What if you put together Work From Home and Home Automation? Well, removing the common denominator (HOME) would mean Work Automation (sic!). I want to tell you about a tiny hobby project I have had at home, still related to work of mine: Whenever an Azure alert is triggered, my Trådfri smart light from IKEA flashes for a couple of seconds. Summary (if you want to skip the long story below): The solution is a tiny web application.

Azure Alerts are awesome for monitoring of solutions in Azure. If you are about to set up your first Alert Rules in Azure, then it’s a guide for you. Configuring alert rules can be quite intimidating at first, with all the options, metrics, evaluation times, etc. Here is a very very simple setup that can serve as a teaser and help you get started with the Azure Alerts. I’ll use Teams as an easy way to set up notifications.

When you rename a site, a new site is REDIRECTSITE#0, you can get all the sites of that type by running Get-SPOSite -Template REDIRECTSITE#0 Please consider some caveats with renaming a site url Effects of changing a site address, MSDocs

Original image by William Warby. https://www.flickr.com/photos/wwarby/16414155179/in/photostream/ Sites in SharePoint are created all the time, not only for SharePoint, but also as storage for Yammer, Teams, Planner and other services in Microsoft 365. There are ways to keep track of them, but the ability to automatically detect a new site creation is quite appealing. Automatic detection means a trigger of a Power Automate (Flow) or a Logic App. There are a few blog posts that exactly describe how you can detect when a new site is created in SharePoint Online:

I found this nice post and a nice decision flowchart. Intelogy. Who can associate a site to a SharePoint Hub Low resolution, visit the post to see more. I also have drawed a simple chart while explaining for my colleagues, you can see it above. I hope this infographics can be useful to more people. By the way, we use the word “Hubber” (sv. Hubbare) for “People who can associate sites to hubs”

Github has changed a lot. While working mostly in Azure DevOps I haven’t followed all the development on Github. Now when I look at that, I am really amazed. Private Repos for Free accounts Well, for me it is not as interesting, because with my free account, I don’t see any harm having my labs public. But I know, some people used bitbucket for their smaller private repos. Github Project I suppose it is the Azure DevOps Project concept that was copied to Github, a place for planning and having multiple connected repos.

Nowadays a Yammer Community gets a corresponding Microsoft 365 Group (Office 365 Group, Unified Group). In your work as an SPO Admin, you might need to differentiate “ordinary” Modern Team Sites from those ones that were created for a Yammer Community. They both have GROUP#0 as Template. On the actual SPO Site object, there is nothing that you can use to differentiate those. Neither you can use the Office 365 Group information.

Have you also got many sites in your tenant? Write-Progress is the bare minimum in a script that goes through all sites. But there is also another nice way to make easier to see the progress - estimated completion time. Although the idea comes from another blog post (My life is a message), I thought it could be worth sharing it again, especially in the cloud context. Here is a bit simplified scenario: Getting information for every site.

Have you had a PowerShell script that contains two bigger arrays and you wanted merge the information. It can become quite slow if you need to search for every item from array A through all items in array B. The solution is called a HashTable! It might be not an advanced tip for some, but I was really glad to see a huge improvement, so I decided to share it as a post.

While trying to set up a new Home Site, I discovered that there is a tool (browser extension) called Page Diagnostics for SharePoint. After running this, I tried that command again and it was smart enough to detect the problem the tool discovered. Also Network Trace is available. Network trace Page Diagnostics Tool is defnitely a tool to have in the troubleshooting toolbelt for SharePoint. Setting up a Home Site Here is the script: