A free Power Apps app for the NHS (or anyone else fighting the C-19 war)

TL;DR - if you are 
a) combatting the C-19 pandemic
b) an Office 365 business or enterprise licence customer
c) want to know staff status, where they are working, and what they are doing;
then, I've this app that I'm able to deploy to your tenant pro-bono.

If you are not directly fighting C-19, but this app would do wonders for you, then I am willing to deploy it to you for a charitable donation to Help For Heroes.

YOU DONT NEED PREMIUM POWER APPS LICENCING FOR THIS

Installation can be done all remotely.

For data it uses standalone SharePoint lists, so there are no complex data setups.  It can be running in an hour or two.

Summary
I've worked with an NHS trust recently to create a Power Apps app for them.  They needed all staff to be able to self report in their status for 7 days (be that WFH, Ill, Self-Isolating, Covering a colleague or something else).  In under 24 hours we had a second version from which the screen shots below are taken.

As a bonus, the data that this app uses can be managed centrally from a Microsoft Access database which I shall also supply.

The below are just how the app finished at V2, there is no reason it cannot be easily and quickly modifed for your circumstances (for instance, you may only want a single status, rather than 1 per day).


Screen 1 - on opening the app you get:

• a list of all your colleagues in your department and their status
• the means to look at any other department
• the means to look at all people in a particular status
• the means to search for an individual
• the means to edit your own status

Screen 2 - on opening the app you get to change your status across the current 7 days, by use of simple dropdowns on each day.  The list of entries is controlled by the company deploying.

Screen 3 - this is an optional extra - a quick display of your calendar so that you can quickly check without leaving the app

Rooftop Gormley...

Active Directory domain time settings (an unintended consequence of VMW - Hyper-V migration)

Over time my network had slipped a few minutes, but everything was synchronised, so there were no authentication problems.  However it was becoming more annoying (especially when email replies appeared to land a minute or two before the original was sent!).

 

So eventually I was persuaded to put time in to fix it, in the past I just fixed the clock on the master DC, and all was well.  However this time…

 

Everything I did had no effect, DC’s were changed to point to external NTP sources, but even with manual time changes at the command line they snapped back to the wrong time almost instantly.

 

Then something twigged.  My master time source DC was one of the last servers I moved off the old VMWare cluster into a new Hyper-V setup.  And of course Time Synchronisation from host to guest was on by default.  As soon as the DC changed time, Hyper-V tools snapped it right back.  And as the host took it’s time from AD, it was always out.  Before, when on vCentre, the host was synchronised to NTP servers, and the time sync worked.

 

This morning I unchecked time sync as below, reset the DC’s clock, and all was well.  I should have thought of this much earlier in the diagnostics.  But I guess having moved away from infrastructure and back to dev, my mindset has changed a bit!  These days I’m just a consumer of the network infrastructure (although I do have to be the admin too!).  I suppose I could have just changed the time on the Hyper-V host, but this is a better answer, as the NTP usage means the network should remain on the correct time.

 

TTFN

 

 

 

The case of the Nokia 8 and the missing fingerprint data...

A funny thing happened the other day.  I finally (and accidentally) let the phone fully run down to 0% battery.  But it when it was charged again, something odd – I couldn’t use the fingerprint reader to unlock the phone or for anything else.  On opening settings to investigate it even prompted me to register fingerprints.  It appeared to have lost all fingerprint data.

 

So I went to re-register the fingerprints I used before and was told to try another digit.  A quick BING search confirmed that this can happen, but curiously there wasn’t much I could find on sorting it out.

 

So, having tried all the digits I had previously registered I finally tried a new digit.  It worked and was registered correctly.  But I still couldn’t register or use the originals.

 

Ten minutes later, thinking laterally, I deleted the new print.  At which point the phone decided it didn’t know about of any of my prints and I could re-register the ones I normally use.

 

I don’t know if this is an Android 9 issue, a Nokia 8 issue, or the combination.  But as a heads up – leave at least one digit unregistered on your phone for when this happens to you!