Office-365

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.

Last week Microsoft made Azure AD conditional Access publicly available. Let me explain what it is and why we would like to have this.

What is it?

First let’s talk about what it is. Azure AD conditional access lets you decide per application in Azure AD how your authentication should be handled. By default all the applications use the same kind of authentication. It does not matter if you are inside the company walls or at Starbucks.

As a follow up on my post from last week I wanted to add some extra data in the terms. This is not possible with the default CSV import that SharePoint has. I mentioned in my previous post that Office Dev PnP has also an option to import terms. And with that option we can add a lot more than only the term itself.

What commands do we have?

We have a 2 options here to add term to Office 365.

This week I was working with the term store and had to create and import a big chuck of data in the term store. We all know that we have multiple options here

• Just enter them one by one in the browser (great for a few entries)
• Use the csv import
• Use CSOM
• Use Office Dev PnP PowerShell

This post will address the csv import.

Getting started with the csv

For the csv import we have a sample that can be downloaded from the term store (http://“tenant”-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/1033/ImportTermSet.csv)

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.

In the trend of my recent blog post I create a new addition to my automation of Office 365 tasks. This time creating a report with the license consumption per month with PowerShell automation, Azure table storage and Power BI. In this post I will take you with me thru the steps to set this up.

What do we need?

Before we can get started coding we need to do some plumbing first. The first thing we need is a storage account. From this storage account we need the connection string.

Last week I was getting complaints by users in our Office 365 environment that the address book in Exchange was not up to date. The issues was that users where getting email addresses with the ‘domain’.onmicrosoft.com as the default email address. The users with these onmicrosoft.com mail addresses where users that are in our on-premises Exchange environment.

The situation

At this customer we have a select group of users in Office 365 and all other users are in an on-premises Exchange environment. A few weeks ago I have updated the AADConnect client to the latest version and everything went well with the update and all users where still in sync with Office 365.

Two weeks after my visit to SharePoint Saturday Paris I visited SharePoint Saturday Netherlands. The schedule for today was a bit more relaxed than in Paris. We had 4 session slots of 75 minutes with great sessions and more time in between the sessions to have a chat with sponsors, trying out the HoloLens and playing some games. The HoloLens is a very cool device and I tried it here for the first time.

In Office 365 we have the option to give some of our users an administrative role, but what role(s) can we give them?

This post will be an overview of the available roles within the portal and PowerShell.

What roles do we have in the portal?

Within the portal we have the following roles available

• Global administrator
• Billing administrator
• Exchange administrator
• Password administrator
• Skype for Business administrator
• Service administrator
• SharePoint administrator
• User management administrator

Microsoft did a great job outlining what each of these roles can do. https://support.office.com/en-US/client/results?Shownav=true&lcid=1033&ns=O365ENTADMIN&version=15&omkt=en-US&ver=15&HelpID=O365E_AssignAdminRoles and scroll down to “Choose which Office 365 admin role to delegate”

On May 28th 2016 I visited SharePoint Saturday in Paris (http://www.spsevents.org/city/Paris/Paris2016/). The event was held in the Montparnasse Tower in the center of Paris on the 40th floor. We had an amazing view from that height.

This article contains my notes of the day.

Start of the day

We had some trouble getting in the building because of some regulations of the building owner, but when we were all registered we could go all the way up to the 40th floor. Here we started with a small breakfast, I did not eat in the hotel so I could use this. I came in just after 8 and all sponsors where getting settled because they also had trouble getting into the building. After breakfast and a delay of 15 minutes the first session started at 9:15