Reason – they can’t read anything!
Suggestion #1: below
Suggestion #2: below

Note: it is not only the SharePoint app

❌ Same issue on the Dynamics app

✅ The Teams app has fixed this issue

✅ The Outlook app has fixed this issue

Figure: Android default is too hard to read for some.

Suggestion #1: Fix this accessibility problem by adding pinch to zoom (users expect the same as the web page)

Figure: Android Settings

Suggestion #2 – add a Cogs button that would take the user to Settings | Font Size and Style where they can increase the system font size! People don’t want to use this setting because it changes everything on your phone.

Figure: Android after increasing the size on Settings

Suggestion #2 is magic UX – see it is broadly fixed (❌ the top “News” is weird)

iOS seems to have a different problem

Figure: iOS normal view

 

Figure: iOS accessibility settings

 

Figure: ❌ Broken – Nothing increased except for the Search box (which is overlapping)

 

Microsoft Forms results should show in SharePoint news

There are a couple things that frustrate me about SharePoint News. I believe that Microsoft Forms results should be shown in SharePoint news. By fixing this, SharePoint news will be more useful.

I see 2 problems:
❌ SharePoint News is not used a lot in most companies I work with
❌ Not many people in a company know when is the right time to read a Forms survey results…. Or even that you can.

Suggestion:
✅ When you are looking through the results of a Microsoft form, it would be great if there was an easy option to show the results in SharePoint News.

✅✅ Even better would be a way that the Form owner who reviews the comments, could add their own commentary to give context, before the others get to read them.

Help me have a better initial experience (🏠 The home page + featured links)

I use the browser for SharePoint a lot but love the SharePoint Mobile app more.

The initial experience is very different and it should be the same. The mobile app is better, and the start screen could be even better.

At the moment on my mobile, under the “find” tab, we see 4 groups:

  • Frequent Sites
  • People
  • Recent Files
  • Featured Links
Figure: The mobile app displays content well, but it could be improved

#1 Suggestion for Mobile app – Make sections consistent and change from 4 groups to 6 groups

I want to see what I am using, and what the rest of the company is using, therefore I’d love to see this:

  • My Recent Sites – i.e. sites that current user has been browsing, renamed from “Frequent” to “Recent” for consistency
  • (New) Popular Sites – i.e. sites popular across the organization
  • My Recent People – i.e. rename current “People”
  • (New) Popular People – i.e. people with highest stats
  • My Recent Files – i.e. Documents that current user has been opening
  • (New) Popular Files – ie. Most used files across the organization

#2 Suggestion for Web app – Make SharePoint WebApp Start Page consistent

This is the first experience when people reach an intranet home – everyone clicks that 🏠home icon (see red arrow).

Many users first notice the horrible URL, e.g. https://sswcom.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx

More importantly the page’s content is pretty bad, i.e. it shows different sections and even different content compared to the mobile app.

Figure: This is the SharePoint “Home page” and it needs improving – make it consistent with the mobile app

I would love to see the same categories described above in Suggestion #1 (i.e. Sites, People, then Files).

In short, the content should be the same – whether I use the browser or mobile app
(e.g. today even just the Frequent Sites I see on the browser and on the mobile app are different – how??).

Cheers,