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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.