Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.
Recently I had the great opportunity of attending the Microsoft 365 Global Developers’ Bootcamp. This consisted of two workshops, each going through a series of activities around a themed task, developing applications for use with Microsoft Teams, and using the Microsoft Graph API.
The workshop for Day 1 was ‘Build an Emergency Response Solution with Teams and SharePoint’.
This workshop was run by Bob German, and it took us through a series of tasks to create a Teams app for coordinating the response to an emergency such as a natural disaster. It grew out of work done to help with the aftermath of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami in Asia.
Obviously this was one of the high points for me: there I am in second place on the podium in the Kahoot quiz!
To be fair, I did do this quiz twice…
Personally I would love to have my own working copy of the One Productivity Hub app, as it is a step better than the ‘Team of Me’ that I had put together earlier in lockdown as an attempt to bring all my notifications together. I am still a step or two short of being able to install something like that in our Office365 setup: our security does not allow for setting up the ‘ngrok’ tunnelling and I don’t know yet how to deploy the app in a more permanent way.
So at the moment I am stuck on this error when I try to install it to my personal Team: Valid domains cannot contain a tunneling site. Please remove these in your manifest. To help to ensure the security of your app and users, domains outside of your organization's control (including wildcards) and tunneling services cannot be included in the valid domains in your manifest.
But it’s been a great learning experience, so I thought I’d share my joy and thank the instructors on Twitter😎:
I’ve been having fun with Google Analytics this week😃.
Yesterday, I needed to add statistical tracking to our Digital Education Team blogs on the University’s hosted version of WordPress. This has previously been no problem (eg with this blog), but with the new blogs, it didn’t work.
I created a new Google account for the team with our non-Gmail address, and that turned out to be fine.
I set up a Google Analytics account for the team, and that all seemed to work too.
But when I tried to connect my Analytics account to the Beehive Pro statistics plugin in the blog, it couldn’t find the website listed in my account. It said there wasn’t a ViewID. I was able to authenticate the Google account with the plugin, but the plugin couldn’t find anything in my Analytics account to associate with it.
Here is a summary of the Google Analytics account structure:
Organizations: An organization is an optional way to represent a company, which lets you access your company’s product accounts (e.g., Analytics, Tag Manager, Optimize), and manage product users, permissions, and cross-product integrations.
Accounts: You need at least one account so you can have access to Analytics, and so you can identify the properties you want to track. An account can be used to manage one or more properties.
Properties: A property is a website, mobile application, or device. When you add a property to an account, Analytics generates the tracking code that you use to collect data from that property. The tracking code contains a unique ID that identifies the data from that property, and identifies it in your reports.
Views: a View is (or was) a defined view of data from a property. Users are given access to a view so they can see the reports based on that view’s data. Analytics creates one unfiltered view for each property you add, and allows you to create more defined views using filters.
So, what could have gone wrong?
The first thing I checked was the Analytics account permissions, in case my plugin, although authenticated with Google, wasn’t actually authorised to do anything. But these all appeared to be correct: I had granted the default permission set of "Edit, Collaborate, Read & Analyse, Manage Users", so all the required permissions were there.
However, looking in the Analytics account, many things did look different from the various help and instructions available. They also looked different from my own personal account:
The Tracking info option wasn’t listed under Admin > Property.
There were no Views listed in the Admin panel, and I couldn’t see any way of adding one.
I noticed that the tracking code for my web property began with 'G-' instead of the usual 'UA-'.
There were a lot more interactions available for tracking