Martina Grom

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. ...

IT-Governance is an important topic, especially in large organizations. In an agile and evergreen world, as it can be found with Microsoft 365 services, Governance becomes an integral part which needs to be monitored and updated on a regular basis. At Microsoft Ignite conference, we showed the “Groups Governance Toolkit” with a bunch of useful tools to regulate and monitor for Office 365 Groups and Microsoft Teams. Everything we showed at Ignite is open source and built with out of the box tools within Microsoft 365 and Azure. ...

If you are working with Microsoft SharePoint, 2019 will be a great year! First of all, because SharePoint Server 2019 has been announced, and because SharePoint Conference North America 2019 will take place in May in Fabulous Las Vegas (again). We from atwork will be part of the conference and we are looking forward to it. The event registration is already open and there are reduced price packages available. Additionally, find a discount code here! ...

This session gives you insights from Microsoft IT about how they use their internal Teams Champion program to drive collaboration and communication using Microsoft Teams. The session was delivered by Sara Bush, Sr. Program Manager Microsoft Teams, Microsoft. Sara is a member of the Teams & Voice team in End User Services Engineering, Sara is driving Microsoft Teams adoption internally through the Art of Teamwork Tour training program, the Teamwork Champions program and the EUSE change management effort to bring all Microsoft users into a deep understanding of how Microsoft Teams supports day to day work, increasing collaboration and productivity. ...

Good to see that Microsoft is committed to sustainability in their data centers as seen in the session “Inside Azure Datacenter Architecture with Mark Russinovich” from the last BUILD conference. There are a lot of interesting facts to learn about the Microsoft Azure data centers, as e.g. “Microsoft signed the largest corporate deal on solar panels for Virginia in the US in history, good for 257 Megawatts”. The goal is to reach the 100% energy use from renewable energy. ...

Workflows really help to standardize and to solve business processes. This can be done with Microsoft Flow in Office 365 or with Logic Apps in Azure (which is the same engine). Often, I see questions, if it is possible to call an Azure Logic App from another Logic App. Does his work? Well, see this quick sample. In workflows, it’s usually a clever idea to simplify steps as much as possible. So, each step could be implemented as one independent Logic App. ...

Microsoft provides a bunch of cloud services, tools, and resources that provide tools for developing an intelligent Bot service. To get started, check out the free “Developer’s Guide to Building AI Applications” eBook and download it here! Azure Bot Service provides tools to build, test, deploy, and manage intelligent bots all in one place. The free eBook by Anand Raman and Wee Hyong Tok can be downloaded from Download the Developer’s Guide to Building AI Applications after providing your name and email address in the short form on the web page. Afterwards, you can download the Developer’s AI Guide. The book was published by O’Reilly and is available in PDF format. ...

Due to the coming GDPR regulation in May 2018 many customers are working very actively towards this date and check their compliance and security environment. Many requests arise around Azure Information protection which gives customers the ability to classify and protect their data in an easy, reproducible way. Data classification helps users to differentiate between data that can be shared outside an organization and data that is classified or NDA information. Many statistics show that less than 5% of all data from an organization are in that high classification range. ...

Microsoft Graph is the unified endpoint to programmatically access resources and services in Office 365 and Azure Active Directory. To inform the developer community with the latest news, the Microsoft Graph team organizes a monthly Microsoft Graph API community call. We, Toni and I, were happy to contribute a use case at the last call showing a scenario of an Office 365 Group orchestration workflow with PowerApps, SharePoint Lists, Azure Functions and Microsoft Graph. ...

Recently a colleague asked me: “How can you deal with users in large Enterprise Tenants, who share the same name? How do you know who is who?” Indeed, this can happen, as soon as your Office 365 Tenant has a lot of users in it. There are some very common names in each language, so you should know who you add to your Microsoft Team. From an organizational perspective, this should be solved with a proper identity management: Users have a unique e-mail address, but it does not end here: there are some other fields that need to be filled, like Job Title, Department and a lot more. But in fact: which fields is the Microsoft Teams user dialog using here? ...