Category: Technology

Microsoft Teams – At Mentioning Shortcut For Multiple Individuals

I usually find myself at-mentioning the same handful of people in Teams channels – the managers, project leads, or SME’s. In a situation where I know everyone pretty well, that’s OK. A little time consuming as I get the three or four names typed in. And it’s not always obvious who the “go to” people in a Team should be. I find myself reading through a bunch of old posts just to figure out who is a good contact for a question.

Microsoft has introduced the idea of tagging individuals in Teams. These tags are defined within a Teams space – so the “managers” in Team XYZ aren’t the same “managers” from Team ABC. Tags both provide a shortcut – instead of typing the three individual manager’s names, I can at-mention managers – and a way of identifying people’s roles within the team – you can find the SMEs, Team Leads, or Tech Contacts just by looking at those tags.

How do you set up tags? You need to be a Team owner. Anyone can view the tags you set up, but creating tags is something only Team owners can do. Click on the ellipses next to the Team name and select “Manage tags”

Select “Create tag”

Give a name to your tag & start adding members

Tags aren’t objects that can be deleted – simply by removing all members from a tag, it disappears. So you’ll need to add someone here, even if that’s you. Click “Create” to create the tag.

You can also manage tags by managing the Team members – you’ll see a column for the tags, and moving your mouse into the tags column for an individual will display a little tag icon you can use to add tags to the individual.

If you enter a tag that does not exist, you can click the button to “Create …” the tag.

For existing tags, you can click the box to select the appropriate tags and select “Apply”

Now any team member can view the Team membership and see who is a project lead and who is an SME

Additionally, any Team member can at-mention these individuals by the tag. The display will indicate how many individuals are included in the tag – asking three people a question is probably reasonable, asking fifty may not be!

The at-mention will resolve as the tag name

Another cool feature — when I look at the members of a tag, I can start a chat with those people.

 

Excel – Including Current Date In String

Here’s a trick to include the current date in an Excel string — especially useful if you want to include the current date on a graph without having to actually type the current date each time. If you just include TODAY(), you get the integer representation. Wrap TODAY() in TEXT() and supply the formatting you want (“yyyy-mm-dd” in my example). Voila, a date like 2020-03-22 instead of 43912.

Office 365 Feature Scale-back

Microsoft is adjusting some non-core features to save capacity while the number of remote workers increased dramatically. This won’t impact core services (signing on, viewing/sending messages, uploading/downloading files), but don’t be concerned if you’re getting replies where the person seemingly didn’t type, presence updates seem slow, avatars aren’t showing up next to someone’s name (or yours in the upper right-hand corner of Teams), etc.

Web Meeting Platform Capacity Comparison

I’ve had several situations now where a group is looking to start an online video meeting. To eliminate platforms that don’t support the number of people required, I put together this quick list. Teams and Zoom are, unfortunately, something home users are less apt to be familiar with … but it really is “click to join the call” easy.

Microsoft Teams (300)
Zoom (100)
Facebook Messenger (50)
Skype (50)
FaceTime (30, but limited to Apple products)
Google Hangouts (10)

Hangout Meet has a 250 person limit, but only if it is part of the gSuite subscription. It’s not part of our school district’s education package. Not sure if it’s part of our Township’s government package. Update: Google is now offering paid Hangout Meet features for free through 01 June.

MySQL: Moving Data From One Table To Another

Our OpenHAB persistence data is stored in MySQL. There’s an “items” table which correlates each ItemName string to an ItemID integer. There are then Item#### tables that store persistence data for each item. If you rename an item, this means a new table is created and previous persistence data is no longer associated with the item. For some items, that’s fine — I don’t really care when the office light was on last month. But there’s persistence data that we use over a long term — outdoor temperature, luminance, electrical usage. In these cases, we want to pull the old data into the new table. There’s a quick one-liner SQL command that accomplishes this:

INSERT INTO NewTable SELECT * from OldTable;
e.g. INSERT INTO Item3857 SELECT * FROM Item3854;

You can drop the old table too:

DROP OldTable;

But I run a cleanup script against the item list so often don’t bother to remove tables one-off.

ESP8826 (12e) Multisensor

We’d set up a prototype multi-sensor with an environment sensing kit that Scott picked up at MicroCenter a few years ago. There’s a little LCD display … but we wanted to report readings back to our OpenHAB server. Which required a network connection. Checking out prices for network cards to add to the Uno … well, it wasn’t a cheap add-on. But we found these ESP8266 modules that support 802.11b/g/n and provide the memory/processing for small programs. At about 3$ delivered, that was exactly what we needed.

I ordered a bunch of components to make multi-sensors – pressure sensors, luminescence sensors, temperature/humidity sensors. The sensors connect into a CP2102 ESP8266. The device is powered by a couple of 18650’s in a little box — another buck. There’s some miscellaneous wiring and a little breadboard, too. The total cost for the multi-sensor is about 8.50$. We could add a vibration sensor for another 0.50$, a PIR sensor for 2$, and a UV sensor for 2.50$. That’s 13.50$ for 7 different sensors — and we don’t need seven sensors everywhere.

I kind of want to make a weather station too — add a water level sensor, a precipitation detector, and a wind speed sensor. Those are surprisingly expensive! I want to check out the process to build your own anemometer. But I’d probably buy a nice Davis Anemometer 🙂

Connecting to a WiFi network with the ESP8266 is really easy:

  • Add a library to the Arduino IDE —
    • In the Arduino IDE preferences, select File>Preferences menu.
    • In the “Additional Boards Manager URLs” field, add ‘https://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json’
    • Select the Tools > Board menu and open the Boards Manager. Search for “esp8266” and install the platform.
    • From the Tools > Board menu, select the appropriate board. I ordered the CP2102 ESP8266 module, and we’re using “NodeMCU 1.0 (ESP-12E Module)” as the board.
  • Configure the WiFi network connection details in your code
  • Compile
  • Upload
  • You’ve on the network!

We’ve used an MQTT library and send sensor readings to our MQTT server.