I have noticed that not every domain register can add every DNS record that is needed for Office 365. This leaves you with two options, move your domain to another register or host your DNS records somewhere else. To host your DNS records in Azure DNS, you need to be able to update your NS records at your domain register. If that is not an option, you need to move the domain to another register.

In this post, I want to take you with me how you can use app credentials in an Azure Automation script to connect to SharePoint Online. Many PowerShell scripts use a username and password, but these are less secure than using an app credential and can also be used to login to SharePoint Online in the browser. By default, connecting to SharePoint uses basic authentication and many companies are on route to disable this to make use of conditional Access and MFA.

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

• OneDrive can handle over 300 different filetypes with a preview; this works in the browser and on the mobile clients.
• The Scan feature will be placed more centered in the app so that you can scan receipts or whiteboards a lot quicker. No need for the separate app Office Lens anymore
• Text recognition for images so you can search for the content of the images.
• @Mentions in Word Document will send a notification to that user. If that user does not have access to that document, a share request is displayed.
• In Microsoft Teams there will come full support for SharePoint document libraries.
• Modern pages will get the ability to have extra metadata that can be used for user targeting
• Microsoft Training services will be available around the summer. This can help with the user adoption of Office 365
• Search extensibility will come to Office 365; this means search suggestions and SPFx extensions for search
• Modern Teams and Communication sites will be in SharePoint 2019

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.

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.

A common situation in SharePoint is adding custom properties to a SharePoint profile. In an on-premises environment, it was very easy to link these properties to a property in AD. In SharePoint Online, you are not able to link these Azure AD properties. So how can we solve this?

There is a very simple solution for this in the Office Dev PnP PowerShell pack called ‘Set-PnPProfileProperty’.

This command sets any user profile property for the given user.

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.