It seems that Work from Home (WFH) is here to stay, it’s okay. I’d say, Work from a Smart Home is even more okay. To me, Home Automation (HA) and Work from Home (WFH) are really two peas in a pod.

Today’s “guest” is a tiny application that I’ve set up on my raspberry pi to listen to my presence (status) in Teams and show it with colors of my smart RGB light (IKEA Trådfri).

While importing images from my iPhone using Image Capture on my mac, I discovered that almost all pictures had corresponding videos. They had the same name, only the file extension was different:

• IMG_2829.JPG
• IMG_2829.MOV

For archiving I don’t to have live photo videos, that’s why I needed a script for that. I found a good start in an answer on SuperUser.stackexchange.com:

• OSX Command line Find Duplicate Filenames with different extensions

I altered it a bit to remove the corresponding .MOV-file (rm):

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. The publicly accessible url, exposed using ngrok, is registered as a webhook in an Azure Alert. It’s on Github, you’re welcome to use it as you please 😎:

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.

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. But there is a way: if you connect to Exchange Online and get the group from there, then there is something useful.

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. The status message in Write-Progress contains also the estimated completion time.