M.S. Lavieri

Who is an App available for you to use in Teams that gives you the ability to search for anyone in your organization. At the time of writing this Who is at version 0.2 so features are likely to change. You may have noticed this app if you've ever clicked the ellipsis in Teams, or perhaps you didn't even know there are apps instead of Teams that you can use. The goal of this post will to get you familiar with Teams and hopefully give you a few reason to use it in your every day work lives. For starters, what is Who? The app description states that you can "search for anyone in your organization based on what they're working on, who they work with, and more." However that does not provide a great explanation of all it can do. Yes, with Who you can search for people by attributes that have listed in their User Profile including their skills, manager, and also pull in details from the Graph such as the people they work. But the real value of who is how the informa...

Every week I'll be posting a quick summary of O365 updates included in the admin weekly digest email that you can sign up for via the admin Message Center:  https://admin.microsoft.com/AdminPortal/Home#/MessageCenter  -these emails include items posted to the message center over the last week and come out every Monday. Lots of updates and reminders to some already talked about features this week. The one I am most excited about is the new site branding and mega menu navigation (Roadmap IDs 33131 , 33132 , 33138 , 43781 ). The rollout for this feature was pushed back a bit but is now rolling out. There has also been a delay in the rollout for SharePoint reminders based on date fields ( Roadmap ID 34267 ), and the new icons for the waffle which are rolling out soon as well ( Roadmap ID 45441 ). The updates this week also sent reminders for the Planner Notifications in a Teams activity feed that was covered last week ( Roadmap ID 45878 ), as well as the opt-in toggle for ...

Every week I'll be posting a quick summary of O365 updates included in the admin weekly digest email that you can sign up for via the admin Message Center:  https://admin.microsoft.com/AdminPortal/Home#/MessageCenter  -these emails include items posted to the message center over the last week and come out every Monday. Last week was a busy one for M365 announcements, lots of updates around OneDrive, a few updates to Teams, and some Major Update notifications. Starting with OneDrive, OOTB flow templates are coming to OneDrive (Roadmap ID 45703 ) , so if you’re keeping all of your personal documents in the cloud (which you should be) you can now easily run flows on them with these new templates. OneDrive is also getting a new mass delete notification if you are using the OneDrive sync client and since you can also use the sync client for SharePoint document library, you’ll be seeing this update on the SharePoint side as well (Roadmap ID 31754) Teams and Planner are...

PowerApps is a great way to easily customize the new, edit, and/or display forms of list items in SharePoint online. In some cases you may also want to pull in items from another list with items related via a lookup column. In this blog I will discuss the steps to use a gallery control to pull in these related items. This blog assumes that you have a working knowledge of using PowerApps to customize a list form, if not you can view some information on getting started with PowerApps here:  https://powerapps.microsoft.com/ro-ro/blog/microsoft-powerapps-learning-resources/ Starting with a PowerApps customized list form, from the PowerApps canvas select 'Insert' from the ribbon and select one of the Gallery controls. I'll be using Vertical for this demo. From the Data pane select add data source to connect to the list you would look to pull in data from. Note: This can be any list or library in SharePoint so while lookup columns are site specific if you use something l...

Every week I'll be posting a quick summary of O365 updates included in the admin weekly digest email that you can sign up for via the admin Message Center:  https://admin.microsoft.com/AdminPortal/Home#/MessageCenter  -these emails include items posted to the message center over the last week and come out every Monday. Quite the exiting week with 3 major updates and the rolling out of the new icons but the change I'm most excited about is the O365 Video to Stream opt-in migration. In my opinion everyone on O365 should be using Stream for all of their videos. The automatic captioning and facial recognition features make it arguable the most powerful video players on the web and are everyone's most talked about when I demo video capabilities on O365. Now with the opt-in migration you can easily get off Video Hub if you are currently using it. (Roadmap ID 44019) Moving on to the major updates included this week. Microsoft is moving Staff Hub functionality into Teams, makin...

You were once a beginner too While it may seem like some people were born with a SharePoint silver spoon in their mouths I try to remind myself that everyone had to start somewhere and that everyone is starting their O365/SharePoint journey at different times. So even if something was first announced years ago someone may be discovering it for the first time today. Blogs and Twitter today are usually focused on what's new and exciting and sometimes gloss over very useful resources because "everyone should know about it." So while I love to talk about what's new and exciting, from time to time I'll take a step back and try to get you the information you need to have the best experience in the O365/SharePoint worlds. So if you're just starting to get in the O365/SharePoint world beyond just being an end user you may be wondering how to get started, well lucky for you Microsoft has great communities build around the two great O365 tracks with different intere...

Every week I'll be posting a quick summary of O365 updates included in the admin weekly digest email that you can sign up for via the admin Message Center:  https://admin.microsoft.com/AdminPortal/Home#/MessageCenter -these emails include items posted to the message center over the last week and come out every Monday. To be honest I wish the first one of these that I did was more exciting but here we are. The most exciting one for this week is arguable that mail reads will now be enabled by default in the Exchange Online mailbox auditing. I've guess I'll always have a sweet spot for audit tools after the " Magic Unicorn Tool " was exposed then killed off in the summer of 2018 but it's good to see Microsoft working on tools to help admins track and surface user activities. ( Roadmap ID 32224 ) Moving to the desktop, in mid-January 64-bit office will be set as the default for Office ProPlus and Office 2019 installations. If you're a Mac user, OneDrive F...

I'm sure many of you have listened to the Intrazone's December 2018 Roadmap Pitstop podcast  by now and if you haven't I highly recommend doing so, it does a great job talking about what's to SharePoint online in the coming months. But I wanted to take some time to talk about the one thing that I am most excited about in early 2019 - Page Designs. For those that don't know Page Designs are basically Page Layouts or a Page Template for the Modern UI, you can set a standard look and feel for all of the content on a page including webparts and placeholder content. More information here:  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?featureid=33136&rtc=1 So why am I excited about this? News and articles. From what I've seen at our clients news is one of the biggest reasons they do not want to move to the Modern UI since there is currently not a way to standardized the look and feel of a page. Yes Modern allows you to easily create and publish news,...

I will try to keep it short and simple. I'm Matt Lavieri and I'll be blogging about Microsoft products such as O365 and SharePoint, plus some 3rd party tools that you will likely encounter in the space. At the time of writing this I'm a Manager at Protiviti specializing in O365, but my journey with Microsoft actually began 10 years ago when I was a high school student working at my local Best Buy. At this job I would get my first Microsoft recognition through their ExpertZone program for retail associates. Then in college I served as Microsoft Student Partner and eventually a Senior Student Partner through Microsoft's MSP program. From there I started working as a SharePoint consultant at Protiviti where I've been exposed to the many iterations for SharePoint from 2007 to its current form in Office 365 and just about everything in between. So here were are, I hope you find this blog helpful, or at least a bit entertaining. You can follow me on twitter @mslavie...