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Office 365 uses Azure Active Directory for storing user information. Since SharePoint and SharePoint Online both have it´s own User Profile Service and User Store it was clear for Microsoft that some of the user properties have to be shared between these two storages. So Microsoft built a synchronization – or at least an one way transport - between the Azure Active Directory (AAD) user objects and SharePoint Online (SPO) user profiles. ...

When using SQL Databases in Microsoft Azure you´re self responsible for backups. Of course, usually the SQl Azure database cluster takes care of availability – but what if an app deletes records, or you need an older consistent version of a database or you want to work with the data on your local system or in your company´s network? This article shows how to create manual and automated backups and restore them locally or in the cloud. ...

Delegate365 changelog version 2.3. This version is a major release. We made some changes in the time consuming tasks and optimized them. Performance Improvements in all user lists: If an AAD or Office 365 tenant has many thousand users loading the list of all users was time consuming. The reason is that the Microsoft GraphAPI delivers objects in slices (we take about 200 users per call to ensure there are no timeout errors) but has no filter functions we need for separating our domains and OU´s in D365. The result have been some wait time in some cases if many thousand users are existing. So we decided to improve that mechanism and add a cache layer between the AAD and our D365 client. With version 2.3 there´s an extra service added which synchronizes all new, updated and deleted user objects in our own cache. This service runs in the background and takes care of all changes in AAD. The D365 client now uses that cache and has a completely new logic with async calls and organizies the requested data page per page. So – depending on the individual page size – the client at runtime requests only the data page which is rendered. The benefit is that all user list operations like searching and paging are happening instantly in less than one second, regardless of the number of users to be shown. This performance improvement delivers a great user experience even with ten thousands of users in the user list! ...

Delegate365 changelog version 2.2. This was an internal version only for testing some new features… We rolled out that version on some of our demo clients and did some heavy testing of the performance with many thousand users and tested SMS notifications. We built in some new features which will be integrated in the next official release 2.3.

April/May 2014 Added User Self Password Reset (SPR): Now users (not only admins) can login into D365. If the admin had deposited a notification for the specific user (email or SMS), the user can perform a self password reset. When resetting the password the user can decide if he wants to receive the necessary security-code via email or SMS (depending on the settings made by the admins). Then he receives the code and gets a temporary password on the website. With that he can login and now has to change the password to his own, individual password. This function simplifies the administrative effort when users can use this reset on their own. This feature is integrated in D365. *So IT departements have no need to buy Azure premium licenses just for their users to perform self service password reset when using D365! * SMS is a preview function. If used, additional costs for the SMS provider will be added – depending on the location (country) and the amount of SMS messages which is usually about 10 Cent per SMS. ...

We´re happy to publish our new Delegate365.com website today! Since Delegate365 is a very attractive tool for managing users and licenses in Microsoft Office 365 it also deserves a top modern and fancy product website. So, here it is! Have a look and check it out! The redesign starts with our new logo for Delegate365, from the left it´s the cloud symbol going into a capitalized D followed by the product name. ...

Today’s tip is a quick one: If you have licensed mailboxes you only need as additional E-Mail addresses with a separate E-Mail address you can think about converting them to shared mailboxes. Shared Mailboxes have 10GB free storage and there are no additional license costs. Setting the appropriate rights to the shared mailbox they will also automatically show up in Outlook. If you want to convert one of your licensed mailboxes to a shared mailbox you can do that with PowerShell. ...

Have you seen it? Now it´s possible to *delete *Azure Active Directories from the Azure Portal! Just discovered this (long expected) feature shortly. Just an important information about deleting… When selecting an AD (mark the corresponding line right of the name…) and clicking the “Delete”-button… you maybe get a message like: *The following issue(s) prevent deletion of this directory: - Directory has one or more Multi-Factor Authentication providers. You are signed in as a user for whom ‘*.onmicrosoft.com’ is the home directory Directory is a “Partner” directory. Directory has never had an Azure subscription. Directory has one or more subscriptions to Microsoft Online Services. Directory has one or more applications. Directory has one or more applications. Delete all users except yourself ...

Right now Microsoft TechEd 2014 is happening in Houston, Texas. Tools-Maker Telerik is also celebrating this event and gives away their best tools for creating Windows Universal Apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Interested Developers open https://www.telerik.com/account/teched.aspx, register (or use your existing telerik account) and claim a license for the Telerik tools. The campaign runs till end of TechEd 2014 (till May 15th), so be quick! When Telerik launches the tools officially, all license holders will be upgraded automatically. ...

Last week European SharePoint Conference 2014 took place in Barcelona. Time to recap mentions of the SharePoint event on Twitter (hashtag #ESPC14). Here are the results by 11th May, 21:30 made with Twitter Analytics for Excel (which @magrom also showed in her session PowerBI and SharePoint Online). In this week there were more than 4.300 tweets sent, about 40% (1.700) of them were retweets. The top tweet-days were Wednesday followed by Tuesday and Thursday with average 1.200 tweets daily in these three days. (Click on the graphics to increase them.) ...