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Showing posts with the label SharePoint

Data Sovereignty Coming to Microsoft 365

 It's been a minute, but I am back with some absolutely exciting news. Just the other day, I came across an announcement that is sure to send shockwaves through the Microsoft 365 community - the implementation of Microsoft 365 Local: Microsoft's answer to keeping your M365 data sovereign. Over the past little while, more and more companies and organizations have been pivoting towards local alternatives to Microsoft 365 as the lines between data ownership and residency are getting blurred. Given that a plethora of countries in the EU started to pull away from Microsoft 365 and Azure due to lack of control over where their data was going, Microsoft has announced Microsoft 365 Local, which gives organizations the ability to bring the best of the Microsoft 365 environment into their own environment. What does this mean for organizations? Instead of hosting the infrastructure required on servers in the cloud - companies can now opt to host the services on their own infrastructure, p...

Using Power Automate to Update Contact Information

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 We've all been there- you have a large organization who has out-of-date contact information. What do you do? You could go around to each department and ask them nicely to update their information, or send out an org-wide email prompting people to do so. However, this is tedious and oftentimes a pointless task. By the time you update one department, you're running to fix another. What if you could put the power back in the department's hands to do so? This is a struggle I faced recently as I was trying to find was I could conjure up some updated contact information for each department. As I did my research, I found that I was not alone in this endeavour as it seems that many IT professionals would love to make this process a little bit less painful. With this in mind, I introduce to you my latest flow! This flow will allow you to encourage users to update their contact information, without the overhead that comes with manual effort. In addition to this, this flow utilizes t...

Making a SharePoint Knowledge Base Part Two: Knowledge is Power... Automate

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Happy snow day folks! Well, at least for me. We saw up to 40+ centimeters last night which gave me plenty of time today to sit down and write the second part of this series which is adding templates and automation with Power Automate (in between all the shoveling and snow clearing of course). So this is where we get into some of the cool stuff that our knowledge base can do, as well as touch on some key points that may inspire you to go beyond even the knowledge base. However, if you're looking to finish off your knowledge base, here's the part that is for you! Templates Let's start with templates, as this is likely the most user-dependent part of the whole post. Before continuing, it's important to note that each template may differ, and it's really up to you and the stakeholders in your team or organization to determine the content to include. For the sake of demonstration, I'll keep this very barebones and focus on how to add a template to your knowledge base...

Making a SharePoint Knowledge Base Part One: Getting Our Ducks in a Row

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Howdy everyone, it's great to be back again for another post! As a matter of fact, this is our very first post on this blog. Amazing! For this post, I am going to help you create an intuitive Knowledge Base in SharePoint that your department or company can use as a whole. We'll also use Power Automate to notify us when our team adds to our Knowledge Base. So with this in mind, let's get started! Why a Knowledge Base? This idea comes from a recent SharePoint migration I did in my own workplace. I wanted to create a centralized resource for our team to find knowledge articles, troubleshooting steps, and guides. This helps us share knowledge across our team as well as with our end-users. For those of you who do not know what a Knowledge Base is, it is as simple as this: A centralized resource to share knowledge and provide self-help to users.  Now that you're privy to what it is, we can begin to build ourselves a Knowledge Base! We'll start with our foundational assets...

Hello, world!

Hello everyone! Thank you for stopping by my blog. I know it's a bit barebones right now, but I plan to captivate you with awesome tech news and insights into Microsoft 365, Azure, and other technical knowledge troves in the future. For those unfamiliar with me, I'm Colby, a Systems Administrator. My work primarily involves Microsoft 365 and Azure, although I also delve into other IT-related areas. It's a mixed bag of different topics, which I hope to share with you on my technical journey. Stay tuned for more content and be sure to check in weekly for updates!