Querying Skype for Business Online using UCWA and PowerShell

7th of September, 2016 / / 29 Comments

Introduction

Recently a colleague from a previous employer of mine pinged me about connecting to Skype for Business using the Unified Communications Web API (UCWA). UCWA is the REST API that comes with Skype for Business 2015 and exposes Instant Messaging and Presence capabilities. Initially UCWA was only for the OnPremise release of S4B, but this has recently been extended to Skype for Business Online.

The detail on leveraging the UCWA is all here however when it comes to actually doing it, it gets a little daunting.… [Keep reading] “Querying Skype for Business Online using UCWA and PowerShell”

Testing Azure Functions in Emulated Environment with ScriptCs

5th of September, 2016 / / 2 Comments

In the previous post, Azure Functions Deployment Strategies, we have briefly looked several ways to deploy Azure Functions codes. In this post, I’m going to walk through how we can test Azure Functions codes on developers’ local machine.

Mocking and Asserting on ScriptCs

We need to know how to run test code scripts using ScriptCs. We’re not going too much details how to install ScriptCs here. Instead, we assume that we have ScriptCs installed on our local machine.… [Keep reading] “Testing Azure Functions in Emulated Environment with ScriptCs”

Azure Functions Deployment Strategies

4th of September, 2016 / / 9 Comments

As a serverless architecture, Azure Functions gives us a great benefit, ie. we don’t have to worry about server maintenance. However, we still need to manage our codes and setup a proper strategy for deployment. In this post, I am going to describe list of deployment strategies for Azure Functions.

Git Integration

Azure Functions provides a git integration as an out-of-the-box feature. We can simply integrate local git repository, GitHub, BitBucket or Visual Studio Team Service.… [Keep reading] “Azure Functions Deployment Strategies”

Developing and configuring Multi-tenant applications using AngularJs, WebAPI and Azure Active Directory

1st of September, 2016 / / 2 Comments

In this post, I am going to share my experience about publishing multi-tenant applications in Azure Active Directory where Azure Active Directory’s role is OAuth server.

You can read more about OAuth2.0 at https://oauth.net/2/ . I am going to use implicit flow where client is an un-trusted application. For instance AngularJs application or phone application etc. Why these clients are called un-trusted because they cannot hide the secrets given/shared by OAuth server.

Let’s have a look at OAuth 2.0 actors in implicit flow.… [Keep reading] “Developing and configuring Multi-tenant applications using AngularJs, WebAPI and Azure Active Directory”

Leveraging the PowerBI Beta API for creating PowerBI Tables with Relationships via PowerShell

31st of August, 2016 / / No Comments

If anyone actually reads my posts you will have noticed that I’ve been on a bit of a deep dive into PowerBI and how I can use it to provide visualisation of data from Microsoft Identity Manager (here via CSV, and here via API). One point I noticed going direct to PowerBI via the API (v1.0) though was how it is not possible to provide relationships (joins) between tables within datasets (you can via PowerBI Desktop).… [Keep reading] “Leveraging the PowerBI Beta API for creating PowerBI Tables with Relationships via PowerShell”

Connecting Azure Mobile Apps and Web Apps to existing on-premises infrastructure using Azure Hybrid Connections

31st of August, 2016 / / 2 Comments

This article describes a very easy and secure way of connecting your Azure Mobile Apps and Azure Web Apps to your existing on-premises infrastructure. The option is called Hybrid Connections and is a feature of Azure BizTalk Services. The feature does not require any VPN configuration or opening Inbound ports on the Firewall. After completion of a few simple configuration steps in the Azure Portal and installation of so-called Hybrid Connection Manager(HCM) program on your on-premises servers, you are ready to consume your on-premises services from your Cloud App right away.… [Keep reading] “Connecting Azure Mobile Apps and Web Apps to existing on-premises infrastructure using Azure Hybrid Connections”

Interacting with Azure Web Apps Virtual File System using PowerShell and the Kudu API

30th of August, 2016 / / 11 Comments

Introduction

Azure Web Apps or App Services are quite flexible regarding deployment. You can deploy via FTP, OneDrive or Dropbox, different cloud-based source controls like VSTS, GitHub, or BitBucket, your on-premise Git, multiples IDEs including Visual Studio, Eclipse and Xcode, and using MSBuild via Web Deploy or FTP/FTPs. And this list is very likely to keep expanding.

However, there might be some scenarios where you just need to update some reference files and don’t need to build or update the whole solution.… [Keep reading] “Interacting with Azure Web Apps Virtual File System using PowerShell and the Kudu API”

Office365 License Reporting in PowerBI from Microsoft Identity Manager

29th of August, 2016 / / 8 Comments

 

Overview

A common request I’m hearing from my customers is visibility of Office365 licensing. Typically this is more from the management staff over the technical team as they don’t have the know-how to get the info themselves. From a management perspective it is also about making sure they get full use of their licensing entitlements. Also to know when they are running close to their licensing limit and the conversations about procuring additional licenses need to be had.… [Keep reading] “Office365 License Reporting in PowerBI from Microsoft Identity Manager”

Office365 Licensing Management Agent for Microsoft Identity Manager

26th of August, 2016 / / 5 Comments

Licensing for Office365 has always been a moving target for enterprise customers. Over the years I’ve implemented a plethora of solutions to keep licensing consistent with entitlement logic. For some customers this is as simple as everyone gets say, an E3 license. For other institutions there are often a mix of ‘E’ and ‘K’ licenses depending on EmployeeType.

Using the Granfeldt PowerShell Management Agent to import Office365 Licensing info

In this blog post I detail how I’m using Søren Granfeldt’s extremely versatile PowerShell Management Agent yet again.… [Keep reading] “Office365 Licensing Management Agent for Microsoft Identity Manager”

How to quickly recover from a FAILED AzureRM Virtual Machine using Powershell

25th of August, 2016 / / 3 Comments

Problem

I have a development sandpit in Azure which I use quite a lot to test and mess with different ideas and concepts. This week when shutting it down things didn’t go that smoothly. All but one virtual machine finally stopped and de-allocated, but one virtual machine just didn’t make it. I tried resizing the VM. I tried changing the configuration of it and obviously tried starting it up many times via the portal and Powershell all without any success.… [Keep reading] “How to quickly recover from a FAILED AzureRM Virtual Machine using Powershell”