Posts
11 Things I learned about chat bots in Teams
Recently we developed and published a chat bot in Power Virtual Agents for Teams (PVAforTeams). I would like to share my takes and lessons learned with you.
#1 Easy to edit, fun to work with Bots in PVAforTeams are no-code solutions and provide a comprehensive graphical interface. Developers, analysts, business representatives can work together on defining topics, user flows. It has been really fun to shape the bot in a group - with a lot of laughter and interesting discussions about users’ work habits and how users search and find information.
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My WSL Setup
This is my installation of Windows WSL and SharePoint Development Environment. The procedure and technology is ever-changing, the details might change, but the process is worth documenting, at least for myself, this is a working guide as of writing (2021-12-20).
Installing Windows Terminal Installing Windows Terminal is not a prerequisite, but it will make your life much easier. Open Windows Store and search for Windows Terminal and click on Install.
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Export AppendOnly Comments
Remember the old comments in SharePoint Lists? I am sure there are tons of lists that use the Append-Only Comments. They are implemented using versioning. The problem is that it is hard to export the comments, unless you know the tricks. The trick I want to share comes from a colleague of mine. The reason why we need export all the comments is that we need to document and save/archive the decision making process that took place in the comments field.
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New Home for My Blog
Hello World Now I have moved my blog. chuvash.eu is a static site. I’ll share more details and insights later.
Update 2022-02-10 It has passed a few months since the move from Wordpress to a static site. Now it is time to summarize the insights.
Why I moved Here are the reasons why I switched from Wordpress.com to a static site
To be honest, the main reason was that I was curious about static sites.
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A powershell script for activating an eligible role assignment in Azure AD
Recently my role assignments in Azure AD were switched from permanent to eligible ones. This is part of PIM - Privileged Identity Management, you can read more about it on MS Docs:
Start using Privileged Identity Management To activate your eligible assignment you can use Azure Portal, Graph API, and PowerShell. The activation in the portal and Graph API is described on MS Docs:
Activate my Azure AD roles in PIM My roles within Privileged Identity Management in Azure Portal
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Sites.Selected and Governance
The new permission in Graph API - Sites.Selected - is a step in the right direction. Since long we have been looking for ways of scoping the accesses to live up to the least privilege principle. It was either nothing or everything. I have tried out the new Sites.Selected permission and here are my findings.
First of all, if you haven’t heard about Sites.Selected, please visit these pages to find out more.
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Smarter way of loading SharePoint CSOM dll in PowerShell
Have you also got a legacy powershell script that loads SharePoint dlls and runs CSOM code directly? It’s quite easy to convert to PnP PowerShell. But if you run out of time and just need to execute the script, then I have a quick tip for you.
First of all, a CSOM script can be recognized by Add-Type commands (or Import-Module) plus the SharePoint dll paths.
Loading the dll the old way.
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A cost effective way of running legacy scripts in the cloud
Have you also got some old huge scripts that run on a server locally? Have you also considered moving them to the cloud? Here comes an idea of how to do it quickly and easy.
In my case I have some older powershell scripts that are harder to convert to serverless applications:
They use MSOnline module in PowerShell, hence they require rewriting to AzureAD before using them in an Azure Function They take around 15 minutes to complete, Azure Functions Consumption Plan is limited to 10 minutes.
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Monitoring Microsoft 365 using Raspberry Pi and M365 CLI
I would like to show you my recent hobby project with a raspberry pi, a unicorn phat and the powerful cli-microsoft365: A simple monitoring solution of Microsoft 365 Services.
Status of some important services in Microsoft 365
In essence, I put the unicorn phat onto the raspberry pi zero w and wrote this python script:
unicorn03_m365.py The python script checks the service status every five minutes and shows it with colors on the unicorn phat.
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Git Merge develop to main in an Azure DevOps Release
This post is a techy one. It’s about running git commands in Azure DevOps Releases in order to finalize a deployment job to production.
Let me first describe our scenario: We use Azure DevOps for code and for deployment. Our branch strategy a simplified Gitflow model, where all the current work is merged to the “develop” branch. The code from the “develop” branch is then built and released to staging environments and production.