Sharepoint-Online

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

In 2014 I wrote a post on how to force the renewal of the content types in an on-premises environment and got a request on that post if it was possible to do the same in Office 365.

After a short research and some changes to the original script, see below for the result.
It uses the Office Dev PnP PowerShell CmdLets.

See below for the version for SharePoint Online

The first thing that might come to your mind might be that modern authentication is enabled for Office 365. Well that is partly true. It is enabled for SharePoint online, not for Exchange and Skype for Business if your tenant is created before august 1st 2017. While writing this about 95% of the tenants are older then 1 month so modern authentication is not enabled for Exchange and Skype for Business.

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.

Friday session

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:

• Upload CSV file thru https://manage.windowsazure.com
• Add a user in the new portal https://portal.azure.com
• Invitation API in the Microsoft Graph

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.

Get Typing with TypeScript

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

Last week I got an email from a coworker that Microsoft has created a score website (https://securescore.office.com/) for Office 365 tenants. This website measures the security of your Office 365 tenant. By default the score of your Office 365 tenant is very low, I got on my personal tenant a score of 29 out of 243 and on one of my customers also got 29 out of 243.