Episode 194 – Microsoft Lists GAs in Microsoft Teams

- Welcome to episode 194 of the Microsoft cloud It pro podcast, recorded live September 4th, 2020. This, is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of IT Pros and end users, where we discuss recent news or topics, and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott dive more into Microsoft list, now that they've been recently GAID, both from the Microsoft list point of view, as well as from the app and Microsoft Teams. So, let's dive in and talk. Microsoft lists.

- Yeah.

- Hit the button.

- All right, all of the buttons have been hit.

- Excellent, I'm glad we figured that out once again.

- And hopefully our video recording this time will put us back side by side, instead of flipping back and forth like last week.

- I'ma yell at my producer.

- You should, he's using a new camera too, `cause the camera wiggling on his desk annoyed him. But I don't know that I liked this view, I feel like it kind of looking at my nose.

- Well, I mean, you're a vlogger now, right?

- And that was a vlog point

- I'm a vlogger. . What is that thing?

- It's the Sony Z...

- The Sony ZV1, ZV, ZV?

- Yeah, ZV, Sony ZV1.

- Yes, see you are a blogger now, that's vlogger camera.

- I'm a vlogger.

- Yes, we've actually been doing a lot on YouTube. I have another friend of mine that's been doing some YouTube videos too on my channel, and, he, it's interesting, `cause he comes with a different perspective. So he's in a completely different industry than us, but uses Microsoft 365. So he's been doing light more end-user type videos, that we've been putting on the Intelligenk YouTube channel, So if you're looking for like some Word, Excel, and you still a bit of a technology guy too, so he's been playing around with Power apps, but, doing a little bit more beginner videos, I've been doing a bunch more Teams' videos, but, we've been putting like two or three videos up a week on YouTube lately.

- You need to get a--

- So... custom channels slug, it's what you need to do there.

- I do, I have it already. It's slash Intelligenk. So it's YouTube slash Intelligenk.

- You don't get it navigating just through the YouTube directory, that's an--

- You know what, yeah, and I don't know why, `cause if I go into all my settings, it is set to be my custom URL. But going through the directory doesn't get it. I, maybe if I undo it and redo it, I don't know, I blame YouTube. But yes, as a result.

- As you should.

- I got tired of using webcams, and for a while I was using my itune camera, my iPhone, for video, and I finally splurged and bought the Sony ZV1, and I figured I'd try it for today too. I have a bit of a goofy setup, `cause I'm actually, naturally they released their webcam software for it, for windows, but not for Mac, so I have to go out of the HDMI out, and I have one of the Blackmagic ATEM Mini HDMI switches, So it goes, HDMIO into the Blackmagic ATEM Mini, and then it shows up like that device shows up, as a webcam, so I can pick any one of my four HDMI inputs as my webcam, and my camera's one of them. So, that is what I'm doing. But then it's always like, where do you position the camera, right? `Cause I could put it over there, or I could try to put it up here, but if it's yeah...

- Well, the next step is, you get the mount, that can come right over your monitor, and then come down right dead center in the monitor, so it's actually gonna be sitting in front of content on your screen, but you would be looking directly into it, like into the souls of your audience.

- Right, I mean, it's small enough, I could probably get away with that, or I could just like set this tripod up, so that, `cause I have a little mini desk tripod, that I could set up, so it's right in front of the monitor, that would work too. But then I couldn't see

- Your beautiful face on my monitor Scott.

- Oh sure you could. You could find a way to make that happen.

- Although I'm not looking at my monitor right now, I'm looking at the camera. That's the weirdest thing with all the webcams and everything, is always like not looking at everybody else, but trying to keep looking at the camera.

- Yeah. I keep trying to adjust my set up, like, can I pull mine over further or move the camera, over, you know, what that looks like, and where it comes out in the middle, but-- or we just--

- The struggle is real.

- Yeah, or we just need to use Teams for everything, go get ourselves some surface devices, and use the eye fixing feature.

- Yeah?

- That we could

- Is that what's next? The Surface Duo?

- No, not the Duo. Didn't we talk about this last week? Well, I didn't know if, I didn't know if you had broke down an order one yeah.

- No, I have not. It's interesting to see the feedback on it. It has gotten some good feedback, because, like you said, I drastically... Misunderstood--

- who's had good feedback from? `Cause it's had one of the weirdest roll outs, that I've seen in a while. There's a dual embargo, so, the people who received

- Oh calf.

- You know those kids for like the first 50 devices--

- But they couldn't turn them on?

- Yeah, well they could, they're just not allowed to talk about it. Which is hilarious, because if you're willing to brave Best Buy, at whatever store, the demo units are up with the software on, so you could totally go into a Best Buy or something like that, and just play with the shelf unit, with its demo mode.

- Interesting. So, maybe not good reviews it hasn't been terrible, like everybody talks about the price, but they didn't, I personally didn't realize how, in line that pricing actually was with all the other foldables. Because there was another one--

- So the pricing is in line with the form factor, but if you consider other foldables, it is still not up to spec, for a bunch of different things, right?

- It's a hardware, it's all apps, use hardware. Yeah, so, SOC Ram camera, all those things are behind, and even the battery is pretty small, because it's such a thin device, I think you're looking at something, it's on the order of like 35, 3,600 milli amp hours, in that battery, versus going to, you know, like something that's a larger, thicker device, like the Fold2 user things that have come out recently.

- True, I was pressed by the size of the... Like some of the reviewer said, it looks super wide, like, I look like I'd have to stretch my fingers out, to actually hold it because of the width.

- Yeah, not you, you'd be like a one-hander, but--

- You know, like normal people, yeah, two hands.

- It was about the same height as the iPhone 11 Max, but it was definitely wider than the iPhone 11 Max.

- Yes, yeah.

- So.

- Different devices for different things, but, we'll see.

- Yes.

- Again, I am probably not the target market for that, because I have no plans in buying, that or frankly, any foldable for that matter. Because I don't have a use for it. If I need something bigger, I'm gonna take my iPad. And if I want something small, yeah. And I won't have to fiddle with that. Or like, if you want to take a picture, having to take it out, like flip it all the way around to, take a forward facing picture of my kids, instead of a selfie, it's not gonna happen.

- But again, that's unique to the surface, the Surface Duo, that was a design decision they made, only to have that camera on the inside, things like the Galaxy Z Flip, or the Galaxy Fold, they do not have that issue, because they have cameras on both the front and back.

- Yes, although, like you said, I think those are actually, which one came out, they announced this week, it had a starting price of like $2,000.

- That's the Fold2. Yeah It's a Galaxy Z Fold2, yeah.

- Anyways, should we actually get into stuff we haven't talked about before, as we rehash stuff we already talked about?

- Yeah, what do you wanna talk about?

- What do you wanna--

- Physio, AKS...

- Lists.

- Lists.

- That have GAID now in Teams.

- You know, yes. So, Lists, I think it was announced just yesterday, so today is what? Today is November...

- November?

- November.

- Wow.

- I don't even have slug...

- You're so way off in the future--

- Yeah--

- September, let go back a couple months back--

- Maybe, I'm like projecting, I'm wishing it was already in November and it's almost over, yeah.

- But then you would have missed Ignite. Okay, we'll talk about that later.

- I don't know, I could've gone back and watched on video.

- That's okay, it's September 4.

- Yeah, so on September 3rd, they announced, that all this stuff was GAing. So, Lists are GAing inside of Teams, and the interesting thing here, the part that I thought was really cool, when you think about like parody between, between the different clouds that are out there, like commercial clouds and sovereign clouds, like GCC, things like that, they actually announced--

- Yup.

- That it's coming to both commercial cloud, and GCC at the same time. So awesome job, you know, congratulations lists, and Teams team, they're getting it done, but, the funnier thing is, you still might be in a tenant, that doesn't have Lists, `cause it hasn't finished its global rollout yet.

- Right, `cause now it's GA well, yeah. `Cause it's GA, both Lists are GAID, and the List app and Teams is GAID. But, both of them are going through, like you said, that global rollout, so technically, you can have it in Teams, and not in SharePoint, which means it wouldn't work in Teams, or you could have it in SharePoint, but you don't have the app in Teams. I have it in both places. I was surprised how long it took me, like, I'm on the preview beta first release of everything, and, some of the stuff around lists, I didn't actually get in my preview environment, until it GAID.

- Yes, yeah.

- So, but, I mean... Microsoft Lists, I will give props to the marketing team, for making SharePoint list exciting again, how's that? Because, I think we talked about this, but I hadn't had a chance to play with it yet, and, if you go look at Twitter and all of that, you can figure this out pretty quickly, but, Microsoft list really is nothing more than a page, that was added, underneath, My Site, old My Sites, One Drive for business, whatever you want to call that site. It's a new page that was added under that URL, that pulls in a bunch of lists, and I have seen some people asking, "How does it decide which lists to pull in, and which lists not to pull in?" I think it's based on activity, but frankly I don't really know, because mine has been somewhat random at times, in terms of what it will pull in from one day to the next. But really, it's just a page, that pulls in a bunch of SharePoint lists, and if you click on Microsoft list, it goes to the SharePoint URL, for that list because it is just a SharePoint list, and all it does, is that adds little query string at the end of the URL, to give it the new Microsoft Lists look and feel.

- If you go delete the

- So you're navigating to that site.

- Right you're actually navigating to that site.

- Yep, so if you go delete the query string off the end of the URL, go delete those 10 characters, or whatever, you literally get your exact same... You're in your SharePoint site, in your SharePoint list, and you would never know that Microsoft list was even a thing, if you deleted that query string, on the flip side, you can go to any single SharePoint list in your environment, go paste that query string on the end of it, and you would think you jumped back into Microsoft Lists. A list is a list, is a list when it comes to that, in Microsoft Lists, or SharePoint list with the new UI, you do have an option now, I think they call it My Personal list, to add like your own private personal lists, all this does is it goes, and creates a SharePoint list, in your SharePoint site, that is your One Drive for business, which, they've done a pretty good job at kind of disguising that UI, but all of us old SharePoint people know that, One Drive for business is just another SharePoint site collection. So, all Microsoft Lists is doing with your personal list, is creating that list in your SharePoint site collection, that is your One Drive for business. And, same type of thing, you can go delete query strings, you can add query strings, you can go view your site contents of your My Site, and all of a sudden, all these lists will start, SharePoint list will start showing up. So you still have all the same restrictions, like the 5,000 list item, in a query, and, every thing that a SharePoint list is before in Microsoft list still is, it just has a new look and feel, is... Then what I have come to the conclusion with, With all of my digging and playing with it.

- Yeah, yeah, I think that's... It'll be interesting to see how it manifests itself, and if it can get away from that perception, that it's you know, just SharePoint list, with a effectively like new coat of paint, right? And, they're gonna have to add some features to it that SharePoint lists have never had, and things like that, but we'll see. I think the more interesting thing there is, diverging away from SharePoint Lists, right? If Microsoft Lists become the thing, but they still live in SharePoint, kinda like you said, like One Drive, in Office 365 or Microsoft 365 tenants, is, in your, where My Site, right? It's not a separate consumer service coming from One Drive, things like that, It's still SharePoint--

- Yep.

- But it's called One Drive, and now, you know, it's SharePoint Lists, but they're not SharePoint lists, they're Microsoft lists, because they should go into more of the ecosystem, and, SharePoint kind of becomes, that glue that holds it together. Which is the way that's stuff been going for a long, long time.

- Right, and we've seen it even with files. Like Teams files is just a SharePoint document library, and, it kind of keeps going in circles. So, I don't know, 2013, 2016, everybody was all about SharePoint, and then for a while there even in Office 365, the SharePoint name went away, and I think it was called Pages, or something like that, and everybody kind of started seeing, hey, is SharePoint just kind of turning into this backend repository for things like lists and files and ASPX pages and all of that? And SharePoint name is gonna kinda go away, and it's just gonna serve this backend service for all these other Office 365 features, and then, I think maybe it was about the time Jeff Teper came back and all of a sudden it got renamed back to SharePoint, and it was like, SharePoint's alive again, where everything got rebranded back to SharePoint, and I feel like now you're starting to see it flip back again, where it's like you have the Microsoft lists, you have Microsoft 365 groups, you have files and Teams in SharePoint's, kind of falling back into the background a little bit more again, where it's serving up, or storing, the content that's driving all of these other Office 365 or Microsoft 365 services, I mean, you still have your pages, you still have like your hub sites, and your communication sites, but, more and more you show people, hey, you can go create these SharePoint sites, and make them as a tab and Teams, and, I feel like SharePoint's kind of, I don't know, not as much as it did before, back in like the 2016 ish timeframe, but I feel like it's kind of starting to fade into the background a little bit more going back to being just a repository for some of this stuff.

- Yeah, I mean, it's, an entitlement that gives you access to these other things, right? I don't think you can say it's going away until the day you walk in and, like One Drive, and less, and, some of these other things that live fundamentally inside of SharePoint, become their own entitlements.

- True.

- Then they're effectively, like they're their own products, and kind of split out there, you know, it's, you know, you might know, like, how do your read your email? I go to Outlook to get my email, well, that's, that's exchange, right? That's been exchanged for a long time and it will continue to be exchanged, I can imagine.

- Right.

- Same kind of thing, with these, Add-Ons on SharePoint.

- Yup, it's interesting to have watched the whole life cycle of the SharePoint product, and all these things that, especially being in SharePoint since sometime in 2004 ish, and starting with the 2003 product, is seeing how it's evolved over the last 16 years. If I had really been doing SharePoint for that long, wow. Okay, enough reminiscing about how old I am, and how long I've been dealing with this stuff. What else, any other news, you had some news around, were you gonna completely switch topics here.

- Hold on, before we get out of that one. So, in that vein, that these things may not be available in your tenant yet, that is certainly a truism here. If you're looking to at least kind of go through the motions, and understand how Lists are gonna show up in your tenant, and you don't wanna watch a video, but you actually would like the ability to maybe like click stop on it, and, you know, dive into it a little bit more--

- Yup. Microsoft did create a bunch of click-through demos, for lists, so you can go and execute through a bunch of different scenarios. So one of the ones that they put in the... They have a link to it in the blog post for the announcement for Lists in Teams, but there's actually like three or four other ones, that are out there, there's one, you know, just create a list through like the One Drive experience, They have a click through demo for creating a list from Excel, from existing Lists, and also takes you through quick edit. So, if you're looking to get potentially a little bit ahead of that, they do have a bunch of click through demos, that you can do yourself at your own pace, over in the Microsoft Lists resource center.

- Okay.

- So, I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

- Okay, perfect. Oh, and one other thing, `cause, you got me looking at the blog posts, the other thing you do get with lists, I'll give you this, that you don't get with the SharePoint list, is they did add some templates there, so you can go create like an issue tracker list, or an employee onboarding list, work progress tracker, that, it's creating SharePoint, I mean, Microsoft Lists, SharePoint list templates, but those are only available through that list interface, It's not like they rolled out new templates into SharePoint Lists, in terms of creating some of those. So, I think they do some of the, they add in a bunch of stuff to like the column formatting, and create some columns, and, there is some other stuff kind of running in the background there, to create those Microsoft Lists templates that you do only get through that template, or the Microsoft Lists.

- Yeah, I'm trying to remember how those manifest, I thought I had saw someone saying that when you create a Microsoft list, even though it is a list that lives in SharePoint, so one of the things that you might've done in the past, was identified lists by like their template ID, that they were created from,

- Yup.

- So a task list versus a calendar you know, versus a custom list, but I believe that all of the Microsoft Lists that are spun up with their custom columns, and, row formatting and everything else, those are all custom Lists as well, so you can't readily differentiate them, from existing custom lists in your site If you're trying to do that, like programmatically for parsing, or, you know, say you're trying to do something like discovery within your environment, you wanna migrate a site or something and figure out where all the custom lists are? Enumerating that is they'll show up as custom lists and SharePoint, and then you might have to do, more splunking from there to figure out, was it a custom list my users created? Or was it a custom list that was instantiated through a Microsoft Lists template and then come up that way?

- Yup, which does kind of make sense with the fact that it's only available through that list format, and that they aren't actually different templates and SharePoint.

- Yeah, I don't think it like it doesn't affect you from the front end, it affects you from the backend--

- Right.

- For discovery, I would see, like I said, migration from site to site migration, and trying to make sure you understand everything that's in a site before you migrate it, so you can go talk to process owners, and, you know, make sure that you're grabbing the right things and only bringing over what you need to, that's one component of it. I think another is just general adoption. Like sometimes when you turn these things on, you know, when you turn on Teams for the first time in your tenant, you not only allocate the licenses, but typically you wanna track who's using it, what their usage is within that product? And you know, list potentially falls into that same kind of thing, because it's not just about like the UI, but it's why are people choosing to go into this business pro... Why are people choosing to go into this product? You know, you wanna be out with kind of getting the pulse of your organization and understanding like, did they see it solving a business problem? Did it like magically integrate with power automate and flow better for them? Like, what was the thing that drove them into kinda new shiny?

- Right, the other thing I've used that for is, if you let's say you have an Issues list, and internally you need an additional column, on all of your Issues lists, or some change to all of your issues list for internal processes, or some type of compliance or legal things, I've used PowerShell to go find all of those lists, and to your point programmatically, add columns, update columns, remove columns, that type of stuff, and that, could also pose a bit of a challenge when they're all just custom Lists. Yeah, it'll be interesting to play with it more, and continue to see where this evolves to. Okay, are we done with Lists now? We can be done with this whenever you wanna be done with this. I'ma make sure you get it all out of your system at once.

- So that you don't have to listen to me talk about Lists anymore. I don't think I have anything else about lists. I'm done with Lists.

- That's my Lists.

- Nope, you want to dive into your news announcement now? To completely switch topics on our listeners or viewers.

- Or we can stay in Office 365.

- Office 365?

- Yeah, so, did you see that the... Well, it's, it's not exactly new, but Microsoft has been updating the Visio stencils, for things like Azure and office services.

- Oh, no.

- That's, yeah, so you're, getting the most kinda modern versions out there. But one of the nice things that they've done here, is if you have your Visio online licenses, you can go to just a viso.office.com, go into the template gallery, like if you're somebody who works with Azure, or Office 365, Microsoft 365, and you have to create things like architecture diagrams, or kinda like overall, depictions of your environments, even at like a super high level, just go into the Visio gallery, and they've got a bunch of different diagrams, and they're all ready to go for you. So like the integrating on premises, active directory with Azure active directory, Dev test deployments for certain things, they've got a retail and eCommerce retail, retail and eCommerce site diagram. So there's a bunch of those, and then they all leverage you know, these new shape sets. So I think there were 18 or 19 new shape sets on top of that.

- Interesting, so I actually do have Visio in the labs, so I just went in and yeah, I see them all here where I can go like Jenkins server on Azure, is one of them I see in here, Dev test deployments, personalized marketing, decentralized trust between something, my text still chopped off. Azure LMS workspaces, we've talked about those before.

- Yup Yeah.

- True that's a making.

- So, anyway, could nice quick way, to like, if that's, what you're doing is working with Azure stuff, nice easy way to get up there.

- So do you have the link to go download all the updated stencils?

- I can find it--

- Have you found it?

- Some someplace, yeah, it's on the download center, but...

- Oh, it didn't work though. I chose one of them, and I get no drawing. I'll blame my browser.

- You ask for too much.

- I do.

- And this, is decidedly, a Microsoft specific, and maybe you do other things like you play with... You play with AWS or GCP, or you're, in like a Multicloud environment, I don't know if you ever played around with some of that stuff, and, had to create diagrams for that? There's a nice little free diagramming service, that has the latest for the most part diagrams for all those stencils for all those services as well, called CloudSkew. So I'll put a link to that one in the show notes, `cause that's been kind of one of my go-to's, on the side when you've got to do like Azure and AWS at the same time.

- Got it, I've not done CloudSkew. I have used Lucidchart a lot in the past, which is awesome.

- The nice thing about CloudSkew is , it just has all that stuff built into it.

- Got it.

- So it's got, and then you can bring in you know, your SVGs or I think PNGs--

- Okay.

- And, make it, do all the things that you would want it to do.

- All that stuff. Yeah, Lucidchart had some of them built in, but I was like, there, I could go upload my own too. There you can go crab Visio stencil packs, or any stencil packs that you can find and upload them, and add your own stencils to Lucidchart. But there's a lot of great diagramming options out there. But yeah, those are nifty, I see all the, even though my drawing didn't come in, I do see all the new shapes out there in Visio.

- Yeah.

- Very cool. What other Office 365 stuff do we have? Do we have any other Office 365 stuff?

- I don't have anything else for Office 365. I think where we're, you are officially into the slow times, as the ramp up for a freak night comes up. So the register--

- Oh we need to talk about registration stuff.

- The registration has opened, yeah.

- I registered the other day. Have you registered yet?

- Not yet, but--

- Not yet. But yeah, it is free. It's much like, I think we talked about it, `cause they started dripping out announcements, but it's much like build, It's gonna be a 48-hour nonstop conference, all virtual, all online, all free. So there is no reason not to sign up for Ignite this year. And we will be podcasting, from our houses.

- We'll?

- Yes, there's a new file sharing experience in Teams. I'm not gonna go through these while we're talking. But yeah, it should be good, I registered. What conference was it that, if you were like the first thousand you got free swag mailed to you? Was that Build?

- Well, it wasn't in, I mean it just in the first thousand, I don't know how they--

- They decided, because somehow you got swag and I did not.

- Yeah, I don't know, how that was or what that...

- And we have no idea about Ignite, and if you're actually gonna get swag, but, if you register early, there's always a chance you might possibly. Unless they did it based on job title or some other metric. Ask the question is how many times to... How many times do we have to register? And I guess we're just registering as regular people this year, not media.

- I know I'm kind of, I'm sad. I feel kind of a letdown of that, there's not media. Although I haven't emailed our context to see if there's still any media type stuff, but--

- You should.

- Given--

- I should, and I probably will, but given the format, I'm not thinking there's gonna be... It's definitely not gonna be like previous years, from a media perspective.

- I don't know, you should try it out and see.

- All right, I will do that. That'll be my homework for the next week. And with that, we can probably wrap it up. Like you said, we're kind of in a little bit of a low slow down there. They're GAing bunch of stuff, because there's a whole bunch of stuff that they said they would release in the next year, at Ignite last year, so it kind of has to GA before Ignite this year. And, I think you said they're sun setting a bunch of stuff, and to deprecating a lot of stuff, because, Ignite tends to be announcements and releases, which means a lot of stuff is hitting some end of life cycle type things, so we're in that wall of a bunch of Gas, a bunch of deprecations, and, we'll have to wait another three weeks? Yeah.

- Yup.

- Three weeks for ignite, and then there will be a slew of new stuff we can talk about.

- Yeah, It's coming.

- All right, well thanks, Scott.

- Yeah, thanks Ben.

- Go enjoy the rest of your Friday, and your weekend, and we'll talk to you next week.

- Yeah, three-day weekend, let's do it.

- All right, enjoy the boat.

- Bye.

- Bye