Martina Grom

At Microsoft Ignite conference last September, we demoed an approach for a self-built Office 365 Groups Governance Toolkit. Since Microsoft 365 is an evergreen service and continues to evolve, today we have more group settings available and we extend our provisioning function to work with group naming policies as well. See here how this can be accomplished by including new Graph requests. Foreword You can find the previous articles of our governance story at Provisioning an Office 365 group with an approval flow and Azure functions-part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 and part 6 and the source code at martinagrom/Ignite2018GroupsGovernanceToolkit. ...

Microsoft started to recommend its 64bit edition of Office 365 pro plus to be installed as the default Office installation. While at first many people think this is a bad idea due to all add-ins I did the switch last weekend and it was a very smooth and friction free experience. Till April 2019 you had to manually uninstall the 32bit version of Office first and than install the 64bit version. If you are deploying Office 365 pro plus through the Office 365 Deployment toolkit you can now automate this experience and add a new switch to your config file. ...

The Delve App allows to discover company and user data across Office 365. Unfortunately, while the app is very helpful, it can not be customized. Well, but we can easily add additional user information, such as personal data, a cost center, additional contact data or hyperlinks, etc. See how this works here. The default Delve experience When opening the Delve app and a user profile, this looks like in a demo tenant here: https://REGION.delve.office.com/?u=USERID&v=profiledetails ...

Delegate365 allows to modify licenses in many ways, manually, automatically and with bulk-assignments. With version 8.3, the license policies will be considered for bulk assignments as well. See a description of that functionality here. The Delegate365 permission and license policies control what modules and what licenses a scope administrator sees. An administrator can be assigned to one permission policy and to one license policy. While many organizations are using the Delegate365 sync rules, scope admins can manually assign entitled licenses and plans. The menu Licenses / Bulk assign licenses allows to accomplish such an operation for multiple users and takes the unauthorized licenses into account with this update. ...

Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows to analyze large amount of data, even interpreting and indexing handwritten documents and learning key topics. In the Microsoft AI.Lab, engineers combined Azure Search and Cognitive Services to analyze more than 34,000 pages and scanned evidence photos related to the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy in 1963 that went public. Read more about burning questions and see the results online. Many secret JFK files have been released in 2017, but there were too much information and too much unstructured data to go through. So, modern technology helps to analyze the data and to deliver relevant details. The Microsoft AI.Lab project is using Cognitive Search that is powered by Azure Search with built in Cognitive Services: “It pulls data from almost any data source and applies a set of composable cognitive skills which extract knowledge”. This approach allows to get answers and relationships in context with the original documents. ...

Are you interested or already working with Microsoft Azure? Download the freshest and latest version of the free e-book “Inside Azure Management v3”. This preview release of “Inside Azure Management” is now available with more than 500 pages in 16 chapters covering topics like implementing solutions, containers, migrating workloads, hybrid, automation, backup, costs, governance, monitoring and alerting, analytics, and more. Check it out! The e-book already has about 30.000 downloads and is written by Microsoft MVP´s. “Inside Azure Management” can be downloaded at Free Book: Inside Azure Management v3. ...

Office 365 Groups bring a lot of advantages to a connected workspace within Office 365. For me they are like the glue between all different Office 365 Services. If you provision an Office 365 Group you get an Outlook Mailbox, a SharePoint TeamSite, Planner and much more. When you create a Microsoft Team, you create an Office 365 Group. So it is really important for anyone who is working in the Microsoft 365 space to understand how Office 365 Groups work and what impact they have. Together with Microsoft Graph and Azure Active Directory those are the fundamentals of Office 365 to understand. ...

In this multi-part series we show you how to handle the Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams governance toolkit. The next article cover the governance part of our Groups Governance Toolkit.Imagine your company policy requires at least 2 owners per Office 365 Group or per Microsoft Team. In this part, we want to monitor all groups that are ownerless (orphaned), or do not comply with our organization’s policies. The IT department shall get the information of all groups and teams where there are no owners or not enough owners and the possibility to fix that. Read below how this can be accomplished. ...

After the introduction of the Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams Governance Toolkit and with the necessary requirements we are now looking into Azure Functions. In our group and team provisioning scenario, we need a little code for provisioning of an Office 365 group and a Microsoft team. Serverless computing with an Azure Function provides the optimal solution for that. Follow these steps to create the function we need for our workflow. ...

In part 1 of this series we described the scenario for our Office 365 groups governance toolkit. In this part we will setup a workflow for the Office 365 and Microsoft Teams provisioning. Workflows help to follow specific processes for a successful collaboration. Offering self-services for users is a key to reduce workloads on the IT department and to allow users to cover their requirements quickly while the organization’s policies are enforced during the process. A frequently asked request is how to provision a new Microsoft Team in Office 365 in a secure and monitored way. See how this can be implemented here. ...