Using PowerShell to query Oracle DB’s without using the Oracle Client – Oracle Data Provider for .NET

11th of June, 2019 / / No Comments

With every Identity and Access Management project comes the often tactical integration with heritage/legacy systems that can often assist with their decommissioning. That is exactly what I was having to do a couple of weeks ago with Oracle. My public frustration with installing the Oracle Client on a Windows Server 2016 host to allow me to integrate Microsoft Identity Manager with Oracle saw me rewarded with an unsolicited but fantastic response from Sylvan Laurence. The suggestion was to use the Oracle Data Provider for .NET… [Keep reading] “Using PowerShell to query Oracle DB’s without using the Oracle Client – Oracle Data Provider for .NET”

Weekly AWS Update: Friday 31st May 2019

31st of May, 2019 / / No Comments

Well, it’s the end of autumn, and if the weather in Melbourne is anything to go by, winter’s here. Regardless, here we are with another weekly look at the goodies AWS have given us over the week. In this weeks update, we take a look at an extensive collection of releases from across the platform. We have more updates to EBS functionality. Amazon Connect adds additional Telephony Metadata, opening up new routing possibility. And some exciting features added to Amplify and CloudFormation.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS Update: Friday 31st May 2019”

Get/Update SailPoint IdentityNow Global Reminders and Escalation Policies

31st of May, 2019 / / No Comments 
Update: Oct 2019. Global Reminders and Escalation Policies can be easily managed using the SailPoint IdentityNow PowerShell Module.

SailPoint IdentityNow Access Requests for Roles or Applications usually require approvals which are configured on the associated Role or Application. The Approval could be by the Role/Application Owner, a Governance Group or the Requestor’s Manager. However for reminders and escalation policies the configuration is only available to be retrieved and set via the API. The SailPoint Identity Now api/v2/org API is used to configure these Global Reminders and Escalation Policies.… [Keep reading] “Get/Update SailPoint IdentityNow Global Reminders and Escalation Policies”

Goodbye GoDaddy WebHosting, Hello Azure Static Website

30th of May, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Way back in the 2000’s I got pulled into the commercial side of the Craft Beer Industry. I’d spent the previous 10+ years perfecting some eclectic beer styles and my professional brewing mates figured it was time to unleash them on the unsuspecting public. With any enterprising venture (but especially beer) you need a website to get the message out. I had a brand new 27″ iMac so I hacked together a simple one page website using the now defunct Apple iWeb.… [Keep reading] “Goodbye GoDaddy WebHosting, Hello Azure Static Website”

Building “Dial a Joke” Part 1 – Using Lambda functions with Amazon Connect

28th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

In this article, we take a look at how to add AWS Lambda functions to our Amazon Connect Contact Flows. This will be the first in a series of articles where we build our very own “Dial A Joke” Service. That’s right, we’re going back to the ’90s using 2019 technology. Throughout this project, we will be taking a look at:

  • Adding Lambda Functions to Contact Flows for dynamic response generation
  • defining and leveraging call variables
  • Using Lambda responses to drive Contact Flow decision making and conditional logic flows
  • Implementing and triggering outbound calls from Amazon Connect
  • a basic introduction to SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language

If you haven’t already taken a look at Amazon Connect, you can take a look at some of our previous articles.… [Keep reading] “Building “Dial a Joke” Part 1 – Using Lambda functions with Amazon Connect”

Weekly AWS Update: Friday 24th May 2019 – Part 2

26th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

And we’re back with part 2 of our weekly update. In this, the second part of our weekly update we are taking a look at all of the RDS releases. And over the last week, there has been a lot of them. Over the last week, We’ve got an update to RDS Recommendations for Amazon Aurora. Password validation support is now available for MySQL and a bunch of performance and feature uplifts.

Each of the AWS Weekly updates we publish on this blog isn’t an exhaustive list of all the week’s updates.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS Update: Friday 24th May 2019 – Part 2”

Weekly AWS Update: Friday 24th May 2019 – Part 1

25th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

It’s Friday again, and that means it’s time we take another look at the releases and announcements made by AWS. Like always, we have a lot to cover this week and there are a few things everybody. In fact, there is so much to cover this week, we actually had to break it up into two separate articles. In this article, we look at the ability to add additional website authorization providers to WorkLink. We also have an update on AWS Ground Station and changes to Amazon Worklink.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS Update: Friday 24th May 2019 – Part 1”

Extracting a list of Azure AD App Proxy applications with PowerShell

24th of May, 2019 / / 2 Comments

Recently during the Azure AD Application Proxy (App Proxy) deployment project with one of our clients, I was asked to give a list of applications that are on-boarded into App Proxy. Namely the client needed the Internal Url, External URL & DisplayName of the application. Usually there are two ways of doing that. One way is to export them manually into a csv file or alternatively: automate it! If there are small number of applications, then exporting them manually wouldn’t take that long but a long-term solution is to automate it.… [Keep reading] “Extracting a list of Azure AD App Proxy applications with PowerShell”

Reactive Properties in Xamarin Forms

23rd of May, 2019 / / No Comments

In this post, we will look at using Xamarin Forms in a more reactive manner, which will give more control over validation and synchronous UI updates, with potential to easily add custom animations.

The primary components for a Xamarin Forms mobile app are view models, presenters, services, repositories, business layers, DTOs etc. All interaction with a mobile app can be thought of as a series of asynchronous events handled by the view model. All interactions with the underlying layer, i.e… [Keep reading] “Reactive Properties in Xamarin Forms”

Adding Call handling logic to Amazon Connect

22nd of May, 2019 / / No Comments

This is the third article in a series where we are taking a look at Amazon Connect. In this article, we will add some logic handling to our “Contact Flow” by adding a basic IVR. However, if you haven’t been following along, I highly advise you go back and review our previous articles:

  1. Getting Started with Amazon Connect – In this article, we set up a new Amazon Connect Instance by walking through the Setup Wizard
  2. Accepting our First Call using Amazon Connect – Once we’ve got our new Connect instance, we walk through the process of setting up our first contact flow

If there is a feature that you’d like to see a blog article on, post a note in the comments.… [Keep reading] “Adding Call handling logic to Amazon Connect”