I wasn’t aware that Microsoft has built a solution, that simply allows any Power User to create their own, very functional conversational bot. I was always thinking, that creation of bots requires programming knowledge and therefore somehow is out of my radar, but it turns out I was wrong.
In the first part of the series I wrote a general overview of Message and Adaptive Cards, their brief history and purpose. This part is focused only on Message Cards – the technology from which it all begun and that is still available to use although recommendation is to move to Adaptive Cards.
This post is not about solving problems. Or business real life case-studies. This post is about what can you do with tools from Office 365 suite. I am documenting here the solution I built to make my home a little smart and to make my life easier.
Although it has been repeatedly said that the history of InfoPath is over, for many companies still building workflows’ forms using InfoPath is as obvious as using Excel. However, when doing that in Office 365 and SharePoint Online the product’s boundaries are really visible and are becoming a real pain.
I’ve been struggling some time ago with an issue related to the workflow’s instance size (here), what was directly related to the size of the InfoPath form together with attached files. The obvious solution I was thinking then was moving those attachments away from the form, into a dedicated SharePoint library, but I wasn’t able to do that easily mainly because of the algorithm that is used in InfoPath to handle file attachments.
The article is a continuation of the post describing creation of a simple newsletter using SharePoint Designer 2013, written here and the other one using Nintex Workflow for Office 365, written here. This time I would like to show, how the similar solution can be made using Microsoft Flow and SharePoint Online.
I was working on my newsletter’s solution, aimed to automatically send prepared messages hosted in my SharePoint. Naturally, newsletters often contain images. Lots of them frankly speaking. The most straightforward approach was to insert them as a URL to the physical file stored in SharePoint (described here). However, in that approach, if a recipient has no access to the site, where the file is hosted or is not yet logged in, the images won’t show up.
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.