The Tech Blog of Dan Usher

Category: Cloud

  • Are you blocking Office 365?

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    One of the funnier things that I run into every so often is when someone’s Office 365 implementation isn’t working because their firewall administrator is following the age-old practice of least permission.  Definitely, a good way to keep your environment secure, and I wouldn’t tell you not to go down this path… but you probably want…

  • Azure: Setting up a custom domain for Office 365 by way of Azure Active Directory

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    If you’re like me, sometimes you like to do things a little more efficiently and elegantly through PowerShell or through the Azure portal when it deals with the underlying infrastructure that’s associated with an Office 365 tenant. If you’re using Office 365 you’ve established a tenant with a .onmicrosoft.com name.  Reminder PSA: You can’t change…

  • Security and Compliance with Office 365

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    If you’ve signed up for Office 365 and kicking the tires? Consider checking some of the capabilities that you get with the Security and Compliance Portal within Office 365.  How do you get there? If you head over to https://protection.office.com you’ll be prompted to log in with your Work ID.  Once you’re in you’ll be able…

  • Office 365: Managing your users through PowerShell

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    If you’re like me, then you tend to find yourself wanting to automate as much as possible, or at least be able to work with sets of data in a way that quickly allows you to get to the root of an issue rather than clicking through endless screens of information. In case you were…

  • Office 365: How to become an Office Insider

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    Microsoft continues to provide iterative changes to the Microsoft Office productivity suite. At one point in time Microsoft was deploying changes on a very frequent basis. While this was helpful for many users that were excited to see new bits flowing to their computing desktops on a regular basis, the amount of change fatigue became…

  • Don’t turn into a pumpkin because of DirSync with your Office 365 system

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    I feel like I may have already mentioned this on the Twitter, but I feel like I need to put out a reminder PSA for folks that perhaps were asleep at the terminal or looking at their iPhone playing Pokemon Go… DirSync and AzureAD Sync Service will no longer connect as of 1 January 2018.…

  • Azure’s Access Control Services Retiring

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    If you’ve been working with Azure for a while you may have come across a need to make use of Azure’s Access Control Services. This service offering or capability effectively allowed developers to create something that was hosted on Azure but have authentication and authorization to be completed performed outside of the application that a…

  • Office 365 Group Management and Auto-Expiration Public Preview

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    If you’ve been working with Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, you probably remember a utility that was made available as a part of SharePoint Server 2003 to automatically delete old site collections that hadn’t been worked with in a while. This was an incredibly helpful utility for system administrators that were watching their SharePoint systems…

  • Reston SharePoint User Group – August 2017

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    Every so often, I take a few nanoseconds and reflect on the activities within the community. Like everything in life, things ebb and flow. In the case of the SharePoint and Office Server and Services community though, it continues to thrive. This past weekend the Women in SharePoint Group within the DC area hosted a…

  • Azure QuickStart Templates

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    If you’re like me you prefer to automate things as much as possible. In some instances that means using desired state configuration, in other instances it’s launching a series of PowerShell scripts. This saves time and helps to ensure a configuration that’s repeatable and easy to kick off without a ton of work – yes…