Author: Adam Fowler

Microsoft Forms Preview

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Microsoft Forms has been around for a while. A year ago, it was released only to Office 365 Education customers as a nice, simple way to make surveys and quizzes. There’s a bunch of content out there about it already, for those who want to learn more.

More recently, it’s been released to the wider population with a bunch of improvements, albeit still in ‘Preview’. As I can now access it from one of my Office 365 tenants, I thought it was worth having a play with.

Forms is a lightweight, easy way of creating questionnaires and gathering the responses. Having no experience with it previously, I made up this survey within a minute (half the time was picking a theme!).

Have a look and feel free to enter data, and try to break it:

Test Quiz

Right now, there’s two options on the main Forms page: Create a form, or create a quiz. Creating a quiz looks pretty blank from the beginning, with a title and the option to add a question. It’s worth mentioning that I couldn’t tell what the difference between the form or quiz option was!

Using the ‘Add question’ button gives you the options on what sort of question it is; Choice, Text, Rating or Date. From that, you’ll see a very easy to configure form, where you can configure the question to your liking. Points are possible if it’s checking someone’s knowledge and you want an end score. You can choose if a question is mandatory with the ‘Required’ toggle, or if multiple answers are allowed.

The elypsis hides a few more options depending on the question type – maths, if you need to use an equation (you can see the education influence here). but also if your question needs a subtitle, or if you want the answers shuffled to reduce bias (there’s that type of person that always picks ‘C’ when they don’t know).

There’s also a ‘Branching’ option which lets you configure what path the quiz will take, depending on which answer is given. How long until someone creates a ‘Choose your own adventure’ with this :) ?

I posted this on Twitter not too long ago, and at the time of writing this, there was 26 responses. I haven’t done anything beyond clicking the ‘Responses’ tab to see this data:

To me, this looks incredibly useful. So little effort required to start getting feedback, and the data displayed easily. There’s also the option to open the data in Excel, which shows the raw data and lets you manipulate the views.

The survey by default requires access in your organisation to respond. With that, you can choose if names are recorded, and if only one response is allowed per person.

It’s possible and easy to change this restriction to ‘Anyone with the link can respond’, but it does mean all entries will be marked as ‘anonymous’ and you’ll have no guaranteed tracking of who entered the data.

Another note is that forms is fully supported on mobile browsers. A few people tried this quiz and reported a great experience.

As pointed out on Practical 365, Microsoft Forms is turning up and on by default on Office 365 tenants, if you don’t want this on please read that post.

This is a free component of Office 365, and worth investigating even in it’s preview state for internal surveys – maybe it will replace Survey Monkey (which I’m a fan of)?

PowerPoint 2010 and 2016 Startup Templates

Posted on by Adam Fowler

With PowerPoint 2010, there was the ability to autoload templates with the .PPAM extension, by deploying the template to %ProgramFiles%\Office14\ADDINS\ and it would load with the launch of PowerPoint.

When migrating to PowerPoint 2016 however, this doesn’t work. Of course you’ll need to change the folder from Office14 to Office16, but it will still ignore the .PPAM template file.

The fix, I eventually found after trying several things, was to just rename the file from .PPAM to .POTM – no need to open and resave the file, just rename the file itself.

I can’t find anything specific about this online, but it works.

Side note – Excel and Word 2016 templates works the same way as 2010, with the XLSTART and STARTUP folders respecively for XLAM and DOTM templates.

(Updated to .POTM rather than .POTX for the file extension, as .POTM is macro enabled while .POTX is a template without macros – thanks Rhys!)

Recover a SharePoint Online Site

Posted on by Adam Fowler

In SharePoint Online, it’s easy to delete an entire site or documents in a site.

Recovering documents is also quite easy, go to the site’s recycle bin which is normally located at https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/sitename/_layouts/15/RecycleBin.aspx – replacing ‘contoso’ with your tenant name, and ‘sitename’ with the actual site name. Deleted items can be selected and restored to their original location.

“How long are deleted items kept in the Recycle Bin?

In SharePoint Online, the default retention time is 93 days for both site recycle bin (first stage) and site collection recycle bin (second stage). The site recycle bin storage counts against your site collection storage quota and the List View Threshold. The site collection recycle bin retention starts at the same time for both recycle bins when the item is first deleted, so the total maximum retention time is 93 days for both recycle bins. The default amount of space for the site collection is 200% of the site collection quota.”

However, I had some issues when trying to recover an entire site. My top level recycle bin https://contoso.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/RecycleBin.aspx showed nothing. I’m unsure if there’s another way of viewing deleted sites via the web interface, and gave up after a lot of clicking around and Googling, but it’s easy to do with PowerShell.

After installing the SharePoint Online Management Shell, and connecting to SharePoint Online with the ‘Connect-SPOService‘ cmdlet (and don’t forget to use HTTPS rather than HTTP when connecting to your SharePoint Online instance or you’ll get a rather generic error: connect-sposervice : Could not authenticate to SharePoint Online http://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com/ using OAuth 2.0), you can see what your deleted sites are with this command:

Get-SPODeletedSite

Simple, you’ll then be presented with a list of all sites that are deleted and waiting in the recycle bin along with when they were deleted, and how many days are remaining before they disappear from the recycle bin. Sites deleted seem to sit in that recycle bin for 30 days, rather than site collection items but I couldn’t find any documentation supporting this.

To restore a deleted site, just use the following command with the URL of the site to restore, which you can see from the ‘get’ command above

Restore-SPODeletedSite -identity https://conotos.sharepoint.com/sites/oops

That’s it. Your site is back.

From what I’ve read, there is no way to change the retention values of SharePoint Online recycle bins.

Updating the Country Field in Active Directory

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Wanting to have all users to have the country ‘Australia’ in Active Directory, I thought it would be a simple PowerShell command. Get all the users you want and set a field to ‘Australia’. However, it’s more complicated than that.

As you can see from the above, the Country/region field is a dropdown, where you can select the country. If you look in PowerShell using ‘get-aduser username -properties *’, there’s 4 fields that get populated with this setting:

c : AU
co : Australia
Country : AU
countrycode: 36

Trying to just change one of these fields will result in an error such as:

Set-ADUser : A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument ‘Au’.
Set-ADUser : A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument ‘Australia’.
Set-ADUser : A value for the attribute was not in the acceptable range of values

The answer is that all fields need to be set at the same time. The C and Country fields are based on ISO 3166 codes, with Australia being AU and 36.

The resulting command would end up being:

set-aduser adam.fowler -Replace @{c="AU";co="Australia";countrycode=36}

Of course this can be done on a boarder scale by using ‘get-user’ with a larger scope, and piping that into the set-aduser command:

get-aduser -filter "company -eq 'Contoso'" | foreach {set-aduser $_ -Replace @{c="AU";co="Australia";countrycode=36}}

That’s all that’s required to change the field.

Hide Edge Button from IE11 Tab

Posted on by Adam Fowler

A feature that’s popped up in IE11, is the little Edge icon next to the new tab icon. Not something I’d want in the enterprise space:

Thankfully, it’s easy to disable. There’s a group policy policy called “Hide the button (next to the New Tab button) that opens Microsoft Edge” which can be found in User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components/Internet Explorer\Internet Settings\Advanced Settings\Browsing\ . 

If you can’t see this policy, make sure you have the latest ADMX files from Microsoft – Windows 10 1703. If you haven’t had much to do with adding ADMX files to your environment before – they should be centralised, and Microsoft have a great guide you can follow.

Bonus tip – If you have internal sites that use a single word (e.g. intranet) you can enable the policy “Go to an intranet site for a one-word entry in the Address bar” which will check for an internal site starting with that name before using the word in your default search engine. This one’s actually an old policy that I hadn’t noticed before!