Office-365

The last few weeks I had to create a few PowerShell scripts where I had to combine certain information from several sources.

The way I used to do it was to do a where-object on an ID in an array. This works well, but I noticed that on large datasets it takes a lot of time. A where-object on a dataset of 30.000 items it takes on average between 1 and 2 seconds. So if we do the math 2 seconds on 30.000 items costs in total 60.000 seconds (16 hours) just doing the where-object.

This weekend I had the privilege to speak at SharePoint Saturday in Madrid. The session was about Automation in Office 365. See the slides below

[slideshare id=151347967&doc=20190622-usingautomationinoffice365-190623120657]

Last week I attended the European Collaboration Summit for the third time. This year another location in Wiesbaden.

It was a fantastic conference with a lot of great speakers. This year I choose not to make a long post an everything I saw but made an Instagram story with the highlights.

Go and watch it here
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17889983905339614/

Next year the conference is coming back to Wiesbaden from June 8th till June 10th

Last month Microsoft announced that they enable auditing by default on every mailbox. Before this, you needed to run a script on every newly created mailbox to enable auditing for the items you wanted. Microsoft provided a script for this that can be found on GitHub.

The announcement can be found on techcommunity.

In this announcement, they say that every new mailbox gets the default set of auditing. This default set can be updated from Microsoft’s side, but when you have enabled auditing by yourself or the script, they provided it stays that way.

Let’s kick this post of what I mean with a break glass account.

What is a break glass account?

A break glass account is a non-personal in case of an emergency account that is never used and is stored in a vault where only a few people have access too. This account is a global admin on your tenant and in some sense is the top-level account of your environment.

Collaborating with Microsoft Teams is very easy, and I’m using it at several customers. At one customer the teams are getting multi-language where before every conversation was in Dutch, now with new team members that are not speaking Dutch they have trouble going back into the conversations and do not understand what is written. Luckily Microsoft Teams now offers the ability like Skype to have translations for this.

We found that this was not enabled by default in the tenants that I worked checked. There are two ways to enable this, with the GUI and with PowerShell.

This week I had the privilege to speak at DIWUG about securing your Office 365 environment. This time I started from a governance point of view. So what policies do we have and do we need before we can set up the security in Office 365. Also what licenses are available and do we need additional licenses to satisfy our security needs.

In the demos I showed how Conditional Access can help securing the environment and how Terms of use can be used for certain user groups or applications.

Today I had the privilege to speak at SharePoint Saturday Genève. I did a session about security in a cloud environment when you are moving from an on-premises environment to the cloud. The security then moves from your perimeter network to the user’s identity. The session gave an overview of the tools in Azure AD to secure the cloud identity.

[slideshare id=125157044&doc=20181206-spsgenevewearemovingtothecloudwhataboutsecurity-181206131838]

At my customer we are using Privileged Identity Management (PIM) for all admin related tasks, no employee has standing access within the company.

What is PIM

Let’s first start by explaining Privileged Identity Management. It is a service that is available in Azure AD and is part of Azure AD Plan 2. For a user to use it, they need this plan enabled. PIM makes it possible to give a user the privilege to elevate his or her access rights for a preset amount of time to a higher role such as User Administrator or SharePoint Administrator. PIM gives access to about 35 different roles in Office 365 and Azure resources where the user is by default a reader and can elevate it to be an owner of a resource (group).

This week I had the privilege to speak at Office 365 connect.

My session was scheduled on the second day at 9 am. My session was about Protecting your data in Office 365 and had the big room where the keynote was yesterday.

For me, this was the first time on a big event speaking and was a bit excited on doing this. After just a few minutes it felt good and had a great presentation with good feedback from the audience.