Intro to Site Scripts and Site Designs with a Simple SharePoint Modern Site provisioning

6th of March, 2018 / / No Comments

Microsoft announced Site Scripts and Site Designs in late 2017 which became available for Targeted release in Jan 2018, and released to general use recently. It is a quick way to allow users to create custom modern sites, without using any scripting hacks. Hence, in this blog we will go through the steps of Site Scripts and Site design for a Simple SharePoint Modern Site Creation.
Before we get into detailed steps, lets’ get a brief overview about Site Designs and Site Scripts.… [Keep reading] “Intro to Site Scripts and Site Designs with a Simple SharePoint Modern Site provisioning”

Migrate SharePoint contents using ShareGate

27th of February, 2018 / / No Comments

Background

The first step in any migration project is to do the inventory and see what is the size of the data you have got which you are looking to migrate. For the simplicity, this post assumes you have already done this activity and have already planned new destination sites for your existing content. This means you have some excel sheet somewhere to identify where your content is going to reside in your migrated site and every existing site (in scope) have got at least a new home pointer if it qualifies for migration.… [Keep reading] “Migrate SharePoint contents using ShareGate”

Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 6: Build and Deployment

20th of February, 2018 / / No Comments

So far in this series we’ve been compiling our server-side TypeScript code to JavaScript locally on our own machines, and then copying and pasting it into the Azure Portal. However, an important part of building a modern application – especially a cloud-based one – is having a reliable automated build and deployment process. There are a number of reasons why this is important, ranging from ensuring that a developer isn’t building code on their own machine – and therefore may be subject to environmental variations or differences that cause different outputs – through to running a suite of tests on every build and release.… [Keep reading] “Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 6: Build and Deployment”

Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 5: Unit Testing

13th of February, 2018 / / 4 Comments

Over the last four parts of this series, we’ve discussed how we can write server-side code for Cosmos DB, and the types of situations where it makes sense to do so. If you’re building a small sample application, you now have enough knowledge to go and build out UDFs, stored procedures, and triggers. But if you’re writing production-grade applications, there are two other major topics that need discussion: how to unit test your server-side code, and how to build and deploy it to Cosmos DB in an automated and predictable manner.… [Keep reading] “Cosmos DB Server-Side Programming with TypeScript – Part 5: Unit Testing”

Automating the submission of WordPress Blog Posts to your Microsoft MVP Community Activities Profile using PowerShell

13th of February, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

In November last year (2017) I was honored to be awarded Microsoft MVP Status for Enterprise Mobility – Identity and Access. MVP Status is awarded based on community activities and even once you’ve attained MVP Status you need to keep your community activity contributions updated on your profile.
Up until recently this was done by accessing the portal and updating your profile, however mid last year a MVP PowerShell Module (big thanks to Francois-Xavier Cat and Emin Atac) was released that allows for some automation.… [Keep reading] “Automating the submission of WordPress Blog Posts to your Microsoft MVP Community Activities Profile using PowerShell”

How to set Property Bag values in SharePoint Modern Sites using SharePoint Online .Net CSOM

8th of February, 2018 / / 1 Comment

If you think setting Property Bag values programmatically for Modern SharePoint sites using CSOM would be as straight forward as in the Old Classic SharePoint sites, then there is a surprise waiting for you.
As you can see below, in the old C# CSOM this code would set the Property Bag values as follows:

The challenge with the above method is that the PropertyBag values are not persisted after saving.… [Keep reading] “How to set Property Bag values in SharePoint Modern Sites using SharePoint Online .Net CSOM”

Automating the creation of Azure IoT Hubs and the registration of IoT Devices with PowerShell and VS Code

5th of February, 2018 / / No Comments

The creation of an Azure IoT Hub is quick and simple, either through the Azure Portal or using PowerShell. But what can get more time-consuming is the registration of IoT Devices with the IoT Hub and generation of SAS Tokens for them for authentication.
In my experiments with micro-controllers and their integration with Azure IoT Services I often find I keep having to manually do tasks that should have just been automated. So I did. In this post I’ll cover using PowerShell to;

  • create an Azure IoT Hub
  • register an Azure IoT Device
  • generate a SAS Token for the IoT Device to use for authentication to an Azure IoT Hub from a Mongoose OS enabled ESP8266 micro controller

IoT Integration

Prerequisites

In order to fully test this, ideally you will have a micro-controller.… [Keep reading] “Automating the creation of Azure IoT Hubs and the registration of IoT Devices with PowerShell and VS Code”

On-demand, Scaleable VPN Access to AWS

3rd of February, 2018 / / No Comments

Recent growth in our Managed Services business (driven in part by our acquisition by Telstra) has meant that a number of tools and processes that we have previously taken for granted have had to be re-assessed and re-architected to allow us to scale and maintain the same level of service at low costs.
One particular area that we’ve recently reworked is how we remotely access and administer workloads within customer’s AWS environments. Previous methods of access leveraged either static bastion hosts or VPN endpoints and they worked well up until a point, but after analysing at the overall footprint of resources used and costs incurred by doing so, it became clear to us that we needed to find a better way.… [Keep reading] “On-demand, Scaleable VPN Access to AWS”