Author: Misra GOZ

Power BI – Our 2020 June Favorites

Hello there dear reader! As much as the weather has different opinions on this subject, according to the seasons calendar they taught us in the 1st grade, summer is here! This month even if we write about just one of the updates, it would be enough. What an update! Come on, lets start analyzing Power BI June updates right away.

Without keeping you waiting for too long, here is the superstar of the Power BI June updates:

1- Enhancements to mobile authoring

We always liked the fact that Power BI had mobile authoring. Of course it lacked some stuff. For example the squares were too big. Not being able to change the background, not being able to place, not being able to put objects on top of each other could be a bit of a pain in the neck. We got rid of all of them with just one update! Now, isn’t that amazing?

We don’t have to display expressions with low values in huge areas anymore, we can place them to an empty part of a graph. Thus we obtain a mobile layout fully matched with the design of the report. We can easily find images by their names.

There is one more thing that I am still waiting for: Images that are not displayed on page view can be displayed on mobile layout. For example I use a slicer on page view but it is not useful on mobile layout. I need another slicer special for mobile layout. I hide these slicers or any image that I will be using behind the other graphs. I wish it was not necessary, but i do believe that it will not be in the near future. 😁

2-Automatic Page Refresh

It was a feature that made Pro users on Premium cry out “Aren’t we gonna have automatic page refresh too?” Finally it is released for Pro as well. Now Pro users too can enjoy instant refresh. To enable this feature you have to connect to a Direct Query source with this method. After that you can see this feature in page properties.

3-Enhancements to Hierarchical Slicer

In February hierarchical slicer was introduced to us. We had some issues since then, like issues with icons and font size. It is indicated that with this month’s update we got a new slicer cleared off these issues completely. Now we have more options for expand/collapse icons. Now we are able to customize indentation for child items -we had too seek it in the space back in the day as you know. Also the icons are scaled with the font size.

4-RLS is now supported for Featured Tables in Excel’s Data Types gallery

The matter of connecting to Power BI datasets from Excel is developing rapidly. Now, when you mark a table as featured and then publish to the Power BI service, that table will appear in Excel’s data types gallery even if it has RLS rules applied. Previously, these tables were not shown in Excel. This new enhancement means that users in Excel will only see the rows of data they have access to.

5-Line chart dot formatting options

Sometimes we realized that something was not quiet right, that something was missing in this line chart. But what? We found the missing point, or shall we say the missing dot. Now we can color the dot corresponding to the related title on the X axis in the line chart. We can do it on the Data colors tab in the formatting pane.

6-Data Connectivity

Palantir Foundry Connector

Palantir Foundry is a platform that reimagines how people use data by removing the barriers between back-end data management and front-end data analysis. Foundry enables users with varying technical ability and deep subject matter expertise to work meaningfully with data. With Foundry, anyone can source, connect, and transform data into any shape they desire, then use it to take action.

This connector will soon be available in the Online services section of the Get data dialog.

You can click here to go to the download page of Power BI June updated version. And to take a look at out other articles on Power BI you can click here.

Wish you all a great month. Take care!

Good game well played.

How to Add a Poll to a Stream Video

You are at the right place if your organization has educational/informative videos for your users to watch and you want to do polls/tests or collect feedback during videos. It is possible to insert polls that you created in Forms to certain minutes of your videos on Stream. This way while watching the videos people will come across a form and keep watching from where they left after answering. Now let’s take a look at how it is done.

1. Upload a video on Stream and click on the “Add New” option under “Interactivity”.

In this step stop the video at the minute you want your poll to appear and continue with the “Add New” option.

2. Choose the poll to be added from the Forms app and copy the share link.

The poll to be added should be created in the “Microsoft Forms” app. Copy the share link of your poll like in the image below. Microsoft Forms screen for getting the URL of the form to copy to Stream

3. Paste the poll link to “Form URL” field.

Paste the share link of the poll you want to have on your video to the “Form URL” text box and name your poll. Then end your action with the “Add to timeline” option below. Interactivity tab showing where to paste the URL

4. Job Done! Now your viewers can continue their videos after they reply the poll that comes across them.

Stream video Interactivity tab showing a new form called Feedback

Forms Microsoft Forms Stream

NOVA IoT Platform Online Press Launch

NOVA that is a completely domestic and national platform developed by Turkish Engineers in the PEAKUP technology laboratories has been introduced with an online press launch.

Brilliant Invention from Turkish Engineers: Now you can control an office with just one click

“Technology”, the lead actor of the changing world order, is digitalizing everything rapidly. Digitalization that has gotten even faster with the Covid-19 pandemic has surrounded us, so to speak. Our offices where we spend most of our time get their shares from this change as well. But most of us are still worried. The biggest question we have in our minds is if the precautions taken in the offices against pandemic are enough or what awaits people who work from home in the new order… Thanks to the IoT app developed in PEAKUP technology labs, an invention answering all these questions has been made. The era of minimum physical contact in the offices will begin with the IoT platform called NOVA.

Model of working from home that has been tried out for years but got faster with the pandemic is full of unknowns both for the employers and the employees. Even though some of the workers are back at their offices, the old way of working is going to change for sure. PEAKUP that develops technology for the offices of future with products like digital workplace platform Velocity, digital signature application Sign&Go and cyber security solution PassGate brought the IoT Platform NOVA into life, and integrated all these products to the same platform. NOVA that has been introduced by PEAKUP COO Kadircan Toprakçı and Head of Labs Emrah Uslu in the press conference held on Microsoft Teams, turns offices into safer environments, increases efficiency and savings by minimizing physical contact.

Ahmet Toprakçı who gave the opening speech of the meeting stated that he is proud of the inventor team of NOVA and that their goal now is to export this domestic and national technology to the world. He also reported that their England office might sign a major agreement. Here are the merits of NOVA…

NOVA, welcomes at the office door

NOVA takes the lead starting from the entrance to the office. The biggest benefit is decreasing physical contact in the environment. You will not need to touch the door handle everyone touches, you will not need to touch the remote controller for ac or a button for lighting. Opening a door with fingerprint ends with NOVA as well. All these can be done with just one button on a mobile phone or on a computer screen. Taking someone’s temperature is going to be contact-free and in a risky situation the person is not going to be let in. Warning and guidance systems will kick in by detecting with heat detectors if someone’s temperature gets high during the day and in which parts of the office this person walked around and with who he/she has been in contact with.

Regulates the air inside, prevents crowdedness

Air density quality and calorific values in the environment are important values when it comes to the health and motivation of office workers. NOVA analyzes all the changes in the air and sends notifications to the system in an adverse condition. Traditional air conditioning systems don’t have any functions other than measuring the environment temperature and automatically turning on and off. NOVA, in addition to these, offers an automatic system management to optimize the conditions by tracking the environment conditions like sufficient lightning, density of carbon dioxide and similar gases, and air flow. System can take the decision of turning on and off in accordance with the conditions that can be defined. It warns the crowded areas by detecting the number people per square meter, plays a determining role in putting specific people into quarantine in cases of risk rather than shutting the whole office down. NOVA that detects people who have been in contact with the person with risk, analyzes and reports it, is the safest and most advanced way of keeping track.

Meetings are in control of NOVA

While the digital meetings are becoming more efficient with the functions that Microsoft Teams offers to the workers, online meetings are being done in a shorter period of time and they are more target-driven. While physically it is not possible to have more than 3 meetings a day, the number triples when it comes to online meetings. On top of it, you don’t have to take notes thanks to being able to record the meetings as a video. The number of minutes of online meetings that were 900 million on March, 19 Monday had reached 4.1 billion minutes on April 29, Wednesday. The number of users increased to 75 million from 44 million in the same period of time. All these changes lead to serious expectations on both efficiency and security in physical meeting rooms. NOVA, by means of the devices placed in the meeting rooms, measure the air quality, crowdedness, time management and organizes the room reservation in compliance with the social distance rules. While entrance of a risky amount of people to the meeting rooms is monitored by NOVA, safer and more target-driven meetings from the meeting notes to the meeting statistics are possible via the mobile app.

Savings of 11 thousand dollars in a year increased the attention on the digital workplaces

PEAKUP COO KadirCan Toprakçı who put emphasis on the fact that even though the offices are enhanced thanks to the advanced technologies, running the business on digital platforms is easier and more efficient contrary to the popular belief said: “Even though the number of workers working at the office is pretty low right now, it is certain that it will increase over time. But it is estimated that around 30% of the workforce will be done from home a few days a week by the end of 2021 in the whole world. This rate right now is 3.6%. It is a must for the people who cannot let go of working at the office to redesign their office with regards to the pandemic rules. This means extra costs for a business. NOVA makes the life of both the employers and the employees easier without the need of redesigning the office with its online and offline integration.

Toprakçı who mentioned that the demand for digital workplaces has increased 70% in 3 days with most companies changing to working from home because of corona virus pandemic commented: “A worker working from home provides the employer a saving of 11 thousand dollars a year in average. Interest of businesses that want to carry out the digitalization parallel with the pandemic in change management service given by PEAKUP has increased by 15 times on a monthly basis. This means that our country is going through change parallel with the world trends and that we are on good terms with technology at least as much as the other developed countries.

A Deep Insight into Guest Access

Guest access allows users outside your organization to access your existing teams and channels and cooperate with the people in your organization.

Guests are people like partners, suppliers, and consultants that are not workers or members of your organization. Anyone who is not a part of your organization can be added to Teams as a guest. Which means that anyone that has a business (I.e. an Azure AD account) or a consumer e-mail account (Outlook.com, Gmail.com etc.) can join your teams and channels with full access as a guest. All guests in Teams are covered by the same compliance and auditing protection with the rest of Microsoft 365 and can be managed securely within Azure AD.

Guest Access is a tenant-level setting that is turned off by default on the Admin Center and when it is turned on everyone in your organization can add guests to Microsoft 356 Groups. Guest Access includes a lot of Microsoft 365 subscriptions without the need of an extra license.

There are two different options as Guest Access and External Access for communication with people outside your organization in Organization-wide Settings of Teams Admin Center . Guests access allows people outside your organization to reach your teams and channels while External Access allows communication by entering their e-mail into the Search Box in Teams. Most importantly, WHILE EXTERNAL ACCESS GIVES ACCESS PERMISSION TO AN ENTIRE DOMAIN, GUEST ACCESS GIVES ACCESS PERMISSION TO INDIVIDUALS!

You can see the guest access diagram below:

Managing Guest Access

Guest Access can be managed at 4 main levels:

Azure Active Directory
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft 365 Groups
SharePoint Online & OneDrive for Business

Azure Active Directory

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 Groups

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-dependencies

Ideal Office Environment During the “New Normal”

Workplaces have started to gradually go back to work life with the normalization process. Terms that we didn’t use 3 months ago like social distance, face shield, 3 mm mask have come into our lives. We have to learn how to live with the new normal until we go back to the “normal” that we are used to. But how is our new normal going to be when we go back to our offices? Here are the precautions we have to take against Covid-19 that has a very high spreading rate:

Inside the office:

We should disinfect our offices with a special team and equipment in a way that will provide 2 months of protection,

Common use area should be reorganized in accordance with social distance rules; warnings and guidelines to inform people should be placed,
Maintenance of air conditioners that we use for in-office air conditioning and ventilation should be carried out regularly. To fight Covid-19, disinfectants that provide long term protection should be applied to air conditioners and our equipment should be made safer,
Masks and face shields should be provided to be used while coming to work and going from work, and at work.
Hand sanitizers should be handed out to workers,
Trash cans special for throwing used masks and gloves should be placed at the door entrances,

It is a must to take and record every workers temperature while they are entering the office every day,
Sitting arrangement of workers should be reorganized with regards to social distance rules,
Offices, meeting rooms and restrooms, elevator, hand rails of the stairs, door handles, equipment like tools with screens that are frequently touched, computer keyboards, mouses and phones should be disinfected regularly.

Services:

Capacity of all service vehicles should be redetermined with regards to social distance rules.
Hand sanitizers and disposable masks should be provided in vehicles.
To prevent possible overcrowdedness, service timetables should be rescheduled.

Keep in mind that we can prevent this pandemic by taking personal measures and keeping social distance. We all have to take a responsibility in this new normal period. Just like authorities mention all the time, social distance and wearing masks are our most important weapons against the virus.

Wish you a healthy day!

Manage Microsoft Teams with PowerShell

Hello everybody, we all know that Microsoft Teams that has millions of active users daily has its Admin Center. So do we have the capabilities that we have on the admin center with Powershell that makes IT personnel’s job easier? The answer, for sure, is yes. 🙂 Even if we want to import the list of existing channels or make changes on policies, we can. I will be sharing Powershell cmtlets of the mostly used actions and some Powershell outputs. In addition to what I share, you can access Powershell cmtlet list published by Microsoft through this link.

Connecting to Microsoft Teams with Powershell

We need to connect to Teams via PS first to be able to run actions on Powershell just like in Exchange Online. But first we need to install the Microsoft Teams module on PS or if it is installed, we need to import it. I will accept it as not installed for you and share both versions below.

1. Install-Module MicrosoftTeams

2.Import-Module MicrosoftTeams

3.$credentials=Get-Credential

4.Connect-MicrosoftTeams -Credential $credentials

As you can see in the image above, now we are connected to Microsoft Teams with Powershell.

Most Frequently Used Cmtlets for Microsoft Teams on Powershell

Cmtlet To Find Out Current Team List :

Get-Team

Cmtlet to Find Out the List of users in Microsoft Team : Get-TeamUser -GroupId 2f162b0e-36d2-4e15-8ba3-ba229cecdccf

Cmtlet to See the Owners in the existing Team : Get-TeamUser -GroupId 2f162b0e-36d2-4e15-8ba3-ba229cecdccf -Role Owner

Cmtlet to Add a User to the Team on Microsoft Teams : Add-TeamUser -GroupId 31f1ff6c-d48c-4f8a-b2e1-abca7fd399df -User [email protected]

Cmtlet to Remove a User from the Team on Microsoft Teams : Remove-TeamUser -GroupId 31f1ff6c-d48c-4f8a-b2e1-abca7fd399df -User [email protected]

Cmtlet to Add a User to a Private Channel on Microsoft Teams : Add-TeamChannelUser -GroupId 31f1ff6c-d48c-4f8a-b2e1-abca7fd399df -DisplayName “Engineering” -User [email protected]

Cmtlet to Remove a User from a Private Channel on Microsoft Teams :Remove-TeamChannelUser -GroupId 31f1ff6c-d48c-4f8a-b2e1-abca7fd399df -DisplayName “Engineering” -User [email protected]

Cmtlet to Remove a Team on Microsoft Teams : Remove-Team -GroupId 31f1ff6c-d48c-4f8a-b2e1-abca7fd399df

Even though the actions we run on Powershell save us time compared to GUI, the changes we make are going to take some time to be displayed on the system and always keep in mind that Powershell doesn’t afford mistakes. It is important to check the cmtlets that we haven’t tested or we are not sure 3 times before we run them.

I hope that this was helpful for you.

You can click here to read our article about the effects of severe paper usage in offices on deforestation.

Active Directory Setup

First of all, hello everybody! In this article we will be talking about Active Directory Setup together. We need to go over the question of “What is Active Directory?” before we start the setup. It wouldn’t be wrong to briefly say that Active Directory is a directory service. So what are the attributions of Active Directory? We can say manageability, delegation, replication, scalability, expandability, and management with group policy.

Before we go into the questions like “What is Active Directory? What is it used for? What are its FSMO roles?” I want to move on to the setup. Because all the attributions and roles we talk about here are an article topic on their own. First we can complete the Active Directory setup, Forest setup and AD Connect setup and then move onto the roles and their attributions.

For setup we of course need a server. We activate the “Active Directory Domain Services” Role via“Add roles and features” on the server that we will set Active Directory up on.

Once the said “Active Directory Domain Services” role is added, we will be required to complete the Active Directory setup. We can access it through the part that is seen as a yellow flag on the Server Manager screen on top right. Since we will be setting up a new Active Directory in this part, we will continue with “Add a new forest”. We continue with next after entering the domain we want to use to the Root domain name section.

We are required to specify attributions of the dc that we will be setting up and enter a password after we enter the domain. The password we will be entering here is very important. If we were setting up AADC or RODC our steps would have been different. Since we are setting up Active Directory from zero here the settings can be kept as recommended.

In the next screen we are welcomed by the area concerning DNS. I leave this area empty because I don’t want DC to provide DNS service for now. We will be coming back to DNS service setup and administration later. We leave the parts that come after DNS service as default and complete the setup by clicking next-next-install. The server will automatically restart when the setup is complete.

You can see that Active Directory Role on the “Tools” section which is located on top left and top right on Server Manager once the server is on again. To get to the AD you have set up, after clicking Windows button you can reach it through “Windows Administrative Tools”.