Do you agree that products always have room for improvement?
"Every day there are little things in software that we find annoying. Some write books about it, like Annoyances.org, but I thought this site would be more constructive.
BetterSoftwareSuggestions.com is proudly maintained by myself and the developers at SSW."
- Adam Cogan 
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:
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.
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
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).
When it comes to software, user experience is paramount. One area that could benefit from improvement is the way we handle ‘My Access’ approvals.
Current Experience
When someone requests access, the recipient gets a detailed email with a neat table. This table clearly shows who requested what access and their reasons for doing so.
Room for Improvement
However, when it comes to approval notifications, the details are missing. The recipient only knows that the access was approved but doesn’t see who approved it or why. To find this information, they have to click a link and navigate through the history to locate the specific approval.
Suggestion
It would significantly enhance the user experience if the approval email could directly provide these details, similar to the access request email. This change would offer users a consistent experience, reduce the number of steps to find information, and increase overall efficiency.
TinaCMS is awesome and has the best editor. It can be used on a public site like www.ssw.com.au where the users are known and will be added to the database.
However for a public site like SSW Rules www.ssw.com.au/rules where users are _any_ github users, then the problem is each user needs to be added to the database _before_ they can make any changes.
FYI – TinaCMS also has the issue of not allowing GitHub users to directly contribute to the content repo like what NetlifyCMS and Keystatic allow. This means no more GitHub green squares!!
Note: Similar products such as NetlifyCMS (aka DecapCMS now) do not have this limitation, nor does Keystatic.
The Approvals app is great for simple scenarios like purchase approvals and event attendance approvals.
There is a problem with more complex approvals. Say you need approvals from 2 out of 5 designated people, then validation stops this from being done.
The current validation does not allow the same person to be in multiple approver groups. This validation should be removed.
There are other solutions that allow this such as www.KissFlow.com and www.integrify.com
Suggestion:
The Microsoft Teams Approvals App should allow the same individual user to appear in multiple approver groups.
This modification would give the flexibility to allow more complex approval scenarios.
At SSW we are rolling out the use of the Approvals App with Teams to get requests approved through the organization. I love how easy it is to create templates and use them to submit requests. Previously we were using emails to manage these approvals, so another benefit is a reduction of noise across our collective inboxes.
Once an approval is submitted there is no way to alter the data. While this makes sense for requests that have been approved, it would be great if we could edit requested approvals prior to being approved. Currently, the only way we can do this is submit another request which means manually entering all information again which takes time.
Workaround:
Suggestion:
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:
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.
