Microsoft Teams – Help me create a Team without a sensitivity label

By Warwick Leahy in Microsoft, Teams 0 Comment

Update – Microsoft has fixed this issue in the latest version of Teams v2 (24152.405.2925.6762)

The new Microsoft Teams app is a huge improvement over the older version. However, there is currently one serious fault.

A new Team should not automatically apply a ‘Sensitivity label’ unless a “Compliance policy” sets it as the default.

In the new Teams app only, when creating a Team, it cannot be created without a “Sensitivity label”.

Figure: See the red box – New team defaults to “Private – Sensitive-Accounting Documents” | Click to change

Figure: Choose 'None' Sensitivity | Click Public
Figure: In the Sensitivity Label dropdown | Choose ‘None’ | Click Public to close this window

Figure: See the red box - Team will be created with a Sensitivity label
Figure: Blocked – See the red box – Team will be created as Public with a sensitivity label that only a few people can read

Microsoft Forms – Make it easy to see that a question has branching logic

By Adam Cogan in Microsoft, Microsoft Forms 0 Comment

We run forms frequently and this morning we had a problem. There was a question with branching logic enabled and this caused a couple of issues:

  • It didn’t show the last few questions of the form that I expected to be there (so I thought that there was a bug)
  • When I checked the form by going into the editor, all the questions were there
  • I assumed that there was branching logic in the form but all the questions only had an option to “add branching” which I interpreted as there was no branching configured
Figure: I had to click through a lot of questions to work out that I had branching turned on for 1 question, which caused ½ my form to be invisible

Suggestion #1: Add an option to add a progress bar to the form so that people completing the form know that there may be more questions

Figure: I can’t submit the form because question #7 has branching logic, hide the submit button and add a progress bar in the red box

Suggestion #2: When a question has branching turned on, make it obvious for the person editing the form

  1. Change dropdown text from:

Add branching

                To

Edit branching

  1. Add an icon to the bottom bar so that you don’t have to drill down to discover that the question has branching
Figure: Make it obvious that a question has branching turned on so I don’t need to drill into “more settings”

Microsoft Outlook – Help me understand when emails are from other mailboxes

By Adam Cogan in Outlook 0 Comment

A cool feature of Outlook is when somebody is on holidays, you can access their mailboxes. An uncool feature is in the UX, it combines all emails when you are using the view of “Show as Conversations”.

For example, in the UX, a thread groups all emails from different mailboxes, regardless of who the email was sent to. This causes confusion as you assume the email was sent to you.

Suggestion: Microsoft Outlook should change its logic and not include the emails from other mailboxes in the Conversation view.

❌Bad Example – Outlook groups an email from Stephan’s mailbox into Jimmy’s conversation

Help me kindly know I am not connected to the internet

By Adam Cogan in Teams 0 Comment

I wish all Microsoft applications behaved the same when offline. 

Ideally, they would all have a black bar (or reverse when in dark mode), when they had reduced functionality.

I am on a plane with no wifi…

⚠️This new green message when you are offline, is pretty unfriendly:

❌ Figure: Bad example – Don’t say “server error” when I didn’t do anything wrong
✅ Figure: Good example – Tell me I have no internet connection

Dynamics 365 – Help me delete appointments from Outlook

By Chris Schultz in Dynamics, Microsoft 0 Comment

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is a really useful tool for integrating Dynamics 365 and Outlook, especially for tracking appointments. However, it could be improved to make it even better!

Cancelling an appointment in Outlook should delete the appointment in Dynamics 365

If an appointment is tracked to Dynamics 365, there are 2 steps required to remove it:
– Untrack and delete from the Dynamics 365 App
– Cancel the appointment

There should be a way to delete the appointment in Dynamics 365 when it is cancelled – either as a popup each time you cancel in Outlook, or as a global setting in Dynamics 365.

This would potentially solve another issue – currently, it is not possible to track/untrack single occurrences of a series of appointments. If cancelling an appointment in Outlook also deleted it from Dynamics 365, then a single occurrence could also be deleted that way.

Figure: Outlook | Dynamics 365 App | “Recurring appointment occurrence cannot be tracked”

Help me keep Passwordless sign-in as my default method

By Chris Schultz in Azure AD, Microsoft 0 Comment

Passwordless sign-in with the Microsoft Authenticator app is a great solution for signing in with MFA, while removing our reliance on passwords – as per: Do you use MFA instead of typing a password?

However, occasionally something goes wrong with Passwordless sign-in, and a password needs to be entered. When this happens, the default sign-in method switches to using a password and the Authenticator app, and users don’t bother to (or don’t know how to) change it back.

There should be a way to set Passwordless as the default sign-in method, so that even if a password is entered once, the next time a sign-in happens it goes back to using Passwordless.

Figure: Nowhere to set a default sign-in method

Help me customize Azure Access Review emails

By Adam Cogan in Azure, Microsoft 0 Comment

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

Improve the collaboration breakdown by having clear numbers

By Tiago Araujo in Viva Insights 0 Comment

Currently we see the data about emails and chats in minutes (that is hard to convey)

I would prefer to have the numbers of:

  • Emails sent/received
  • Chat messages sent/received

Another good info to have would be how people react to chat messages, showing the number of:

  • Positive reactions (thumbs up, love, smile)
  • Negative reactions (thumbs down, angry face)
Figure: What does 37 minutes over emails mean?

Help me see when a patch has failed

By Chris Schultz in ManageEngine, Patch Manager Plus 0 Comment

Patch Manager Plus is a great product, saving time and improving security by automatically installing updates for Windows and third-party applications. Read more about it here: Do you automate update and patch management?

Each time an automatic deployment is run, an email notification is sent with a report of the patches installed. However, it can be easy to miss if there have been any failed patches since there is nothing to make them stand out. Additionally, there is no way to edit the email template that is used.

❌ Figure: Bad example – The failed patch does not stand out at all

If the text was red and a ❌ emoji was added, it would make it clearer that a patch has failed:

✅ Figure: Good example – it’s obvious that a patch has failed, and action is required.

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

By Adam Cogan in Delve, Microsoft, Microsoft Forms 0 Comment

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