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Office 365 Groups vs Microsoft Teams

Office 365 Groups vs Microsoft Teams, comparision and misconceptions

Office 365 Groups are a quite old concept. They were first introduced somewhere in 2014, but since then the concept developed, from a simple Shared Mailbox, into a tool dedicated for collaboration between employees. Then, in November 2016 Microsoft Teams went public what… brought a lot of confusion on users’ faces. I guess this confusion is still present.

I this post I am not trying to explain when to use what, but to compare those two products to show you their capabilities and… to help you answer on your own, which tool to use when.

Communication Sites – where are they?

Yesterday I was crawling Twitter being a bit upset, that I cannot find any mark of the new Communication Sites. It was said, that my tenant must be set to be in “First release” to get that new feature before anyone else in the world. So I did it. But still, no sign.

Then I read somewhere, that it cannot be the “First release for everyone”, but “First release for selected users”! Go to https://portal.office.com/adminportal/home#/companyprofile and change “Release preferences” indicating your account as one from the selected users.

Microsoft Stream

Microsoft Stream – what kind of app is that?

Earlier this month (20th of June) Microsoft Stream, the new application in the Office 365 family, became Generally Available. Many users are still in doubt because that is not very clear how this app is positioned to the Office 365 Video actually. The answer however is quite simple – many organizations demand having a secure and trusty storage to keep and stream multimedia files – which are in fact the largest files organizations are working with.

I hate SharePoint IT frustration

User Adoption issues in SharePoint and Office 365

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.

Collaboration Summit 2017 Promo image

European Collaboration Summit 2017 – Recap

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.

Nintex Workflow Cloud Xtensions

Xtensions – Nintex Workflow Cloud is becoming expansible

It has already been announced couple of months ago, during the Nintex InspireX conference in New Orleans, in February this year, by Vadim Tabakam and Brad Orluk during their presentation “Extensibility on the Nintex Workflow Platform” and later on Nintex Blog.

The new, cool feature (that now is in beta preview), called “extensibility framework”. The tool that is allowing customers to add to the Nintex Workflow Cloud a custom REST API endpoints, that are “encapsulated” into ready-to-use actions. How does it work?

Nintex Pricing Revised

Nintex licensing models revised

Nintex subscription based pricing model is evolving since the beginning (since July 2016, when it was first announced). In January 2017 it has had it’s first major update. That time Nintex introduced such changes, as:

  1. No more workflow action limits (before it was 50 per workflow)
  2. Increased allocation of Dev/Test Workflows and Forms
  3. The new Grace Period Policy allowing customers to use Nintex for 60 days without being charged
  4. The Nintex Cloud Accelerator Program (NCAP) was introduced
  5. Small workflows (5 or less actions, no “Start a workflow” action inside) are not counted

Office 365 – Roadmap for 2017

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.

How to: Import data from XLSX file into SharePoint Online using Nintex

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.