January 13, 2021

Add a security group as hubbers using PowerShell

Today I needed to add a security group to “People who can associate sites with this hub” through PowerShell. Here is quick how-to. I usually say “hubbers” instead of the long “People who….”. By the way, if you want to know what prerequisites there are for being a hubber, read my other blog post

Infographics. Who can associate a site with a hub

An example of how to add a security group is missing in the MS Docs:

January 8, 2021

Own praise badges in Teams

While reading the Teams News recap from December 2020, I found one thing that caught my attention particularly: Custom Praise Badges in Teams. Let’s try this. But first, those badges are the default ones:

They are good starting point. But to take it a step further, to really engage people and praise, you need some specific badges that mean something for your company.

To add a new badge all you have to do is to go to Teams Admin (obviously it requires you having the Teams Administrator Role):

January 6, 2021

Two workarounds for overcoming the listview threshold

These are two workarounds to see documents / list items in a view that exceeds the listview threshold of 5000 items.

Overcoming the listview threshold is as fun as succeeding in the limbo games.

This is changing all the time. When you read this, it might have changed. Today, 2021-01-05, me and my colleague found following two workarounds for listing over 5000 items in a list view in SharePoint Online:

December 17, 2020

Teams incoming webhooks for performance monitoring

Incoming webhooks in Teams are great, indeed. Last week I saw this tweet, which inspired me to share one of our webhooks.

There are many scenarios where it can be used, I would also like to share one of our scenarios: notifying our DevOps team about performance issues in SharePoint Online, detected through Exoprise.

This adaptive card (in Swedish) shows an alarm from Exoprise about login problems.

November 26, 2020

MagicMirror2 and Chuvash

This post is about my setup of the popular MagicMirror2 application. I show the steps needed to set it up on a Raspberry Pi Zero W and connect it to a TV set. As a bonus, I share my thoughts on the Chuvash localization work.

MagicMirror2 is a DIY project and an open-source application, voted to number one of the best Raspberry Pi Projects. In essence, it shows information of your choice (weather, calendar, news) on a screen that is embedded in a mirror.

November 6, 2020

Two site logos?

We have had troubles updating site icons in SharePoint Online. It might be related to one of the following:

It occures only on hub sites
The sites have a custom theme

The error message:

We experienced a problem updating the icon. Please try again in a few minutes.

But what I found is that there are two places where you change the site icon. If the first does not work, try the second one, that was what worked for us:

October 27, 2020

DIY: Integrating Trådfri lights with Teams presence

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).

October 23, 2020

Mass remove live photo videos

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):

October 21, 2020

Flashing Trådfri lights on Azure Alerts

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 😎:

October 16, 2020

Setting up a HelloWorld Azure Alert

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.