Nick Cottrell

We've recently been looking at the different tools already available to aid organisations in their adoption journey. In my last post I reviewed the Champion Management Platform .  In this post I review another adoption tool called the Microsoft Teams Adoption Bot.  What is the Adoption bot? It is a Chatbot built using Power Virtual Agents and is a Microsoft open source tool available on GitHub. The bot can be deployed to your Teams environment and made accessible to the whole organisation to support adoption of the Microsoft tools. Once deployed users can add it to their app bar in teams. From here anytime the user has a question relating to the Microsoft 365 tools, then can ask the chatbot.  The chatbot will then provide an answer or using Power Automate post feedback or questions to a designated Teams channel. For a more detailed explanation and instructions on how to deploy take a look at the GitHub page here . There is also a short YouTube video by Mat...

Whether you call them Champions, Super Users, Power Users or Influencers they are a core tool in supporting adoption efforts across an organisation while you role out new applications and tools.  I've worked with many organisation's to help implement a Champions network, a group of upskilled individuals that can support their colleagues and evangalise Microsoft 365 within their teams or departments. Tracking who the champions are for your business is important to ensure you have the coverage required, so I often support organisation's by building some form of tracking list that can be used to track who the Champions are and also double as a resource to support the end users.  This can be a time consuming task but Microsoft have recently announced  The Microsoft 365 Champion Management Platform . This new solution is an application you can add to your tenant and add to a tab in a Microsoft Teams channel.  In this post I will take you through some of the features ...

In my first post: SharePoint Site Design: An Introduction , I gave you a brief overview on site designs and what they can do. In this post I want to show you how to get started building a simple design that you could add to an environment.  Creating your Site Script  To get started take a look at the Site design JSON schema on Microsoft Docs. From here you copy the overall JSON structure into your script. Once inserted to your script it will look like the below. {   "$schema": "schema.json",   "actions": [     ...     <one or more verb actions>     ...   ],   "bindata": { },   "version": 1 } The yellow highlights text that can be removed and replaced with the actions you want to add to your script. The  Site design JSON schema  on Microsoft Docs provides you with example JSON, which you can copy and paste into your script to add a specific actions between the two square brackets ([ ]). The text I've highli...

This is one of those posts I've been wanting to do for over a year.  When I first started looking at SharePoint site design I found it challenging to get started. I couldn't find the guidance anywhere that would help me understand it. As a result each time I looked at SharePoint Site Designs it felt a bit like black magic!  I understood and could see the benefits of being able to use site designs to create sites with predefined elements and automation of actions, but the actual building of the site design and scripts seemed shrouded in mystery. I searched across the internet looking for guidance on how to create and implement the designs but of the material I found most was written in a way that I found hard to follow as a beginner in this area.  My aim in this post is to share what I have learnt and help you get started. To make this subject more manageable to digest I have split it into separate posts: Introduction to SharePoint site design  Create and deployi...

SharePoint Online Site Themes: SharePoint comes with a number ready made out of the box themes that you can apply to your SharePoint site(s). The themes can transform your site to give it a more unique feel. You can change the theme by navigating to the Settings (Cog) > Change the look > Theme . Once there you will be presented with the available themes. More recently you are able to customise the out of the box themes. At the time of Although this allows you to customise existing themes you may not find the colours that match your branding.  Often organisations want to use there own brand colours to personalise their SharePoint sites. With a few steps it is possible to create and import your own theme(s) in to your SharePoint environment. You can then utilise the theme(s) by adding them manually to sites or in your site designs. Benefits of having a custom site theme You or other site owners can switch to the company branded theme once added to your tenant It will be availab...

Background There have been a number of occasions where I've needed to create images and animated images for different SharePoint related projects.  I've used a number of tools in the past with varying success.  More recently I've been using PowerPoint to create custom images, which has saved me time and allowed me to do what I wanted without buying new tools or using free ones with adds. Although I had been using PowerPoint to create images it was only recently I discovered a new feature in PowerPoint that allows you to create GIFs "Graphic Interchange Format". GIFs are animated or static images.  There could be many reasons you want to create an animated image most common would be to display an action with moving images rather than creating a video. Another reason might just be that you want to jazz up your SharePoint page or presentation.  Here's an example of a GIF I created in PowerPoint. Steps to create your GIF To create an animated image follow these 12...