Office 365 – Page 2

Office 365 Lessons Learned – Advice on how to approach your deployment

11th of February, 2019 / Con Efessopoulos / No Comments

Hindsight sometimes gets the better of us. That poor storm trooper. If only he had the advice before Obi-Wan Kenobi showed up. Clearly the Galactic Empire don’t learn lessons. Perhaps consultants use the Jedi mind trick to persuade their customers?

I’ve recently completed an 18 month project that rolled out Office 365 to an ASX Top 30 company. This project successfully rolled out Office 365 to each division & team across the company, migrating content from SharePoint 2007 and File Shares.… [Keep reading] “Office 365 Lessons Learned – Advice on how to approach your deployment”

Office365-AzureHybrid: Building an automated solution to pull Office 365 Audit logs

6th of February, 2019 / Asish Padhy / No Comments

Custom reporting for Office 365 Audit logs is possible using data fetched from the Security and Compliance center. In the previous blogs here, we have seen how to use PowerShell and Office 365 Management API to fetch the data. In this blog, we will look at planning, prerequisites and rationale to help decide between the approaches.

The Office 365 Audit logs are available from the Security and Compliance center when enabled. At present, audit logging is not enabled by default and needs to be enabled from the Security and Compliance center.… [Keep reading] “Office365-AzureHybrid: Building an automated solution to pull Office 365 Audit logs”

Analogue Devices and Microsoft Teams

30th of January, 2019 / Craig Chiffers / No Comments

Last week, I was working through a technical workshop with a customer who wanted to make the move to Microsoft Teams. We’d worked through the usual questions, and then the infamous question came: So .. are there any analogue devices still in use? “Yeah, about 50 handsets”. You’d be forgiven for thinking that analogue handsets were a thing of the past. However, much like the fax machine, there’s still a whole lot of love out there for them.… [Keep reading]

Create Office365 business value through the power of limitation

22nd of January, 2019 / Con Efessopoulos / No Comments

Recent consulting engagements have found me helping customers define what Office365 means to them & what value they see in its use. They are lucky to have licenses and are seeking help to understand how they drive value from the investment.

You’ve heard the sales pitches: Office365 – The platform to solve ALL your needs! From meetings, to document management, working with people outside your organisation, social networking, custom applications, business process automation, forms & workflow, analytics, security & compliance, device management…the list goes on and is only getting bigger!… [Keep reading] “Create Office365 business value through the power of limitation”

Azure Automation MS Flow Hybrid Workers SharePoint List upload CSV output

21st of January, 2019 / Robbie Vidler / 1 Comment

In this Blog I will discuss how to leverage SharePoint Lists as a front end using MS Flow to call Webhooks on Microsoft Azure Automation PowerShell scripts. These scripts execute via a hybrid worker to access On Premises resources. Results will be zipped and uploaded back to the SharePoint list.

Prerequisites

Azure Automation Subscription and Account
SharePoint Online / Site Collection
On-premises resource (Windows 2016 server) configured as Hybrid Worker
CredSSP needs to be enabled on hybrid Worker as Azure launches scripts as system account and some commands cannot use ‘-Credential’ )
Modules needed on Hybrid worker from elevated powershell run “Add-WindowsFeature RSAT-AD-PowerShell and “Install-Module SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline”
From Azure Import module from gallery SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline

Create SharePoint List

Create a SharePoint list as below this will be the input required for the script.… [Keep reading] “Azure Automation MS Flow Hybrid Workers SharePoint List upload CSV output”

Retrieve Office 365 audit logs using Office Management API and Azure Functions

18th of January, 2019 / Asish Padhy / No Comments

For creating custom reports on Office 365 content, the best approach is to fetch the Audit data from Office 365 Management Audit log, store it in a custom database and then create reports through it. In an earlier blog here, we looked at steps to retrieve Office 365 Audit log data using PowerShell. In this blog, we look at a similar process to gather audit data by using Office 365 Management API in Azure Functions.… [Keep reading] “Retrieve Office 365 audit logs using Office Management API and Azure Functions”

Use Azure AD Apps to connect with Office 365 and Cloud Services securely

15th of January, 2019 / Asish Padhy / No Comments

Azure AD apps provide a faster and secure way to connect to the Office 365 tenancy and carry out automation tasks. There are many advantages of using Azure AD apps and could be used to authenticate for various Microsoft services such as Graph, Office 365 Management Api, SharePoint etc.

In this blog, we will look at the steps to set up an Azure AD app for Office 365 Management API, however the steps are mostly the same for other Office 365 services too.… [Keep reading] “Use Azure AD Apps to connect with Office 365 and Cloud Services securely”

Selectively prevent and secure content from External sharing using Labels and DLP policies in Office 365

11th of January, 2019 / Asish Padhy / No Comments

In a recent project, we had a requirement to prevent specific selective content from shared externally while still allowing the flexibility of external sharing for all users. We were able to make it possible through Security and Compliance Center. There are few ways to achieve this, Auto-classify (see below conclusion section for more info), Selective apply via Labels and both.

Note: Till recently (Dec 2018), there was a bug in Office 365 which was preventing this DLP policy with Labels to work. This is fixed in the latest release so available for use.

In this blog, we will look at the process where business users can decide the content to be shared externally or not. This is a nifty feature, because there are cases when the content could be classified as secured even when they don’t have any sensitive info such as contracts (without business info) or invoices (with only business name). Also, there are cases when content could be public even when the document has sensitive info because the company has decided to make it public. So, at the end it is up to the discretion of the owner to decide the content’s privacy and hence this feature a great value in these scenarios.

Note: If you would like to auto classify the content using Sensitive info types, please refer to the great article here. This process leverages the machine learning capabilities of Office 365 engine to identify secure content and automatically apply the security policy on it.

The first step is to create a Retention label (somehow this doesn’t work with Security labels, so must create retention label). After creating a label, publish the label to the selected locations, for our use case we will post it to SharePoint Sites only. While the label is published, we could go ahead and create a DLP policy to prevent sharing with external users (I was not able to make it work while set to Test with notification so put it to on state to test also). After this, when you apply the label to a document, after some time (takes about 1-2 min to affect), then the content is not able to be shared with external users. Lets’ look at each of the above steps in detail below.

Steps:

First step is to create a retention label in Security and Compliance center. To my astonishment, the selective process doesn’t work with Security Labels but Retention Labels, so will create Retention Labels. If it is optional to apply a retention period to the content, then the retention period can be left, so not required for this exercise.
Secondly, we will publish the label to SharePoint Sites, for our requirement. I haven’t tried the process with other sources such as Outlook and One Drive but should work the same when applied.
Note: It takes about a day for the retention labels to publish to SharePoint sites, so please wait for that to become available. We can move to the next configuration step right away but will have to wait for the label to be published to stop sharing.
Next, we could create a DLP policy for the content to be applied. For creating a DLP policy we need to follow the below configuration steps. Once created, we might have to turn it on in order to test it.
First step of the policy creation would be select Custom Policy for DLP policy creation and give it a name.
Then, we would select the sources to be included for this policy. In our case, it is only SharePoint.
After the above, we will set rule settings for the DLP policy where we will select the label to which the policy to apply, then select the policy tips, block sharing rules and override rules as shown in the below screenshots. We could also set the admins (provided) to get notified when such as content is shared externally.
Next, we could allow the users to override the policy if needed. For this blog and our requirement, we had decided to not allow it to happen.
After this is setup, we could turn on the DLP policy so that it could start applying the rules. There doesn’t seem to be any wait time for applying the policy later but give it some time if you don’t see it happening right away.
Now the policy is enabled and if the label are published, the user can then apply the label on a content as shown in below screenshot.
Note: In some cases, it takes about 2-3 min for the policy to be effective on the content after applying the label so give it some time.
After the label is effective after 2-3 min wait, if the same content is shared with an external user, we get the following error.

Active Directory User Migration in Hybrid Exchange Environment Using ADMT – Part6

10th of January, 2019 / Anupam Phoghat / 1 Comment

Security Translation – Local Profiles and things to consider for end user experience

The last bit of any migration project is to keep the end user experience as simple and smooth as possible. So, by now we have successfully migrated the groups, migrated the users keeping their mailboxes intact and providing them access to all their resources using SID history. As the last bit of the migration I would like to discuss about few things that should be considered from an end user’s perspective to make their experience good when they login to the new domain.… [Keep reading] “Active Directory User Migration in Hybrid Exchange Environment Using ADMT – Part6”

Active Directory User Migration in Hybrid Exchange Environment Using ADMT – Part5

10th of January, 2019 / Anupam Phoghat / 1 Comment

Users Migration

The gun seems to be pretty much loaded with all the ammunition, ready to fire? Probably not yet …

Here I want to discuss about few basic things that are easily missed and can cause the migration to fail or go wrong. Few things worth noting down before getting into the migration:

Make sure you have a plan to provide the permissions of file shares that built-in groups in source domain have access to.

… [Keep reading]