Governance

The newest version 7.3 of Delegate365 provides a complete new reports module that replaces the old reports section. See the benefits and the details of the new Delegate365 reporting engine and how to use it for all your Delegate365 admins with just their entitled data. Learn about the details here. New reports menu: The old reports menu was replaced by the new module. Now, there are four boxes with a description, the available reports, scheduled reports and finished reports. All Delegate365 Admins can now select from new reports (1 and 2), activate a notification when finished (3) and start a report job with the Submit button (4). This creates a task in the schedules reports list (5). A job picks that task and executes it after a couple of minutes. When the report has been created, a notification can be sent to the report owner and the report shows up in the finished reports list (6). Refresh updates the reports boxes (5 and 6) with the current status if needed. ...

With Delegate version 7.2 there come some new and useful features especially in the sync rules. See the details described here. Sync Rules: Groups OU-assignment by new name rules: All group rules now offer additional options in the Property dropdown allowing to assign a group to an OU by its name. To get the OU name out of the group name, the OU name must be the prefix of a name and a predefined separator must be used. The options include the following separators: [space] , [underscore] , [hyphen] –, [point] ., and [slash] /. To clarify the mechanism, the options show a sample. So, if a group Display Name is set to “New York_Group”, the sync rule strips down by the separator “” and uses “New York” as OU name and “Group” as group name. So, group “Group” is automatically assigned to OU “New York”. Take care when using a normal space character as separator: Then, the OU name can only be one word, for example: “New York Group” would result in an OU “New” and the group name is “York Group”. As workaround, the OU-name could be named with a hyphen “New-York” or similar. That’s the purpose, to use a Display Name for automatic OU-assignment instead of object properties. Now, admins can use this feature additionally if needed for the following objects: Distribution Groups, Office 365 Groups, Contacts, Resources, Shared Mailboxes and Security Groups as marked red in the following screenshot. ...

Right after Delegate365 version 7, we are releasing version 7.1 with some relevant updates. This version brings some fixes, an improved SyncOp, Sync Locking, First Start-support, a new Multi Factor Authentication automation feature, a streamlines sync rules experience, more videos and some updates. See the benefits and the details here. Dashboard-First Steps: To inform Admins if the basic Delegate365 configuration is missing, the dashboard now shows a First Steps box if necessary. This essentially helps new Delegate365 admins to show the required steps to configure Delegate365. Tasks that are already accomplished are marked with a green OK icon, open tasks are shown with an orange warning icon. So, this feature basically checks if they SyncOp has been executed to update the Delegate365 cache at least once, if at least one OU is existing, if at least one administrator has been assigned to one OU and one domain and if there are users assigned to any OU (so that there are users visible in Delegate365). The admin can click on the task to open the corresponding page to configure the desired properties. The following screenshot shows an example with three accomplished tasks and one open task. Once all requirements are satisfied, the First Steps box will no longer be visible (or show up again, if any requirement is missing). There is no manual method for switching the First Steps box on or off, it appears automatically to support the admin. Independently, Delegate365 checks if the connections to Azure Active Directory and Office 365 are valid as well. We think, this new feature makes sense in existing Delegate365 tenants and particularly in new ones. ...

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. ...