Microsoft

We are very happy to announce that Dominik Hoefling was awarded for the 1st Microsoft MVP Award for Office Servers and Services! Dominik has expertise in Microsoft Office 365 and is a recognized expert, MSL (Microsoft Learning) author, blogger, and conference speaker. See Dominik’s MVP profile. Dominik (@DominikHoefling) is a Senior Consultant for atwork deutschland GmbH. He currently works in Microsoft technologies, especially in Microsoft Exchange, Exchange Online and Office 365. He holds several Microsoft certifications including MCSA for Office 365, MCSE Messaging and MCITP Enterprise Administrator for Windows Server. Dominik also write technical blog posts for international companies and various topics about Exchange Hybrid deployments and Office 365. ...

In many scenarios, public cloud services allow a high grade of elasticity, flexibility and cost effectiveness combined with standardization. On the other hand, every customer needs to build trust to the desired platform and that all his services and data are protected against any attacks. So, it’s very interesting to see, what kind of mechanisms the large cloud providers as Microsoft are using to keep data safe and how they detect attacks and what countermeasures they execute. ...

The Microsoft Graph API is the new unified endpoint for developers accessing data from an Office 365 tenant. Amongst many other features, you can work with OneDrive and SharePoint files with the Graph REST API. Additionally, you can directly work with Excel files through the Graph Excel API. Since all samples I found just use the personal OneDrive for Business (OFB) file storage, I wanted to document how to access files that are stored in a SharePoint Online site (SPO) as well. So, here we go! ...

Holidays are a good time for cleaning up. For migrating an old on-premises file storage to the cloud, I used some tools and invested some time. See my scenario and the tools here. The scenario I had a Virtual Machine (I connected to remote via RDS from my holiday location into the company) with an iSCSI storage to a NAS system where old project files were stored. This storage was used over the last years. You can imagine … the mess. To make it short: In that VM, the file storage was connected with a network drive P: (for Projects). With my work account, I have 1TB personal cloud storage. Since this should be an archive for my coworkers as well, I decided to use a SharePoint Online site (SPO). I created an Office 365 group - with a SPO for storing the documents - named “projects” and installed the OneDrive.exe client. Then, I created a new Document Library and synchronized that (empty) list to the local computer. ...

…by using a query as here: Use SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or the new and cost free SQL Operations Studio to run one of the following TSQLs in the desired database: -- SQL Azure - Get statistics (rows) of all tables quickly (options summarized) -- method 1: use sys.tables -- [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/arunrakwal/2012/04/09/sql-azure-list-of-tables-with-record-count/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/arunrakwal/2012/04/09/sql-azure-list-of-tables-with-record-count/) select t.name ,s.row_count from sys.tables t join sys.dm_db_partition_stats s ON t.object_id = s.object_id and t.type_desc = 'USER_TABLE' and t.name not like '%dss%' and s.index_id = 1 -- method 2: sys.partitions Catalog View -- [https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2537/sql-server-row-count-for-all-tables-in-a-database/](https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2537/sql-server-row-count-for-all-tables-in-a-database/) SELECT QUOTENAME(SCHEMA_NAME(sOBJ.schema_id)) + '.' + QUOTENAME(sOBJ.name) AS [TableName] , SUM(sPTN.Rows) AS [RowCount] FROM sys.objects AS sOBJ INNER JOIN sys.partitions AS sPTN ON sOBJ.object_id = sPTN.object_id WHERE sOBJ.type = 'U' AND sOBJ.is_ms_shipped = 0x0 AND index_id < 2 -- 0:Heap, 1:Clustered GROUP BY sOBJ.schema_id, sOBJ.name ORDER BY [RowCount] DESC GO -- method 3: sys.dm_db_partition_stats Dynamic Management View (DMV) -- [https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2537/sql-server-row-count-for-all-tables-in-a-database/](https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2537/sql-server-row-count-for-all-tables-in-a-database/) SELECT QUOTENAME(SCHEMA_NAME(sOBJ.schema_id)) + '.' + QUOTENAME(sOBJ.name) AS [TableName] , SUM(sdmvPTNS.row_count) AS [RowCount] FROM sys.objects AS sOBJ INNER JOIN sys.dm_db_partition_stats AS sdmvPTNS ON sOBJ.object_id = sdmvPTNS.object_id WHERE sOBJ.type = 'U' AND sOBJ.is_ms_shipped = 0x0 AND sdmvPTNS.index_id < 2 GROUP BY sOBJ.schema_id, sOBJ.name ORDER BY [RowCount] DESC GO As a result, you get a list of all tables with the number of stored rows, similar as here: ...

The free eBook Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure Second Edition is available! The book was written by Michael Crump and Barry Luijbregts, The introduction starts with “why cloud” and covers app development, Azure services and ends with the Azure Marketplace. And it’s free! Get more information at the Azure blog at Free eBook – The Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure now available or download it directly from aka.ms/azuredevebook. There’s a lot of current and useful information in that book and many hyperlinks to specific topics in the web. Thanks to the authors and to Microsoft for providing this free eBook. ...

BCP, the bulk copy program utility is still around - and it’s helpful! It’s a long time, since I used this tool, but nowadays it got promoted for one of my daily jobs. See a short description how to use the Microsoft Command Line Utilities with Azure SQL Database for connecting and importing and exporting data quickly. Recently, I had the request to import local data to a SQL Azure database and BCP did the job. Since the tool is handy and very fast, it’s also good for running in a script (but you need to find a solution for storing the credentials…). So, here’s an overview how to use BCP and SQLCMD as quickly as possible. ...

When moving SQL databases to Azure, let Azure do some work for you. As the name suggests, the Azure SQL Database Automatic Tuning feature provides automatic performance optimization for databases. Activate it, it’s simple. Once the data is available in Azure SQL Database, there is no more server maintenance necessary. Azure SQL Database is a relational database-as-a service that runs in the Microsoft Cloud. With the service there comes a bunch of benefits. One of them is the Automatic Tuning Mode. This enables stable workloads through continuous performance tuning utilizing Artificial Intelligence and applying corrective actions for databases in use. See more at Automatic tuning in Azure SQL Database ...

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. ...

The new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) comes in force in 6 months. From then on, every business processing personal data has to fulfil the statutory European data privacy laws. A violation can result in high fines and penalties. Within the cost free seminar series “The Art of Data Management”, taking place in Germany and Austria, atwork prepares you for the statutory changes. Our experts pass on a first general insight into the security concept of Office 365 and Azure and tell you how to fulfil the conditions of the new regulation with the help of Microsoft Cloud Services. ...