Microsoft-Azure

Since some time we have the ability to see the health of the Azure Active Directory Connect in the new portal (https://portal.azure.com) and since a few days I saw that the sync errors are now displayed in this blade as well. This is a great addition, because it will give a better overview of the synchronization errors than the email you get every 30 minutes. I also have noticed that there are rules created to move this email to another map when it arrives because it gives a lot of clutter in the mailbox.

A week ago Microsoft released the public preview of the Azure B2B invitation API. I have seen this at Ignite in September that they were working on that. The announcement can be found here https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2016/10/31/azuread-b2b-invitation-api-is-now-in-public-preview/

With this announcement I went looking into this what other options there already are for inviting a partner into your AD. The options at this moment are:

• Upload CSV file thru https://manage.windowsazure.com
• Add a user in the new portal https://portal.azure.com
• Invitation API in the Microsoft Graph

With these three options you have a way for every kind of administrator. The csv function is a simple way to invite a larger group of users, but not the easiest one to work with. The UI in the new portal is a lot easier and integrates with adding a normal user to your AD. When the input recognizes a username with a domain not known to the Azure AD it will ask to add a personal invite message and will send an invite to that user.

This week I was trying to find a good way to disable the creating of Office 365 Groups from creating. I love the functionality of Office 365 Groups but it is still missing some key elements from using in a large corporation. The main thing missing is the ability to have naming convention, now you say but they released that. Well that is partly true. The naming convention is only applied when you create an Office 365 Group in Exchange, Outlook or the Groups app. When you create a group from Planner or any other application using groups the naming convention is not applied. This is because the naming convention that you can set is done within Exchange. This naming convention is initially meant for distribution groups but also applies for Office 365 Groups when created from the Exchange endpoint. This also applies to the creation of Office 365 Groups. You can disable this, but that only applies to the same 3 applications as the naming convention

Last weekend I visited SharePoint Saturday in Brussel Belgium. This was my fourth time here in Belgium and again a great one. The day was setup up 6 sessions of 50 minutes and a lunch break of 1.5 hours with a 30 minute.

We started at 9 with a welcome from the BIWUG team and the first session started short after that. I started with some developer sessions.

Get Typing with TypeScript

I started the day with a session from David Opdendries (@sharepointdavid)

Last week I had the privilege to attent Microsoft Ignite in Atlanta. This week was full of news, sessions and a lot of walking. Besides the sessions, this year the expo hall was large, I have spend a lot of time at the expo talking to venders, partners and Microsoft.

I have created a PDF from all my notes. On a few notes I have references to slides, the slides should be come available on https://myignite.microsoft.com/videos. On this site are also all the videos.

This week I will attend Microsoft Ignites 2016 conference in Atlanta. To make it easier for everyone to follow me I have created a OneNote that I will use to share my notes.

You can find that OneNote here: https://arjansp.nl/Ignite2016Notes

I’m part of the Microsoft Heroes at Sogeti and this week we had an evening event about DevOps where I did a talk about the operations part of DevOps for Office 365.

At my current customer we are preparing Office 365 for deployment to every employee in the Netherlands. So far we had moved 1000 employees of one operating company and we are now working to get the rest of the Dutch working companies to Office 365. To make this happen we used PowerShell automation to make our operations work a lot easier and more fun by automating the boring and repeatable stuff.

This week I had a customer that has some data in their on-premises Active directory that we needed to use for a custom application in SharePoint Online. This data was placed in the ExtensionAttribute field of the user. With the latest version of Azure AD Connect we have the option to select attributes to sync to Azure Active Directory and that is what the customer did. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/hybrid/connect/how-to-connect-sync-feature-directory-extensions

This screenshot has selected division and employeeID, but in the complete list of available attributes there are also the ExtensionAttributes. When you do not select them here, the extension attributes will be in the synchronization.

Last week Microsoft has send an email that on august 15th 2016 the Azure AD token-signing certificate would roll over and that I had some applications that is using this token-signing certificates. The list of applications contains all of them, this was not very useful.

Luckily there is a short step-by-step instruction with a link to a complete manual (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/active-directory-signing-key-rollover)

Because I manage a few Azure Active directories like many developers, this was going to give me some work.

In my previous post I wrote about using Azure automation to start and stop an Azure VM that is deployed using Resource manager. If you did not read that one I suggest you read it first since I will use that setup and the scripts in this post.

The azure automation has a great editor, but there is no version control in it. To solve this Microsoft added an option to integrate with GitHub and Visual Studio Online. For now only the GitHub one is available.