Hello and welcome to episode eight of the level up in 365 podcast here. With this show, we talk about all things Microsoft 365 collaboration or admins, pros and CEO’s. Today’s topics that we’re going to cover is. Some preamble. Personal updates bring over the message center. 2 items that stuck out to me where it covered the topic of the day, which is I’m talking about Kanban boards and Microsoft 360 fives and. Tips and tricks? From a technical perspective, and then we’re going to end on the tip of the day. So with that being said, let’s get right into it. Right before we get into our content, let’s talk about today’s sponsor. That is me. That’s right. This show with this effort is something that I do in my free time. And if you want to support the show, all you got to do is rate it on the podcast catcher, share a post like a post. And I also even have a little tip jar. On any of my M365 posts, if you. Want to buy? Me a beer. That’s all I gotta say. Let’s. Get right into it, the preamble. OK, for the preamble of the. Show it has been a long time since I’ve actually done a podcast episode. I have done a form or a post on my blog like a text post with a bunch of visuals, primarily because in between the multiple hats that I wear, I have moved from Florida to Indiana and we are just about mostly. Impact one thing I’ve I’ve lived in Indiana before, but one thing I’d like to kind of give a shout out where if you know of any good M365 meetups within the. Midwest, the Indianapolis they are preferable, but you know I’m not that far from Louisville. I’m not that far from Cincinnati. Any of the. Tech conferences in the Midwest are user groups in 365 user groups in the Midwest. Please let me know in the comments. I want to do a better. Job of getting back into that community another. Thing that I’ve been up. To is. What is it? I got through the classic book do. I’m on the second one right now. It’s a really nice book. Definitely a good story if you were into fiction, if you like Star Wars, it’s not too science fiction, even though that’s the genre. But if you like, you know stories. Lots of Lord of the Rings type stuff. I understand why doing is is a good one. And I couldn’t recommend it enough. If you do go through Doom, there’s a lot of things you can miss, so I do recommend looking for a book club to help you really enjoy all that’s laid out. There. OK. That being said, let’s go into the message center radar. So this is a short one. The only two I’m going to put, it’s so hard to keep up with all the things in the message center. So let’s just get right into the first two that stuck out to me. So for the two items that I’m going to talk about here in the message center radar is the E signature in SharePoint, there is a, you know, first party E signature method along with SharePoint there is a link that I’m gonna put in the show notes. Actually everything we talked about is in the show. Notes and this little 12 minute overview is from a YouTube channel I just found called Bright Ideas Agency. Really cool stuff that he does a lot in the videos are kind of over use. Not too deep into the weeds of all these new products. Specifically I found out this about this channel through my research on copilot. But there’s a great video I’m linking that talks about the SharePoint E signature, and I think that just. That is, having a first party signature solution means you are not exposing your data to other areas that may be less secure. So you are respecting first parties, going to respect all of the first party governance, Microsoft DLP, conditional access, multifactor authentication. Keeping it all within your environment means you’ve got full control over it. I really like that. I think the price is is relatively affordable compared to the third party solutions, but the like the Bright ideas Agency like they referenced in their. Video it is a new product not fully baked. So it isn’t as refined as something like Adobe or DocuSign, but definitely worth checking out. I will be pushing this heavily for my clients where it makes sense obviously, but I also like that because this is baked into in 365, it means it’s already taking advantage of approvals in Microsoft Teams. Which means you can already benefit from the other third party mechanisms that Microsoft that third party, but first party mechanisms like power. Automate teams, SharePoint lists, planner. The list goes on. So I really like being able to coddle all of those Microsoft 365 apps together and they just gonna they’re gonna work together a lot easier than a third party. Ohh yeah, and this item is MC729. 72. Zero and you should start to see it. Yeah, it’s only available for PDF, so here’s some release notes that you gotta think about. But it’s only in the US market. You’ll go out to other regions towards the end of the year. It’s only available for PDF at this time. It does support other signature providers such as Adobe Acrobat Sign and DocuSign. I don’t know what the value would be of stacking Microsoft solution and then some third party solution, but you’re not relying on a third party solution, and yeah, you’ll be able to track your easing to request using the approvals app in Microsoft. Teams really like that, and I’m gonna kind of go off of a of a tangent here. One of the things that I’ve it’s not a tangent actually, it’s kind of a little tip of the day, but. Not really official tip. Of the day that approvals app in teams is. Actually pretty nifty. I recently had a situation where I needed multiple approvals like seven people had to approve this one. Document before it could go towards the next phase and I couldn’t figure out an an easy way of informing the requester the person requesting where this document was. In this the approval process meaning of the seven who has responded, who hasn’t responded. And I’m a little embarrassed to say I didn’t know about this, but using the approvals app in teams. If you do any type of approvals in Microsoft 365 where you have to have, like I said, seven of those approvers and all seven have to agree and you’re you’re stuck in limbo because one guy has ignored his his notifications. You can see that individual within the approvals app within teams, really cool stuff. You can see who’s approved, who hasn’t approved, and even you even have an option in there to kind of bug them to poke at them again within that app. And I I really like doing that as opposed to e-mail because. It’s going to notify them on Microsoft Teams and notify them on e-mail, and it’s all in your log where you can say hey, I’ve been bugging John Doe over there and he’s been ignoring my request. That’s why things are like something like that. So if you’ve ever done an approval of. The Microsoft Teams. App you know the log of your approvals is is pretty cool. Open those that log up. All right, so. Now I’ve talked too much. This topic, the second item of today, is Microsoft Loop guest sharing ohh my gosh this is before I forget MC 736437. Now there are some constraints here you have to have the B2B external guest setting enabled on your tenant. I think most tenants have this enabled by default. But obviously, most large enterprises can’t solve this addresses. One of the biggest complaints I have about loop. I absolutely love Microsoft Loop. I just think it’s. I think it has an identity crisis and one of the issues that I posted this on on another, I think it was episode 6. Let me make sure. Yeah, in episode 6, I talked about why I’m I’m using OneNote over Microsoft Loop for meeting minutes and personal note taking. So if you really want to know more of the nuance between measuring up, you know, loop measuring up to one note, episode 6 is definitely something you want to. Review because there are some cases where loop does make more sense and if they get this guest sharing thing done right. It will actually position loop to be in a better spot. Then one note for meeting minutes in some cases and in. Here’s my metaphor. I don’t think of Microsoft Loop any more as a OneNote replacement or even a OneNote similar app. I would actually say it can take the place of a SharePoint page. A SharePoint page is obviously high functionality. Great stuff, but it’s not as collaborative as I would like it to be. So if you needed a centralized web page. Where folks could see their project update or click a link to enroll in a particular volleyball, sign up, or a wedding agenda, as in an example, I could see Microsoft Loop actually doing a loop page, you know, actually helping with that. Now we’re not talking about consumer. We’re talking about business stuff here, you know, business to business. Maybe business to consumer, but it’s not something that’s going to replace a WordPress site, not ask. I’m not saying. That, but if you needed a public facing space to distribute or disseminate enterprise data, a loop page. Might be a good alternative because you can put in your Kanban board. You can have people in there at the real, you know, at at the same time your Kanban board. Can live in. Multiple places and just be showing where things are in Microsoft Loop, so it’s really good at real time collaboration. So I think that’s where I see. How loop can position itself in those use cases where you have a large group of people that need to collaborate on key item. OK, so this should be out by now. I actually I think I got this notice in April, but I noticed there were some delays in getting to my tenant. So I waited to see how it’s going and I still think it’s a little bit the B2B feature is a little bit clunky because here we are, we’re in the late late end of August now, so. I’ve used this. It’s OK. Yeah, I think that it needs a little more refining is primarily the B2B component of this needs a little bit more, more refining. So hopefully I would say keep loop in your portfolio of options. It’s very valuable. All right, now on to the content of the day. So this segment is called Kanban supremacy in 365 and one of the main things I’m basically using this segment to highlight A blog post that I wrote recently about using Kanban boards in Microsoft 365. So it’s going to be LinkedIn, the show notes, but one of the main reasons why I’m choosing this is because I see a lot of people. Using these, we have all these tools but no clear guidance in Microsoft 365 on what is the task management tool of choice you have to do. You have a SharePoint. List you have planner you actually have. If you go up the chain of add-ons you have Microsoft project for the web. You also have people still using classic project and we talked about loop. Some people are doing project. Management and loop so. If you’re interested in task management and I’m drawing a line in the sand. Between project management and task management, project management is something that is going to have task dependencies, robust reporting like Gantt charts and budgets, and maybe even some type of timesheet integration. That’s not what you use a Kanban board for, although you could, that’s not what we’re talking about. OK, so the meat potatoes of this is, hey, what are out of all this stuff we’ve got in in 365? What are the key things that would really help organize things into a task board? And what I see commonly, and I would recommend you all take a look at is you have. A. They call it the lists app, which is. Just a glorified SharePoint list. And you have the Microsoft Planner, which is very popular. And then? You have a lesser. Known tool, although I do see people prop it up here and there called whiteboard and whiteboard is is a I’m going to say a more streamlined version of the. I think it’s the mirror board that people are using nowadays for project management and. Those are like. The three main things I’m seeing, folks. Use and you know right off the bat I would recommend the SharePoint list over anything or the Microsoft lists app. You go into your app drawer, you’ll see a list with a capital L and the key reason why I would recommend that over everything is because there’s a template. There’s a task template when you go. To create a new list. And. The Kanban view that has a little bit of a learning curve, but it’s completely worth it. You’re going to get more functionality out of a SharePoint list or a list with a capital L than you are Microsoft Planner. Although planner is super easy if it’s like one or two people, or you’re you’re managing personal tasks. Planner will probably be just fine. The problem that I see is when you get more than two or three people on a Microsoft Planner Board, people start. Adding to the. Board and the Microsoft Planner Board does not have. Have any type of recycle bin? It doesn’t have version history so if somebody comes into your your Kanban board on Microsoft Planner and they delete it to me there’s no way. Is happy. Of getting it. Back so doing the list app addresses those complaints that I have and the list app. It also has better integrations within Microsoft Power automate or any type of due date reminder e-mail approval for a particular task. So I would recommend that it does have a a bigger learning curve than Microsoft Planner, but I think it’s a better suit for task management, especially within the enterprise. And then we have Microsoft Whiteboard, which I would not recommend running Kanban board projects on Microsoft Whiteboard. But one thing you should know about and I’ve used this a few times is whiteboard does have the integration into other apps, so you can host a whiteboard that has a loop component inside of it and whiteboard. Has these awesome sticky notes. That are pretty cool for brainstorming, so I’ve seen white note great for brainstorming meetings. If you’ve got a virtual board, a lot of us are remote and doing hybrid work environments here, so whiteboard’s been really good. If you’ve got a problem and you’re just trying to get a whiteboard to brainstorm some ideas and then like I said, after you get some ideas, you have the post it note. Featuring whiteboard, you can start writing up minutes in a loop component and that loop component could be a paragraph, or it could be a planner board. So there are some use cases where I think whiteboard does make sense in brainstorming, but I wouldn’t use it for task.
Which?
I actually have a lot of visuals that everything they talked about on the attach blog post. So I would highly recommend you go out there, take a look at that. One of the things and this is kind of the footnote is the main reason of the Kanban board in my world and how it helps me is not just to know who’s doing what, but to know what we did a year from now. There are so many times, you know, I wouldn’t say that I’m a a traditional software developer or I publish release notes for every update. That’s not what I do. I’m kind of a low code hacky developer. You know there are some solutions I’ve built that are really well documented and I do have. Pretty due diligence in the change management policies, but that’s not the majority of automations I built the majority of automations I built are for me in my own personal use. So one of the nice parts about the Kanban board is I like to dock. I meant if I’m building something in power automate or if I’m doing any type of configuration in Microsoft bookings, turning something off up at my tenant at my, you know, in my Azure settings I like to document that task. You know why I went to that particular decision? Maybe I’ll include a OneNote notebook on some of my developer notes of. Hey I tried making the left and failed so I had to turn. Right and go. Through 3/4. So the having a Kanban board is nice. Because especially in a SharePoint list, because six months go down, go away, 12 months go away, as long as I’m properly labeling that the. Search is going to work. Really well, so I can search and get that knowledge back and all the data doesn’t die with me. So that’s one of the nice parts. And then the second key benefit of. Taking advantage of a Kanban board. Is is done well? The Kanban board is the status update, so you don’t need to have meetings about status updates. You can have meetings about decisions on those tasks or decisions where you need help where you have blockers and it’s an effective way of guiding the meaning towards being something of a productive. Environment towards an A productive environment. So here is my tip of the week and this is a I build in the power platform, really cool stuff and I have a great long video attached that I learned from Laura Rogers. If you’re in the M365 environment world, you’ve definitely heard of Will Rogers, so. What is AI builder? It’s a way of doing processing documents with generative AI and my. Use case was I receive a Word document from a process. In this Word document, each page on that Word document is a patient record with a field in there that has the patients identification number. Now what I needed to. Do was I? Needed an automated process of breaking each page. Up on this. Giant Word document and renaming the file a series of numbers that also include the record number or the patient. Number and yeah, there’s a lot of things that are similar to that. There’s no out-of-the-box word, Splinter. Adobe may do something, but Adobe doesn’t have a reach into my inbox. Adobe doesn’t have or reach into my other apps like Power Platform does. So what I have happened is. After I split this document up, the AI builder recognizes the values on this Word document. Because this Word document is unstructured data, it’s just text. You don’t know the patient name, the patient name is not defined, the patient number is not defined. But power automate using AI can define those fields and it can. You can take action based on those parameters. So we can take unstructured data which is a giant Word document and structure it into something that you can build automation out of. So why that’s valuable is after it splits this document. Up. It then stores the documents in the correct directories needed for our case management system. So now you are having these documents go and be attached to your patients actual records. So when you open up your case management system, you can see the last. Case related to CQ and it’s pretty cool. It’s kind of like if you’ve gone to get your car worked on and they have a service history of all the things done on your vehicle, well, that information comes from somewhere. So this process feeds a system like that. I really you know highly recommend it because again, I don’t have much of a background in AI. But with a cup of coffee and a candy attitude, I was able to get something highly functional in about an hour. Watching the video from Laura Rogers here. Highly recommend checking it out and let me know you know what else you’re doing within power platform and the AI builder because there are so many cool things available and the price is a lot cheaper than hiring another person, that’s for sure. OK, I guess that concludes our show for today. Again, all the show notes are on the level. Up in three. 65 website it’s at level up in 365.com. And I am on all of the podcast catchers. I have one of those distributors, so if you. Like this content? Feel free to subscribe. I do upload an AI based transcription and there will be a blog post referencing everything we’ve covered. So thanks for listening and y’all have a good one.
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