EP77: Back to Basics - Change your thinking to Lists and Data

Office 365 Distilled

Starting with a conversation about music and movies Marijn and Steve suddenly realise that it is supposed to be a technical podcast with a dose of whisky… not film music.

As they realise this and move across to the podcast subject of looking at the Back-to-Basics of data in SharePoint online.

Steve pushes listeners to think about how they process data and make it available as data.

From a Change and Adoption basis, we teach how to manage documents when we need to decide on the form that the data is stored before just falling into the habit of using excel

The Value of the data we can use every day is reduced greatly when it is stored (and lost!!) in an application like Excel.

Statistics around which applications focus on document and which focus on data was taken and it was roughly equal. But we do not teach and explain the management of information and knowledge in the same proportion.

We wonder how much data is lost inside the documents we plan on migrating or the documents we are creating and uploading to SharePoint.

Going back to basics for lists means looking to keep your data in data format whilst working out how you can publish it as a port and document.

The boys realise that they also need to change and focus more on lists and only on documents when it makes sense. Preparing for the future use of the data will become a value in the future.

New Microsoft tools mean that you can present list data as Panels and great page data.

The famous whiteboard gets a Name: PATTI which gets very rude very quickly, so the boys decide on PADDI as it holds pads of paper. It now delivers more structured divergence

A warning is discussed that whilst there is the value of thinking about content data, over content documents, simply because lists are more granular.

Steve surmises down the rabbit hole about creating virtual contracts creating from a bunch of re-usable items which are in fact data defining another blurred line between documents and data. “It’s a good job nobody else can here this great idea”

To sum up - Don’t just focus on the content separate the data at the source, beware of the rabbit hole because more decisions are needed around access control. PowerApps and Power BI are a tool that can turn around your company’s perspective on their content.

Steve and Marijn consider how much knowledge is lost when Data is stored inside content.0

The boys drink Deanston Virgin Oak whisky which is one of the boy’s favourite distilleries featured on their Whisky@ease channel on YouTube. No-fuss just great whisky is a great description of the Deanston product.

The round-up at the end of the podcast brings out the key thoughts that generate a few thoughts about how to approach the overall contract and data strategy across the change and adoption plans.