How to manage multi-project Trello boards

I've been using Trello since its launch in 2011, mostly for personal productivity, and small single board projects. I was very happy with out of the box functionality, but some time ago I've started using it in a special team which worked on more than fifteen projects simultaneously and realized that I need a way to manage backlogs of different projects on separate boards, but still have the main board for tracking work in progress, as easy and usable as if it was all one board.

Basically, I needed something like this:

Integrating Lync/Skype for Business with Bot Framework

Since the release of the Bot Framework, I've been waiting for Lync/Skype for Business support for two main reasons:

• Lync API is outdated and not very reliable.
• Easy and straightforward dialogs in the framework

Using SharePoint REST API $filter with large document libraries

About a year ago I've created a SharePoint application which used  document library as it's main storage. I knew that there are some limitations and restrictions but after reading the following article: Manage lists and libraries with many items I thought that it's not a problem if you setup the indexed columns and views properly.

However, once the library has reached 6000 plus something items, everything suddenly slowed down dramatically, basic queries which used to load in 1 second started to time-out or take more than 60 seconds to load.

In addition to that, WorkflowServiceHealth.aspx page just died and only returned "Timeout Expired" error.

PowerBI dataset sharing via content packs

I've recently started using PowerBI content packs for sharing data with my colleagues (as well as different group workspaces) and noticed a few weird and misleading things around them. In this blog post I'd like to share my findings.

Refreshing an organizational content pack
The documentations basically says the following:
As the content pack creator, you can schedule refresh of the datasets.  When you create and upload the content pack, that refresh schedule is uploaded with the datasets. If you change the refresh schedule, you need to re-publish the content pack (see above).

You might think that datasets within the content pack are self-sufficient and can update themselves but that's not how it works.In reality, when you update the main dataset, the changes will be applied everywhere. Refresh schedule settings at the dataset copies might show absolutely irrelevant information in this case. Here's the one which was actually updated on Feb 3 and is setup to update automatically.



Dataset model (schema) updates
When you update SQL database schema, the changes will not be picked up automatically during the scheduled refresh, but you don't need to update content pack either. All you need is to refresh the data in the PowerBI Desktop, and then publish the report. This will update associated dataset and all it's copies even without updating content pack.

I'll add more similar findings here if I come across any in the future.