Automate SharePoint Document Libraries Management using Flow, Azure Functions and SharePoint CSOM

30th of January, 2018 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been working on a client requirement to automate SharePoint library management via scripts to implement a document lifecycle with many document libraries that have custom content types and requires regular housekeeping for ownership and permissions.
Solution overview
To provide a seamless user experience, we decided to do the following:

1. Create a document library template (.stp) with all the prerequisite folders and content types applied.

2. Create a list to store the data about entries for said libraries.… [Keep reading] “Automate SharePoint Document Libraries Management using Flow, Azure Functions and SharePoint CSOM”

Export/Import SharePoint Designer Workflows using PowerShell

24th of January, 2018 / / 3 Comments

Background

Your organisation is using SharePoint as a collaboration and productivity platform, and your business units have built their solutions on it. As part of business solutions, IT teams have built workflows using SharePoint designer to cater business needs. One of the challenges developers or IT professionals used to have is how to export and import this workflow to other SharePoint sites in case if you are having multiple environments like Dev, Test, UAT and Prod.… [Keep reading] “Export/Import SharePoint Designer Workflows using PowerShell”

Provisioning Hybrid Exchange/Exchange Online Mailboxes with Microsoft Identity Manager

19th of December, 2017 / / 3 Comments

Introduction

Working for Kloud all our projects involve Cloud services, and all our customers have varying and unique requirements. Recently one of our customers embarked on their migration from On-Premise Exchange to Exchange Online. Nothing really groundbreaking there though, however they had a number of unique requirements including management of Litigation Hold. And that needed to be integrated with their existing Microsoft Identity Manager implementation (that currently provisions new users to their Exchange 2013 environment). They also required that management of the Exchange environment still be possible via the Exchange Management Console against a local Exchange server.… [Keep reading] “Provisioning Hybrid Exchange/Exchange Online Mailboxes with Microsoft Identity Manager”

Seamless Multi-identity Browsing for Cloud Consultants

29th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

If you’re a technical consultant working with cloud services like Office 365 or Azure on behalf of various clients, you have to deal with many different logins and passwords for the same URLs. This is painful, as your default browser instance doesn’t handle multiple accounts and you generally have to resort to InPrivate (IE) or Incognito (Chrome) modes which mean a lot of copying and pasting of usernames and passwords to do your job. If this is how you operate today: stop.… [Keep reading] “Seamless Multi-identity Browsing for Cloud Consultants”

Moving an Office 365 domain to a new tenant

26th of November, 2017 / / 4 Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com
There are times when companies acquire other companies to increase their portfolio. When this happens, the acquired company’s IT infrastructure normally gets merged with the parent company. The opposite of this situation is also true. There are also times when a company sells off one of its acquired companies or divisions. In this scenario, the company that is being sold off must have all its IT infrastructure separated from the parent company.… [Keep reading] “Moving an Office 365 domain to a new tenant”

Migrating Sharepoint 2013 on prem to Office365 using Sharegate

14th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Recently I completed a migration project which brought a number of sub-sites within Sharepoint 2013 on-premise to the cloud (Sharepoint Online). We decided to use Sharegate as the primary tool due to the simplistic of it.
Although it might sound as a straightforward process, there are a few things worth to be checked pre and post migration and I have summarized them here. I found it easier to have these information recorded in a spreadsheet with different tabs:
Pre-migration check:

  1. First thing, Get Site Admin access!
… [Keep reading] “Migrating Sharepoint 2013 on prem to Office365 using Sharegate”

Exchange Online & Splunk – Automating the solution

13th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

NOTES FROM THE FIELD:

I have recently been consulting on, what I think is a pretty cool engagement to integrate some Office365 mailbox data into the Splunk reporting platform.
I initially thought about using a .csv export methodology however through trial & error (more error than trial if I’m being honest), and realising that this method still required some manual interaction, I decided to embark on finding a fully automated solution.
The final solution comprises the below components:

  • Splunk HTTP event collector
    • Splunk hostname
    • Token from HTTP event collector config page
  • Azure automation account
    • Azure Run As Account
    • Azure Runbook
    • Exchange Online credentials (registered to Azure automation account

I’m not going to run through the creation of the automation account, or required credentials as these had already been created, however there is a great guide to configuring the solution I have used for this customer at  https://www.splunk.com/blog/2017/10/05/splunking-microsoft-cloud-data-part-3.html… [Keep reading] “Exchange Online & Splunk – Automating the solution”

Connect SharePoint Online and SQL Server On-Premises with BCS/SharePoint Apps using Hybrid Connection and WCF Services

13th of November, 2017 / / 2 Comments

SharePoint Online cannot directly connect to on-premises data sources such as SQL Server. A recommended approach is to use Hybrid with SharePoint 2013/2016 but adds an overhead of infrastructure and maintenance costs. Hence to overcome it, I am going to describe in this blog how to use the Azure PaaS workloads and connect to on-premises data sources using BCS.
Using Azure Hybrid Connection (refer this post) and BCS with Azure Web App hosting WCF endpoint, we can now expose on-premises SQL data to SharePoint Online and Cloud by external content types (ECTs) or SharePoint Hosted Apps.… [Keep reading] “Connect SharePoint Online and SQL Server On-Premises with BCS/SharePoint Apps using Hybrid Connection and WCF Services”

A tool to find mailbox permission dependencies

5th of November, 2017 / / 30 Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com
When planning to migrate mailboxes to Office 365, a lot of care must be taken around which mailboxes are moved together. The rule of the thumb is “those that work together, move together”. The reason for taking this approach is due to the fact that there are some permissions that do not work cross-premises and can cause issues. For instance, if a mailbox has delegate permissions to another mailbox (these are permissions that have been assigned using Outlook email client) and if one is migrated to Office 365 while the other remains on-premises, the delegate permissions capability is broken as it does not work cross-premises.… [Keep reading] “A tool to find mailbox permission dependencies”

Global Navigation and Branding for Modern Site using SharePoint Framework Extensions

30th of October, 2017 / / 43 Comments

Last month at the Microsoft Ignite 2017, SharePoint Framework Extensions became GA. It gave us whole new capabilities how we can customize Modern Team sites and Communication sites.
Even though there are lots of PnP examples on SPFx extensions, while presenting at Office 365 Bootcamp, Melbourne and taking a hands-on lab, I realised not many people are aware of the new capabilities that SPFx extensions provide. One of the burning question we often get from clients, if we can have a custom header, footer and global navigation in the modern sites and the answer is YES.… [Keep reading] “Global Navigation and Branding for Modern Site using SharePoint Framework Extensions”