Tools

Today Microsoft announced a new tool named “PowerApps” at Convergence 2015 EMEA in Barcelona. PowerApps are a new service for providing a new and shiny app user interface for all kind of devices and works with any data (OData) delivered from cloud services. So, it’s a kind of form and workflow generator for the cloud… See the announcement here: Introducing Microsoft PowerApps. “…PowerApps is an enterprise service for innovators everywhere to connect, create and share business apps with your team on any device in minutes…” ...

Delegate365 will be updated to version 4.5.3 this Friday. In this version resource mailboxes receive a new feature for controlling the AllRequestOutOfPolicy property (a feature the Office 365 portal does not provide). The AllRequestOutOfPolicy setting: When using resources like a room, there can be an issue with reservation: “Office 365 users can reserve a meeting room even though it’s already reserved for another meeting”. Microsoft describes this issue in https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3066068. This resource mailbox property cannot be set in the Office 365 portal, just with PowerShell – and with Delegate365 for portal admins and scope admins as well. ...

With Delegate365 version 4.5.2 there come some improvements. See the details here. Sorting in all Lists: We changed the sorting in all lists of D365. Before that, sorting only sorted all visible items on the current page in the list. If a user now clicks on a sortable column header, D365 now sorts all items in the list - regardless on which page the entry is. The following screenshot shows the behavior: In this user list there are two pages. If the Admin clicks on the column “Display Name”, all items are sorted. If the sort order is descending like here, we see the last item “Zack Kelly”, even if this user actually was on page two. So, now D365 sorts all items (server side) in any list and no longer just the items on the current page (client side). This behavior now delivers the results a user would expect of the sorting. All lists have been updated in D365 and now use this new sorting method. Besides: Also Search is searching all entries in lists! ...

We will update Delegate365 to version 4.5.1 shortly. In this version a fix was made in the resources, “booking delegates” feature. Thanks to Henry K. for reporting this issue! The issue: In Office 365 resource mailboxes “Booking delegates” had an other status than in Delegate365, depending in which way they were created or when they were updated. Analysis: Let’s have a look in the Office 365 / Exchange Admin Center regarding this feature: ...

The second innovation of Delegate version 4.5 is the automatic license assignment. This brand new feature is described in this article. So what is this automatic license assignment in Delegate365? In the past we got customer feedback that (mostly in hybrid scenarios) new users do not get an Office365 license automatically - when they are synchronized to the cloud (or when they are assigned to an OU in Delegate365 automatically). So new users need to be assigned a specific Office 365 license in an extra step via PowerShell or other tools. ...

In IT business fall time often is the most productive (stressy) time period of the year. We see that and the great demand for our solution Delegate365 as well. After summer holiday season we also have been productive and implemented some outstanding feature requests in Delegate365. With Delegate365 version 4.5 mailbox conversions in all directions have been added. In this article we start with the mailbox conversions, part two covers the new automatic license assignments. ...

Windows 10 ist mittlerweile ein gutes Monat alt. Es gibt auch bereits viele Ressourcen zu Windows 10 und natürlich auch für Developer, angefangen von Azure bis Visual Studio. Einige davon habe ich hier gesammelt, sozusagen ein erster Überblick in loser Form (to be continued)… Wir starten mit dem Visual Studio Developer Tools Download. Hier ist der Download aller Visual Studio Versionen, inklusive VS2015, möglich. Das Windows Apps Team hat einen Überblick über UWP Apps und .NET geschrieben: .NET Native – What it means for Universal Windows Platform (UWP) developers ...

We are using a lot of PowerShell for configuring Office 365 tenants and Exchange Online. When getting new requests, I usually use my existing PS-Scripts to connect to Exchange Online, modify them, execute them and that’s it – that’s the real world scenario. Recently I had the issue that – when connecting to Exchange Online – I always got the error “PowerShell has stopped working” or when using PS ISE “PowerShell_ise has stopped working”. ...

With Delegate365 version 4.4 we changed the auditing format in the portal. Auditing works in the same way as before and logs all operations, but the way how data is stored and handled has been changed. Read the details here. Why did we change the storage format? Well, we have customers with many users and objects in Office365. Since Delegates executes automatic sync operation multiple times a day Delegate can gather a lot of (changed) data each time. So we had instances of D365 running where the auditing log was some million lines long. With the logging the D365 SQL database grew immeasurably and the auditing log took a long time to open (or download) the list in the D365 portal. In some cases the auditing log could not be opened since the data fetching from the database took too long. So we needed to change that. The new logging saves data to an CSV file instead to the SQL database on a monthly basis. By outsourcing logging the D365 database stays small and performant while D365 can make use of simply appending lines to the logfiles. ...

Wer mit Visual Studio arbeitet liebt sie – und braucht sie: Tools um produktiv zu arbeiten. Aus der Community gibt es eine sehr coole kostenfreie Extension für Visual Studio 2015, die “Refactoring Essentials for Visual Studio”! Die Refactoring Essentials bieten – wie der Name verrät – Refactoring und Code Analyzer direkt in Visual Studio an. “The premier free Visual Studio 2015 extension for C# and VB.NET refactorings, including code best practice analyzers to improve your projects.” ...