Category: Blog

So, okay. I’m writing all kinds of technical articles, that are almost like knowledgebase pages. I’m basically using this blog as a public documentation of different solutions I’ve found.

But then I’m also writing these slightly more personal blog posts, that aren’t exactly related to any technological solution per se. Some of them are personal professional updates, but some are actually more like rants.

This category is for the latter. You can find the non-personal blog posts here.

SharePoint Home Sites – a Game Changer?

This topic seems to be on everyone’s mind right now: SharePoint Home Sites. They’re finally rolling out (again). Or maybe even rolled out, in case this article ends up late in my publishing queue! But what are they? How do you create SharePoint Home sites? How do you best use them in your organization? To take a step back, let’s first take a step upwards – to get the 1000-feet view! Getting the big picture – why is Microsoft doing this stuff in the first…Continue reading SharePoint Home Sites – a Game Changer?

Work from home? Work from anywhere! | Hockey player reviews weekly reports Cassie smiled. The results were finally beginning to materialize. It was gratifying to see her hard work pay off.

Top Tips To Survive Working From Home!

Due to the outbreak of Corona-virus, there’s a sudden influx of people working remotely. As someone, who has only recently gone through the transformation from a regular office worker (with an actual assigned desk and all that classic stuff), to a full-time remote worker, I thought I could share some of my experiences on how to survive WFH (that’s Working From Home for those of you who’re even newer to this stuff than I am!) Introduction Up until recently, I used to work at Valo’s…Continue reading Top Tips To Survive Working From Home!

Office 365 video migration to Office Stream imminent – Get Ready!

While this post will mostly be about the highly topical migration from Office 365 Video to Microsoft Stream, there’s also a fair amount of rambling about Microsoft’s partner strategy and a bit of history included. I’m starting with the main stuff and then proceeding to the ranty parts, so just skip the last 75% of the post if you don’t care about that kind of stuff! On to the content, then! Microsoft Stream is taking the world by storm There’s been a lot of buzz…Continue reading Office 365 video migration to Office Stream imminent – Get Ready!

Colleague enjoys tasty glass of maple syrup during presentation by hockey player - Photo by Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA)

2019 – Year Review (200th post on this blog!)

When I started this blog in 2015 as a place to stash my, eh, thoughtful workarounds, I didn’t think I’d ever hit 200 live articles (with another hundred still in draft mode). Or that I’d get half a million people reading them in a year! Man, I didn’t know either one of these things when I was writing my 2018 review, which feels like was just a moment ago. Taking a look a bit further back, year 2017 living, working and traveling in the United…Continue reading 2019 – Year Review (200th post on this blog!)

Awarded MVP for Office Development

Late Friday night a couple of weeks ago, I got an interesting and a bit of a surprising email from Microsoft. Flabbergasted, I tweeted this right after: Wait, WHAT? First of all, when did #Microsoft learn to write proper Finnish, second of all, HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? :D I’m genuinely at a loss of words. Just… Thanks everyone for sparring and pushing me – I’ll do my best to be worthy of y’alls trust! 🤩 #MVPBuzz #MVP pic.twitter.com/wn3EMKfrvA — Antti K. Koskela #MVPBuzz (@koskila) November…Continue reading Awarded MVP for Office Development

Another year, another Hacktoberfest (2019)!

Like a lot of the more frequent readers of this blog know, I generally work in proprietary – that is, non-open-source – projects. Whenever I do have some time to dabble in OSS, it’s usually for a hobby. This time around, I’ve been really struggling to find the time to contribute to open-source projects. Last year I had just had a baby – so it’s not like I was sleeping anyway. I was able to submit a few useful scripts, bugfixes and documentation improvements during…Continue reading Another year, another Hacktoberfest (2019)!

Name a more Canadian thing. That's right - you can't! Sorreyh.

Au revoir Canada, bonjour Finland.. Eh?

Is this seriously my first ACTUAL post about Canada? What a major gap in my content! However, living in Canada has been fairly hectic (with the work, family and trips), so I haven’t been able to write much about our life here – unlike when we were living in the States. Which, conveniently, brings me to the main point of this rambling – This post works as an announcement of sorts: I’m wrapping up my life in Canada, and moving back to Finland. I’ll be…Continue reading Au revoir Canada, bonjour Finland.. Eh?

Thanks for coming to my session at SPS Charlotte 8/10/2019!

This is just a quick update to share my materials from my SharePoint Saturday Charlotte 2019 session. What a fun event – and a cool city! It was a pleasure getting to know the local community and visiting a new state. Thanks for the local user group (and the conference organizers) for having me! Charlotte – what a beautiful city! Charlotte seems like a really lively city. And what an active audience – a long day, but people actually stayed at the venue until the…Continue reading Thanks for coming to my session at SPS Charlotte 8/10/2019!

SPS Charlotte - Saturday, August 10, 2019 UNC Charlotte Center City, 320 E. 9th Street, Charlotte, NC 28202.

Speaking at SPS Charlotte 8/10/2019!

I got an awesome, (kind of) last-minute opportunity to join a crew of awesome speakers at SharePoint Saturday Charlotte (NC) on 10th of August, 2019, and I was super happy to jump on it! I’ll be presenting about extending Microsoft Teams with some SPFx goodness. Last time, the session spurred so many questions I had trouble keeping up – pretty awesome! Having never been to Charlotte, I’m super excited about this trip. If you’re from the area, hit me up on Twitter with the most…Continue reading Speaking at SPS Charlotte 8/10/2019!

The whole Valo team's #ValoJump at Valo Bootcamp 2018!

Want to join the winning team? Valo is recruiting!

On this site, I don’t write “sponsored posts”, and while I do obviously have a bias of sorts for Microsoft products (having tried others before, I’ve worked almost entirely on Microsoft’s stack for the last few years), I try to write about everything in a neutral manner. Now, however, there’s a topic I probably can’t write objectively about – but still feel it’s important to share, because it might be an exciting opportunity for someone following my blog! My employer, Valo, is currently recruiting people…Continue reading Want to join the winning team? Valo is recruiting!

Koskela - SharePoint Saturday Nashville 2019 on 6/16 session.

Thanks for coming to my session at SPS Nashville 2019!

I had the honor of speaking at SharePoint Saturday Nashville 2019 again, and it was a lot of fun! I had the chance to meet a lot of new (and some “old”) people. And what a crowd – so many (difficult) questions about SPFx & Teams development… 😬😂 (Don’t want to crawl through the jabbering? Just here for the materials? Well, they are here: SPS Nashville 2019 materials . Thanks for your interest!) SPS Nashville 2019 from a speaker’s viewpoint Posting the materials took me…Continue reading Thanks for coming to my session at SPS Nashville 2019!

Internet Explorer finally gets left behind

The boring version of browser wars is upon us

The next browser war is upon us, and this time it isn’t fought on the battlefield of proprietary API implementations and badly implemented CSS and JavaScript standards, but rather it’s different ecosystems battling it out with their respective variants of Blink, which itself is a part of open source Chromium. Sounds boring, right? And to some extent it really is. No Firefox fanboys, no Opera elitists and Internet explorer normies keeping to their respective corners of the public space, each group looking down on the…Continue reading The boring version of browser wars is upon us

Enter the BRAVE new world of Chromium forks!

I’m trying out a new, more long-form content on this blog – tell me what you think about it in the comments section below! This article explains one of the only cryptocurrency initiatives I find to be kind of level-headed – Basic Attention Token – and the browser that’s pretty tightly coupled with it, Brave. Note: If you just want to skip all the banter and download the hecking browser, click this. Preface As far as different cryptocurrencies go, there have been quite a few…Continue reading Enter the BRAVE new world of Chromium forks!

Speaking at SPS Nashville 6/15/2019

Exciting news to share again! My session on using SPFx to extend Microsoft Teams got accepted to SharePoint Saturday Nashville next June. I’m excited to return to the Music City – it was a lot of fun last time, and I have a new session to present this time! Correction: The title has been fixed – it used to say 6/16, but the event is on 15. SharePoint Saturdays are typically on Saturday 😁 Thanks for pointing that out! What will I be speaking about?…Continue reading Speaking at SPS Nashville 6/15/2019

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Thanks for an amazing 2018!

Year 2018 is drawing to an end, and it’s a good time for some reflection on what an interesting year it’s been! Personally, quite a few things have happened in the last 12 months – I moved to Canada, started a new/old job, became a father, spoke at awesome events, met a lot of cool people – just tons of awesome stuff. But personal things aside, 2018 has been an interesting and rewarding time to be writing this blog! 2018 was the year when the…Continue reading Thanks for an amazing 2018!

The Scary Anatomy of a Microsoft License Fraud

Note: While this was originally posted around the Christmas of 2018, and some company or seller names might not be relevant as scammers come and go, the principles in this blog post seem to be valid since early 2000s to probably until 2038 (when the Internet ends due to the Epochalypse). For those of you, who don’t want to read any extra fluff, let me just offer you this extra-short version of my article in FAQ-form: Tis the season for gifts, and lots of y’all…Continue reading The Scary Anatomy of a Microsoft License Fraud

Speaking at SPS New England on 10/20/2018!

Another exciting announcement to make – I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday New England on 20. of October in Boston! My session about Microsoft Flow, Azure Functions and a bit of Cognitive Services was accepted for the developer track. I’ll be presenting at 9:00 – 10:15 AM in room Cranmore. There’s a lot of awesome sessions and other awesome speakers, and I’m honored to share with the community what I’ve learnt lately while playing with some of the latest and greatest of Microsoft’s tools! :)…Continue reading Speaking at SPS New England on 10/20/2018!

Microsoft Stores Backups For 14 Days, But Restores Them in 15

A cautionary tale of relying on the automatic backups in SharePoint Online

So Microsoft keeps 14-day rolling backups of your SharePoint Online sites. That’s awesome – no need to take backups anymore, right? Not so fast. It’s not always so easy, and by just relying on these backups, you risk losing your data. Forever, I might add. This cautionary tale is about SharePoint Online, but I’d say you’ll need to take caution anytime you’re dealing with Microsoft’s automatic backups. The story starts with the client doing something unwise – a prime example would be them removing the…Continue reading A cautionary tale of relying on the automatic backups in SharePoint Online

Thanks for coming to my session in SPS Nashville!

I was at Cloud Friday and SharePoint Saturday Nashville 2018 (SPSNash18), and had my session on Saturday – that was a lot of fun! I had the chance to meet a lot of new (and some “old”) people, and I think the community liked my session about Citizen Development tools (for “actual developers”) quite well! Posts Related to “Thanks for coming to my session in SPS Nashville!”:5 ways to enable Custom Scripts for a SharePoint site collectionThe Scary Anatomy of a Microsoft License FraudSharePoint Localization…Continue reading Thanks for coming to my session in SPS Nashville!

SharePoint Saturday Houston session banner

Speaking at SPS Nashville on 5/5/18!

This Spring is crazy – so many cool announcements to make! I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Saturday Nashville on 5.5.2018. This one’s a completely new SPS event for me, and I’m honored my session was accepted on the developer track! Based on the feedback from earlier sessions, I’m really excited to speak to the community about the cool new toys Microsoft is giving us! :) Posts Related to “Speaking at SPS Nashville on 5/5/18!”:The Scary Anatomy of a Microsoft License FraudSharePoint Localization – a (somewhat) comprehensive how-to!5 ways to enable…Continue reading Speaking at SPS Nashville on 5/5/18!

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Solutions are worthless unless shared! Antti K. Koskela's Personal Professional Blog