Governance

Wow, we had a busy year 2015 with Delegate365. Thanks to our customers and partners we got a lot of feedback to improve the service. As you see by the number of blogposts in 2015 (almost 40) we released updates of Delegate365 continuously and implemented a lot of useful features in the product in the last year. All customers get these updates automatically in their SaaS D365 tenant and benefit from the improvements. We collected feature requests and summarized and prioritized them internally. ...

In the last two months, from December until now, we were busy with improving Delegate365. We did not communicate much in that time here because we did a lot of work in maintaining and optimizing the core project and not in features. Currently, we are still testing the new, improved version which will be rolled out mid of february for all D365 tenants. Customers will benefit from optimized code and better performance, specially in the SyncOp and from optimized loading times in lists in D365. We will post a list of some new features and improvements here shortly!

Delegate365 will be updated to version 4.5.3 this Friday. In this version resource mailboxes receive a new feature for controlling the AllRequestOutOfPolicy property (a feature the Office 365 portal does not provide). The AllRequestOutOfPolicy setting: When using resources like a room, there can be an issue with reservation: “Office 365 users can reserve a meeting room even though it’s already reserved for another meeting”. Microsoft describes this issue in https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3066068. This resource mailbox property cannot be set in the Office 365 portal, just with PowerShell – and with Delegate365 for portal admins and scope admins as well. ...

With Delegate365 version 4.5.2 there come some improvements. See the details here. Sorting in all Lists: We changed the sorting in all lists of D365. Before that, sorting only sorted all visible items on the current page in the list. If a user now clicks on a sortable column header, D365 now sorts all items in the list - regardless on which page the entry is. The following screenshot shows the behavior: In this user list there are two pages. If the Admin clicks on the column “Display Name”, all items are sorted. If the sort order is descending like here, we see the last item “Zack Kelly”, even if this user actually was on page two. So, now D365 sorts all items (server side) in any list and no longer just the items on the current page (client side). This behavior now delivers the results a user would expect of the sorting. All lists have been updated in D365 and now use this new sorting method. Besides: Also Search is searching all entries in lists! ...

We will update Delegate365 to version 4.5.1 shortly. In this version a fix was made in the resources, “booking delegates” feature. Thanks to Henry K. for reporting this issue! The issue: In Office 365 resource mailboxes “Booking delegates” had an other status than in Delegate365, depending in which way they were created or when they were updated. Analysis: Let’s have a look in the Office 365 / Exchange Admin Center regarding this feature: ...

The second innovation of Delegate version 4.5 is the automatic license assignment. This brand new feature is described in this article. So what is this automatic license assignment in Delegate365? In the past we got customer feedback that (mostly in hybrid scenarios) new users do not get an Office365 license automatically - when they are synchronized to the cloud (or when they are assigned to an OU in Delegate365 automatically). So new users need to be assigned a specific Office 365 license in an extra step via PowerShell or other tools. ...

In IT business fall time often is the most productive (stressy) time period of the year. We see that and the great demand for our solution Delegate365 as well. After summer holiday season we also have been productive and implemented some outstanding feature requests in Delegate365. With Delegate365 version 4.5 mailbox conversions in all directions have been added. In this article we start with the mailbox conversions, part two covers the new automatic license assignments. ...

With Delegate365 version 4.4 we changed the auditing format in the portal. Auditing works in the same way as before and logs all operations, but the way how data is stored and handled has been changed. Read the details here. Why did we change the storage format? Well, we have customers with many users and objects in Office365. Since Delegates executes automatic sync operation multiple times a day Delegate can gather a lot of (changed) data each time. So we had instances of D365 running where the auditing log was some million lines long. With the logging the D365 SQL database grew immeasurably and the auditing log took a long time to open (or download) the list in the D365 portal. In some cases the auditing log could not be opened since the data fetching from the database took too long. So we needed to change that. The new logging saves data to an CSV file instead to the SQL database on a monthly basis. By outsourcing logging the D365 database stays small and performant while D365 can make use of simply appending lines to the logfiles. ...

Today we released Delegate365 version 4.3. Now the user types are shown in the users list to see these information at a glance. Custom views got new filters by user type and text search was generalized in the D365 portal. Also custom email addresses can be added now. See the details here…. New type information in users list: The users list now got a new column “type” showing the type of the user object in Office 365. Since all “mailboxes” have a user object this column helps admins to see of what type the user is at a glance. The type column works in the same way as the other user properties and can be searched, sorted and filtered (see below). ...

Delegate365 version 4.2 is out. The users list now can be filtered in a better way. The text search has been improved and the list offers system and customizable views for quick and easy filtering. For synced users now there is no Password reset function and Global Admins can restrict if admins are able to create new users. OU Overview delivers all managed objects at a glance. See the details here. ...