Programmatically interacting with Yammer via PowerShell – Part 1

For my latest project I was asked to automate some Yammer activity. I’m first to concede that I don’t have much of a Dev background, but I instantly fired up PowerShell ISE in tandem with Google only to find…well not a lot! After a couple of weeks fighting with a steep learning curve, I thought it best to blog my findings, it’s good to share ‘n all that!

    It’s worth mentioning at the outset, if you want to test this out you’ll need an E3 Office 365 Trial and a custom domain.
[Keep reading] “Programmatically interacting with Yammer via PowerShell – Part 1”

Azure Active Directory Connect high-availability using ‘Staging Mode’

With the Azure Active Directory Connect product (AAD Connect) being announced as generally available to the market (more here, download here), there is a new feature available that will provide a greater speed of recovery of the AAD Sync component. This feature was not available with the previous AAD Sync or DirSync tools and there is little information about it available in the community, so hopefully this model can be considered for your synchronisation design.… [Keep reading] “Azure Active Directory Connect high-availability using ‘Staging Mode’”

The Secrets of SharePoint Site Mailbox

A Site Mailbox serves as a central filing cabinet, providing a place to file project emails and documents that can be only accessed and edited by SharePoint site members.

It can be used from a SharePoint team site to store and organise team email or via Outlook 2013 for team email, and as a way to quickly store attachments and retrieve documents from the team site.

Users will not see a Site Mailbox in their Outlook client unless they are an owner or member of that Site in SharePoint.… [Keep reading] “The Secrets of SharePoint Site Mailbox”

Windows 10 – First Look: Scaling on the Surface Pro 3

As a fellow Surface user, I love my device.

The surface is a great device, which packs plenty of performance for heavy duty workloads such as running guest virtual machines or 3d rendering. It’s also extremely light which is great for work meetings and note taking on the go. You could say the Surface is great for any task that you can throw at it, almost…

Remember the first time you plugged your brand spanking new Surface into an external display to enable a little more desktop real estate in the office?… [Keep reading] “Windows 10 – First Look: Scaling on the Surface Pro 3”

Microsoft Intune: what, when, where, why, how

Originally posted at Lucian.Blog.


Having worked with Microsoft Intune a fair bit recently, in some clever ways like to extended System Centre Configuration Manager to the cloud for multi-factor authentication purposes, I’ve come to find Intune quite handy. In most ways it can be considered SCCM in the cloud which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In this post I’d like to quick fire off a whole bunch of handy Intune facts, figures and maybe other f-words for commonly asked questions I’ve been asked about the product suite…

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Microsoft Office 365 readiness assessment

Originally posted at Lucian.Blog.


Okay, you have the green light and it’s time to get cracking deploying Office 365. Before a mailbox can be migrated, before even an account can be AADSync’ed, before you even provision the O365 tenant, there is the matter of checking if the existing infrastructure is ready to handle the great features of Office 365.

What is always recommended before the design phase of a project even starts is to conduct an Office 365 readiness assessment. Working on a project recently and having it fresh in my mind, I thought I’d put finger to keyboard (pen to paper) and jot down the key items to check.

There’s allot of IT companies out there who offer this discovery and assessment process which is great. As a handy reference point, here’s the approach I take, with the a focus on Exchange Online messaging as that’s what I’m pretty good at…

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Connecting Salesforce and SharePoint Online with Azure App Services

Back in November I wrote a post that demonstrated how we can integrate Salesforce and SharePoint Online using the MuleSoft platform and the MuleSoft .NET Connector. In this post I hope to achieve the same thing using the recently released into preview Azure App Services offering.

Azure App Services

Azure App Services rebrands a number of familiar service types (Azure Websites, Mobile Services, and BizTalk Services) as well as adding a few new ones to the platform.… [Keep reading] “Connecting Salesforce and SharePoint Online with Azure App Services”

How to implement Multi-Factor Authentication in Office 365 via ADFS, Part 5, the finale!

Originally posted in Lucians blog over @ lucian.blog.


I know what you’re thinking: does Lucian really have to create another part in this long MFA series? In short, probably not, but I’ll have saved your index finger the thousands of years or scrolling you would have done to read the entire brain dump in a one page post.

So to explain this ‘epilogue’, if you will, on MFA, using X.509 SSLs for your second factor of authentication is a powerful means to automate and manage a process for your mobile and external users. This blog post will explain how to leverage an on-prem Microsoft System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2012 R2 deployment linked to Microsoft InTune to deliver SSL’s to mobile and external devices to use in MFA.

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How to implement Multi-Factor Authentication in Office 365 via ADFS – Part 4

Originally posted in Lucians blog over @ lucian.blog.


The final installment in the long series that’s taken me allot longer to get around to writing then initially I had thought. However, I hope it’s worth the wait and the solution that has been proven works well for you. Before I get into the technical aspects of the final piece of this MFA implementation puzzle, I’d like to make a quick shout out to all the awesome consultants at Kloud Solutions who helped both in the technical implementation but also with the initial design and work required to see this solution through- a big thank you!

In the previous blog post I went through essentially what an internal configuration of MFA would look like with everything ready for the ADAL component that was previously under NDA and preview only availability, is now generally available for testing. So let me quickly delve into that ADAL in Office 2013 and Office 365 component before an in-depth guide on how to utilize Microsoft InTune and System Centre Configuration Manager as a means to deliver SSL certificates to users and use those certificates as your second factor of authentication! Exciting as its been a long build up to get to this point with several moments where I was questioning whether this would work in the real world.. lets start..

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How to implement Multi-Factor Authentication in Office 365 via ADFS – Part 3

Originally posted on Lucian’s blog over at lucian.blog.


In this blog post I’ll go into the configuration and implementation of Active Directory Federation Services v3.0 Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). This is in line with a recent proof-of-concept project I conducted for a large customer in the FMCG sector. ADFSv3 MFA coupled with some new functionality that Microsoft is working on in Office 365, MFA in Office 2013 which will be covered by part 4 of this series, offers a fantastic solution to organisations wanting to leverage MFA by way of adhering to company policy or simply to further secure their users accessing Office 365 cloud services.

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life

-Jane Addams

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