Microsoft 365 Apps and Services for Work and School Accounts
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To show a manager their team, you need the people who report to them. The Office 365 Users connector's Get direct reports (V2), Office365Users.DirectReportsV2(), returns them from Microsoft 365. It has one quirk that trips everyone up: the people are inside a .value table. Here's how to call it, shape the list, and turn it into a simple "is this person a manager?" check.
Approval apps need to know who someone reports to. The Office 365 Users connector's Get manager (V2), Office365Users.ManagerV2() in Power Apps, returns a person's manager straight from Microsoft 365. The catch: for anyone without a manager, it returns an error rather than a blank. Here's how to call it and how to handle that case.
User() gives you a name and an email, but not a job title, department or first name. For those, the Office 365 Users connector has Get my profile (V2), called Office365Users.MyProfileV2() in Power Apps. Here's how to call it, how to ask for only the fields you need, and where to keep the result.
User() tells a canvas app who's using it: their full name, email address, Microsoft Entra object ID and photo. It needs no connector and no setup, which makes it the quickest way to greet someone or fill in "requested by". Here's what each part returns, as seen in Studio, and what User() can't tell you.
The modern Avatar control is supposed to show a person's initials when they have no photo. With its default settings, for a user without a photo, it showed a grey person silhouette instead. The cause is User().Image, which returns a default picture rather than nothing. One check with Office 365 Users brings the initials back.
Your canvas app calls Office365Users.ManagerV2 and a red banner appears: Office365Users.ManagerV2 failed … Resource 'manager' does not exist or one of its queried reference-property objects are not present. Nothing is broken in your formula. The person simply has no manager in Microsoft 365, and ManagerV2 reports that as an error rather than a blank.
Power Apps solutions, the packages you use to move apps from one environment to another, are stored in Dataverse. Your organization's Default environment doesn't have Dataverse until an admin adds it. It takes a minute, uses storage Microsoft already gives the Default environment, and can't be undone.
Every screen of the Career Development Plan app reads from or writes to two SharePoint lists. This part builds them, and the site they live on, column by column and setting by setting, exactly as the app will expect them.
A SharePoint list can hold millions of items, but SharePoint blocks any single query that has to work through more than about 5,000 of them at once. An index on the column you filter by lets SharePoint jump straight to the matching items instead. It takes a minute to add, and the best time to add it is while the list is still small.
A new SharePoint list accepts file attachments on every item, and anything in it can turn up in your organization's search results. That suits a team's task list. It doesn't suit a list an app writes private records to. Four settings on the list's settings page fix that.
