Microsoft Teams Approval App – Allow me to easily find important approvals

Every company has the need for requests to be approved.  We’ve found that the Microsoft Teams Approval App works well, but only in simple cases.  It is easy to create templates and use them to submit requests. 

When companies switch from emails to a centralized structured approval, processes improve, and emails are reduced.

Senior Management are often responsible for approving most requests and as such can have a large backlog of requests to approve.  In order to help approvers action the most important requests I would like to see the following enhancements:

  1. Allow Priority to be set in Custom Approval Templates – ideally the priority level would be set in the Custom Approval Template, and not able to be changed by the user making the request.
  2. The ‘Request title’ field is not enough.  We need another column called ‘Approval Template Type’.
  3. We can sort on the column titles, but we need the ability to filter by Priority and Approval Template Name
Figure 1: Approval Hub – Can see Priority and Title, but not Request Type
Figure 2: Not able to filter by Priority and/or Request Type
Figure 3: We are able to configure priority for basic requests, but NOT able to do this for Custom Request Templates.  We need access to this field in Custom Request Templates.
Figure 4: Why are there only two priorities?  We would like to have 3 levels (for example, similar to how Outlook works (see below))
Figure 5: In Outlook we have 3 priorities.  For consistency, we would like 3 priorities in the Teams Approval App also.

Azure DevOps – Show Display Name from Azure AD

We have Azure DevOps connected to Azure AD so that our users can log in with their Azure AD credentials.
Currently, DevOps does not show our users’ Display Name that is set in Azure AD.

Users can change their own name here, but this is not a fix. For the sake of consistency, display names should match the display names used in Azure AD.

Figure: Display Name in Azure AD (with [SSW])
Figure: Display Name in Azure Devops (missing [SSW])

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

Azure – app registration secret/certificate logs cannot be forwarded to Azure Monitor

Azure AD Audit Logs are very helpful when diagnosing issues. Similarly, sending these logs to Azure Monitor is very useful for storing logs, and for setting up alerts on certain events.

In Audit Logs, we can see when an app registration secret or certificate is created or deleted.

Figure: Azure AD | Audit Logs app registration secret/certificate logs

However, there is no way to send these logs through to Azure Monitor so that we can set up alerts on these events.

Figure: no option for app registration secret/certificate logs

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 improve the experience of writing hands-free emails on Outlook and Word with Dictate

Things I have problems with:

  1. Clunky with list items – You have to slow down a lot to make sure it recognises your commands like “next line”
  2. Can’t do any Alt commands
    • E.g. Can’t add email signature (Alt NAS)
    • E.g. Can’t track in CRM (Alt HY1)
  3. Won’t recognise autocorrects
  4. UI – Can’t easily see that you’re mid-dictation like you can with Siri (the movement to on the icon to recognise noises)

Help me to see how many staff are accessing SharePoint with the mobile Apps

I am very interested in how people are accessing our services.  I especially like how I can see that our users are accessing Dynamics 365 on their mobile app.  

  1. SharePoint should display similar results.  I would like to see how many of our SharePoint users are accessing our intranet via the ‘SharePoint app’ and also SharePoint Lists via the ‘Lists’ app.
Figure: Dynamics usage report shows that a number of people are using the Sales app to access Dynamics
Figure: SharePoint usage report should show the same things
Figure: Office365 Power BI app shows Outlook Mobile and Teams but doesn’t have SharePoint stats