In the week of September 24th, Microsoft held their biggest tech event of the year and I had the privilege to be there again. This post will give you a summary of my journey thru this week.
The official conference starts on Monday but on Sunday evening I got invited to the welcome party of Microsoft Netherlands to meet all Dutch participant, get to know the others and meet all we already know. This is a great way to start the conference.
It was time again for the European Collaboration Summit. After the success of last year, I attended again. This time it was a bit closer to home in Mainz.
We started on Tuesday with a keynote from Dan Holme (@DanHolme) with a recap of the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas from last week. The take a way’s for me were
After the keynote, I went to the session “Enabling the protection, detection, and response to cyber-threats” of Martina Grom (@magrom)
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.
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.
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.
As I described in a previous article you can add a partner to your Office 365 tenant to assist you with managing your tenant. This article goes deeper into what your partner can do in SharePoint Online
Your partner can do the same things as the SharePoint administrator can do, so they see the SharePoint admin portal and can change all the settings. By default, they do not have access to any site collection or the data in your site collections. If you have chosen to add the add the role SharePoint admin to every site collection like I described in this article, your partner is not able to access these site collections. From a security point of view this is great, but what if you need the help of your partner to solve an issue in a specific site collection, should you create a new account for them and use that or use a guest account to solve this?
This year of SharePoint Saturday’s started with the one in Munich last weekend. This time there was also a preconference session on Friday. The sessions on Friday and Saturday were held at the brand-new building of Microsoft Germany.
This year they organized two preconference sessions. A developer one about Office Dev PnP and an IT Pro about SharePoint 2016. I went to the SharePoint 2016 session where they talked about all the aspects of SharePoint 20116. They started with the architecture and the differences between SharePoint 2013 and 2016. They also explained where the issues were and how to solve them. After the architecture session we went into the authentication options within SharePoint and the hybrid identity. Here we looked at the identity options within Office 365 and the options to get your on-premises users into the cloud. Also, the dependencies where discussed like ADFS on-premises and your local internet line is down. After the lunch break we had a session about PowerShell and the Office Dev PnP PowerShell module that is available for on-premises and Office 365. We ended the day with setting up Hybrid. Thomas did a complete hybrid setup in just 1 hour with some preparations that he did on forehand. The most important part of the hybrid setup of Office 365 is that your identities are available in Office 365. When you have, that part done and your SharePoint farm can talk to the internet you can run a simple wizard from the SharePoint Online admin portal to setup the hybrid farm. This wizard will setup:
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:
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.
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.
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