office 365 – Kloud Blog

Microsoft Teams Announcements and New Features – Enhance your meetings today

25th of March, 2019 / Con Efessopoulos / No Comments

Microsoft Teams has just turned 2. To celebrate, new features have been announced and are coming your way soon. With this wave of new features there aren’t many reasons left not to adopt Microsoft Teams. Many of our customers are embracing Teams as they see the value in a connected collaboration experience that brings together voice, chat, content & meetings.

For me, nothing beats a face-to-face meeting. Though, as people embrace flexible working, are geographically distributed or constantly on the go, connecting with others can be challenging.… [Keep reading] “Microsoft Teams Announcements and New Features – Enhance your meetings today”

SharePoint Modern Sites hacktips – Manage Client-Side Pages via PnP PowerShell

8th of March, 2019 / Asish Padhy / 1 Comment

Sometimes I get requirements when projects require a full width layout pages in Team Sites or would like to create a page which is System maintained, so users cannot edit those pages. In this blog, we will look at some of these options and how easy it is to set them up using PnP PowerShell

Set Full Width Layout pages using PnP PowerShell

By default, any new page that is created in Team site gets a left-hand navigation (Article Layout) when created through UI.… [Keep reading] “SharePoint Modern Sites hacktips – Manage Client-Side Pages via PnP PowerShell”

Great SharePoint Modern updates Feb 2019 #makespintranetcoolagain

26th of February, 2019 / Asish Padhy / 1 Comment

During Ignite 2018, Microsoft showcased some great updates that are going to change how we implement SharePoint Intranets. It will scale Modern Communication sites to new heights to become the Next-gen Intranet.

Since Ignite 2018, there have been many steady releases and some great updates on SharePoint Modern communication sites. Following this blog, I am planning to start with a detailed blog series about how to build cool Modern Intranets in SharePoint #makespintranetcoolagain.

Here is quick blog for these updates.… [Keep reading] “Great SharePoint Modern updates Feb 2019 #makespintranetcoolagain”

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”

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.

Build a better technical architecture with reusable components in React for SharePoint Framework webparts

8th of January, 2019 / Asish Padhy / No Comments

If there is a complex web part to be implemented (for eg. with over 5000 lines of code), then the important question to ask is how to distribute the implementation logic, so it could be better maintained. From a technical architecture point of view, better readability and efficiency, the react components provide a suitable solution for it.

Another important consideration for this is to increase performance of the control during build and debugging. From experience, if a control’s logic goes beyond 5000 lines of code then the build performance decreases drastically, it takes about 30 secs or more to build and another 30 secs or more to ready the control for debugging.… [Keep reading] “Build a better technical architecture with reusable components in React for SharePoint Framework webparts”

Retrieve Office 365 Audit logs using PowerShell and store in Azure table for quick retrieval

21st of December, 2018 / Asish Padhy / 1 Comment

To create custom reports for Office 365 events, we could use the Audit logs from Security and Compliance center. The process is quite simple and could be implemented easily using PowerShell. In this blog, we will look at the steps for the same.

Later we will also see how we could store this data in a Azure Storage Table, so it is easy to fetch the data available.

Steps to fetch data from Office 365 Audit log using Exchange Online PowerShell

The first step in the process is to import the commands from Exchange online PowerShell.… [Keep reading] “Retrieve Office 365 Audit logs using PowerShell and store in Azure table for quick retrieval”

PnP Provisioning PowerShell, Site Scripts or CSOM scripts – which one to use and when?

23rd of November, 2018 / Asish Padhy / No Comments

There are various approaches to plan and automate the process for Site creation and management of SharePoint Online Sites. In this blog we will look at these options and how to use with a best possible approach.

Pnp Provisioning PowerShell is a great way to automate creation of SharePoint assets through an xml or pnp template file using PowerShell. Similarly, Site scripts and site design allows us to create Site using JSON templates and also allows call to any Provisioning automation scripts or use a Template for custom implementation.… [Keep reading] “PnP Provisioning PowerShell, Site Scripts or CSOM scripts – which one to use and when?”