Here is the truth. The beloved term “best practices” is almost meaningless in a system as complex and flexible as Microsoft 365. The services of Microsoft 365 can be configured in radically different ways to limit or expand their reach into the world, and you have to determine what best represents your organization's way of working.
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My relationship with SharePoint goes way back to the SPS 2003 days. Let’s just say if SharePoint and I had a kid together, the kid would be able to move out and vote by now.
And since the beginning of my time with SharePoint, I always understood a document library to be a “special” kind of SharePoint list, one where each item just so happens to be a file. Sure, there are other differences between libraries and lists, but they all have columns and rows and views (and dreaded list view thresholds!) and content types and version history, etc. They are much more alike than they are different!
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“No internet connection.”
Cue the eyeroll, audible groan, and heavy sigh as perhaps the three most feared words of our modern culture appeared on my phone’s screen.
I was sitting in my car in a parking lot of a nondescript office park, waiting for my wife and daughter to finish an appointment in one of the businesses. As they walked inside, I (almost instinctively) pulled my phone out of my pocket and logged in, as most people tend to do these days when faced with the threat of Having To Wait With Nothing To Do.
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It’s October 3, 2023. I am sitting at my PC, waiting as the digital meeting equivalent of "hold music" plays. According to the graphic on the screen, the Q&A session should begin momentarily for the "Microsoft OneDrive: The Future of File Management is Here" event where Microsoft just unveiled the 3rd major version of OneDrive to the public. The main presentation is over, and while I wait, I’m digesting the latest announcements and changes that were unleashed upon us.
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If you work in even a lightly technical workplace these days, you know there is a big push to use technology to automate many day-to-day tasks. Microsoft has worked hard to provide an array of tools to feed that need. If you look at the list of Power Automate's "connectors" (https://make.powerautomate.com/connectors), you will see that Microsoft has worked with a variety of partners to build an ecosystem of endpoints for working with data that moves to and from Microsoft 365 in a way that is designed to be useful for automation tasks. Connectors reduce the "friction" between various services interacting, reducing development needed to make various data sources communicate with one another. If you need to have something automated, in the Microsoft 365 context, Power Automate has probably come up.
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I don’t know about you, but for me AI is starting to feel a little too intelligent and a little less artificial. I’ve been watching as blog posts, videos, scripts, images, and now workflows and applications generated by AI have gradually gone from “oh that’s so silly,” to “wow that’s pretty good.” I even saw an AI generated hand recently that had the right number of fingers! At the onset of the AI invasion, I thought “I can’t be replaced by machines” but these days I’m not so sure… So, what’s an IT Pro to do to stay on top in an already competitive field?
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