Azure

From time to time (yes it’s almost that time of the year again, when we use this opening statement)… user’s have difficulties to connect to a SQL Azure Database with Power-BI. So I decided to post this article as a brief hint (and as reminder for myself), how to connect from Power-BI. First of all, allow the connection with TCP port 1433 to your client IP address in the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com. Click “Add client IP” and add it to the firewall settings of the SQL server as in this sample here. ...

As covered in our blog post “Some snapshots around MVP Summit 2016”, we enjoyed the Microsoft MVP summit very much. We met many friends from all over the world and talked about various topics. One talk ended in a very international podcast production, recorded at the famous Channel 9 studios in Redmond made by Aurélien Prévot (MVP from France), including Christophe Fiessinger (Microsoft Corp.), Martina Grom (RD and MVP from Austria), Adis Jugo (MVP from Croatia), Luc Labelle and Sébastien Levert (both MVPs from Canada). Follow this link here: ...

Last week Martina and I have been speaking at Unity Connect in Haarlem in the Netherlands. Unity Connect is an IT conference about Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Skype, Yammer, and Azure and took place from 16th to 18th November 2016 in the beautiful city of Haarlem. We arrived on Tuesday evening and entered the stunning inner city of Haarlem with so many cool restaurants and bars. The banner picture of Unity Connect just gives a brief impression of the beautiful buildings in that small town. The conference location was in Philharmonie Haarlem which is actually a concert hall but a very cool event location. With the inner city and the hotels around the corner, this event is - besides the conference offerings - one of my absolute favorite places to go in this region. ...

End of October, Martina and I have been at SharePoint days Conference (SPD) Slovenia. This was our first SharePoint conference in Slovenia in the beautiful small town of Bled which is just across the southern border of Austria. The location was very close from our home town Vienna (about 4 hours drive) and very close to our second home in Villach. SPD Slovenia took place from 24th to 25th October 2016 at Hotel Kompas in Bled. IMHO, Bled is in maybe one of the most beautiful regions in Europe with a small lake and surrounding mountains. There were 5 tracks and about 50 sessions, presented in English, see more about this great event at SPD Slovenia. ...

Nice numbers of our two Office-AddIns “TagCloud Generator” and “Like for Outlook”. Both Apps are available in the Microsoft Office Store. TagCloud Generator is a simple to use tagcloud generator for Microsoft Word (working with Word 2013 and above) and delivers an overview of a document rapidly. Like for Outlook enables users to send a Like with one click and works in Outlook 2013 or later, Outlook 2016 for Mac, Outlook on the Web. ...

Need the new OneDrive (and SharePoint) Next Generation Sync Client on your computer? Download the bits directly from here: Update 02. Nov. 2016: Download-Link replaced. Follow this following link to get the latest version of the NGSC client, since Microsoft is currently updating the client almost daily… https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=823059 If you have an older version installed, this will be automatically overwritten by the new client. The NGSC client supports OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. ...

Last week, our third IT/DevConnections conference took place in Las Vegas. We had the pleasure to have several sessions there. The IT/DevConnections conference took place from 10th to 13th of October in the luxurious Aria resort that is located right in the middle of the famous Las Vegas strip. That’s a very cool location for obtaining KnowHow transfer during the day and enjoying the nightlife of Vegas. Besides the networking at the conference, there were social events and parties. ...

It has been a busy week when we’ve been at Microsoft Ignite conference 2016 which took place in Atlanta from 26th to 30th September. This was Microsoft’s second Ignite conference (the first one happened in Chicago in May 2015, see here) with more than 20.000 people attending and more than 1.000 sessions. For us, it was our first time in the US South (in Georgia) and we enjoyed it very much. ...

Office 365 Groups are THE connection between the different Office 365 services. Office 365 groups are very useful for team collaboration, collaboration on ideas and projects, sharing documents within teams, have a team calendar and a lot more. They span like an umbrella around all Office 365 services and are the key connection point in Office 365. What I like most about them from an architectural perspective – they are where they belong to: in Azure AD. In some practical examples with my customers I learned how they love groups because they are easy to create, offer self service and provide a lot of additional value within Office 365. But there are probably also some things which especially IT administrators don’t like and topics which are challenging especially in large tenants: everybody can create groups and naming policies are hard to implement. As a first workaround Microsoft provided a possibility to disable group creation out of Exchange Online, which is definitely one of the most common usecases. But this did not avoid Office 365 Groups creation through Planner or other services. ...

Recently, I wanted to do a cleanup in my various Azure subscriptions. A lot of websites and databases were created during the last months and years, so the idea was to cleanup and to combine websites into one (or just a few) App Service Plan(s) and to do the same with multiple SQL Databases into one Elastic Database Pool. The goal was to reduce costs from multiple App Plans and single databases into few ones. Here’s how this works. ...