Basic PowerFx Functions Every Developer Should Know

Basic PowerFx Functions

PowerFx is a declarative, Excel-like programming language, created by Microsoft, primarily for the creation of Canvas Apps. Like Excel, it uses functions and expressions to accomplish tasks with little to no need to specify step by step procedural logic. It abstracts away the implementation details, so the focus is on the ‘what’ and not the ‘how.’  This blog will highlight some of the basic PowerFx functions every developer should be familiar with. Take the following table that lists the items and their cost in a ‘Shopping Cart’ for example.   ShoppingCart  ID  Item  $ Cost  1  Bread  2  2  Milk  5  3  Butter  7  In an imperative language, the developer would have … Read more

Microsoft Sample Solution Gallery: Unlock Innovation 

Microsoft Sample Solution Gallery

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulder of giants”. – Sir Isaac Newton  Isaac Newton, one of the most influential scientists in history and known for formulating the laws of motion and universal gravitation which laid the groundwork for much of modern physics and mathematics.   Newton is saying that innovation is a process and is often built on the ideas and work that existed before and seldom by isolated inspiration as often depicted in popular television. This type of innovation is exactly what Microsoft is attempting to inspire with the creation of their Sample Solution Gallery.   For those not already familiar, the Microsoft Sample Solution … Read more

SharePoint Look Book: A Hidden Design Gem 

SharePoint Look Book

SharePoint Look Book: A Hidden Design Gem In the world of digital collaboration, SharePoint stands tall in helping organizations enhance collaboration and empower teams to create, share, and manage content seamlessly. One of its impressive features is the SharePoint Look Book, which showcases a vast array of design ideas and solutions of modern workplaces.  SharePoint Look Book is a hidden gem – a treasure that offers design ideas and solutions, showing the endless possibilities of leveraging SharePoint for the modern workplace.  SharePoint Look Book serves as a gallery of modern, visually stunning templates and designs built on SharePoint. It offers a collection of site designs, layouts, and components that demonstrate the … Read more

Protecting Sensitive Data: Ensuring Privacy from a Data Engineering Perspective 

Sensitive Data

Protecting Sensitive Data: Ensuring Privacy from a Data Engineering Perspective  In a bank call center, staff members handle clients’ data. They have to identify clients for various requests while maintaining privacy. The call center representative must be able to identify the client while keeping the credit card number private, even though the system holds card information. Protecting sensitive data is crucial for the bank’s success.   You also want to keep the value of transactions on the card private. Data may be substituted with random numbers or displayed as ***, showing only the last four digits for validation purposes.  Now, imagine the same data set is sent to the analytics team to analyze … Read more

Custom Script Setting in SharePoint & OneDrive Removed

Custom Script Setting

Last week, we published a blog discussing Microsoft retiring SharePoint Add-Ins. In that blog, we briefly discussed how the Classic Mode for Custom Scripts has been affected by that change. The Custom Script setting in SharePoint and OneDrive has already been removed – the change took place in May 2024.   There is a new PowerShell command (DelayDenyAddAndCustomizePagesEnforcement) that will allow administrators to delay any changes until November of this year. Additionally, the NoScriptSite setting will be configured to True for all existing sites except for specific site templates.   How Will The Removal of Custom Script Settings Affect My Organization?  Because the Custom Script setting has been removed, you can’t add, … Read more

SharePoint Embedded: Full Featured SharePoint Inside a Custom Application 

SharePoint Embedded

Custom applications that require a lot of document management have always been a challenge to build. Historically, we would build an ASP.NET application and then pass content back and forth to Azure blog storage or make the document available for immediate download (but not store the document in the application after the download is complete). Microsoft has released SharePoint Embedded, a new way to store and manage content in custom applications. SharePoint Embedded offers a headless, API-only pattern to build content apps that integrate management capabilities like collaboration, security, and compliance into any app by storing content inside an enterprise’s existing Microsoft 365 tenant.  Enterprises can use SharePoint Embedded to … Read more

Custom Global Navigation Using SPFx Application Customizers

SPFx Custom Applications

Out-of-the-box navigation in SharePoint Online has come a long way over the last number of years. Hub sites and hub site navigation provide much more customizability and consistency for navigating around a hub. However, modern intranets in SharePoint Online are generally made up of multiple hubs. Maintaining a consistent experience across all those hubs and sites can become a daunting task. While infinitely better than what we’ve had in the past, it still falls short of a truly unified and engaging experience. The ever-expanding lists of links can make it difficult to keep organized and make it difficult for users to find what they are looking for. In this blog, … Read more

Data Migration to SharePoint Online Improves Data Manageability

A government financial services organization had a significant amount of data on Windows File Share and wanted to move it to SharePoint Online. While transferring the data would be a simple data migration, they also wanted to make changes to some of their internal file structure.   Migrating from Windows to SharePoint would allow them to have improved document management, as well as to take advantage of the numerous benefits of SharePoint. Before contacting Imaginet, they lacked document tracking or versioning, and permissions were difficult to manage. They also don’t own the servers – other people control them, so there was a communication gap between our client and the team managing … Read more

Power BI Reporting Improves Data Quality and Accuracy

An Information Technology organization specializing in business solutions contacted Imaginet to create a more effective approach to their data reporting. They had been using Excel for reporting purposes and relied on manual manipulation of their data. Using Excel was neither effective nor efficient, and the manual work was leading to data quality issues. We determined the best solution for our client would be through Power BI reporting.   What We Did:  We recreated some of their existing reports in Power BI and created reports using data from Salesforce based on the following 2 requirements:  We changed their data reporting system report by report. To begin, we created the semantic model in … Read more

Power Automate Solution Automates Processes and Reduces Errors

A North American capital management organization contacted Imaginet to create separate libraries for each of their fund types – direct and indirect. They did not have a solution in place to separate data and were relying on manual work. This led to errors, lost information, and wasted employee resources. We determined a Power Automate solution could solve the issues our client was experiencing.   We used Power Automate to create folder structures in document libraries that were based on data from a list provided by the client. When a new fund was created by someone in the organization a flow would automatically allocate it to the correct library (direct or indirect). … Read more