Report of All Taxonomy Fields containing a term in SharePoint Tenancy

24th of April, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Recently we had a request to find fields/columns in all lists across the tenancy which have a specific Taxonomy term because we needed to report on field usage across all site collections. However, we found that getting a report of all Taxonomy fields in your SharePoint tenancy that is linked to a specific Term Set can get quite daunting because there is no direct SharePoint Query to fetch the associations.
The technical challenge is that using PnP PowerShell, the Taxonomy fields are returned as a generic SP.Field… [Keep reading] “Report of All Taxonomy Fields containing a term in SharePoint Tenancy”

Promoting and Demoting Site pages to News in Modern SharePoint Sites using SPFx extension and Azure Function

23rd of April, 2018 / / No Comments

The requirement that I will be addressing in this blog is how to Promote and Demote site pages to news articles in Modern SharePoint sites. This approach allows us to promote any site page to News, add approval steps and demote news articles to site pages if the news need to be updated. The news also shows in the modern news web part when the site page is promoted.
Solution Approach:
To start with, create a site page.… [Keep reading] “Promoting and Demoting Site pages to News in Modern SharePoint Sites using SPFx extension and Azure Function”

Protecting Application Credentials when implementing Modular Azure Functions with Microsoft Flow

23rd of April, 2018 / / 1 Comment

This weekend I was attempting to rework some older Azure Automation tasks I wrote some time ago that were a combination of PowerShell scripts and Azure (PowerShell Functions). I was looking to leverage Microsoft Flow so that I could have them handy as ‘Buttons’ in the Microsoft Flow mobile app.
Quite quickly I realized that Microsoft Flow didn’t have the capability to perform some of the automation I required, so I handed that off to an Azure Function.… [Keep reading] “Protecting Application Credentials when implementing Modular Azure Functions with Microsoft Flow”

Global Azure Bootcamp 2018 – Creating the Internet of YOUR Things

21st of April, 2018 / / No Comments

Today is the 6th Global Azure Bootcamp and I presented at the Sydney Microsoft Office on the Creating the Internet of YOUR Things.
In my session I gave an overview on where IoT is going and some of the amazing things we can look forward to (maybe). I then covered a number of IoT devices that you can buy now that can enrich your life.
I then moved on to building IoT devices and leveraging Azure, the focus of my presentation.… [Keep reading] “Global Azure Bootcamp 2018 – Creating the Internet of YOUR Things”

How to quickly copy Azure Functions between Azure Tenants and implement 'Run From Zip'

17th of April, 2018 / / 3 Comments

As mentioned in this post yesterday I needed to copy a bunch of Azure WebApps and Functions from one Tenant to another. With anything cloud based, things move fast. Some of the methods I found were too onerous and more complex than they needed to be. There is of course the Backup option as well for Azure Functions. This does require a storage account associated with the Function App Plan. My Functions didn’t have the need for storage and the plan tier they were on meant that wasn’t a prerequisite. … [Keep reading] “How to quickly copy Azure Functions between Azure Tenants and implement 'Run From Zip'”

How to quickly copy an Azure Web App between Azure Tenants using 'Zip Push Deploy'

16th of April, 2018 / / No Comments

In the last couple of weeks I’ve had to copy a bunch of Azure WebApps and Functions from one Azure Tenant to another. I hadn’t had to do this for a while and went looking for the quickest and easiest way to accomplish it. As with anything cloud based, things move fast. Some of the methods I found were too onerous and more complex than they needed to be. There is of course the Backup option as well.… [Keep reading] “How to quickly copy an Azure Web App between Azure Tenants using 'Zip Push Deploy'”

Demystifying Managed Service Identities on Azure

13th of April, 2018 / / 5 Comments

Managed service identities (MSIs) are a great feature of Azure that are being gradually enabled on a number of different resource types. But when I’m talking to developers, operations engineers, and other Azure customers, I often find that there is some confusion and uncertainty about what they do. In this post I will explain what MSIs are and are not, where they make sense to use, and give some general advice on how to work with them.… [Keep reading] “Demystifying Managed Service Identities on Azure”

Xamarin Forms – Platform Specifics (iOS) : Blur Effect

12th of April, 2018 / / No Comments

As a Xamarin mobile developer ever wonder, why we need write some much of code in PCL and iOS projects to do simple Native feature, some of which are usually one-liners code natively.
Xamarin has now introduced a nice nifty feature that helps us to write code in Xamarin Forms in the form of Platform Specifics.
In short, Platform Specifics helps us to consume the features or functionalities that are only available on iOS, without needing to implement custom renderers or effects in the required platform project.… [Keep reading] “Xamarin Forms – Platform Specifics (iOS) : Blur Effect”

Deploy active/active FortiGate NGFW in Azure

10th of April, 2018 / / 22 Comments

I recently was tasked with deploying two Fortinet FortiGate firewalls in Azure in a highly available active/active model. I quickly discovered that there is currently only two deployment types available in the Azure marketplace, a single VM deployment and a high availability deployment (which is an active/passive model and wasn’t what I was after).
FG NGFW Marketplace Options
I did some digging around on the Fortinet support sites and discovered that to you can achieve an active/active model in Azure using dual load balancers (a public and internal Azure load balancer) as indicated in this Fortinet document: https://www.fortinet.com/content/dam/fortinet/assets/deployment-guides/dg-fortigate-high-availability-azure.pdf… [Keep reading] “Deploy active/active FortiGate NGFW in Azure”

Evaluating the migration of Azure Functions to Microsoft Flow – Twitter IoT Integration

5th of April, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

Almost 18 months ago I wrote this post on integrating Twitter with Azure Functions to Tweet IoT data. A derivative of that solution has been successfully running for about the same period. Azure Functions have been bullet proof for me.
After recently implementing Microsoft Flow as detailed in my Teenager Notification Device post here I started looking at a number of the Azure Functions I have running and looked at what would be better suited to being implemented with Flow.… [Keep reading] “Evaluating the migration of Azure Functions to Microsoft Flow – Twitter IoT Integration”