Happy new year everyone. I found some time to work on a few Company Communicator bug fixes and a special new feature that is being requested for those ones using the dev build.

I have the pleasure to announce that the Company Communicator targeting mode is now available on my unofficial CC master branch. You can get more information, including instructions on how to enable and use the feature here.

The master branch is now complete with the targeting mode, analytics and also updated with version 4.1.5 codebase. I know the main code is now on v5 but I promise I’ll start the work on that soon. 🙂

This new release has the following additions:

  • New feature: Targeting Mode (as mentioned). That mode implements a two layer administration approach for CC. The master admin can install multiple instances of the authors interface in different Teams channels, and for each channel there will be a separate set of messages. That is, messages created by the Human Resources team will be only available for authors in that group and will not be available for authors of the Sales department, for example. The same admin also defines M365 security groups that will be available as the only options to send messages. There are also specific branding customizations that can be done per channel. You basically get a multi department communication tool, with limited governance just deploying one instance of Company Communicator.
  • Improvement: We now show the current size of the card and the maximum size so authors can manage to get the content under the limit of the Azure table record. That is a major thing for authors. Azure tables have a limit of 32K per record and CC uses that low cost database technology. When creating or editing messages authors can now see the space that is currently available so they don’t have any chances to create messages that are bigger than the limit (please note that I’m restricting in 30K just to be safe).
  • Improvement: This version also allows the upload of CSV files with a list of UPNs identifying users that will receive messages. The authors interface is now checking the size of the uploaded CSV file and comparing to the remaining space we have on the card. If the file is bigger a message is shown to the user. We are storing the CSV file in the same record used by the message thus subject to the 32Kb limit. This is something I’m looking into and I promise I’ll use a different approach in the future to avoid the 32K limitation, at least for the CSV user list.

  • Bug fix: Clicking to upload a new file is now resetting the size of the card. Previously, authors had to type a space or anything on the text field to clean up the image buffer. Now when you try to upload a new file it automatically clears the buffer.

  • Bug fix: Show the targeting channel customization during send visualization. I got a few customers complaining that when sending the messages the branding was not being shown. This version now has all the fixes to allow the correct visualization, including the branding.

As I said before, this is a side project I have to improve CC with some features requested by our customers in a unofficial way. If you want to use this variant/fork, remember that there is no official support provided by Microsoft.

If you have any questions, suggestions or complaints, please use the comments section here or create an issue on the GitHub repository.

Stay safe, Cristiano.

Disclaimer – The information contained in this blog post doesn’t represent the official Microsoft guidance or best practices. It is just the view of the author on current alternatives, implementations and workarounds for common issues and/or business needs. Please refer to official Microsoft documentation and evaluate carefully any steps, code or procedures documented herein. The author doesn’t offer any warranty. Use this information at your own risk.