Welcome to episode 342 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on July 7th, 2023. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of it pros and end users where we discuss the topic where recent news and how it relates to you Microsoft Edge Workspaces, what are they, what do they do? And how we started using them is the focus of today's episode.
We also talk a bit about how we manage access to the internet for our kids as well as some jenness when it comes to enterprise notes and loop for recurring meetings, as well as some jenness around documentation for Microsoft Graph PowerShell. I have a question for you. I recently bought, I think we talked about this maybe, maybe we just talked about it some point not on the show. Okay. I recently switched my network over at home from a TP link mesh network. Yes. Over to Unify. Okay.
Over to ubiquity. So I've got kind of the R two D two trashcan router, like the Unify dream router and then I, you know, I picked up some unified cameras, things like that. Yep. One thing that I have been missing, and I've been missing this ever since, like my early days with like I think some of my links, this routers and even the TP link had a sense of control for this was parental controls for children.
And now that I'm in this unify space and it's like not quite consumer grade, but it's also not quite enterprise grade, like it's this halfway middle of the road thing, they really don't have things that I'm used to. Maybe like Disney Circle ish kinds of things. Like right, take this group of devices, associate it with these kids, maybe shut off the wifi at this time of day or oh time to get the kids out of the room.
Like I wanna kill the wifi just for these five devices or I wanna kill this set of websites for this class of devices that belong to these people effectively. Like I wanna be able to associate devices to people and then from those people, and you could think of maybe a person as a group because it's got end devices underneath it, I wanna be able to execute actions on top of that. So my current network is unify with like I said, UDR.
So it's the latest version of Unify network and and the network app and all that stuff. Okay. And I also run a pie hole for DNS and I would also accept answers here that say, Hey, you can do this on the pie hole, but it would be kind of janky. But I want to get to a world where I can get back to a associating at least my kids' devices with like my kids as like some type of named security group or thing on the network that then I can just turn on and off.
Like my kids have no business being on the internet at 2:00 AM so I just wanna make sure like if they wake up at night, like there's not even a chance that they can hop on and do that kind of thing. So I've looked at Unify, I can't find anything in there that's like hey, here's really a good way to do the same kinds of things which you know, something like a Disney Circle offered,
which I get like that was a very specialized kind of thing, right. But gee, it would be nice to have and when I looked at doing it on the pie hole, you know I can create like device groups on the pie hole, but then I have to do all these like weird inclusion exclusion rules. Like it's kind of tough.
You actually get to the point where like you create a group that's basically like kids enabled and kids disabled and then you're kind of like moving devices between those two groups, what you want to have, which what you want to, you know, affect on them. And then all you're doing on the pie hole is black hole traffic. So it's not a great experience cause all your devices show online but then you can't really browse anything.
Like it meets the need but it doesn't quite like, it's almost but not quite. So I'm wondering if you have the same struggle being that you have a bunch of devices in your house, you have a bunch of kids, like how do you moderate and kind of make sure that your kids are maybe approaching like device time in a measured way, maybe with some of the controls that you have in the house that are more than just like, hey get off your device, it's time to come eat dinner .
So I do a mix right now. I'm also curious, do you, does it need to differ because you have multiple kids? I have multiple kids. Do you have one global sweeping rule for all the kids or do you want to have different rules for different kids? Preferably different rules for different kids. My kids are pretty close in age, but like one is 16 and the other is 14.
Like there's probably a little bit of a line where we would let, like in a, in a perfect world, if I could do both, I would certainly give the 16 year old more leeway with certain things on the internet, Uhhuh, then I would potentially give to the. 14, 14 year old. Year old. But if they had to be the same then cool, so be it. You know that that's okay. Well. One advantage, I would say advantage, one thing we have is everything we have is Apple devices.
We do not have a non-Apple device in the house. So I use some of the screen time controls on my kids' devices. So that is actually going around to each device and like my daughter has experienced it before when she was up for a couple late nights and like all of a sudden at 10:00 PM she can't do anything on her device anymore because of those screen time controls where it's like shut off the internet for anything
she's logged into. So that translates to an iPad. We have a Mac mini, it translates to that. It's like these controls and we actually just got her an Apple watch as well and like it kind of propagates across all of those. So that's a little bit more on the person by person level, but it does have to be this is the only device they use. Yeah. So I do screen time as well. Okay. And where it breaks down for us is my kids have additional devices that, you know, fall outside,
don't fall into that outside the boundary of that. So think like Kindles like, yep. I don't mind if you read on your Kindle, but ideally I don't want you reading on your Kindle at 1:00 AM like you should be sleeping at 1:00 AM and figuring that out and, and those have some parental controls and, and that's okay. The other one that we have is like Nintendo devices or like consoles. Got it. And those all have parental controls built into them in some way as well.
Like you know like all my, both my kids have switches, like they bought 'em for themselves with their own birthday money, blah blah blah. But like the parental control and the switch, like all it does is beep at you when you're out of time. You can totally sit there and keep playing for another four hours if you don't mind the beep around it. The beep.
And I would rather like take away and I think the whole takeaway network access thing is sometimes the safest way to do it because even with like video games and things like that, sometimes they require an update before they'll launch. So I'd rather just stop you from updating and like block you that way. And really one of the ways to do that is to potentially have all the internet access cut off.
Shut. Off. And that's really what things like Disney Circle were kind of doing the best and I, I could probably go about like I haven't looked to see like if I could get another device like that again or like if they even still sell it. But to be honest it was a little weird. Like it slowed down the network a little bit. It had some weird DNS things. Yeah. I agree. So here's my other solution. I do a combination.
So I do the screen time, this is gonna depend how granular you want to get is gonna be how many networks you want to create on Unify. So I have created multiple networks and one such network is the family network and I have my work network. Now in theory you could go through and like create Scott's network and Scott's Wife's Network and your 16 and up network and your 14 to 16 network, all of those. And then I use Next DNS and then I set custom d n s providers on those various networks.
So the family has one set of dnss that has one profile and next D n s than my work one has a different profile in next DNS. And within that DNS provider it has things like threat intelligence feeds. You can go in and set like Google safe browsing or crypto jacking protection. You can have privacy where you can do some of the block lists for ads.
But then you do have a parental controls where you can restrict access to websites or games you can restrict access to categories and then you do have a recreational time set a period of each day of the week, which some of the websites, apps, games will not be blocked. I'm thinking maybe you could figure something out with the recreation time.
But you can do things like force YouTube, restricted mode, force, safe search denial lists, allow lists, analytics I across all my devices have 1.8 million D n s queries and 91,000 blocked queries. It's amazing some of the queries that get blocked, particularly when you start doing ad blocking, you can go log across the devices so you can do some there. So I don't think this would let you do it based on device because it's DNS based but you could do it on network. This.
Is back to kind of the path I w I was down the pie hole with is. So in the pie hole you can create configurations and device groupings and kind of move things forward that way. So I don't know like going to a service like Next DNS or even open DNS like
Family Shield, something like that. Like eh, it feels like ever so slightly off given that I'm already running like a full pie hole infrastructure with Unbound and everything else here that I'm already routing through and able to respond to millions of requests and get all that stuff done. So yeah, maybe I'll have to go play around with pie hole a little bit more and see if I can report back with a good way to do it or maybe I just need to learn to let go
and let my kids live their lives on the internet. Who knows? We'll see. I feel like there's another device that was like Disney Circle but I can't remember what it was. It would be interesting to go see if there's more devices out there like that. Like I said, it had some downsides. Yeah, I don't have a great scenario or solution and my kids like yours are all close in age. They're all five years apart but they're ages five to 10 right now.
So I kind of have just lumped them all together again as they get older and we end up with like 11 and 16, I may need to come up with a solution because I'm not sure I'll let the 11 year old to your point do the same thing the 16 year old will be able to access and do on the internet. Makes sense. Okay, so that's random question number one. Random follow up.
Number one, we talked about kind of notes and loop and some weird stuff last week and you pointed out something to me that's been annoying me and I like forgot to articulate it. Shared notes with loop components in recurring meetings do not refresh between recurring meetings. So should we have a meeting notes in a recurring meeting series like we happen to have for this recording the podcast right?
Every single week our meeting notes is the same list of things in the same to-do list and if you check it off it stays checked off and it doesn't refresh week over week, which seems kind of weird and I don't know, it doesn't feel like the right way for it to behave. So maybe like something else for the the loop devs and PMs to go take a look at.
I agree like I mean I've been at lots of companies where you have recurring weekly status meetings and you want to take meeting notes and this does not feel like the way to do it. And I know we talked last week when we were talking about enterprise notes and OneNote as the sole note taking app in Microsoft 365 that eventually you'd be able to put these components in your OneNote for your meeting notes.
But do you really want like this running list of notes from 26 meetings if you have a recurring meeting once a week for six months and then you have to paste like this component in each one. It feels like even on a recurring meeting every time you click meeting notes instead of pulling up just a singular loop component that has all the meeting notes for all the recurring meetings all crammed into a single note that you should be creating a new component every time you have a meeting,
regardless of it's recurring or not. I mean if you wanna tie 'em all together, maybe somehow automatically create an index of meeting notes somewhere. But even that it could get long. I'm with you, this should be a single meeting notes per meeting regardless of recurring meetings. There's some weird stuff with recurring meetings.
I've had some issues with recurring meetings in SharePoint too and just how recurring meetings are handled across Microsoft products in general can sometimes be a little janky I would say. A little bit just, just so ever so much off. All right, so follow he's gonna talk about follow something. Else, janky. . Yeah let's, let's talk about the next jenky thing since we're going down that path.
So last week when we hopped off the show we were talking a little bit with some folks in Discord about like would there be better ways that we could maybe pres share the list of articles we're gonna cover what we think we're gonna be going through for that week and you know, could we pull it up in the screen and do all that? Yep. So we actually spent some time and we played around with that a bunch.
We tried to figure it out, we couldn't figure out a way to get it like live in the screen share without like really messing us both up cuz really we're bouncing back and forth between both of us as we go through topics and things like that. But one of the things that you got me to start playing with is Microsoft Edge workspaces and I didn't even know these were a thing until you sent me an invite for a workspace and I was like what is going on here?
And just like how does this work and what is happening? So I think it'd be kind of fun to talk about edge workspaces as well cuz it's just something I've never encountered in edge. I didn't even know this was an option, didn't know how it worked, how any of it comes together, if it was like a personal, an enterprise feature, anything like that. So we could spend a couple minutes on it. Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment?
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business. This is interesting and I'll be honest, when they first announced Edge workspace and I can't remember when this came out, this article on it is from June one, so it may have been then, it may have even been a little earlier, but it's essentially I can have a browser session that I can invite other people to. It was like why would I ever wanna be browsing the internet and invite somebody to my browsing session where they can see all the stuff I'm looking at.
And as we were kind of digging through all of this, I'm like, you know what, I can invite people to this. Scott and I often have a bunch of tabs like you said that we're going through. What if I create a workspace for the podcast and invite Scott to it and we can just play around with it. So what this is, and this says edge workspaces for personal use is currently in preview there is an edge workspaces preview for consumer accounts as
well. I haven't looked at that link, I don't know how that differentiates between the two. But what this allows you and I to do is before we record it, we have this MS cloud, it pro workspace in edge that I can open tabs in, you can browse to it and as I add tabs to it or as you add tabs to it for things we wanna talk about, it stays in sync between us. So it's it's. It stays kind of in sync. Between I would would say kind of in sync.
We had some goofy things we were playing with earlier, but it's not that it syncs in that we're looking at the same webpage at the same time. And I can see Scott browsing around in the webpage, but we both have the same tabs open. If I close the tab, it closes in Scott's instant of the workspace and if he closes one, it closes in mine and I can actually see which tab Scott's on and then up an edge it shows me that Scott is in the workspace with me.
I get a little link where I can go to your tab but something like this where we're on a phone call, we're talking about the same articles, we want to compile a list of websites that we want to talk about. It actually kinda works well and it still allows you to do grouping and actually syncing these groups. So we have a group for the current week, we have a group for future topics. A tab group. A. Tab group.
Just to be clear, there's not a, there's not another groupie group group that's going on group? No. A tab group, yeah, select select the tabs, way, shape, select, create a group and kind of group these together so we can have some websites for future stuff for random stuff that we talk about and it works. Okay. Earlier we were fighting over the group. So you created a group. I didn't see the name of the group so I deleted it and it actually deleted the
group for you. The interesting thing here is, I don't know, do you see all my groups when you go to create a new group, like if I go add to the group, I see current week I see future topics but then I also see like I have a group in my normal non-work space that's like speaking in distractions and stuff around YouTube. So I also see those groups when I go to create a group or add a tab to a group. I don't know. Nope I don't, I don't see those. You.
Don't see those. So there is some bit of privacy. It's like this weird, it's shared but not a hundred percent shared. Yeah, so it's really weird when you read the list of things and and the limitations. So workspace workspaces share a limited set of information but I think it's very interesting what they chose to share and not share. So what is shared, actually let's start with what's not shared. Okay,
so none of your logins are shared. None of your passwords, downloads, collections, extension, cookies, none of that stuff. So if we have a website like say we have like the Office 365 admin port, Microsoft 365 admin portal up. Yeah and you're logged into that. I'm not logged into your session like there's no shared cookies between us
there. Like I could see the page that you're on like the U R I, but other than that, like if I'm not authenticated I can't get to the same place so that that all feels right and good. None of your personal browser settings are shared so you can't like share like a common search engine, things like that. No tabs or data from outside the workspace. But maybe based on your description of being able to see groups outside the workspace like eh it could be a little bit off kind of thing.
Well but I only see my groups, not your groups and you don't see my groups. I don't really really use groups anyplace else other than other than this workspace. And then the other thing you mentioned is you do not see the user's device screen.
That means like if you and I are on the same tab at the same time in that shared workspace and say I'm scrolling down and you're scrolling up and we're at different places on that page, we're highlighting different themes, things whatever, like we can't see how we are interacting individually with that given thing. So that's like kind of the list of stuff that doesn't work and it's documented
not to work like all all good. But interesting enough, what is documented to work is browser tabs favorites. So it's not just your open tabs, it's also the favorites collection for that workspace. But interestingly not the collections collection for that workspace like which seems to be left out of the documentation altogether. And also the history is shared, which I thought was another interesting one because really history should be for the most part like session specific.
Like you would think you would want that to go away or just be local to your browser and not to the next browser. So like if we go into a webpage and navigate through it, so like I'm on your edge workspace preview for consumer accounts now available article, there's an AK ms link in there and if I click that, where did it take me to? It took me to some totally other web browser. Why did it do such thing? I don't know. Da da. I'm trying to figure out where you even see the history.
Well I'm wondering like if I go into one of these, like if I go into the Edge Workspaces article and I click a link in there. Yep. So now it took me over the edge workspaces page. So now I can hit back and I can go back. Can you go like if I go to Edge Workspaces, can you click the back button and go to where it was personal previously? I can, yeah you can. So there you go. There's a little bit of history for you going back and forth. That's a weird one.
like I was sitting there on that page and then you click back and there was no notification or anything. Boop. It just like. Changes before your eyes. It changed before my eyes. The other interesting thing here, it's not like well documented or at least maybe it was I, I missed it. So Edge has sleeping tabs by default. So it sleeps in active tabs. It seems to always keep the tab that I'm on plus the tab that you're on awake if you're on a different tab at any given time.
So like when you go to another tab that's asleep for me. Yeah it just goes ahead and and wakes up for me which is kind of interesting. Got. It. Yeah like. I see your tab, it's like prefetching the cash and doing whatever it needs to do there. So it's an interesting one. Only top level navigation stuff is shared. If you happen to have like iframes, popups, anything like that, that stuff is not shared across. It looks like that's a policy, right?
You can configure workspace navigation using the workspaces navigation settings policy. The following general rules apply. On an MDM machine here. So. , I'm not either. Know what policy applies. So I think maybe those are applied by default but maybe you can change them and you can even define like custom workspace navigation behavior using red reject patterns.
This is something I have not played with is what are all these navigation setting policies and patterns list these patterns, navigation options, associate any or all of the options with a set of URL patterns. Do not send from if a navigation otherwise qualifies to be shared with all workspace users. This option will cause the navigation not to be shared if the referer URL matches one of your patterns.
So you can like it looks like using policies you can set certain URLs not to be shared with a workspace if you would happen to go visit one within a workspace. Hmm. I'm reading through kind of like the faq. So there's some other weird stuff here. So there's a call out that your workspace data is stored in your personal OneDrive for business.
So if I go into my OneDrive for business that's associated with this a e D account and and tenant, I've got my files in the apps folder there is now a Microsoft Edge folder and under that there's an Edge workspaces and then there's a preferences edge file that sits underneath there. So I don't know may have to crack that one open with text thing and see if it's a binary file, see what's in there, what that is. Yep.
And then the other thing is you and I had been chatting about like hey maybe this is a way for us to share collections of links with folks externally uh, ahead of time or at least be able to share 'em like live during recordings and things like that. That doesn't look like it'll work because Edge Workspace is created within an Azure ad tenant are only available to users in the same tenant when they're logged into Edge with their matching Azure AD account.
So that means no sharing Oh with guests or people outside of your organization. Got it. That is interesting. I hadn't tried sharing with somebody outside of the organization yet. Yeah. It's a good thing you sent it to my phantom account over here. It is a good thing I sent it to that account. Interesting.
And they give you some scenarios too, like onboarding individuals to a project or working on project with multiple teams so you could like keep a running workspace for the project you're going on. I don't know about you but I'm working on a project and I'm getting deep in the weeds on it. I'll end up with like 50 tabs open. You and me both.
I was doing some stuff in ADO earlier today like a bunch of like management and trying to like reparent things and I had at least 15 different browser windows going and each browser window had like five tabs in it. It was driving me absolutely crazy just while I was trying to figure things out. The one thing I will say, so we're doing this shared one benefit I see to this even personally is I have two devices. I have a Mac that's at my desk,
I have a Mac studio over here and then I have my laptop. If I'm just doing, so let's say I'm signed into my work account and the profile, I'm not doing workspaces, my tabs don't,
aren't kept in sync. Like I'll be working on something at the studio, I'll have a bunch of tabs open, I'll go sit down on the couch in the evening, pop open my laptop and I'm like, uh, and I could use the sync history so I could go into my history and I could go dig through it and find the tabs I wanted to open but workspaces because they're synchronized, if I pop open the same workspace on my laptop,
everything will be there. So if I had a workspace for like, not even to share it but just to use a workspace across two different devices, it would allow me to kind of have those same tabs open in my open tabs synchronized across all of my devices. There's a setting for tab sync. Yeah and it's specifically for open tab sync. So history and open tabs and edge are different things so you should be able to turn on sync doesn't, but you have to go and turn it on deliberately.
Like you have to turn on both sync and both history to get it. Going. So I do not see if I go into sync. So I have see the same open tabs when you switch between devices. Yep. That does not work in terms of like them actually being active and open. I can go open a new tab and then I can go look at my history and then. And then you see tabs from other devices, see. Tabs from other devices. Yes. But then I have to scroll through that whole list and find the tab that I want.
And I, again going back to the 50 tabs thing, if I use a workspace they're just automatically open. So my browsing session more or less on both devices is identical. Yeah. Fair enough. Could be good. I could be bad. I can see where you're going with it. But that's the other way I've used it. And one thing I actually like, I used the arc browser a little bit too. That's one thing I liked about arc, like open tabs synchronized instantaneously.
If I had both devices open, I closed a tab on one similar to how we see it in workspaces. You close a tab and it's like gone within a fraction of a second across everything. It's interesting and edge workspace as I'm seeing a little bit more of a use for 'em, I could see the onboarding stuff too or even onboarding new employees. If you had a list of like hr, a workspace with here's all the intranet sites or all the forms everywhere you need to go.
Let me go invite this user to a workspace and go through this list. I mean the downside is if the user starts closing tabs as they're done with them, you have to go recreate your workspace every time. Yeah. You can't do that. So that feels more like an edge collections feature. Like we're getting pretty esoteric on like all the weird stuff that Edge does here. But can you share, I don't know if you can share collections.
I know that you can create collections collections, like that's what collections are therefore is you know like that idea organization kind of stuff. But. It's, I don't see a way to share a collection. I can show citations sort by. Maybe. Maybe that would be the nana end of day we're we're like back to like a list in SharePoint or OneNote or something like that that right.
But no, for the podcast, this has been kind of nice just having the same tabs open and if you flip over to a new one, I don't know how we got on authentication and conditional access for external identities in one of these tabs but it's over there. You. Opened them up so. I opened that one up. Who knows, who knows where that one came from. Maybe I came from my history .
All good. We'll try this one moving forward folks should go maybe check out edge workspaces, like if this sounds interesting to you, we totally rabbit holed on it and did not, did did not get to any of the other tabs that were actually in there. I'll, although I did get through all my random stuff so I think I'm pretty happy. Uh, , uh, happy with that. Like I got what I needed out of it. Why don't we take a couple minutes and you wanna close out with this. With our final. PowerShell one?
Janky one? Yeah like we'll just end it on like a series of, a series of jenk, our. Jenness for the week. So this was a PowerShell one and we've had discussions with this before. You do a lot with AZ copy. I do stuff with PowerShell with all of that and we've had discussions about documentation and the benefits or detriment good or bad documentation can have.
And I went in today I'm working on converting some of my scripts for some of my clients from Azure AD to Microsoft graph because as we all know Azure AD is going away in favor of Microsoft Graph and specifically I was updating users and I'm trying to convert and I got to one where it's mg, it's update MG user extension and I had to use an update Azure ID extension before but with graph some of the parameters have changed like it's gone to extension ID instead of just,
or instead of extension name I don't even see like the AD one was you insert a name and you insert a value. This one doesn't have name or value and it has the syntax and then it has some of the parameters where it's what are they? And I went to do example and there are no examples of how to use this parameter And I was like Scott, this is one of those perfect examples where this feels like some good documentation would go a long ways to solve customer frustration .
And then I went to do this update MG user one to do something similar and I was looking for a certain parameter and I started scrolling and I kept scrolling and I kept scrolling and I kept scrolling and I looked at how long this is and this is some obscenely long documentation. If you exported this to word I'm guessing it's like 10, 15 pages. A lot of it is not even relevant. Part of it is is this has a lot of properties.
There's a property in here for updating every single ad attribute, postal code, zip codes, phone numbers. This one fortunately does have one example. There are 75 parameters on some of these. I think you counted . There is one example, I. Didn't count them off off the cuff just like there are dozens and dozens of like, there's easily 50 plus parameters on the two iterations of this commandlet like like you said, like this page scrolls four yeah's and it's a hilarious list of parameters.
Like this is one you would really want to see some like prescriptive targeted guidance for especially around some of these like array based parameters like agreement acceptances accepts the type of I Microsoft graph agreement acceptance. But it's an array of those like great what does that array look like? Like you know what like a string array looks like.
Like business phones is a string array but then you and I were talking about business phones and you pointed out that business phones is a string array that only accepts a string array with one item in it. Like okay like shouldn't it be called business phone then like, like there's a just like a weird mismatch in like tonality and and the way this stuff comes through and I think like this is a great example of what is very likely auto-generated documentation, which is great right?
Like at some point someplace there's a definition that loads this thing up so that you can have a nice pretty doc where you know it tells you that there's an agreement acceptances parameter and you know the user's terms of use acceptance statuses, it's read only but it's nullable that doesn't make any sense but you know to construct go see this note section blah blah blah create a valid hash table. Like all these things great.
Like why would I need to construct this if it's read only but then it's knowable like why am I creating hash tables? I don't know.
But like all this stuff like just screams like okay I was auto-generated and there's none of that just like nice little like prescriptive stuff like this would be a great commandlet to have 20 examples of like this is one you would wanna see like a bunch of different permutations of like oh do this, okay now you wanna do this, do this, here's here's common actions you would take in your organization to onboard.
So like yeah we've got 50 plus parameters here but you know you really only need to worry about like these five or you only need to worry about these 10 and in this scenario kind of thing. Yeah it just feels, and to your point when it's auto-generated it doesn't feel approachable for an end user. If I'm an end user and I am, let's say I had an intern and I'm like okay I need you to go write some PowerShell for updating users via the Microsoft graph.
Like this is instantaneously overwhelming to them. To your point, it's not user-friendly, it's not teaching me how to use MG graph. It's not giving me a bunch of examples that note section, I don't even know where to start with that. Like it is the notes. Ridiculous. Starts maybe a 10th of the way down the page and then it's just bullet point after bullet point for the other 90% of the page again going through. And it's missing a bunch of stuff.
Like it's got images that are hard coded wrong like HTML examples like yeah this is not a shining example of like what makes for good auto-generated documentation. Yeah it's on learn. I know a lot of learn comes from GitHub. You can make community contributions to it. I mean I sort of get the, yeah we wanna automate this, we wanna make sure it stays updated, it's current, we don't wanna take resources to do all of this.
I don't know if you noticed this one, this is on learn but it's a reference so Got it. You don't see the little edit this in GitHub button over here, right? Like cuz it's coming technically from a different repo with a different set of publishing policies. And so I run into this in my job as well kind of like interacting with and helping out with some of our documentation around like our data plan APIs and things like that.
Like I'd be willing to guess like a lot of this stuff is auto-generated, like if there's prescriptive guidance on it, it doesn't exist in these docs, it exists someplace else. But the problem with that is like there's no related link over to those docs from here or anything like you'd have no other way to know they exist other than being maybe really good at searching and being able to dig that out and suss that out.
And then the other problem with it is because there's no like direct feedback link here, like there's no feedback loop, there's no opportunity for you or probably for the person who owns this to even like go in and look at it and say like, oh yeah this doc needs an update.
Like you're very likely going back to like the original system of record like in this case like like there's gonna be a swagger definition for that graph API endpoint , there's gonna be some auto-generated docs that are spit out based on that definition. There might be some other autobi auto build stuff that goes in but this one just screams like hey I was built off of like an API spec and good luck using me, right?
Because I bet if you went and looked at the same endpoint in the graph that this goes ahead and and you know updates against that graph endpoint is going to have all these parameters as well and you know Got it AR arguably like that makes that rest API probably a little janky to use. Too, right? This is one where I would love that feedback or I would love this to actually be something community based because I would absolutely go in and like add some examples when I'm doing this.
If I could do a quick poll and say like, hey here's an example of something I did or here's some clarification, especially around scripts when people are trying to figure out how to use them. That just feels, I don't know, maybe it's just me, maybe I'm way too generous with my time but I feel like these would be ones community would be willing and able to update and help out with.
Yeah, so while you can't directly edit that doc and kind of get to maybe the underlying repo behind it, you can submit feedback. So at the top of all those pages there is a little feedback button and you can kind of give it a thumbs up, thumbs down and and add a little bit of context around why you're giving that
response there. Believe it or not, like the content folks, like they do look at that feedback , it is shared across like product groups with PMs and devs and and all those kinds of things. So I know I value it like when customers like make those edits when they can and put in vrs for them. But if you can't make the edit but you can give us the feedback, like we'd love to hear that as well. I just went and typed up some feedback for that article and submitted it.
All right. I tried to see how long, this is Scott, I ca I tried to do a select all and copy and paste and I'm also trying to print it out of the browser. I was way off when I said like 15 or 20 pages. So printing this to P D F right now is telling me that the documentation comes out to 1,152 pages . I don't know if that's accurate or not, but based on how long it took me to scroll all the way down, it actually might be word when I copied it and pasted it in is not responding to me,
but it is saying I'm on page one of 12,110. Lucky. You . It is a massive chunk of html. I'll give him that. Yes. And that wraps up our jenness for the day, Scott. It was a little longer than normal but it does. Oh but hey look, I'm gonna delete this tab now and then next week we're gonna come back and we're gonna have a whole set of tabs ready to go with whatever the next thing is. Perfect. You know what this is gonna do, Scott?
This is going to give us a visual representation of how long our list actually is of stuff. We don't get to like my list. . . I know cuz right now we squirrel it away and random text threads and OneNotes and obsidian notebooks and yeah it's all over the place. But uh, yeah, it'll, it'll get there. Alright, anyhoo. Yeah, that's enough Jenness for today. All right, well go enjoy your weekend. We can put the jenness behind us and enjoy another weekend and we'll talk to you
next week. All. Right, thanks Ben. All right, thanks. Scott. If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five star rating in iTunes. It helps to get the word out so more it pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure. If you have any questions you want us to address on the show or feedback about the show, feel free to reach out via our website, Twitter, or Facebook. Thanks again for listening and have a great day. Hi.