These are often cited tips in the thread:

• Setup your fingerprints in the dark or in low-light conditions.
• During setup press as hard as you normally do during unlock. Many people (including me) press pretty hard during setup to get the device to understand my fingerprint. But if you normally unlock with a light press, also make sure to press lightly during setup.
• Register the same finger twice during setup.

I dont use a screen protector myself, but you could play with the screen protector settings (in Display menu) if you do. Some people say disabling it, actually makes the finger print sensor work better.

We contacted MS Support about it, since there were no changes to the script and the error only happenend very rarely.

We received the reply that Microsoft is working on moving the underlying Azure Automation infrastructure into Azure containers which probably cause the issue. It should auto-resolve after the move has been completely performed.

Reply from Microsoft Support

->Currently, Azure automation is in the process of migrating from SQL Sandbox to Azure containerized environment, we see that the jobs which were running successfully are failing in container environment. More details of this process as below.

Azure Automation is currently in the process of modernizing its backend platform and bring forth a range of improvements. The new platform offers enhanced performance and reliability. Platform updates have required changes to the internal directory structure and the usage of environment variables. If your runbooks have taken dependencies on those internal implementation details, you may find that the behavior of your runbooks in the new environment may change, and your runbooks may require updating in order to adapt to the new platform. The product team has put processes in place to minimize issues arising out of this backend change and is monitoring service health continuously. We are actively working on mitigating any issues and promise to extend our complete support to resolve your queries.

As I checked from the backend, the jobs last failed are from 21st Oct which picked container as environment to run. This is a clear issue that has occurred because of migration to ACI(container). There is no action plan from your side, this will be resolved automatically.

Apart from the above, I do not see any failed jobs that picked container environment.

On 26th, I do see 10 jobs got generated out of which 4 picked container environment instead of Sandbox and completed successfully. Below are the 4 job ids:

As per the latest update from PG on 26th Oct, 70% of the deployment has been completed in West Europe(automation account region). In the coming days, you will see all the jobs using only container environment.

Kindly monitor if you see any failed jobs in the meantime and let me know so I can report them. Also, please reach out to me if you have further questions.

See this PowerShell script to fetch additional metadata of Stream classic channels such as the description and logo. It will create a csv-file with the metadata and store all the logos in a subfolder /Images of the folder you run the script in. Remember that you need to create a token.txt file with the Bearer token that you got from the chrome dev tools on the Stream classic portal.

Find all playlists

You can find all playlists via search using the managed property ListTemplateTypeId and a specific GUID. See
https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/search.aspx/?q=ListTemplateTypeId%3A3a867b4a-7429-0e1a-b02e-bf4b240ff1ce

KQL Query:
ListTemplateTypeId:3a867b4a-7429-0e1a-b02e-bf4b240ff1ce

Create playlist and set TemplateTypeId:

You must use the normal commands to get the PnP list template of a playlist created throught the GUI in order to create a playlist via PowerShell. You can find out how to do so online, for example here.

However, the TemplateTypeId field of the list cannot be set via a PnP Provisioning template. And if it's not set you will not find the list via search with the query above, but also the Playlist view of the list will not work correctly. You need to set the TemplateTypeId field using powershell with these commands:

$list = Get-PnPList -Identity "Playlist"; $list.TemplateTypeId = "3a867b4a-7429-0e1a-b02e-bf4b240ff1ce"; $list.Update(); Invoke-PnPQuery;
Because getting the pnp template and applying it is also non-trivial, you can check them out here:

• PnP Playlist template xml
• PowerShell to create list from template

Creating an item in a video playlist

Creating an item in a list using PowerShell is normally quite simple. However, the video playlist template uses a number of fields that are not even visible in the GUI and you need quite a lot of information about the video file in order to fill the fields. Using the browsers dev tool I found out what data to use during the list item creation to be able to create an item. The script works, however the final step to add the list item does still give an error. You can suppress that by adding parameter -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue to the Add-PnPListItem command. Should you find a way to remove the error altogether, let me know!

See this PowerShell to create an item in a video Playlist.

Sorry for the bad formatting of the PowerShell in markdown, to do that correctly still goes over my head :D

Here's a screenshot of a programmatically created playlist and programmatically added items:

Simply use the embed webpart with the link of the playlist. Get the link to the playlist when you click View Playlist after adding a video to it.
Example link is: https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/sites/jwtestgroup/Lists/Rabbits%20JW%20Test%20group/AllItems.aspx?env=WebViewList

In some occasions you will want to change the URL of an SharePoint Online site. Maybe the function has changed or the team name for example.
You can do that wiht the PnP PowerShell commandlet: Rename-PnPTenantSite.

When you do so and it succeeds, your site will live on the new URL you specified and the old URL will redirect to that new location as well.
The redirect happens by way of a special SharePoint site template with the template name redirectsite#0.
In case you want to re-use the old URL you will have to remove the redirect site at that address. That can be done with the commandlet Remove-PnPTenantSite.
One catch in the process that I have noticed, is that sometimes (but not always it seems) that if you use the Get-PnPTenantSite commandlet it will either get the redirect site or the site that is redirected to!
If you want to get the actual redirectsite with template redirectsite#0, you can do it by first getting all sites of that template and then filtering the list by the URL.
$redirectSite1 = (Get-PnPTenantSite -Template "REDIRECTSITE#0") | Where-Object { $_.Url -eq $aSiteURL };

Make sure to always check after a site rename that:

• The site exists and works on the new URL
• The old site's template is of type redirectsite#0 before removing it.

Should you've come here looking for a script to do a URL swap of two sites, look no further than this PowerShell script to swap site URLs.

Teams working in an Agile methodology will have regular meetings where they prioritize the work they need to do (the User Stories) and vote for the effort and complexity of every story through Scrum poker.

Problem:

• Due to corona virus measures most Scrum planning and voting meetings happen via MS Teams.

• When you vote simply in a teams meeting chat, everyone will see the votes and people will be influenced by the first vote. Often the first vote determines all the responses.

Solution:

• Create a simple Scrum poker bot solution where people can vote without others seeing their vote. Then post the results in a public channel for discussion.

Solution in action:

Personal message from Flow bot to each voter

Response submitted view of card

Final message with responses of two people in teams channel (without any real formatting done :-)

Flow construction:
1. Flow button trigger (manually trigger a flow) with a property User Story Name
2. Three parameters userStoryName (string), voters (array of email addresses) and responses (empty array)
3. Compose a JSON of the Adaptive card we will post in Teams.
4. Apply to each for the voter array: Add action 'Post an Adaptive card to a Team user and wait for response.
5. Append the response to an array.
6. When all responses are collected, post the results in a Teams channel all the voters have access to.

NB: In order to read the results of the 'Post adaptive card and wait' action I had to create an expression since the responses were not selectable in the dynamic content. Must be an issue because of the Preview nature of the action.

The expression is outputs('POSTCARDITERATION')?.body?.data?.acPollChoices where POSTCARDITERATION is the name of the 'Post an Adaptive card to a Team user and wait for response action and acPollChoices is the id of the selection control in the adaptive card.

High level overview of the Flow

Flow Details 1

Flow details 2

Flow details 3

Background:

Say you are developing a business application using Azure Logic Apps and SharePoint Online.
You'll want to deploy it to multiple SharePoint tenants or site collections within a tenant for system testing and user acceptance test purposes. And later easily go live on freshly installed site collection.

When you're using SharePoint actions like Get Items, Update item or similar, you'll have noticed that after filling in the list you want to use, Logic Apps will change the action to use the list GUID instead of the title behind the scenes. That's all fine and dandy until you move the logic app to a new site or tenant with a different list. Your Logic App will not work without manually changing the selected list in all the sharepoint actions. This is very cumbersome and error-prone work to do.

When you setup a release pipeline in Azure DevOps and deploy the Logic Apps through ARM Templates (extract them with this great tool by Jeff Hollan), you'll want to avoid such manual steps of course.

Solution

Here's a simple trick to do it. When you are developing the Logic App, simply define parameters for the List titles and also the site url. Basically anything that will be different for a different site collection or tenant. The nice thing is that in update or create item actions you'll still be able to easily fill in the field values even though the actions is not tied to the list by a unique id.

_{Define a parameter for a list tite}

After you have then extracted the ARM template, your JSON definition of the Logic App will no longer contain GUIDs to lists. It will simply use the list titles.

_{The parameters in the exported ARM template}

Of course, you need to make sure you create a site with the same titles by using a PnP template for example. Also, no one can be changing the list titles, so make sure you lockdown those permissions well.

Hopfully this trick will save you some manual labor and prevent some mistakes!

When you're managing a SharePoint online tenant you'll probably need to investigate performance on a regular basis. Sometimes users report issues and you'll need to open up a support case with Microsoft.
Without supporting data you'll have a hard time providing the right information to really get a quality reply and perhaps even a solution from MS side.

In this article I provide a way to monitor sharepoint performance by collecting performance and processing information Microsoft provides in every page request.

Prequisites

• a SharePoint Online tenant.
• a desktop/server/Azure Automation account to run a PowerShell script. Locally you'll need the SharePoint Client Components SDK installed.
• An Azure subscription with an Application Insights resource created.

Solution

Although differently for Modern and Classic pages, Microsoft provides some data on how the page request performed at their cloud servers' side like the request duration. Next to that, each page request has a corresponding correlation id that can be used by Microsoft to find errors in their server logfiles.

Here I provide a powershell script you can run on a desktop or in Azure Automation to collect the provided data and send it to Application Insights in Azure. Next to that I'll give a Application Insights query to create a graph of the custom monitoring events the powershell script sends.

PowerShell Monitoring script

In the script you'll need to provide:

• An application Insights key (passed into the script by using a parameter)
• You'll need to add URLs to modern and classic sites in the bottom of the script
• If you run it locally you need to set the path to Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll

Application Insights KUSTO query
customEvents | where name == "Event sharepoint monitoring script" | where timestamp >= ago(14d) | extend spRequestDuration = customDimensions.["spRequestDuration"]
| extend siteType = customDimensions.["SiteType"]
| summarize avgRequestDuration=avg(todouble(spRequestDuration)) by tostring(siteType), bin(timestamp, 5m) // use a time grain of 5 minutes | render timechart


You can add this query in the Azure Portal, when you go to the Application Insights you created and then go to Logs (Log analytics) in the left menu. From there you can Pin the graph to a Dashboard.

End result:

There is no official SLA or guidance on what these values should be, but when you see modern sites showing an average request duration of over 1500ms for more than an hour, you definitely need to open a support case towards Microsoft.

Let's say you’re an administrator for a large company that has a substantial Office365 tenant that consist of many SharePoint sites (e.g. more than 20000). And you want to run some kind of monitoring or maintenance script on all those sites. Of course you want to use PnP PowerShell for that.
When you've developed the script you notice processing each site takes a fair amount of time (e.g. more than a couple of seconds). Combine this with the large number of sites and your script needs a considerable amount of time to complete. You perhaps wants to run it on a schedule and not on your own machine either. You then have the option to run it on a local server or in Azure Automation.
The local server may have some disadvantages related to network connectivity etc. That can happen quite often in large enterprises.
Azure Automation is a joy to work with but in this case it also has a downside.

Azure automation scripts are constricted to a maximum run time of three hours

See Automation runbook execution. If a script runs longer than three hours you will run into the error
The job was evicted and subsequently reached a Stopped state. The job cannot continue running.

Solution

Basically any script that iterates over a collection could be done in a batched way. This means you only process a part of the whole collection in one go. By adjusting your script slightly and using Microsoft Flow/Power Automate to call the Automation Job you can reduce the run time per batch to stay under three hours.
The collection in my case was the total number of site collections in the tenant. By doing 19 batches of a 1000 I could process all sites.
Here's the general procedure:

1. Update the script so it handles a batch instead of the whole collection.

2. Create a Flow that takes the total number of items (site collections) and a batchsize and the calls the Automation runbook a certain number of times (the batch count).

In this way you can keep running automation jobs in batches until everything is done, as long as each batch takes less than three hours. This is one way to solve this constraint of Azure Automation in an straightforward way.

Flow

_{Start of Flow - Manual Flow trigger}

With below expression I calculate the number of batches to do, this is done via integer division. Divide the total number of site collections you want to process by the batchsize. The total number of sites will have to be guessed or calculated through some other way, the trick is to estimate a larger value than the real value otherwise you wont process all sites.
add(div(triggerBody()['number'],triggerBody()['number_1']),1)

_{Flow continued - loop}

Run the flow until the index has been increased until greater than or equal to the total number of batches we calculated.

_{Flow continued - Run Azure Automation action}

Here you see the Azure Automation action. This is a premium connector by the way. In case you use boolean parameters in you runbook then you need to perform the following trick.
Instead of selecting Yes or No, use a manual parameter then use below expressions for False or True

- int('0') : False
- int('1') : True

Azure Automation PowerShell runbook

Here's part of a PowerShell script that you could setup to run in a batched way. Notice the parameters $batchNo (batch number) and $batchSize
In the code I get all site collections and the tenant and then using the -skip and -first actions of the select command I get the set of site collections to do in this batch.
Where it says 'PROCESS SITE HERE' you can add your code to process a single site.

param ( [Parameter(Mandatory = $true)] [ValidateSet("QAS","PROD")] [string] $env, [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][string]$logFileSiteUrl, [Parameter(Mandatory=$false)][string]$SPOAdminCredName, [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][int]$batchNo = 0, [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][int]$batchSize = 10, [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][bool]$uploadFile, [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][bool]$runLocal )

$spoAdminCred = Get-AutomationPSCredential -Name $SPOAdminCredName;

$conn = Connect-PnPOnline -Url $tenantUrl -Credentials $spoAdminCred; $allSiteCollections = Get-PnPTenantSite;

$totalNumberOfSiteCollections = $siteCollections.Length;

Write-Output "Total number of site collections: $totalNumberOfSiteCollections";

$startIndex = ($batchNo * $batchSize);

$siteCollections = $allSiteCollections | select -Skip $startIndex; $siteCollections = $siteCollections | select -First $batchSize;

$numberOfSiteCollections = $siteCollections.Length;

Write-Output "Starting from site collection number $startIndex with batchsize $batchSize";

if ($siteCollections -and $siteCollections.Length -gt 0) { $aIndex = 0;

foreach ($aSiteCollection in $siteCollections) { Write-Output "Starting with site number $aIndex of $numberOfSiteCollections";

#PROCESS SITE HERE $aIndex++; }

if ($uploadFile) { Write-Output "Uploading $logPath to $logFileSiteUrl"; UploadLog -siteLocation $logFileSiteUrl; } else { Write-Output "Uploading file $logPath is NOT enabled."; } }