Powerful ways to connect SharePoint team sites, files, lists and pages as tabs in Microsoft Teams

by Contributed | Dec 14, 2020 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

This past year has been one of tremendous integration between Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. SharePoint provides rich content services that power files, lists and pages directly inside of Teams. Team members can easily highlight files, organize lists, and design pages – all as powerful tabs in Teams – due to the ease of benefitting more from the connected SharePoint team site.

We’re pleased to announce the following updates within Teams – all powered by SharePoint:

• Updated flow to add Microsoft Teams to your SharePoint team site


• Updated SharePoint tab app


• Updated SharePoint pages tab app

More screenshots, details, and links to documentation below…

Unifying Teams and SharePoint content collaboration
Updated flow to add Microsoft Teams to your SharePoint team site

[roadmap ID: 46990]

We’re pleased to announce that we are making it even easier to bring SharePoint content into Teams, in the same motion of adding Microsoft Teams to your team site, aka #teamify.

We’ll make it easy to choose lists, libraries and pages that you want to bring into Teams as tabs. When you’ve selected what you need, click the Add Team button to make it happen. By default, your team site home page will be selected, you can change it to suit your needs, and you can fully navigate primary document library from the Files tab – just follow the folder breadcrumbs.

When adding Microsoft Teams to your SharePoint team site, you can select resources (pages, lists and document libraries) to be added as tabs in the general channel of the newly created Teams team.

Once in Teams, it is easy to collaborate with the same group directly around the SharePoint content you just brought in. Pick the same list or page (even the team site home page) you were just working on and engage your colleagues with chat side-by-side the list directly in Teams.

With your content available in Teams, we make it even easier to collaborate and get work done.

Learn more about adding Microsoft Teams to your SharePoint team site.

Updated SharePoint tab app

[roadmap ID: 68860]

We have improved the SharePoint tab experience when adding pages, lists or document libraries to a channel in Teams. It’s easy to select multiple content types from the connected team site, or by providing a link to any other page, list or library to which the user has access.

The updated SharePoint tab experience when adding pages, lists or document libraries to a channel in Teams.

We have also added a new “Recommended” section in the SharePoint tab to help user easily find the most relevant content from their site to pin in their channels. It’s a one-stop shop for adding various types of existing content that began in SharePoint.

Learn more how to add a SharePoint page, list, or document library as a tab in Teams.

Updated SharePoint pages app

[roadmap ID: 60614]

Using SharePoint pages is a great way to consolidate and share content in the right context using images, Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents, videos, links, Twitter feeds and more – all on the same page. And now you can more easily your pages as tabs in Microsoft Teams.

The updated experience makes it easier to choose pages from the connected SharePoint team site and you can also add a page from any SharePoint site link and then paste the URL of the page, or news post, that you want to add as a tab.

Choose pages from the connected SharePoint team site or add a page from any SharePoint site (via URL).

SharePoint will validate the SharePoint URL and if you have access to the page. Permissions of the page itself will not change, and if users on the team do not have permission to the tabbed page, they will be shown a page to request access.

Note: When adding content as tabs in Teams, you may notice a few SharePoint-powered apps – here as an FYI and clarity (in quotes is the text that shows in-app). This is an area of investment to ensure you can easily connect content stored in SharePoint in Teams channels:

• “SharePoint”– add existing content from the connected team site or any SharePoint site – including: Recommended content, Pages, Lists and Document libraries.


• “SharePoint Pages”– add a SharePoint page from the connected team site or from any SharePoint site using a URL. (this is the new app mentioned above)


• Microsoft “Lists”– Create a new list for your team or add an existing list from any existing SharePoint site. (more about working with the Lists app in Microsoft Teams)
  
  
  
  • “SharePoint lists”– you may see this app if you don’t yet have the new Lists app. It can be used to bring existing lists as a tab in Teams – but not to create a new list.
  
  
  
  


• SharePoint “Document Library”– add a SharePoint document library from relevant sites or use a SharePoint document library URL to a site or folder.

Learn more about adding SharePoint pages as tabs in Microsoft Teams, plus further info on how to use built-in and custom tabs in Microsoft Teams.

In closing …
When people work together and get things done, there is less confusion between team members and the content they create. This is the design goal behind Microsoft Teams – the hub for teamwork – and the reason why SharePoint is deeply integrated to provide great content experiences and services within the same user interface. And, it’s all backed by world-class security and compliance to meet the needs of every team across your organization.

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. And when you do this together – as a team – it’s teamwork that moves things forward.

Thanks, @Microsoft_Teams_team 

Microsoft Teams plus SharePoint = better together.

Using a Python Flask application with an Azure ML generated API endpoint

by Contributed | Dec 14, 2020 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Guest Post by Ivan Medrano.

I am a graduate student at Northwestern University in the Data Science program and a developer with expertise in the Azure.

For this project I created a simple Python and Flask interface as a container for our Azure experiment.

The interface interacts with an API that is generated through the Azure ML Ops portal. Azure uses a great interface which is reminiscent of SSIS in its simplicity. The different parts of the pipeline are represented visually, each piece can be dragged onto a canvas and manipulated with a mouse. This is one of the important things I point out in my video, as reducing the technical barriers to data science can help us focus on the work of modelling and domain knowledge.

With a tool like the ML Ops, we can integrate machine learning into enterprise level applications without having to worry about optimizing our code. We can focus on choosing the right model for the job and ensuring the data is clean, then provide the enterprise developers with an API to work with.

Even though the application was light weight I decided to use Azure Devops for source control. This helped keep all the changes organized and safe in the cloud. Its not something that I have seen Data Scientists do a lot, even in my graduate program, all the code is usually kept in a storage space or a local drive. Developers discovered a long time that source control is vital for the success of any large project. Even if you are working with a single page R Shiny application, I would recommend getting comfortable with GIT or any other source control technology. The benefits will be in the pain that you avoided in the future.

One service I did not use in my project but spoke about in my presentation is Azure Data Factory.

With this tool we could automate our data pipeline. For example, if we wanted to deploy our project to a production environment, we would need a way to update our data regularly. We could use ADF to access an API on a schedule and refresh our data. We could then move the data into an Azure Blob Storage item and access it from our ML Ops portal. Azure Data Factory would also allow us to trigger the experiment or notebook that we created to update our model results.

All these tools working together helped me build something very resilient in a very quick span of time. The project helped me get a good understanding of HL7 data used in the medical industry. It was very enlightening writing python scripts to extract data from the documents. The data is stored in documents and is non-relational. The scripts had to flatten the data so we could correlate events to drugs. For example, a patient goes into the doctor for a check up and gets prescribed several drugs. Each of those things exist as different items on the patients’ medical record so they must be tied together after normalizing.

The project also helped me understand some of the issues with applying classification algorithms to medical data, specifically pharmaceuticals. Some drugs cannot be properly classified due to the nature of how broad they are. If you think about painkillers, those can be used to treat a wide range of symptoms and illnesses. An experiment to tie drugs to illnesses in a 1 to 1 comparison would have very low accuracy scores for drugs like these but would work very well with specialty drugs.