Tuesdays with Artificial intelligence - TWAi Sep 2025

Are you having difficulty automating processes to manage your Microsoft Teams environment? Do you want to script and automate things but don’t know where to start? Learn how to start with Microsoft Graph and PowerShell to manage your Microsoft Teams environment programmatically!
In this session, you will learn:

• Use Cases for building your automation - What can be automated out of the box with Entra ID and Teams, and where does it fall short?
• Connecting to your Teams and Entra environments using Graph and the Teams PowerShell Module (TPM).
• Understand the differences between App and Delegate Access
• How to set up an App Registration in Entra ID and assign the necessary roles for Graph and Teams PowerShell Module (TPM).
• Bonus – An exploration into Microsoft’s unpublished config API (the underlying API that powers Teams Admin Center and Teams PowerShell Module)

Below are the questions and answers from the September 2025 TWAi Meetup Session.

Q. Tell us a bit about yourself? – City, family, hobbies, job titleA.  I live in beautiful/bilingual Montreal, Quebec. I’m a proud dad of two little gremlins (2 boys - 4 and 2). I also play in a funk/soul/R&B band called “The Hurt” and we’re currently learning a bunch of Halloween related songs for a show next month! I’m the Software Engineering Director at ZIRO Technologies, where we’ve been really busy helping folks Move their Voice Conversations into Teams with Copilot! My team specifically works on a Platform that assists in the migration of telephony to Teams as well as day-2 management of Teams and Teams Phone.

Q. Tell us something about yourself that not many people know about you?
A. I can be a bit of an introvert. I actually love days when I’m not in too many meetings and can just focus on diving into fixing complex problems.

Q. What does a typical workday look like for you?
A. I actually keep a mini whiteboard on my desk where I line up some weekly priorities. I try to stay focused on them (I basically write up an eisenhower matrix (do, delegate,decide,delete). Because I lead multiple teams from Product Owners, API Devs, UI devs, and DevOps, I can get pretty easily distracted at times putting our fires, so having this technique helps big time.

Q. A bit about yourself work-related
A. I really like what we do at ZIRO. I think we’re a unique company in that we have deep telephony knowledge, but also have a software dev shop that knows/understands how to build/scale maintainable software so it leads to some pretty cool products/features.

Q. 1st job out of college
A. I worked at Nuance coding/developing IVRs with Voice Biometrics. In fact, Microsoft Acquired Nuance in 2022, and some of the work I did years ago has not folded into Copilot Studio and Dynamics Contact Center.

Q. Your 1st version of SharePoint that you experienced and what year
A. Honestly, my first real exposure to Sharepoint was when we started using teams and thus Sharepoint (given it’s the backbone of where things are stored in teams)

Q. Last challenging project and why? (this should relate to your demo)
A. Building a migration module where we are automating data extraction from legacy on-premises PBX (like a Cisco Call Manager) and leveraging the Teams APIs (both Graph and Teams PowerShell Module) to migrate people’s phone systems onto Teams.

Q. What is the biggest mistake that your feel holds back your clients from the results they want (this should relate to your demo)
A. People are sometimes scared of change or doing things differently. I see it often in migrations of phone systems where people want to bring old habits or old ways of doing things into Teams. We need to embrace that the way people communicate is evolving and AI is accelerating that even more.

Q. Describe a SharePoint train wreck project, and what did you learn?
A. My projects don’t involve SharePoint, so I don’t have any.

Q. Your favorite M365 feature/tool and why
A. I love intelligent recaps of my calls. Saves me so much time with note taking. I think if I had to choose a second best, is notifying me when someone becomes available on teams (I get to spy on someone be notified when they free up? Amazing).

Q. Where do you think Microsoft is going with M365.. Be totally honest
A. It’s clear that there’s a significant shift in AI. I think we’re going to continue to see it pop up everywhere. At my company, we’ve really taken the stance that we should make every conversation matter whether it’s a phone call, a meeting, an off-the-cuff conversation in a meeting room or an e-mail or chat. With Copilot, you can ensure that all these convos lead to clarity, action and progress. 

• Q. What are the 3 cool features of the demo?
  I’ll start by discussing some of the Use Cases for automating tasks with APIs.  Some of the cool stuff I’ve seen.
• I’ve prepared a couple of examples
• Exporting AI summarization out of your meetings (say to shoot them to a CRM or Project Management Tool)
• Exporting your Teams directory (ex. to import into other systems like ServiceNow/Workday)
• If there are 3 things to take from the demo, I think it’s as follows:
  1. Teams APIs are actually available from two places
  2. Teams Powershell Module (TPM) 
  3. Graph API
• There are two ways to authenticate to these APIs - Understand the difference:
  1. Delegate Access
  2. Application Access
• You don’t need to use Powershell for either (yes, there’s a hidden Web API behind the Teams Powershell Module and I can show you how to use it!)

Q. What is the sizzle?
A. You can basically build anything you want with APIs. Think of them as lego blogs to building the solution that you dream of. And in 2025, it’s become even simpler to just vibe code these solutions with AI. 

Q. What was your first job out of high school
A. Diary Queen, then a Hardware Store

Q. What's your biggest nightmare project you have worked on … And what did you learn from this experience
A. A project at my previous employer where one of our vendors left/quit the project. We had to reverse engineer their code and finish the work ourselves. Communication is important. Our client was constantly informed of the situation which made things more manageable.

Q. What’s the best and worst tech advice you’ve been given
A. Best - You don’t need to know everything. You just need to know who to go to to get your answers. 
B. Deadlines matter more than quality. I worked on projects where deadlines meant everything, but in reality, you'd be surprised how many customers would prefer you to slip a bit on a deadline to deliver them a higher-quality product. The key is to find a balance. — ship iteratively, but don’t compromise on critical quality

Q. What are you working on to become a developer/consultant / CTO
A. I always see a progression in my career as long as I’m always learning. The day I stop learning is the day I change jobs or careers. And it’s something I think is important to do in and outside of work.  It’s sometimes harder to make the time, especially with two little guys at home, but it’s so important. Even for this podcast, I spent a couple of evenings getting to know the new APIs for grabbing AI insights because I wanted to learn how to use them and think of use cases that could bring value to our customers.

Q. Where do you want to be in 5 years?
A. I think in 5 years I’ll probably doing a lot of the same type of work I’m doing now. I do want to eventually to a radical shift. Get out of tech completely and do something a little different like going back to working at a hardware store or teaching.

Q. What's your blind spot in your Microsoft knowledge? Pitfalls
A. I’d love to get my hands a little dirtier with the Power Apps, specifically power automate.

Q. Where do you source your knowledge? - Twitter- who do you follow, site urls
A. LinkedIn is a great spot to get quick updates. I follow lots of folks much smarter than me in the MVP community and they help me stay up to date on things. I’ll do a couple of other shout-outs - The Teams Fireside Chat hosted by Tom Arbuthnot (MVP), and there’s also a Teams Admin Discord that is moderated by Martin Heusser (MVP).

Q. In your mind, if there was 1 song that could describe Sharepoint, what would it be? - David Bowie - Heroes
A. I cheated and asked ChatGPT for this one. I specifically didn’t use CoPilot because I wanted an honest 3rd party answer and it was perfect - “Welcome to the Jungle” – Guns N’ Roses. 
A. "You know where you are? You're in the jungle, baby!"
→ SharePoint can feel like a chaotic, tangled mess of folders, sites, lists, permissions, and settings — especially if it’s grown without governance.
A. It’s powerful, but dangerous
→ Like a jungle, SharePoint is vast and full of potential, but if you’re not careful, you’ll get lost — or worse, bring down a workflow trying to change one column in a list.
A. Everyone uses it differently
→ One team uses it like Dropbox, another as a CMS, someone else builds full apps on it — and nobody really knows where the latest version of that PDF lives.

Q. Where can people find you?
A. LinkedIn or at easy365.io  where I blog