Connecting to Exchange Online was only possible with an account that did not have MFA enabled because it only can handle basic authentication. This is an issue because Microsoft advises us to have accounts that can do administrative tasks to have MFA enabled. Now we must choose between an account that has no MFA and a possible security breach and an account that cannot connect to Exchange Online. To solve this, we had an account that was disabled by default and when we had to do Exchange tasks we enabled it.

Last week I found out that the account name that you use in Azure automation are case-sensitive. We found this after a co-worker was adding a credential to the credentials assets. I had used some capital letters to read the account name a bit better in our local AD and my co-worker just wrote them down with small letters. He came back to me asking if the password was correct because the credentials did not work.

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.

Last week Microsoft announced the general availability of Managed Disk (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-general-availability-of-managed-disks-and-larger-scale-sets/). Until now you always needed to manage you own storage for storing the VM disks. With this option you now have the option to create VM’s without caring about the underlying storage. Using managed disks is made very easy by just selecting Managed Disk while creating a new VM in the portal. When you want to create a VM using PowerShell you just need to add configure type of storage while creating the OS Disk with this command “Set-AzureRmVMOSDisk”.

Since a Microsoft Teams depends on Office 365 Groups and creating a Microsoft Team creates an Office 365 Group I wanted to know if it was possible to upgrade an already existing Office 365 Group to a Microsoft Team. This is possible but you need to keep a few things in mind to have the ability to upgrade a Microsoft Team. So let’s first start at the beginning, creating a Microsoft Team can be done within the Microsoft Team application by clicking on “Create team” and you will get this simple screen to create a new team

The title of this post is a bit strange because you need Office 365 Groups to use Microsoft Teams, it is built on top of Office 365 Groups. But then you might ask, we do not want to enable Office 365 Groups yet for our organization but we want to use or test Microsoft Teams? To get this working you need to give a select number of people access to create Office 365 Groups, the people that is going to use Microsoft Teams do not need the permission to create Office 365 Groups.

In the last week of 2016 I was working on some issues that some users in certain groups were not synchronized to Azure AD. The users itself were in Azure AD but the group membership did not sync. The problem here was that the users were in another forest than the group. At this customer, we have multiple forests with users from the different countries and they start to work together more and now we had some complaints that the users where not able to access resources while they placed them in the correct groups.

As the year ends it is a nice time to reflect on this year. In the beginning of this year I set some goals for myself, these goals were not only work related but also a few on personal development. Work related goals The work related goals were setup during the year, the first one was creating a blog post every week for at least three months, I started with this because the constituency of content was about one post a month or even less.

Since some time we have the ability to see the health of the Azure Active Directory Connect in the new portal (https://portal.azure.com) and since a few days I saw that the sync errors are now displayed in this blade as well. This is a great addition, because it will give a better overview of the synchronization errors than the email you get every 30 minutes. I also have noticed that there are rules created to move this email to another map when it arrives because it gives a lot of clutter in the mailbox.

This week a non technical post, besides focusing on keeping my technical skills on a high level and sharing all kinds of information via this blog I have a goal to get on stage more often. To get better at speaking I followed a seminar about public speaking from one of the best in the field Andy Harrington. The seminar I went to was a preview seminar what he does and what courses he has.