Delegate365

Delegate365 is registered as an app in the customer’s Azure Active Directory. When a Delegate365 setup is executed, it may be necessary that a new app is registered and is used from then on. So, what happens with old apps? See how to cleanup unused Delegate365 apps here. Technically, the app needs permissions to sign-in the user and to read data from the tenant. If new app permissions are necessary through an update (as this was the case with version 6.5 and the new service health feature), the Delegate365 setup must be re-run. When a new app is created, the Administrator then has to confirm the app consent for his users as described here. ...

We have been busy during summer time and we have been developing and testing our new Delegate365 version 7. We added new features like the support for Office 365 Groups and further useful extensions and made a technical refresh behind the scenes. So, the latest version of Delegate365 is available now and ready for updates. See the details described here. Delegate v7 is the successor of version 6.6. Besides new features, this is a major update since this version takes advantage of using new Microsoft APIs. So, here’s the news: ...

During summer time the next Delegate365 version was born that brings more mailbox and distribution group features, more sync rule options and some minor changes in logging and some fixes. See the details here. Delegate365 version 6.6 brings some improvements on the basis of version 6.5. New sync rules: The menu administration / sync / “sync options” has been renamed to “sync rules” in Version 6.5. Now, the “user license assignments” have been extended with additional options as in the screenshot below. A sync rule can now be switched on or off with the “Active” switch to simplify testing (“On” is the default setting for existing rules). The new “order” allows to reorder the rules. “Action” now allows not only to add Office 365 licenses, but also to remove the selected licenses, which was a often requested feature. “Apply to” allows to execute the rule against “all users”, “sign-in allowed” or “sign-in blocked” users. The new options deliver a much more granular control of license settings. The active sync rules are considered at each sync operation in Delegate365. Don’t forget to save any changes at the page bottom “Save” button! Remember, the more rules are enabled, the longer the sync operation will run, in large Office 365 tenants this might take hours, since every object must be checked and the operations will be executed. ...

In the last days, some customers of Delegate365 experienced a warning in the Delegate365 portal that informed about the failing communication to Exchange Online. This issue was caused by the Microsoft Exchange Online PowerShell endpoint. We are glad to announce that this issue should be fixed soon. Delegate365 informed users about the reduced functionality with a message “Access denied – please check the credentials of your Office 365 account…” when opening the yellow warning icon in the portal. ...

Delegate365 provides various automation tasks. One of these is the new License Assignment rule to automatically assign Office 365 licenses to users based on their user properties or on their group membership. See how this works in real world with a demo scenario here. The License Assignment is available since version 6.4. For details, pls. see the description here. This new feature allows to assign Office 365 licenses in a very custom way to users and runs at each Delegate365 synchronization operation, So, whenever a SyncOp runs, Delegate365 checks the sync rules and assigns licenses as specified. So let’s see how this works step-by-step as follows. ...

Delegate365 version 6.5 is here soon. With that update, there comes new functionality and some further improvements. Read the details here. Notification center: Now, the notification center shows just the last 100 messages (instead of all unread messages) to reduce the loading time for all unread messages that can be produced in a large number by the synchronization process. Anyway, you can access all messages as before by clicking the “Read all messages” link. “Clear all messages” sets all messages to “read”, so that they no longer show up in the notification center. This step improves the dashboard’s loading time. ...

Delegate365 runs as an app in Microsoft Azure on top of Office 365. You can connect to any Office 365 tenant with your Delegate365 portal. You just need a configuration password and a Global Admin user of your Office 365 tenant. The Setup must be executed once, as initial setup or during operation to renew the permissions of the Delegate365 app. See how the new and simplified setup process works here. ...

Delegate365 protocols all modifications of users, licenses and groups within the solution. This is essential to comprehend actions accomplished by Delegate365 administrators or by automated tasks. See how to work with that audited data here. So, all actions are logged to the Delegate365 Audit Log. In the current versions, the audit logs are saved to an Azure Storage Account. There are three ways of working with the audit data: See audit data within Delegate365 Access the data directly with Microsoft Storage Explorer Connect to the data with tools as Microsoft Excel or Power BI All methods are available for Portal Admins in the *administration / audit *menu and are described here. ...

In Delegate365 version 6.2 update we added an important feature to save Delegate365 licenses. With this Delegate365 version, there comes a new, powerful feature for more Office 365 automation. The new version number is 6.4. No worries, you have not missed version 6.3, since this was an internal version for adding the new user license assignment feature, testing and fixes. Delegate365 version 6.4 will be rolled out in the next two weeks. So, what does this update do? ...

Delegate365 version 6.2 comes with some updates and improvements. See the new features described here. License counting update: Delegate365 is licensed per user that shall be managed. There comes just one peculiarity with that: shared mailboxes and resources are delivered from the Office 365 interface as users. This causes that D365 counts such users (but only) if they are assigned to an OU as well although they do not need to have an Office 365 license. So, this can lead to uncertainty, why licensing in D365 can be different from Office 365. Again, this is only the case if the user objects are assigned to an OU in D365. For more information about that topic pls. see Delegate365 license information (Q&A 4 to 6). With the new feature this behavior can be compensated and is obsolete. The following graphics shows such a scenario where a shared mailbox “support” is assigned to an OU in D365 (and counts as a D365 user license). We wanted to simplify that licensing in D365 to make it equal to Office 365 licensing in that specific case. With this D365 update, there come two new switches “Ignore shared mailbox users” and “Ignore resource users” in the administration / sync / sync options user region. By default, these two switches are set to “No”. This means, existing users for shared mailboxes and resources stay in the users list, as it was before. If set to “Yes”, this means that shared mailboxes and resources are ignored as “user” in D365. Such user objects that were existing in the users list will be removed from the users list. (No worries, nothing bad happens, they just no longer show up – and are not counted for D365 user licenses.) After the next SyncOp (of course, with “Use user sync options” switch to “Yes”), these user objects will no longer shown in the users list. The shared mailbox “support” is gone from the users list. Of course, the object is still manageable in the more / shared mailboxes list and can be managed there. The same goes for the resources. Our recommendation: Set both new switches to “Yes”. Usually there is no need to manage a shared mailbox or a resource in the same way as a user. With “Ignore shared mailbox users” and “Ignore resource users” activated, this saves D365 licenses. ...