Create Office365 business value through the power of limitation

22nd of January, 2019 / / 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”

Provisioning complex Modern Sites with Azure Functions and Flow – Part 3 – Post Provisioning Site Configuration

3rd of October, 2018 / / No Comments

In the previous two blogs part 1 and part 2, we looked at steps to create a Modern team site and apply a custom provisioning template to it. In this blog, we will have a look at the steps for the post provisioning process to implement site specific requirements. Some of them could be:

1. Apply default values to list fields
2. Create a bunch of default folders
3. Manage Security groups (SP level) and permission level.… [Keep reading] “Provisioning complex Modern Sites with Azure Functions and Flow – Part 3 – Post Provisioning Site Configuration”

Measure O365 ATP Safe Attachments Latency using PowerShell

19th of July, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is a cloud based security service that is part of the O365 E5 offering. Also can be separately added to other O365 subscriptions. Now a lot can be learned about ATP from here. But in this post we’re going to extract data corresponding to one of ATP’s primary features; ATP Safe Attachments.

In short, ATP Safe Attachments scans documents for malicious content and can block these attachments depending on the policy configuration.… [Keep reading] “Measure O365 ATP Safe Attachments Latency using PowerShell”

Report of All Taxonomy Fields containing a term in SharePoint Tenancy

24th of April, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Recently we had a request to find fields/columns in all lists across the tenancy which have a specific Taxonomy term because we needed to report on field usage across all site collections. However, we found that getting a report of all Taxonomy fields in your SharePoint tenancy that is linked to a specific Term Set can get quite daunting because there is no direct SharePoint Query to fetch the associations.
The technical challenge is that using PnP PowerShell, the Taxonomy fields are returned as a generic SP.Field… [Keep reading] “Report of All Taxonomy Fields containing a term in SharePoint Tenancy”

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”

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”

Restoring deleted OneDrive sites in Office365

16th of October, 2017 / / 1 Comment

A customer has requested whether it was possible to restore a OneDrive site that had been deleted when the user’s account was marked for deletion in AD. After a bit of research, I was able to restore the site back and retrieved the files (luckily it was deleted less than 30 days ago).
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How to configure a Graphical PowerShell Dev/Admin/Support User Interface for Azure/Office365/Microsoft Identity Manager

16th of January, 2017 / / No Comments

During the development of an identity management solution I find myself with multiple PowerShell/RDP sessions connected to multiple environments using different credentials often to obtain trivial data/information. It is easy to trip yourself up as well with remote powershell sessions to differing environments. If only there was a simple UI that could front-end a set of PowerShell modules and make those simple queries quick and painless. Likewise to allow support staff to execute a canned set of queries without providing them elevated permissions.… [Keep reading] “How to configure a Graphical PowerShell Dev/Admin/Support User Interface for Azure/Office365/Microsoft Identity Manager”

Azure AD Connect – Using AuthoritativeNull in a Sync Rule

1st of December, 2016 / / No Comments

There is a feature in Azure AD Connect that became available in the November 2015 build 1.0.9125.0 (listed here), which has not had much fanfare but can certainly come in handy in tricky situations. I happened to be working on a project that required the DNS domain linked to an old Office 365 tenant to be removed so that it could be used in a new tenant. Although the old tenant was no long used for Exchange Online services, it held onto the domain in question, and Azure AD Connect was being used to synchronise objects between the on-premise Active Directory and Azure Active Directory.… [Keep reading] “Azure AD Connect – Using AuthoritativeNull in a Sync Rule”