Create a new Active Directory Forest using Desired State Configuration

8th of September, 2016 / / 9 Comments

Originally posted on Nivlesh’s blog @ nivleshc.wordpress.com

Desired State Configuration (DSC) is a declarative language in which you state “what” you want done instead of going into the nitty gritty level to describe exactly how to get it done. Jeffrey Snover (the inventor of PowerShell) quotes Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation to describe DSC – it tells the servers to “Make it so”.

In this blog, I will show you how to use DSC to create a brand new Active Directory Forest.… [Keep reading] “Create a new Active Directory Forest using Desired State Configuration”

Applying Business Rules to Profile Photos Using Microsoft Cognitive Services

7th of September, 2016 / / No Comments

A customer I am working with at the moment is in the (very) early stages of discussion around the gathering and application of profile photos across their internal systems. In this particular case, we are considering that the photos themselves do not exist. Sure, there are ID card photos of startled staff taken on day one of their employment, but people being people, they would rather not be forever digitally represented by their former selves – particularly not the version of themselves which had an ID photo taken in a poorly lit un-used meeting room 7 years ago before they got that gym membership.… [Keep reading] “Applying Business Rules to Profile Photos Using Microsoft Cognitive Services”

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”

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”

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”

Schedule Office 365 PowerShell Tasks Using Azure Automation

24th of August, 2016 / / 6 Comments

Anyone who has used Office 365 knows that just creating your users or syncing them via Azure AD Connect really isn’t enough; instead we almost always have to run scheduled PowerShell scripts to manage tasks such as adding licenses or enabling features, like litigation hold.

Usually I would run these scripts on a management server, or an Azure AD Connect server, but what do you do if you have no on-premises environment? Or no Windows VM’s in Azure?… [Keep reading] “Schedule Office 365 PowerShell Tasks Using Azure Automation”

Image a Windows Virtual Machine In Azure, then Deploy And Join It To A Domain

17th of August, 2016 / / 4 Comments

The following Azure Resource Manager mode PowerShell will allow you to create an image of an existing Windows virtual machine in Azure, deploy it at will and join it to a domain if necessary.

Login to PowerShell

[code language=”powershell”]
Get-AzureSubscription
$SubID = "your-subscription-ID"
Login-AzureRMAccount
Select-AzureRmSubscription -SubscriptionId $SubID
[/code]

Create the virtual machine image

Run sysprep on the desired virtual machine in Azure.

[code language=”dos”]%windir%\system32\sysprep[/code]

When prompted for System Cleanup Action choose ‘Enter System Out of The Box Experience (OOBE)‘, Generalize and Shutdown from Shutdown Options.… [Keep reading] “Image a Windows Virtual Machine In Azure, then Deploy And Join It To A Domain”