Office-365

When setting up a hybrid environment we usually first setup hybrid search and do not that much on hybrid profiles. I have noticed that there are some quirks in the hybrid profiles what might not get noticed while setting it up. At the moment of setting up hybrid profiles, there is not that much to configure. Only none, all in Office 365 or based on a group. As many of you know a good user profile consists of some basic data like a photo, name, contact details, manager and location.

This week I got the question from my client that they wanted an autoresponder on one mailbox. This autoresponder should only send an email when certain criteria where met. After searching on the internet, they could not find a solution in Exchange, so they came to me if I could help them.

My first response was that it should be possible, but the options in Exchange online are limited and responding was not an option.

There are various ways of security in office 365, this time I walk you thru the security possibilities for Email. As we start with the basics, we have the option to use an SPF record to protect us from spam on a very basic level. This is so basic and a requirement when you add the domain to Office 365.

As we go deeper into the security of the mail flow we see DKIM and DMARC. These two are not often used, but useful and easy to set up. So easy that it should be a requirement like SPF in my opinion.

In my journey of using Microsoft Flow, I had some frustration this week on working with dates. The problem we had is as follows, with the sending of the emails, the dates are in UTC. To make it usable, we needed to convert it to our time zone.

Convert date and time to a time zone

For this Microsoft has built-in functions like “convertFromUtc”, this function converts the input date from UTC like a SharePoint date to any time zone. convertFromUtc(triggerBody()?[‘mydate’],‘W. Europe Standard Time’,‘dd-MM-yyyy H:mm’) this will convert the time to UTC+1. The input uses the default ISO 8601 format https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/base-types/standard-date-and-time-format-strings#the-round-trip-o-o-format-specifier and to find the correct name you can take a look here https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/973627/microsoft-time-zone-index-values

This week I had to convert a few dozen Nintex workflows to Microsoft flow for a migration we are doing. Most of these workflows had some sort of email to a department or an external vendor. The default Exchange email connector can handle HTML but you need to add the HTML to the email body. Adding the header and footer to every email can be done, but maintaining this is a nightmare so we did some thinking and came up with this solution.

Today I had the privilege to present at SharePoint Saturday in Bremen. At first, I would go only as an attendee. Unfortunately, Albert Hoitingh got Ill and I asked if I could do a session in that slot. They were happy to give me the slot and I did my presentation about “We are moving to the cloud, What about security”. I needed some time before the session to go over the slides and make a few adjustments. The session was well visited and from the people I spoke, I heard that they liked it. See below the presentation.

This week I had the privilege to do a presentation at DIWUG. This time the presentation was about the security questions when you move to the cloud.
We are used to control everything in the on-premises world but we cannot do the same in a cloud environment, so we need to adapt to this.

This presentation was about the options there are in the Microsoft Cloud to make it secure. Microsoft already did a lot for the security, but a lot can and must be done on the customers side to make it fit your needs.

Last two weekends I went to SharePoint Saturday in Paris and Belgium. It is always great to meet other SharePoint and Office 365 consultants, customers and suppliers.

SPS Paris

The first weekend I went to Paris where I did not read my emails to carefully, so I was at the wrong venue. I was not the only one. It took some extra time to get to the new location. Arrived there I was just in time for the first session; this was a session about the secure score site from Microsoft. The URL of the Secure Score is http://securescore.office.com. Here you can log in with an administrator account and see what security settings you can do to make your tenant more secure. You need to be a Global Administrator, SharePoint Administrator, Exchange Administrator or Compliance Administrator to access it.

A year ago, I wrote a post about Azure AD conditional access, with the change to the new portal a lot has changed. This post will show what is changed since then and what is coming.

The biggest change in conditional access is that last year you had to configure this per application in the old portal, there was no reference in the new portal (current one) back then. Now you can create policies that apply to one or multiple applications or even tenant wide. There is now 1 logical location where you can manage these settings. This location is in the Azure Active Directory Blade under security.

Within Office 365 a user can set his or her language preferences on several ways, this post will show several ways on setting this and how this can be managed as an administrator for your users.

Let’s start with the places that a user can set this.

Office 365 “My Account”

When you are in Office 365 you can click on your name and select My Account. Underneath Settings part you can set the language of Office 365