Microsoft

Tracking and Automating Business Processes

As businesses grow, it becomes challenging to keep up with business processes. To keep up with a constant flow of tasks associated with these processes, you need to track them, especially when multiple people are involved with the process. Business processes become difficult when you have to enter data into multiple systems. Entering the same data multiple times increases the risk of human error each time data gets entered.

In recent months I’ve been tasked with helping different business units improve and track their processes. Specifically, I started with our onboarding experience. The process tasks get assigned to people that are geographically dispersed, and sometimes the people involved with the onboarding only do a few a month. There is a lot that needs to go into it. You want to factor in things such as IT, Payroll, Equipment, Licensing, Training, which makes it keeping everyone in the loop difficult.

To combat these difficulties we settled on a product called TallyFy. TallyFy gives us a dashboard that will show us how our processes are progressing. It helps keep everyone on the same page and helps communicate issues in a more rapid manner.

Our hurdle with TallyFy was that it was tacking yet another system into our onboarding experience. We already had three different systems involved in someone applying for a job to ultimately receiving their first paycheck. Having multiple systems caused data re-entry, which is prone to typos. To combat the data re-entry, we needed to integrate our different systems. As previously blogged about I wrote a PowerShell Module to interact with the BirdDog HR system; we use this to send our new hires their employee packet to fill out before day one. This PowerShell Module I was able to query new in-coming employees – my next task was to integrate it with TallyFy so that it would track the progress of the onboarding.

Luckily for me, TallyFy has done a fantastic job writing an API that their web interface runs on, and I can do everything they can do. One of the challenges with this is that their API is very complicated. I’ve been lucky enough to work closely with their team to build out this PowerShell Module that only touches on a small fraction of what is available thought their API.

PowerShell Module Git Repository:

I am storing this Module on my personal Git Repository; as it is built out more I might publish into the PowerShell Gallery. You can find the Module at TallyFy API PowerShell Module.

Store the psd1 and psm1 files in Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\TallyFy.

Connecting to TallyFy API

  1. Login to https://go.tallyfy.com
  2. Click on your name in the Top Right corner of site
  3. Click Settings
  4. Click Integrations
  5. Note your Client ID and Client Secret
  6. Open PowerShell and run the below command
  7. Connect-TallyFyAPI -ClientID 'Your client ID' -ClientSecret 'Your Client Secret' -Credential (Get-Credential) 
  8. Use your TallyFy Username and Password when prompted

Feel free to explore the other commands by running the below command.

Get-Help -Module TallyFy

Centralizing Your Chat Clients – Including Multiple Microsoft Teams Accounts!

I ran into a scenario where I wanted to use Microsoft Teams more. I am one of those odd people who have accounts in multiple Office 365 organizations. Having multiple accounts was no issue for me when I used Slack; I am still in a few of those too! Oh yea, don’t forget Telegram and Discord and Whatsapp and the million other chat apps that different groups of friends think you should be using!

While digging into how to address the significant lack of functionality in Microsoft Teams to log into multiple accounts, I made sure to log into the Microsoft Teams UserVoice and vote to add this functionality! I stumbled across a comment by Jeff Angama. He had written a blog post about a neat tool called Franz. This tool integrates 50+ chat and other social media services into a single application that synchronizes across multiple devices. The best part is that you can get this functionality completely free. Still, I strongly recommend you pay for the premium version to at least support development efforts!

Using PowerShell with RESTful API’s – BirdDogHR API Module

In the last few months at work, we have been concentrating on integrating different cloud-hosted systems with our on-premise systems. Integration usually means using some ETL Tool to interact with an API, and either use an API with the on-premise application or dumping directly into a Database.

We decided to start automating our Onboarding Processes. The hurdle came up that the ETL Tool isn’t going to trigger Account Creation and other IT related actions. My logical thought was I can interact with an API using PowerShell! I had done this a little bit in the past but nothing significant – so I had a bit of learning to do!

My Microsoft HoloLens Adventure – Updates on Studying

A couple of weeks ago, I made a post on the study materials I planned on leveraging to learn how to program for the Microsoft HoloLens. This weekend was the first time I finally started digging into studying. I quickly identified that the videos I intended to use might have been a bit off on exactly what I wanted to learn.

To be open and honest with everyone with my adventure, I wanted to share this and point you towards the resources I’ve decided to leverage instead. As I had mentioned in the last post, My Microsoft HoloLens Adventure – Preparing Study Resources. I had looked over some Basics videos back in March when I first started looking into this. I hadn’t touched those since March as I was getting kind of bored with it and it was all I had done when I was in college.

The next section in that post was Universal Apps, which I had never worked with. I started watching the Developing Universal Windows Apps with C# and XAML video. I quickly realized that it was going to be too high-level for me since I had such a limited experience. I tried searching for the videos they mention at the beginning of that course but was unable to find them on MVA. However, I was able to find Windows 10 Development for Absolute Beginners. In the first 10 minutes, I was able to figure out how to get my first 2D Application running for HoloLens. Yes, all it was is a button that shows text that says Hello World, but it was an app!

My Microsoft HoloLens Adventure – First Impressions of the HoloLens

it’s been over two weeks since my last post; however I have an excuse! It may not be a good excuse, however I went on a vacation to beautiful Las Vegas and shockingly decided I didn’t want to do anything computer related while out there (who would have thought?) Also before you ask – no I didn’t take the HoloLens to Vegas with me – in retrospect I think I could have made some decent money if I had and let people take pictures with it, everyone dressed like Mickey Mouse and Minions on the strip seem to make a good of enough of a living!

Matt in Las Vegas riding the High Rider
On the High Roller in Las Vegas

Anyway, I have now been back to reality for about a week and it is time to get my butt back in gear! So let’s talk the well over-due first impressions I need to share regarding the Microsoft HoloLens.

Disclaimer: Before we dive into my first impressions I do want to call out that this device is designed as a developer build – this is by no means a final release of the system or designed for consumer use I will reference this throughout my comments because I am not being as critical as some may have been on this device.