Tools

Microsoft BUILD conference 2018 took place two weeks ago in Seattle with over 350 sessions covering Azure, Visual Studios, Microsoft 365, and more. Although you can watch the sessions online at mybuild.microsoft.com/sessions, sometimes it’s helpful to have them downloaded. You can do so with the following PowerShell script. Our colleague Vlad Catrinescu has published a BUILD 2017 sessions downloader at The Ultimate Script to download Microsoft Build 2017 Videos AND slides! or for downloading directly at TechNet Gallery. Thankfully, this script works if you replace “2017” with “2018”… ...

The previous versions of Delegate365 brought major updates with the new reporting engine and over 80 reports. With Delegate365 version 7.5 there are more improvements coming as litigation hold for Shared Mailboxes, more reports and a new GDPR module. See the details here. Important: If your current Delegate365 version was 7.3, you need to run a new Delegate365 setup once. Please see Delegate365-(Re)run the setup for a step-by-step manual. This step is necessary after the update to Delegate365 v7.5 was done. This step is NOT necessary if you have already been on Delegate365 version 7.4. You need to have a Global Administrator without MFA enabled to run the setup and to accept the new Delegate365 consent: So, after the setup, login with the Global Administrator and accept the new consent for all users in your tenant - otherwise no one can sign-in and use the Delegate365 app. ...

In former versions of Microsoft SQL Server, the SQL Server Configuration Manager was an extra app for configuring the SQL Server services. Since this is gone since some versions, we often get the question where to find the configuration tool nowadays with the modern versions of SQL Server… Well, the answer is simple: For SQL Server version equals SQL Server 2016 (13.x) or higher, open the Computer Management (Ctrl + X and click “Computer Management” or run* %SystemRoot%\system32\compmgmt.msc /s *). In here, you find the “SQL Server Configuration Manager” where you can configure your local services with the snap-in(s). ...

Are you using tools as Telerik Fiddler or Postman for testing HTTP Requests? Well, if you are already working with Visual Studio Code, try out the cool REST Client extension! My colleague Christoph showed me this cool extension for executing HTTP requests directly from VS Code quickly. Simply install the REST Client extension: Press F1, type ext install then search for rest-client as shown in the following screenshot. (Check out the useful Run Code from Visual Studio Code extension as well…) ...

Recently, Delegate365 got a new reporting engine with version 7.3 and more reports have been added with version 7.4 and version 7.5. In total, there are now 87 reports available (and likely more are about to come in the following versions). To keep up with the latest reports, we want to deliver an overview of all available reports at a glance here. Start The reports menu reveals the Delegate365 reports list. The reports are available for all users in Delegate365, for Scope Admins and for Portal Admins. Scope Admins see just data of their entitled OU’s in all their reports. Portal Admins get additional reports marked with a star* and a comment (* Portal Admin), that deliver reports and statistics about the Office 365 tenant and services without any OU filters. The screenshot below shows the reports list, grouped into nine categories. ...

Visual Studio Code (currently, Version 1.22 is available) is a very cool developer tool providing a modern and fast code editor with a bunch of extensions. With extensions as Code-Runner, it’s easy to run a code file or active text directly from the VS Code text editor. Check out this quick description how to configure and use Code Runner. If you are new to VS Code, at a glance: To install the latest version of VS Code, get the download for Windows, Linux or macOS. To run a command, launch the Command Palette with F1 or Ctrl + Shift + P, run Quick Open by pressing Ctrl + P, etc. See all keyboard shortcuts at Windows, macOS and Linux. ...

With Delegate365 version 7.3 a new reporting engine was introduced. With this update, additional reports are available in Delegate365 version 7.4. The new reports deliver a new report category with risk events, as for example impossible travel risk events or suspicious IP risk events, new Microsoft Teams statistics reports and more. Also, OneDrive usage per user and Shared-With information is now available as a report. Mail Enabled Security Groups can now be assigned with permissions in Resources (rooms and equipment mailboxes) and Shared Mailboxes. See the details and descriptions of all reports here. ...

The newest version 7.3 of Delegate365 provides a complete new reports module that replaces the old reports section. See the benefits and the details of the new Delegate365 reporting engine and how to use it for all your Delegate365 admins with just their entitled data. Learn about the details here. New reports menu: The old reports menu was replaced by the new module. Now, there are four boxes with a description, the available reports, scheduled reports and finished reports. All Delegate365 Admins can now select from new reports (1 and 2), activate a notification when finished (3) and start a report job with the Submit button (4). This creates a task in the schedules reports list (5). A job picks that task and executes it after a couple of minutes. When the report has been created, a notification can be sent to the report owner and the report shows up in the finished reports list (6). Refresh updates the reports boxes (5 and 6) with the current status if needed. ...

With Delegate version 7.2 there come some new and useful features especially in the sync rules. See the details described here. Sync Rules: Groups OU-assignment by new name rules: All group rules now offer additional options in the Property dropdown allowing to assign a group to an OU by its name. To get the OU name out of the group name, the OU name must be the prefix of a name and a predefined separator must be used. The options include the following separators: [space] , [underscore] , [hyphen] –, [point] ., and [slash] /. To clarify the mechanism, the options show a sample. So, if a group Display Name is set to “New York_Group”, the sync rule strips down by the separator “” and uses “New York” as OU name and “Group” as group name. So, group “Group” is automatically assigned to OU “New York”. Take care when using a normal space character as separator: Then, the OU name can only be one word, for example: “New York Group” would result in an OU “New” and the group name is “York Group”. As workaround, the OU-name could be named with a hyphen “New-York” or similar. That’s the purpose, to use a Display Name for automatic OU-assignment instead of object properties. Now, admins can use this feature additionally if needed for the following objects: Distribution Groups, Office 365 Groups, Contacts, Resources, Shared Mailboxes and Security Groups as marked red in the following screenshot. ...

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! ...