Microsoft365

Today Microsoft announced that Microsoft Accounts “MSA” (formerly known as “Live-ID”) no longer can be created with a work email address. That’s important for millions of users. What does this mean? Well, this article Cleaning up the #AzureAD and Microsoft account overlap explains all the details: “Starting today, we’re blocking the ability to create a new personal Microsoft account using a work/school email address, when the email domain is configured in Azure AD.” ...

Delegate365 will receive a major update in October. This will be Delegate365 version 6 and will include a change in the audit logging system, a new license history and a preview for more custom automation features. Read the first details here. Change of logging: With the next update to version 6, the audit logging will be changed. There is a switch implemented which allows D365 to store logged data in various spaces and formats. The following graphics shows an overview at a glance about the planned features. Data will no longer be stored in the Web in CSV format, but in the D365 database for up to 90 days and in Azure storage in JSON format forever. Direct Access of Azure storage: Besides of the almost unlimited space in Azure storage, data in that storage can be accessed directly (if you have the permissions). This allows Portal Admins to generate a URL with a token with an expiration date to download the produced log files. The token is issued by D365, as tool you can download the logs with the cost free Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer. Daily Office 365 license statistics: To see the real usage of licenses per OU and per day, week, month or year, D365 stores daily data from now on. This data will be available for further usage. More Automation: We got a lot of feedback about implementing custom actions in D365, for example setting specific user properties, assigning custom licenses for specific users, setting Skype for Business policies for users in OU’s and so on. To avoid a cost intensive customization we decided to go another way: We are implementing scripts (like “Macros”) with a powerful editor with intellisense that can execute… PowerShell! Yes, you read correctly. D365 will support PowerShell commands and whole scripts for fulfilling custom tasks in Office 365! We are currently developing and testing and plan to update D365 with this module in mid to late October. The working title for this feature is “D365 Automation”. Any other suggestions? More: Improvements in the Sync operation, fixes and some more features… You see there are cool features coming to Delegate365 version 6. Stay tuned! ...

This week Martina and I have been part of the aOS community event in Aix-en-Provence in South France. See our session presentation and some snapshots of the event here. The aOS Community organizes and supports all types of events promoting the sharing and exchange of Microsoft technologies in various communities in public meetings, conferences and online meetings targeting primarily French speaking countries. The event took place in Aix-en-Provence on 6th September at the campus of YNOV, a school building with perfect infrastructure for such an event (rooms, space, seats, projector, aircondition and fast WiFi). The event web page is Journée aOS Aix en Provence. ...

Delegate365 can send notifications for specific operations. Here’s a short overview of roles and in which situations notifications are sent. Who can get notifications? In Delegate365 we have these roles a user can have for using the portal. Portal Admins: They have full access to all features and can configure D365. Scope Admins: They have administrative management features for “their” users, licenses and groups. The difference between Portal and Scope Admins is simply the switch “Is Portal Admin” in the administration / manage administrators and Edit admin feature (see the full screenshot below). License Admins: This can be Portal Admins or Scope Admins. They are defined in the administration / manage administrators and Edit admin feature with the switch “License Administrator” (see the full screenshot below). They can manage license requests. Users: Standard users who can use the D365 Self service password reset feature (SSPR). All user types can receive emails (or SMS) from D365, but their email notification must be configured. ...

Summertime (and holiday season) is almost over and we were busy to advance Delegate365. In the last weeks we concentrated on smaller fixes which resulted in Delegate365 version 5.3.2. Major updates will follow in fall time. So here’s a list of the current fixes: Auditing: When selecting and downloading multiple log files in the administration / auditing menu, there was an issue if the Excel format was created. Then the name of the sheets in the Excel file were too long (since the created filenames were extended with the instance name in previous versions). Therefore the creation of the download package did not work. We fixed that with version 5.3.1 and later versions. Pls. remember that the logfiles can be extensive and the creation of the ZIP or XLSX files can take a while. We recommend not to select too many files in one step but to select only a handful of files to download. We are working on an automation of logfile downloads which will be available in future. ...

Check out this upcoming session with our CEO, Martina Grom, at Microsoft’s Ignite Conference 2016 in Atlanta: Ask us anything about Microsoft Office 365 Groups! https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/4098 CU there!

Finally, we updated our new team photo on our Azure Active Directory (Office 365) login page… The latest and colorful atwork team picture. Here it is… Unfortunately, not all our coworkers are on that picture, but it’s a nice snapshot. For information about our company, pls. check out our website https://www.atwork-it.com/.

When using Yammer, it’s obvious, that uploaded pictures are shown with a reduced quality. Yammer does automatically scale and reduce pictures to make them more web compatible. But Yammer still has the source picture stored! To illustrate this behavior with a sample, see (and enlarge) this picture. It’s a screenshot taken from a Windows machine and the Registry Editor. The items do have poor quality and are not good readable and pixilated. ...

After the announcement on May 4th at the Future of SharePoint event, now the first public developer preview of the SharePoint Framework is available. The SharePoint Framework enables developers to build client-side web parts using “modern script development tools” – this means Javascript and related web components and tools. The new SharePoint Workbench allows developers to test and deploy client-side web even offline! Read the details in the Office Dev Center in SharePoint Framework Developer Preview Release! ...

The Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) delivers a great way to collect, analyze and monitor computer systems and services in your cloud and on-premises environments. Data is collected through agents and is saved to the OMS repository for further analysis. See here how this works for monitoring and reporting for Microsoft Office 365! If OMS is new to you, check out the description of OMS in What is Log Analytics?. If you want to learn more details and proceed step by step, check out this article Get started with Log Analytics ...