Help me to show version history in Desktop/Web versions of Office

By Warwick Leahy in Office 0 Comment

In SharePoint it shows the file history fine.  But the history doesn’t completely appear in the Desktop/Web versions of Office.

We find ourselves looking at version history when debugging SharePoint stuff for clients, and it is useful.
Until now we had never gone to Word to view the history – so to find out it does not work is concerning 🔥

In SharePoint we see:

✅ Figure: Good Example – In SharePoint the file history is complete

In Web version of Word we see:

❌ Figure: Bad Example – Web version of Word shows disabled AD users as “Unknown”

In Desktop versions of Word we see (Note we see more file history in the desktop version too):

❌ Figure: Bad Example – The Desktop version of Word shows old users as “Unknown”

Allow me to open in desktop app

By Warwick Leahy in Teams 0 Comment

When creating a new document directly in Microsoft Teams, Teams always opens the web version of the Office app that you are asking for (e.g. Word).

Please add a checkbox for Teams for open in Desktop App instead.

Figure: Open in Desktop App checkbox here

Note: It even ignores the setting in Teams to always open in the Desktop app:

Figure: Teams ignores its own setting “Open in Desktop App” when creating a new file

Help me have a consistent experience between the Windows version and the Teams version

By Warwick Leahy in Microsoft Whiteboard 0 Comment

This is the history from Microsoft:  

Some background on the tech stack and roadmap:

  • The first Whiteboard app we released was a Windows (UWP) app on an Azure back end. This is still the form factor with the richest feature set.
  • We later added the web app (Web + Teams) which we are gradually evolving. The web canvas will eventually be the single canvas that powers all apps.
  • In parallel, we are moving the back end to ODSP (OneDrive/SharePoint). This is the right platform to handle the required scale, compliance, and sharing capabilities.
  • At the end of this transition period all clients (Teams, Web, Windows, iOS, Android, Surface Hub) will run on a single version of the web canvas to support collab scenarios across all devices.

That transition is complex because we need to build up capabilities on the web app to the level of the Windows client (and beyond), while transitioning the back end, and while also supporting cross-device collaboration sessions across different app versions (e.g. Windows and web) and back-ends.