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

By Adam Cogan in Microsoft, SharePoint App, Sharepoint Online (Office365) 0 Comment

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,

Suggestion: Teams – Auto remove people from the chat at the end of a call

By Adam Cogan in Microsoft, Teams 0 Comment


I am not sure if this is an edge case…. I’d love to know how others work.

On some calls – for example a managers meeting – you want to temporarily add in someone just for a quick question. You don’t want them to remain after the call. It is kind of a security or privacy issue if you don’t remove them.

So I find it really annoying when I forgot to remove them after the call and they probably find it annoying when they get our messages after the call.  So I would prefer not to have to remove the person manually.

Suggestion – next to “Add people”, I think it would be really cool to add a person via an option “Add people (temporarily)”.

Cool suggestion?

Figure: Add new option “Add people (temporarily)”

Teams – ‘Hide’ is in the wrong spot

By Adam Cogan in Microsoft, Teams 0 Comment

Little Suggestion:

We have a new feature “Delete” a chat. I’d love to know if people will use it.

I’m not sure I will use it as I like history in chats, but I regularly use ‘Hide” to remove a chat conversation (I am always aiming for a 0 inbox and a 0 chat list).

On the right click menu, notice the last 2 are about getting rid of a chat…. And so is “Hide” chat. Therefore it is in the wrong place.

Please can you move “Hide” with the bottom 2 menu items. Those 3 are related.

Figure: Teams’ Delete Chat Feature

Help me quickly add the likely members of a new chat group

By Adam Cogan in Teams 0 Comment

I have another fantastic idea 😊

We all love Microsoft Teams and I think this UI looks like it is about to be clever, but it is not.

When starting a new chat… 
If I pick 1 person… please attempt to guess the 2nd person I will add to the chat.
People are often related and I know it would be a nice for all Microsoft Teams users if the people picker showed the like people that I will chat with together. 

Today, it doesn’t matter who I pick first in the chat, the search always shows the same people.

Figure: I type ‘Gert’ it pops open people, if I pick ‘Bob’ it pops open the *same* people!

Suggestion

Please pick who I will probably pick next … it should change the people based on who I am adding.

More info:
Delve tells me who I talk to a bit, that would be ok.
But when you talk to a manager, you probably are going to pick another manager.
When I talk to an Azure DevOps engineer, I am probably going to pick another Azure engineer (not a React developer).

Outlook – Anyone using “Focus time” appointments? (from Viva Insights)

By Adam Cogan in Viva Insights 0 Comment

Hey Viva Insights Team,

I liked the idea of Outlook giving me time to do work without interruption. All these little appointments appeared in my calendar and I was going to focus and get work done.

Clearly I was dreaming. Does anyone successfully use the auto created appointments “Focus time”?

Figure: I had heaps of these auto created appointments. People interrupted me anyway, so with a heavy heart, I deleted them

Suggestion #1

> Microsoft Viva Insights has scheduled your focus time in accordance with your focus plan and work week settings. 
> To edit your settings, visit your settings page at Protect Time Settings.

In an Outlook appointment, when I decide to click this link, I expected to see a button “Delete” or “Unsubscribe”

Suggestion #2

When using this people don’t think of it as a “Plan”… I reckon they think of it as a recurring appointment.

So testing it out, I click “Get Started”…

Figure: Try it out by clicking “Get started”

I am just looking, I should be able to click “Cancel”… I did not know what “Leave Plan” was about.

Also popping up these questions should only happen after I have been using it for more than 24 hours.

Figure: This was weird. You don’t want to be asking users questions this early. It is annoying to the user and useless data for Microsoft

Help me have Recurring Appointments

By Adam Cogan in Microsoft Bookings 0 Comment

Microsoft Bookings – www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/business/scheduling-and-booking-app

This looks to be a nice scheduling & bookings app.

It might work for prospects booking themselves for initial meetings.

I was hoping it might be a bit more powerful. We looked at it for some customer scenarios and discovered it does not support recurring appointments – an instant showstopper!

I guess an alternative to look at now is the Dynamics 365 Resource Scheduling… Anyone use that?

More on Tech Community – Microsoft Bookings.

Help my menus have a nice way to customize them with images 

By Adam Cogan in Sharepoint Online (Office365) 0 Comment

For our customers we get their SharePoint site pointing to Teams and vice versa… I believe it is the right thing to do but the right emoji would cause this to be more UI obvious ✨

In SharePoint there is an issue with menu customization that blocks good UX. E.g. I want to have links to both the SharePoint portals and the right Teams in the menu.

Figure: Plain menu without icon/emojis is not very welcoming
Figure: Emojis make it a bit nicer in some cases. In this case they are the wrong UI… I want to emphasize the fact that these are links to Teams (rather than SharePoint) being https://teams.microsoft.com/l/team/xxxxx

Ideally we should be able to use SharePoint and Teams official icons, i.e.:

Teams
SharePoint

But there doesn’t seem to be any supported way to do so! 

I assume it is a bad idea to inject HTML via a custom SPFX solution or some nasty CSS… It is better to stay within the framework and have easy upgrade.

In summary I am saying that emojis do not do the job every time (BTW I do love emojis). This is one example where emojis are not as good as images.

SharePoint is important to us. It is the intranet of almost all SSW’s clients. I am suggesting that SharePoint should not be making the job of putting images in a menu, hard. It should be simple. 

The goal should be to make it the same as other webparts. I’m thinking of the ‘Quick Links’ Web Part.  Please allow us to add a custom image or an icon to all of our menu items.

✅ Figure: Good example – Add a custom image in the Quick Links web part is easy

Help me have consistent short URLs

By Adam Cogan in Sharepoint Online (Office365) 0 Comment

I think URLs matter and I prefer neat ones.

I’m experiencing a weird bug on our Intranet and cannot figure out why this is happening.

Everytime I click on one of the menu items the URL shows slightly differently.

We have several portals (Team Sites) linked from our Hub Navigation:

Figure: Each item links to a different portal, i.e. https://sswcom.sharepoint.com/sites/XXX

Every single link is setup using the short URL form – i.e. not linking directly to the aspx page.

However, sometimes/often/randomly, when clicking one of the menu items, the URL is somehow rewritten to https://sswcom.sharepoint.com/sites/XXX/SitePages/Home.aspx

Figure: URL being randomly rewritten to the “full” form (i.e. full page’s path)

Moreover, clicking the Site’s “home” tile (i.e. Site Logo) will almost always toggle – yes toggle – between the two URLs… 

I have noticed that, before it flicks to the “long” form, there is a weird querystring parameter being added for a split second, and then the rewrite happens:

Figure: Weird “sw=auth” querystring parameter
  1. Can you please explain what is causing the issue?
  1. How do we fix it? 
    We want to be using the “short” form as much as possible