Microsoft-Azure

Last weekend I moved my blog from SharePoint Online public site to WordPress. The reason for this move is that Microsoft abandoned the SharePoint Online public site. For those who have a public site can use it at least until March 9 2017 (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3027254).

So the first thing for me was where to host this? There are multiple options here:

• WordPress.org
• Self-hosting on my NAS at home
• Hosting in a VM on Azure
• Hosting on Azure website (default template)
• Hosting on Azure website with MySQL in a Docker Linux VM

I choice to host this on Azure website with a MySQL server in a Docker Linux VM. This way I have full performance and it does not cost me anything because I have an MSDN license with Azure credits. The default Azure WordPress template comes with a MySQL database that is hosted by an external partner (ClearDB) witch costs extra and cannot be paid with the Azure credits. There is a free version of a MySQL database at ClearDB but that has a limit of 20 MB database and the performance is low. This solution is great for development. I wanted something for production so I wanted to have more performance than this free database.

After reading this blog of Matthias Einig about using Azure Analytics for your Office 365 portal. I tried this on an clients SharePoint 2013 farm. But I didn’t want to create an app to deploy the JavaScript so I created an Console app to deploy this to the specific site collection.

I first wanted to create a PowerShell script, but that does not work with our farm because of the discovering of the ADFS settings. I created an issue for this on GitHub (https://github.com/OfficeDev/PnP/issues/1118). So for the console app I used the OfficeDevPnP core Nuget package (https://www.nuget.org/profiles/officedevpnp).

Microsoft is developing a whole new portal for Azure which has been in preview for a while now. You may have noticed that within this new portal everything is a resource. With the Azure Resource manager you can bundle different items like websites, databases and storage, or virtual networks and virtual machines. Currently there is no possibility to move already created items in Azure to a new resource to bundle them.

?A new DIWUG magazine has just been published with an article I wrote, really proud to have my first article in DIWUG.

Download DIWUG SharePoint eMagazine #15 (eReader Edition) Download DIWUG SharePoint eMagazine #15

Last week I had to copy a few vhd files to another blob storage. This can be done by downloading and uploading, although I have a nice internet connection this would take a few hours, so after a quick search on the internet I found a great blog from Michael Washam that had the PowerShell CmdLets to do this.

http://michaelwasham.com/windows-azure-powershell-reference-guide/copying-vhds-blobs-between-storage-accounts/

Just saw on the settings page of the SharePoint admin portal within Office 365 that the video portal is coming to my tenant J

It is enabled by default. I could not find a site or a template to create the video portal yet.

To get more information what the video portal is:

Update 18-11-2014: There is an official announcement that it is rolling out: http://blogs.office.com/2014/11/18/introducing-office-365-video/

A new feature in Azure Active Directory (AAD) is ‘Applications’. With this you can give users a single location to sign-in to more than 2100 cloud application. You can even add your own cloud apps. Your users can use this site to access the applications that they have access to: http://myapps.microsoft.com.

There are enterprise apps but also consumer apps like Spotify. To have a single-sign on experience there is client that needs to be installed to make it work. For the Office 365 apps this client is not necessary. With AAD Premium you have the possibility to update the login screen for the user. At the moment that the user goes from the login name field to the password field AAD checks if the user has be redirected to a custom login page (federated users) or can display a custom login page. This way you can give the user a ‘corporate’ login screen. To give this experience wright away the user can add the domain name behind the URL like http://myapps.microsoft.com/worktogether.tech. This way AAD knows the domain where the user wants to login to and displays this custom page

At one customer we have a SharePoint 2013 environment with ADFS 3.0 as the main authentication provider. I wanted to create a SharePoint Provider hosted app to do a Proof of Concept. I had configured everything to get started with apps and build a SharePoint hosted app to prove that my settings on SharePoint are correct.

I did the SharePoint configuration with the help of the following 2 blogs: Mirjan van Olst and Wictor Wilén These 2 blogs provided the information and settings that we need to get SharePoint hosted apps to work.

The last couple of weeks I was creating and configuring 3 SharePoint 2013 farm (Test, acceptance and Production) on Windows Azure. We did the provisioning, installation and configuration with PowerShell. This way we had the basics within 1 week running. Because we are on Windows Azure and the company did not want their AD extended to the Windows Azure environment we configured SharePoint with ADFS 3.0. This way we could give the end user a single sign on experience that they are used to and make it directly possible to let them connect from outside the company network. This was all tested with a Proof of concept a few months back and was working perfect. This Proof of Concept environment was a simple setup with 1 front-end, 1 back-end and a SQL server.