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

Help me find the Teams that contain my forms

By Piers Sinclair in Microsoft Forms 0 Comment

When I navigate to https://forms.microsoft.com I see all the Microsoft Teams. Even ones, with no Forms in them, or which have been inactive forever. That’s a lot of visual noise.

Moreover, the Teams seem to be randomly ordered.  It would be nice if they were ordered by last updated by default and we could choose a different ordering (e.g. Alphabetical) if we wanted.

Help me be able to find the team easier by 

  • Hiding Teams with 0 forms
  • Allowing Teams to be ordered by last updated and alphabetically.
Figure: See red box – There are a bunch of teams with 0 forms, they should all be hidden by default!

Automatically move a Microsoft Form created from a template into a Team

By Piers Sinclair in Microsoft Forms 0 Comment

When I create a Microsoft Form from a template, I must follow an arduous process to get the Form into the right team so we can track the data.

First, it goes into my personal teams, then I must move it to a team, then I need to add it to a tab, then I must move the excel file to the folder I want!

Instead, there should be an option to choose which team and folder the form goes in.

See this video for the current steps, I’m proposing that most of these steps should be automated:

Figure: Save me from teaching people to do all these steps because they never remember!

Help me see a leaderboard

By Piers Sinclair in Viva Insights 0 Comment

When I look at Microsoft Viva Insights, I can see the people I communicate most with, but not whether it’s going up or down over time.

I want to see the trend so I know who I should spend some more time with.

It should show how far up or down someone has moved, similar to a leaderboard.

Figure: The gain or loss arrow gives a nice indicator of change in position
Figure: I should be able to see who has done more or less communication this month

Help me see sparklines in the drilldown

By Piers Sinclair in Viva Insights 0 Comment

When I look at Microsoft Viva Insights, I can see the people I communicate most with, but not whether it’s going up or down over time.

I want to see the trend so I know who I should spend some more time with.

When you drill down into someone’s communication habits we should see 3 spark lines

  • For email
  • For meetings
  • For calls and chats
Figure: Sparklines are great for giving a drilled down view
Figure: I should be able to see a trend of communication habits via sparklines 

Help me order results by the order we define the options in

By Piers Sinclair in Microsoft Forms 0 Comment

I think this would be affecting every Microsoft Forms customer who reads the results. 
When I look at results on the Microsoft Form, they can be ordered alphabetically, or by user, or by date filled. However, I cannot order them by the order I wrote the original questions in.

Therefore, I currently solve this by prefixing every question with a number, so it orders by the number.

Instead, there should be an option to sort by the order of the options (and it should be the default order).

Figure: As a workaround, we use numbers to order by option type, but it would be better if this was built-in