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M365 Admin
February 2026 Marathon – 28 Days, 28 Blog Posts
After a year without the tradition, I decided to bring it back. Twenty-eight blog posts in twenty-eight days, one every single day of February, covering Microsoft 365 across SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Lists, Copilot, and this year with quite a few posts about Microsoft Places too.
I’ve done this challenge before, but this one was the hardest to finish. Not because I didn’t have enough to write about, I still have a backlog of over 100 post ideas sitting in a list waiting, but two things made pushing through genuinely tough this time.
Halfway through the month I got sick. A couple of posts went out from bed, I had no energy to promote them and they just quietly disappeared into the internet. The second thing was harder to ignore, the slow realization that AI is killing blogs. Less and less people are arriving from search engines, and the step-by-step how-to articles that used to bring in most of the traffic are now consumed almost entirely by LLM bots rather than actual people.
That got me thinking and it pushed me toward a change in style. If you go through the 28 posts below you will notice it. Fewer pure walkthroughs, more posts written from personal experience, what it actually felt like to use something, what value it brought in practice, why it matters beyond just the steps. That is the direction I want to go and this marathon is where I started making that shift.
All of this together made completing this marathon harder than any of the previous ones. Here are the 28 posts, I hope you find something useful in there.
FEB
1
I like to start the day with Copilot, but I don’t want to type the same prompt every morning. The fix is simple: turn a good prompt into a small routine that runs for you, gathers the signals you care about, and sends a clean briefing before you even sit down at your desk. Microsoft has quietly added this feature that lets you schedule a Copilot prompt, so you don’t have to remember to run it every morning.
An automated prompt is just a normal Copilot prompt that you save and tell Copilot to run on a repeating schedule — daily, weekly, or at a specific time. It’s simple, lightweight, and works directly inside Microsoft 365 without needing Power Automate or Copilot Studio.
FEB
2
Microsoft Places licensing has shifted from a per-user, Teams Premium-based model to a per-space model centered on the new Teams Shared Space license. In practice, end-user experiences like Places Finder and Places Explorer are now included for virtually all M365 users with calendar access, while advance desk booking, auto-release, and space analytics are unlocked by licensing the physical spaces themselves.
This change makes Microsoft Places practical at scale: everyone gets the rich Places UI, while advanced controls follow the physical spaces you decide to manage. If you were holding back because of per-user costs, the new model removes that barrier.
FEB
3
A SharePoint agent becomes far more powerful when you bring it into Microsoft Teams, where your team already collaborates every day. Instead of switching between browser tabs, libraries, and chat threads, adding a SharePoint agent directly to a Teams channel lets users ask questions in natural language and get grounded, permission-aware answers right in the conversation.
This guide walks you through exactly how to add a SharePoint agent to a Microsoft Teams channel, the benefits for end users, and the limitations you need to be aware of so you can confidently roll it out in your own tenant.
FEB
4
How to add a custom card to Viva Connections and why it matters
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Viva Connections now allows users to create their own custom cards for the Connections dashboard, unlocking greater personalization and a more tailored experience for every employee. This low-code capability lets you build cards that surface the information and actions that matter most to your organization, without requiring developer skills.
In this post, we walk through the full process of creating a custom card, configuring its layout, and targeting it to the right audience — turning your Connections dashboard into a truly useful hub rather than a generic landing page.
FEB
5
Microsoft Places provides a rich digital experience for booking desks and navigating the office, but the workplace experience doesn’t start at a laptop screen — it starts at the entrance of the building. This post explores how Appspace kiosks bring Microsoft Places from the digital world into the physical one, creating a connected workplace experience that greets employees the moment they walk in.
By combining the data from Microsoft Places with Appspace’s digital signage platform, organizations can display live desk availability, interactive floor maps, and wayfinding information directly on lobby and floor kiosks.
FEB
6
One of the things that makes Microsoft Places genuinely useful for hybrid workers is the ability to see what a desk or room looks like before booking it. A photo removes uncertainty, reduces the number of last-minute cancellations, and helps people choose the right space for their work style and the day ahead.
This post walks through exactly how to add images to rooms and desks in Microsoft Places, including where the setting lives, what image formats and sizes work best, and how the photos appear in the booking experience for end users.
FEB
7
Microsoft Lists keeps evolving, and one of the most subtle but important changes is the new admin control that allows you to hide real-time collaborators at the site collection level. It’s now possible for admins to disable the little avatars that show who else is currently viewing or editing a list — and this isn’t just another option buried somewhere in PowerShell. It addresses real privacy concerns and can make a big difference in how teams work day to day.
This post explains what the feature does, how to enable it, and the specific scenarios where hiding collaborators makes sense from both a privacy and a governance perspective.
FEB
8
Build a SharePoint Project Index for a Cleaner, Connected Intranet
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A project index is one of those intranet patterns that sounds simple but can genuinely transform how people navigate and discover work across the organization. Instead of hunting through Teams channels or document libraries, a well-structured SharePoint project index gives everyone a single, searchable hub to find active projects, check their status, and jump straight to the resources they need.
This post covers how to design and build a project index in SharePoint using lists, metadata, and column formatting — turning a plain list into a proper discovery experience for your intranet.
FEB
9
Microsoft has been rolling out a refreshed document library experience in SharePoint, and while the changes are largely improvements, they can feel disorienting at first — especially if you’ve been using the platform for years and built muscle memory around where things used to be. This post is a practical reorientation guide for anyone who opened SharePoint recently and felt like something was slightly off.
From the repositioned command bar to the new default view behavior, this walkthrough covers what changed, why it changed, and how to get comfortable navigating document libraries in the updated experience.
FEB
10
Microsoft Lists has its own form experience, so why should you use Microsoft Forms to collect information and write the responses into a List? The short answer: because Forms does things Lists can’t. More branching logic, better external sharing, richer survey features, and a more polished respondent experience — Forms wins on the front end, while Lists wins on the back end for tracking and action.
This post walks through a Power Automate flow that bridges the two products, automatically writing each new Forms submission as a new item in a Microsoft List, so you can manage, assign, and act on responses without leaving the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
FEB
11
While creating a new list from scratch, I came across a new column type completely by surprise — just sitting there, quietly waiting to be discovered. One of those things Microsoft slips into the product without any major communication. And honestly? It’s brilliant. This new Quick Steps column instantly adds action buttons directly into your list items, removing all the configuration overhead and making automation feel truly native.
Instead of building Power Automate flows or writing JSON formatting from scratch, you can now add a Quick Steps column, define a simple action, and give users a one-click button right inside the list. This post covers how it works and where it fits best.
FEB
12
Quick Steps are coming to SharePoint document libraries, and unlike many incremental updates, this one actually changes the day-to-day experience for people who work with documents. It brings one-click actions directly into the library interface, letting you trigger common workflows without leaving the page or opening a separate application.
The real value here is in reducing the friction between noticing something that needs to happen and actually making it happen. For organizations that rely heavily on SharePoint for document management, Quick Steps could meaningfully reduce the number of steps between a file landing in a library and it being routed, approved, or acted upon.
FEB
13
Microsoft Places roadmap highlights announced at ISE
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ISE (Integrated Systems Europe) in Barcelona was the backdrop for some meaningful Microsoft Places roadmap announcements, and this post covers the highlights. As someone working on Microsoft Places integrations at Appspace, it was a great opportunity to see firsthand where Microsoft is taking the platform and how it connects with the broader ecosystem of workplace technology.
From occupancy sensing enhancements to deeper integrations with hardware partners, the roadmap signals a clear push to make Places not just a booking tool, but the operational layer that connects the digital and physical workplace.
FEB
14
I’ve always had a clear bias when it comes to product integrations. I’m far less interested in the ones that promise to transform the way we work and much more drawn to the quiet connections that remove friction from everyday tasks. The simplest integrations are often the most effective, precisely because they don’t ask people to change their behavior or learn something new — they just make the thing you were already trying to do slightly easier.
The direct integration between Microsoft Forms and Microsoft Teams falls into that category. It doesn’t introduce a new workflow, a new surface, or a new concept to explain. It simply allows you to share a form directly into a Teams channel, putting it in front of the people who need to respond, exactly where they are already working.
FEB
15
How to Build a SharePoint Contact List with Internal and External Users
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A SharePoint contact list that combines internal users and external contacts in one place is one of those deceptively simple patterns that keeps coming up in real projects. Whether you’re managing client relationships, vendor contacts, or project stakeholders, having a single list that handles both Microsoft 365 users and external people — without breaking the People column — is genuinely useful.
This post presents a practical contact list pattern for consulting projects that combines people columns, custom fields, and list formatting connected to a project index, giving you a clean and functional approach to managing mixed contact types in SharePoint.
FEB
16
Microsoft Teams is adding the ability for participants to temporarily change their display name during a meeting. This is a feature many users have been requesting for a while — particularly for scenarios where someone joins a shared device, is attending as a representative of a team rather than themselves, or simply wants to appear under a different name in a specific context.
The feature is optional and controlled by meeting organizers, which means admins and organizers can decide when and whether to allow it. This post covers how to enable it, what the experience looks like for attendees, and the governance considerations worth keeping in mind.
FEB
17
Places Finder is the search and booking experience inside Microsoft Places that helps people quickly locate the right workspace. It’s the interface where users browse desks and rooms with rich details like photos, amenities, floor plans, capacity, and availability — replacing the old Room Finder with something far more visual and contextual.
This post explains what Places Finder replaces in Outlook’s calendar experience, what the new interface looks like for end users, and how administrators can enable it so that it shows up in the meeting scheduling workflow instead of the legacy Room Finder panel.
FEB
18
Microsoft Teams is introducing audio-only meeting recordings — and while it might seem like a downgrade from full video recordings, this feature addresses something that video recordings never quite solved: the discomfort of being permanently recorded on camera. Many participants hold back in conversations precisely because they know their facial expressions and environment are being captured alongside their words.
Audio-only recordings preserve the content of the meeting — the decisions, the discussion, the actions — without the surveillance feeling that video can create. This post explains how the feature works, how to enable it, and why it might actually improve the quality of the conversations you record.
FEB
19
The Microsoft 365 profile card — the small popup that appears when you hover over a person’s name or photo — is getting more useful. Microsoft has extended it to pull in user information from third-party systems, meaning organizations can now surface data from HR platforms, CRM systems, or other business applications directly in the profile card experience.
This is a meaningful shift for organizations that want their Microsoft 365 environment to reflect real-world roles and relationships. Instead of seeing only what’s in Azure Active Directory, users can now see enriched profiles that draw from the tools their organization actually uses to manage people data.
FEB
20
Blocking file downloads in SharePoint and OneDrive is one of those requests that sounds simple until you actually try to implement it. The reality is that the options are more nuanced than most people expect — and some of the approaches that seem obvious don’t work the way you’d think, or have significant side effects that make them impractical in most organizations.
This post cuts through the confusion with a clear breakdown of what’s actually possible, what the platform doesn’t support, which combination of settings comes closest to a real solution, and the important limitations you should communicate to stakeholders before promising anything.
FEB
21
The concept of marginal gains applies just as well to productivity as it does to sport: small improvements, consistently applied, add up to meaningful results. Flagged emails appearing in the Planner app for Microsoft Teams is exactly that kind of improvement — not a headline feature, but a quiet one that reduces the gap between where you notice something and where you actually act on it.
Instead of having flagged emails sit silently in Outlook while your task list lives in Planner, this integration surfaces flagged emails directly alongside your other tasks in Teams. The result is a more complete picture of what needs your attention, without having to context-switch between applications.
FEB
22
As video production inside organizations increases, recordings end up spread across SharePoint sites, document libraries, and personal drives, with little context beyond a filename and a timestamp. Microsoft Lists includes a playlist template designed to address this gap, although it is rarely discussed and often misunderstood.
This post combines the Lists playlist template with Clipchamp to create a practical workflow for managing video content in Microsoft 365 — giving your team a structured way to organize, describe, and find recordings without building a custom application or investing in external tools.
FEB
23
As organizations mature in their use of Microsoft Teams, they accumulate channels — project channels, event channels, initiative channels — that served a purpose at the time but are now dormant. Archiving channels is the right response to this growth, but it raises a set of governance questions that deserve a clear answer before you build a policy around it.
This post looks at channel archiving from a governance perspective: what archiving actually does to a channel’s content and permissions, how it differs from deleting, who should have the authority to archive, and how to build a lightweight governance framework that keeps Teams from becoming a graveyard of abandoned channels.
FEB
24
How to Rename a SharePoint Site and Change Its URL Without Breaking Everything
HANDS ON SharePoint
Renaming a SharePoint site and changing its URL is something that sounds simple but carries enough risk to make most admins pause. The good news is that SharePoint handles redirects for the old URL automatically — so existing links don’t immediately break. The less good news is that there are a handful of things that don’t follow the redirect, and if you don’t account for them in advance, you’ll hear about it from your users.
This guide walks through why renaming matters, what happens behind the scenes when you change a site URL, how to do it safely using the SharePoint admin center or PowerShell, and what to check and communicate before and after the change.
FEB
25
When the Enter Key Became a Liability in Microsoft Teams
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If you’ve ever accidentally sent a half-finished message in Microsoft Teams by pressing Enter, you already know the problem this post is about. The default behavior in Teams — where Enter sends a message and Shift+Enter creates a new line — is one of those small friction points that catches people off guard repeatedly, especially those who are used to Outlook or other tools where Enter just means a new line.
This post looks at how to change the behavior, why Microsoft made Enter the default send key in the first place, and the broader conversation about keyboard shortcuts and user control in collaboration tools that this seemingly small setting opens up.
FEB
26
What 25 Years of SharePoint Meant for My Career
HANDS ON SharePoint
SharePoint turned 25 this year, and it’s hard to overstate how much the platform has shaped not just how organizations manage information, but how an entire generation of technology professionals built their careers. For me personally, SharePoint has been a constant — a platform I’ve been writing about, building on, and explaining to others since the early days of the modern web.
This post is a reflection on what 25 years of SharePoint has meant from a career perspective: the skills it created, the community it built, the moments where it frustrated everyone, and why — despite the noise around newer tools — it remains one of the most consequential pieces of enterprise software ever shipped.
FEB
27
The End of SharePoint Alerts and the Shift to Smarter Notifications
HANDS ON SharePoint
SharePoint Alerts are being retired — and while the timeline has been extended several times, the direction is clear. The classic “Alert Me” feature, which has been a staple of SharePoint since the early days, is being phased out in favor of Power Automate flows and SharePoint Rules as the recommended alternatives for keeping people informed about changes to lists, libraries, and files.
This post explains what’s happening, when new alerts will stop being available, what happens to existing alerts, and how to approach the migration in a way that doesn’t leave your organization’s notification workflows broken when the retirement takes full effect in July 2026.
FEB
28
Microsoft Forms Data Sync: Bringing Responses Directly into SharePoint
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Microsoft Forms has long been a popular tool for collecting responses, but the path from a submitted form to actionable data in SharePoint has typically required Power Automate. With the Forms Data Sync feature, Microsoft is closing that gap by allowing form responses to flow directly into a SharePoint list — automatically and without requiring a separate automation flow.
This post covers how the data sync feature works, what it looks like to set it up from Forms, how responses map to SharePoint list columns, and the specific scenarios where this direct connection is the right choice versus a more customized Power Automate approach.