Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Speaking at SharePoint Klubi about Employee Onboarding in the Digital Era

Odotan innolla SharePoint Klubissa puhumista 💛 I'm looking forward to speaking at SharePoint Klubi on February 11th, 2021.

SharePoint Klubi is an initiative from Sininen Meteoriitti (now Valtti Kumppanit) consultants to share the latest news about Microsoft 365 ecosystem with their customers. I will be speaking about Employee Experience in the context of employee onboarding. The onboarding process plays a central role in the overall employee experience. If this process is not well planned and executed, the new talent might decide during the onboarding process to not continue working at the company or the company might end up after the probation period with someone who doesn't have the right skills for the position. 

Microsoft recently announced Microsoft Viva as a solution to increase employee experience. This is indeed a timely topic and requires attention as the so called "new normal" will not disappear completely after the current global pandemic. Well, at least, I believe that remote work will become more and more common in the future because of its flexibility and possible cost saving factors for companies.

I want to say thank you to Valtti Kumppanit consultants for this opportunity. Let's get in touch if you're also going to participate in this event!


Event information:

Home page in Finnish


Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Speaking at I4-YOU webinar about Employee Onboarding in the Digital Age

I'm looking forward to speaking at I4-YOU webinar on February 10th, 2021.

I4-YOU is a consultancy company from Netherlands focused on delivering real solutions to their customers. Tomorrow, I will be speaking with Maurits Mes (Adoption Specialist at I4-YOU) about employee experience with a focus on employee onboarding in times when working remotely has become the new normal. We will also showcase how Microsoft Teams and Valo Teamwork can increase the onboarding experience.


Working closely with the I4-YOU team has been very inspiring. Iris van Sligtenhorst (Marketing Specialist at I4-YOU), Maurits and Peter de Graaf (CEO at I4-YOU) have been very cooperative and professional with the webinar organization. We have been planning the webinar already since December 2020 and I am really happy about the time we spent together as well as for the content we created.

Let's get in touch if you're also going to participate in this event!


Event information:

Monday, February 8, 2021

Webinar: H2H approach to leadership and employee experience


In times of social disconnection, it becomes apparent how important leadership skills are for the wellbeing and a successful employee experience. Daniel Anderson and Henna Ojala will be addressing this topic in an expert talk about human-to-human approach to leadership and employee experience. I have been working on the organization of this webinar with the Valo Marketing team and I am so glad about it. From defining the marketing strategy, to selecting the speakers and helping with the webinar’s content, working closely with Johanna Riva (Events and Marketing Specialist at Valo) in this project has been an amazing experience! I am also proud of having Daniel Anderson (awarded as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional recently) and Henna Ojala (a passionate Customer and Employee Experience Leader and Advisor) as speakers. They put together a webinar content that you just can’t miss out.

Microsoft announced a few days ago Microsoft Viva as a new Employee Experience Platform. Even before knowing about Microsoft Viva, we already noticed the importance of a good employee experience as a success factor for the challenges we have been facing nowadays and decided to create this free webinar with useful content for HR departments and team leaders in general.

Thanks Johanna Riva, Daniel Anderson and Henna Ojala for the awesome work you have done so far! I am looking forward to attending the webinar tomorrow and learning from your experience.

Free webinar registration: https://www.valointranet.com/events-all/how-to-lead-remove-work/

Support for channel moderation in Microsoft Graph

Microsoft release recently support for channel moderation via Microsoft Graph Teams APIs. This allows administrators to read and apply channel moderation settings programmatically. The feature itself has already been there since a while. However, API support wasn’t available in Microsoft Graph before. In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to use this new functionality and what limitations I faced while testing this new approach.


Benefits of channel moderation

A Microsoft Teams team consists of one or more channels. A channel is the place where chat based communication and content sharing happens. Previously, team members or everyone (including guests) have been able to start a new channel post, which represents channel moderation equals OFF. Now, team owners are capable of turning channel moderation ON which allows them to limit the posting of new posts to only moderators, with additional control options. This becomes handy if a channel should only by used for announcements or if only a specific users should be allowed to start posts in a channel.

Read channel moderation settings

Reading channel moderation settings is only possible with a Microsoft Graph beta API. Please, keep in mind that beta APIs are subject to change and its usage in production environments are not recommended! That being said, you can use the already existing GET channel API to retrieve the channelModerationSettings which is part of the response. This is what the API and the response look like:

GET https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/teams/{id}/channels/{id}
{
   "@odata.context":"https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/$metadata#teams...",
   "id":"...",
   "createdDateTime":"2020-01-09T19:05:27.498Z",
   "displayName":"Test",
   "description":null,
   "isFavoriteByDefault":false,
   "email":"",
   "webUrl":"https://teams.microsoft.com/l/channel...",
   "membershipType":"standard",
   "moderationSettings":{
      "userNewMessageRestriction":"moderators",
      "replyRestriction":"everyone",
      "allowNewMessageFromBots":true,
      "allowNewMessageFromConnectors":false
   }
}

Note: During my tests, I wasn’t able to get moderation settings of the General channel! The moderationSettings object was always returned with a value of null

Applying channel moderation settings

In case you want to apply channel moderation settings programmatically, you can either update an existing channel or apply the moderation settings while creating a new channel. Note that currently only beta API support is available! The example below shows how to apply moderation settings while creating a new channel:

https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/teams/{id}/channels/
{ "description":"description-value", "displayName":"test 2", "membershipType":"standard", "moderationSettings":{ "userNewMessageRestriction":"moderators", "replyRestriction":"everyone", "allowNewMessageFromBots":true, "allowNewMessageFromConnectors":false } }

Channel moderation is a good improvement in Microsoft Teams and opens new scenarios while giving more control to team members. This new API support brings flexibility to administrators and developers.

I hope it helps!
Thanks for reading my blog post.