Tools

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! ...

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. ...

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. ...

For testing purposes, having sample data is very helpful. Recently, I stumbled about a useful tool to get sample images for a custom topic quickly. See how to get test images here. So, imagine you need sample images for testing the Microsoft Custom Vision API. How to get sample pictures? Well, there’s a great source for that by Dmitri Soshnikov. at Custom Vision API demo on GitHub. Download the imdownload.exe tools and run this command line executable with a syntax as here: ...

Developers who are not familiar with the new tooling for creating SPFx apps now get support by the new Visual Studio Extension for SharePoint Framework, available in the Visual Studio marketplace. Check it out at https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SharePointPnP.SPFxProjectTemplate The description describes the functionality as “The Visual Studio Extension for SharePoint Framework wraps the command-line UI of the Microsoft Yeoman Generator (yo @microsoft/sharepoint) into a familiar Windows Forms experience, executes the generator project scaffolding behind the scenes and creates a Visual Studio project that includes all the necessary files for a complete web part project. Also included is a web part item template for adding new web parts to an existing Framework project. Developers can launch the Workbench local sandbox environment to test their web parts by pressing F5 or by binding to the Gulp Serve event in the Task Runner Explorer.” ...

Delegate365 is registered as an app in the customer’s Azure Active Directory. When a Delegate365 setup is executed, it may be necessary that a new app is registered and is used from then on. So, what happens with old apps? See how to cleanup unused Delegate365 apps here. Technically, the app needs permissions to sign-in the user and to read data from the tenant. If new app permissions are necessary through an update (as this was the case with version 6.5 and the new service health feature), the Delegate365 setup must be re-run. When a new app is created, the Administrator then has to confirm the app consent for his users as described here. ...

Working with Visual Studio Code? Then check out the Azure Functions extension for Visual Studio Code at the Visual Studio Marketplace! Find the extension and description at Azure Functions for Visual Studio Code. The Azure Functions for Visual Studio Code extension allows to create new projects and functions from a template, to debug function apps locally, to view and to deploy Azure functions, to start, stop and restart functions and has Intellisense support for the json-project files. ...

We have been busy during summer time and we have been developing and testing our new Delegate365 version 7. We added new features like the support for Office 365 Groups and further useful extensions and made a technical refresh behind the scenes. So, the latest version of Delegate365 is available now and ready for updates. See the details described here. Delegate v7 is the successor of version 6.6. Besides new features, this is a major update since this version takes advantage of using new Microsoft APIs. So, here’s the news: ...