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 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

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,

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

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

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

Help me know what license I have

There is inconsistency in the Person menus…

✅ Figure: Good example – Power BI shows my “License type:” is Pro
❌ Figure: Bad example – Office 365 does not tell me what license I have
❌ Figure: Bad example – Dynamics 365 does not tell me what license I have

More Info: 

In this case the Office | Person menu should show ”Microsoft 365 E3”

And link off to  https://portal.office.com/account/?ref=MeControl 

Figure: My Account shows the licenses you own

Help me to use Office365 groups in SharePoint Online

See the below text from our document on how to set up the security ourselves

Context 

Whenever you create a Site Collection, two O365 groups get created (xxx-Owners and xxx-Members). For retro-compatibility, these O365 groups are automatically added to the SharePoint groups at creation time.  

Figure: SharePoint Advanced Permission setup – 3 traditional SharePoint Groups 
Figure: “Members” SharePoint group has exactly one member – the Office 365 Group 
Figure: “Owners” SharePoint group is Empty!

(Note for SharePoint gurus: O365-xxx-Members is mapped to SharePoint-xxx-members, but O365-xxx-Owners is mapped to… Site Collection Administrators! Crazy.) 

Figure: “Site Collection Administrators” are mapped to The Site Owners Office 365 Group 

SharePoint membership grants access to SharePoint resources, while access to Teams features (Channels, tabs, apps) is controlled directly via O365 groups.  

Problem 

The problem with this model is we cannot add AD (Active Directory) groups (or even O365 groups) within O365 groups (no nesting allowed). So, if we want to give access to two different sites to the same people (say SSWDevelopers), we must add ALL MEMBERS manually on EACH generated O365 group. That is ridiculous, and hard to maintain long term. 

Make ‘more information’ data on exported audit logs in multiple columns

From the audit result, if you double-click a line and then click “More information”, here is what you see :

Figure: audit log results detail panel after clicking “more info”

Which is great! A lot of useful information in there!

However, if you export the Audit result, here is what you get :

Figure: audit log results exported to excel

The whole “More information” data is a single column !!

It is indeed easy to format but requires extra work, and is not ideal.

Suggestion: make these information extra columns in the export!

Show the source Site Collection on search results

Consider this search result:

Figure: audit log results

When I click on “Details” (or double click), I can see :

Figure: audit log results detail panel

This is terribly misleading ! The source is displayed as “/Shared Documents/xxx”, which I assumed being “sswcom.sharepoint.com/Shared Documents/xxx”, but is in fact “sswcom.sharepoint.com/sites/SSWNetworkAdmins/Shared Documents/xxx”. The displayed path is indeed relative, but relative to the site collection, not the whole tenant. Which is misleading in a “unified” log (where results can come from pretty much any site collection).

Suggestion: I would love to have options to:

  1. See the source Site Collection
  2. Filter down & sort by Site Collection