Toni Pohl

Credentials and secrets should be stored in a secure environment and not directly in an Azure Logic App or script. Azure provides the Key Vault service, which allows to store such secrets in a secure and controllable way. See how this works here. What is a secret? The Microsoft documentation of Azure Key Vault describes secrets follows: “A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, certificates, or cryptographic keys.” at Azure Key Vault basic concepts and at Azure Key Vault security. So you want to store ALL secrets in a safe location, in a Key Vault, and access them from other services. This can be done within Azure resources with a Managed Identity (see below). In this article we will focus on using an Azure Key Vault and storing such secrets and accessing them later in this step-by-step guide. ...

In the Microsoft 365 world, sometimes you want to copy a custom list in SharePoint Online to another SharePoint site in the same or in a different M365 tenant. While there are third-party tools for this, there is an easy-to-use method for such a scenario using PnP PowerShell. This article shows how it works with a step-by-step example. PnP PowerShell PnP PowerShell is an open-source component from Microsoft providing over 600 cmdlets that work with Microsoft 365 environments such as SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, and more services. We can use this simple-to-use module for our purpose. See more at PnP PowerShell overview. ...

Exchange Online message tracking logs can be searched by sender or recipient email address to find specific email messages. This update improves the speed of the runtime behavior of the message trace function in Delegate365. Message Trace: The Mailboxes / Message Trace module allows to query the Exchange logs for email messages with a specific sender or recipient within the last seven days. This works for internal and external email addresses, also for Alias addresses if required. ...

When using Delegate365, the system sends emails for various notifications. If the email is not received, check this configuration. Check these relevant points: Sender requirements: Check whether you are using an Office 365 email address that has an Exchange license. The sender address needs to have a mailbox that can be used for sending. As a Portal Admin, open the Administration / App settings menu, and open the Email configuration section. After clicking the Save button, try it out by sending a test email to a user below. The mailbox should get a test message. If this does not work, use another (service) mail account and retry. ...

Last Friday, the cloudusergroup organized the Virtual Community Event #ADCD2022, the Austrian Developer Community Day 2022. We had 25+ interesting sessions with great speakers and a great virtual day of the event. Here are some impressions of it. There hasn’t been a local community event for cloud developers for a long time. So we decided to hold such an event. Martina Grom and I, Toni Pohl, started to organize the event end of 2021. Due to the current Covid situation, it was clear that the event could unfortunately only take place virtually. Thankfully we got great support from Rainer Stropek, Martin Ullrich, Christian Glessner and Zaid Zaim. and we found some sponsors for advertising and for financing the community platform Hopin we wanted to use for the first time: Thanks to Microsoft Austria, atwork, Software Architects, hololux, tietoevry and to Coding Club Linz for your support! ...

Delegate365 v9.2.5 got another update: The license ordering module can display a custom file to provide additional ordering information for administrators when requesting new licenses. This option supports administrators in their ordering process and can provide company-specific information about the order. The document is then displayed with a link in the license ordering module. Upload a document: As Portal Admin, open Administration / General settings and scroll down to the License order process section. The document part for the license order is integrated here. The file can be any file in any format such as PDF, Word, Excel or similar. One file can be uploaded, not multiple files. Click on the Upload document button and select a file from your computer. Then, click on the Save button. In this sample, a document license-order-info.pdf has been uploaded. The file is stored in the Delegate365 Azure Storage (and could be accessed in the storage directly as well). ...

With this update, Delegate365 allows viewing and changing licenses for shared mailboxes and resource mailboxes. Since each mailbox is a user mailbox and Delegate365 works with the OU scopes, the behavior of the new license management depends on the assigned OUs and objects. Details can be found here. New menu license in Shared Mailboxes and Resource Mailboxes The modules Mailboxes / Shared mailboxes and Mailboxes / Resources now show a module Licenses in the context menu on the right when a mailbox is selected in the list. ...

Delegate365 v9.2.5 includes a new module showing a user´s authentication methods and the assigned devices. See the details here. Note: This update does not require a new setup, if the previous version was v9.2.4. Otherwise, the Admin has to run the setup after the update process. New authentication methods menu in Users: In the Users module, when a user is selected, the context menu shows the Authentication methods item. View and delete devices: After opening the Authentication methods menu, a panel opens and shows the assigned devices, and the last login to that device, as here. The admin can remove devices by clicking on the Delete icon per device. A confirmation with the device name follows, like for “Deleted Device” here: When confirmed, a toaster notification in the bottom right corner shows the successful removal of the device. That´s it. Continue as needed to cleanup old devices. ...

Azure storage accounts are a great and inexpensive way to store lots of data. I am using Azure Table storage to store large amounts of structured data for various tools. I needed to filter all rows that have a specific field that shows Null. While this sounds simple, it is a bit tricky. Here’s how. The problem is that columns showing “Null” just don’t exist, but they are shown in list with Null. Therefore, it does not work to filter them out. In my example, I had a table with a column called Users (of type Int32) that contained items with a number and others that had no value. So, the following query filters for a timeframe and all items having a Users value greater than 0. Unfortunately, the query also shows elements with the Null value… ...

Delegate365 v9.2.4 is the latest update that brings new service health, guest user information, teams templates and other improvements. See the details here. Important: To upgrade to this version, Delegate365 setup must be run. We will inform all customers to make an appointment for the setup. This is required because the Delegate365 app needs additional permissions to read the service health (see below). Follow the steps at Delegate365-(Re)run the setup. The dashboard service health: As described at Delegate365 changelog 9.3-Service health, the old Microsoft Service Communications API has been retired by Microsoft. Therefore, the service health components in Delegate365 had to be changed. After the setup, the dashboard shows the service health properly again. The new service health shows more detailed information. Each service can be opened by clicking on it. ...