Microsoft365

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 ...

Since I use PowerApps only from time to time, I wanted to document some common actions, such as working with images and the camera control. So, here are my little notes in 6 tips. Well it´s Saturday evening, and I am listening to fancy music and playing with PowerApps (and Flow, Cognitive Services and Adaptive Cards). To not forget the following basics, I thought, it´s a good idea to document a quick intro for working with the Camera control and pictures in PowerApps. ...

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. ...

When planning IT-services between locations and in the cloud, the network speed is an essential factor. See how Microsoft manages their network and how to see your location´s bandwidth to Microsoft Azure here. Azure currently offers data centers in 54 regions worldwide and in 140 countries. To get a little background about the effort being made for a performant worldwide network, check out this article at “How Microsoft builds its fast and reliable global network” with an overview of their dark fiber network and their software-defined networking (SDN) strategies. “Microsoft owns and runs one of the largest backbone networks in the world,connecting our datacenters and customers. Over the last three years, we’ve grown our long-haul WAN capacity by 700 percent.” ...

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. ...

PowerApps provide a good solution for small apps. They run on a device and connect to an online data source. But what happens if no data connection is available, for instance in a building? Well, you can develop a PowerApp that works offline and synchronizes local data to the data source when you’re back online. See how this works here! A basic demo app To show the basic functionality, I developed the following, colorful demo PowerApp. The app consists of one screen in tablet mode including a connection toggle control, two input fields for a name and an email address, two data tables and some buttons. The goal is to read and write data in offline and online mode. ...

I just got a cute Flic button to play around with. It takes only some minutes to connect that IoT button to a connector and execute customs tasks. Well, as first step, I simply created a message in a Microsoft Teams channel. See the step-by-step instructions here. My colleague Christoph has started to play with the Flic button and another IoT button, so I was interested as well. Another article with that IoT button will follow shortly. ...

To apply governance in an organization, the responsible persons require data. See here, how we can get group data of an Office 365 tenant for further use, for example for a visualization with Microsoft Power BI and all the benefits of such an attractive and interactive tool. Get all groups and their properties Again, we use the same mechanism as before, for getting orphaned groups and external users. For example, a function runs every day in the night and reads all existing groups in the Office 365 tenant. Every group is written to a queue for further processing, in the same way as the other functions did before. A second function is triggered by that queue and reads all the required group data for one group and writes the data into an Azure table. The following graphics shows that process from a technical standpoint. ...

Governance specifies the rules for an organization. The Office 365 collaboration platform allows to invite external users for contributing in groups. In this part, we want to monitor all groups that have external guests and inform the group owners, who has access to a group or a team. See how this works here. Get all groups with external guests We use the same mechanism as before, see the article about Orphaned Groups. A function runs e.g. every day, reads all existing groups in the Office 365 tenant, and writes each group in a queue. A second function is triggered by that queue and reads all the external group members for one group. The following graphics shows that process from a technical standpoint. ...