Microsoft Forms is a simple tool, that allows to create pools and quizzes and of course – collect responses. First it was created for educational purposes. Microsoft claims it was a result of the request from the tutors and students, as they needed a tool to easy create questionnaires and track responses.
The topic is repeatedly discussed over the years. It doesn’t really rely on any specific IT system. Even more – the user adoption is a common word describing how fast and how likely users are getting familiar with and accept a new product, innovation, etc… Not in IT exclusively. It really applies to every segment of the market, where a product or service is being sold to the end-user. The faster user “buys” it, the faster ROI rises.
During the Collaboration Summit that has recently took place in Zagreb, I’ve attended Jussi Mori’s seminar where he was talking about that topic, trying to evaluate reasons for which users do not want to easily adopt new things and ways to help them working it out. This presentation inspired me to make a little more research on the topic, what resulted in writing this post.
Nevertheless, the post is going to be about the user adoption in IT especially, moreover – it will apply to the Microsoft products. To be even more precise – to SharePoint and the whole Office 365.
This year’s Collaboration Summit in Zagreb has just ended, but comments related to the event are still showing on Twitter (look yourself here). I was present at the event for the first time and even though, that many of the news that were presented had already been announced during the SP Virtual Summit (here), I found it very worth to be there. Presenters were making many “deep dives” into the new features being ahead of us in Office 365. Especially Dan Holme showed a live demo of how the new Communication Sites and refreshed Team Sites are going to look like and how the content authoring is going to change.
Recently ended video-conference “SharePoint Virtual Summit” (https://resources.office.com/ww-landing-sharepoint-virtual-summit-2017) confirmed rumors regarding upcoming changes and direction of the development Microsoft is planning for Office 365, in terms of “Digital Workplace” – a space dedicated for the employees, providing them with all necessary tools to make their work more efficient and comfy.
Microsoft is focusing mostly on the following products in these terms:
In my opinion this is where the most interesting changes are foreseen.
In Nintex 2010, 2013 and 2016 for SharePoint (Standard version even) on-premise of course, there was a possibility to use Excel Services to query and work with the xlsx and xls files’ data. However, in Sharepoint Online there is no such powerful mechanism (well, there are Excel Services available via REST API, but it doesn’t provide that much functionality). Moreover Nintex products for SharePoint Online (neither Nintex Workflow Cloud nor Nintex for Office 365) don’t have any “OOTB” actions that would fill that gap. So in the end, there is no straightforward way to achieve it. So how can I import (and preferably automate it) data from XLSX file into SharePoint?
The most common workaround is to convert the xlsx file into a plain, csv file and then to work with the data from the file using collections (I will write about it in second post).
Recently I have realized, that there is a set of Excel actions in Microsoft Flow! All of us, who has SharePoint Online, has also a free version of Flow available.
Recently I’ve been involved in that project, where data and information that was being created for years in on premise SharePoints had to be migrated to the Sharepoint Online environment in Office 365. All migration was said to be a simple, straightforward and easy due to the usage of Sharegate, but… the real truth turned out to be way more dark.
Before the real migration started I sat down and started reading about the process and possible obstacles. I can now divide them into 3 groups:
First things first. I will guide you through all and each from them.
Recently I started playing around with the Nintex O365 Workflow REST API (http://help.nintex.com/en-us/sdks/sdko365/). Although not everything is possible (as saving new workflows), because web request action does not support passing of binary strings and cuts off null bytes (0x00), so the passed file is found by the API as incorrect BUT first thing I faced during my exercise was: HOW TO OBTAIN FedAuth security cookie?
I read articles, reviewed Stackverflow forums and similar looking for an answer how to achieve it using JavaScript. I was a bit upset with the results but then I found this precious article: Remote authentication in SharePoint Online | … And All That JS and everything went clear on how to obtain the cookie inside Nintex Workflow.
The following post is showing how to obtain 3 important security variables, that SharePoint requires from requester to “trust”: