Tag: Office 365

Categories
Office

Are you an Insider?

A decade ago we found ourselves craving new features from Microsoft for the Office platform. We found ourselves getting a Service Pack every 12-18 months that was comprised of hotfixes and perhaps one or two new major features. Release cycles were long and innovation came in fits and spurts. Testing new features was something that as an outsider, you never got to see until that Service Pack was released.

Microsoft introduced their Office delivery rings in 2015 and we began to see an increased cadence in fixes and features being pushed to end users in small increments instead of in large service or feature packs. Caveat being that with increased release cycles that meant that a lot of changes were suddenly flowing to end users.

As those features moved the interface around rapidly end users found themselves suffering from change fatigue and Microsoft introduced some changes to how updates would be pushed out, changing the defaults of channels that users were put into. Rather than having users receive updates monthly, it was recognized that business users (and consumers at home) likely would benefit from a slower release and delivery cycle and also provide help desks time to adjust pushing users into a 6-month cycle.

Where do you find the information about features that are a part of each release?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-history-microsoft365-apps-by-date

For those that prefer to have the latest and greatest, there’s the Microsoft insider program. If you’re an unmanaged user (e.g. a home user) then it’s pretty simple to join the Insider program by following the steps provided as a link off of the Microsoft Office site here – https://insider.office.com/en-us/?ref=O365.Help

If you’re a Business user where things are locked down by GPO or Intune, there are options to work through how to make “Insider” capabilities available to your users – https://insider.office.com/en-us/business/deploy

Even if you’re not looking to shift your user base to the latest and greatest, I’d encourage you to check it out for a single user account perhaps to get a feeling of some of the cool new features that are on the public Insider’s blog.

Categories
Training

Microsoft Learn

If you find yourself here because you searched on “Microsoft Learn” because you heard about it at a conference or on a podcast or somewhere, you’re in the right place.

Microsoft Learn is a site that Microsoft has been slowly but surely growing over the past few years, putting together technical documentation to help you in enhancing your knowledge to in part make use of their platforms. Whether you’re someone that is looking to learn more about Microsoft 365 / Office 365, Dynamics, the Power Platform, or Azure, Microsoft.com/learn has content that is easy to digest and consumable in small bites.

In the past, if you wanted to learn about a particular product that Microsoft developed at a 100 level you may find a few blogs out there or you might find a training class that cost a few hundred dollars. Microsoft has truly removed the barrier to learning its products through this learning platform.

One of the features that are pretty handy if you’re looking to learn Azure is the sandbox capability – effectively Microsoft spins up a pre-configured subscription that only allows you to perform certain actions but at no charge to you for consuming services to learn how to make use of Azure. Well done team.

Categories
Office 365

Sticky Notes

If you’ve been using OneNote for a while you’ve probably found the ability to review tour notes on mobile as something helpful. Caveat, you probably don’t leave OneNote open at all times… and sometimes maybe you don’t need a whole notebook, just a Sticky Note.

In Windows 10 you may have noticed an app on your desktop calmly Sticky Notes. Recently (maybe the past 6 months… hard to say…) Sticky Notes on the desktop became integrated with the OneNote mobile app.

It’s pretty helpful when you just need to put together a quick bulleted list while you’re out and about that you need to be on your desktop.

Nonetheless, more details here on Docs – https://support.office.com/en-us/article/get-started-with-sticky-notes-86b36182-fdf5-4f9b-af7a-2846f83263f5#ID0EAACAAA=Windows_10

Categories
Community Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365…

Recently I was speaking with a few individuals in the community and it was oddly interesting to hear that there seemed to be some misconceptions about Microsoft 365 and what exactly it is comprised of… is it the Operating System, or is it Office 365, or is it something else.

Literally. Eye opening. So eye opening that I feel the urge to drink coffee as I scribe this. Hold on while I go get another cuppa coffee.

Pertaining to what Microsoft 365 is and isn’t… it shouldn’t be too difficult for an individual that works in the IT field to keep up to date by reading all documentation, updates, tweets, articles, etc. in their field – right? Perhaps we need to assess how much time we’re reading as opposed to doing. Seriously though I read a lot during the day… almost as much as Ciphertxt and his trusty bot as they process feeds of information at all times of the day and night while listening to industry podcasts to stay ahead of the rest of us. Yes, even I feel somewhat overwhelmed.

If you’re feeling like there’s too much information to consume and you do want to know more about the platform that you’re working with and the new technological changes that are coming forth… I’d highly encourage you to read the Service Description for Microsoft 365 on a regular basis – perhaps once a month.

The Service Description is sitting in plain site with a URL that’s easy to remember – http://www.office365sd.com. Be advised that it this document link does redirect you to a docs.microsoft.com site.

In addition to the Office 365 Service Description, it’s not a bad idea to follow the conversations and articles being released over at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/. This is where Microsoft works to digitally meet the community. Many new features or changes are socialized through with supporting documentation back at the Microsoft Doc’s site.

Also, if you’re looking for something that you can download, maybe the Microsoft Cloud IT Podcast is for you to able to consume information in byte size chunks – https://www.msclouditpropodcast.com/

Back to the subject at hand and dispelling misconceptions of what Microsoft 365 actually consists of? It’s the overarching brand for all Microsoft Collaboration products and in some sense security and OS. This covers home, personal, business, enterprise, education, and government product lines.

For Enterprise level users, Microsoft 365 includes Windows 10, Microsoft (Office) 365, and EMS.

For Business, Home, and Personal users, it means rebranding of the services but not necessarily inclusion of the OS or EMS – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/03/30/new-microsoft-365-offerings-small-and-medium-sized-businesses/

What’s fascinating to me though is when individuals get wrapped around the axle differentiating the workloads of Enterprise Microsoft 365 and what was more commonly referred to up until recently as Office 365. Why? Mostly due to individuals referring to Office 365 as Microsoft 365 without realizing that they were now including the OS and EMS components into the discussion. Now that they’re all bundled together I foresee many individuals that previously did not work much with EMS, InTune, or the OS side of things getting involved and engaged (perhaps just the IT Pros) in developing solutions that encompass mobility in more ways than just having apps on a device to access their data (OneDrive, Office, etc.)

It’s an exciting new world – dispell the misconceptions of Microsoft 365 by picking up the Service Description and a couple of pots of coffee and get cranking on learning all of the things… and also start working to learn some new things today.

Categories
Off Topic

SharePoint, where for art though?

Captain’s log… the vapor and mist of the cloud have formed and we see that things are starting to take shape in the realm of Office 365. Dan Holme and his cadre of excellence have continued to chart forward with making experiences usable by end users, providing capabilities that to build on-premises, while feasible in large chunks of time, come to life.

In the day of past with SharePoint before “v12” came out, developers seemed to hack away at the core of SharePoint, injecting and reflecting methods to bring to life the Frankenstein solutions that clients were seeking. Not that these solutions weren’t valuable, nor was it that they weren’t well put together, but the typical SharePoint developer had to know how develop using Object Oriented Languages… namely C# or VB.net. Both languages were not for the commoner, or the SharePoint Citizen as some may call it.

Then came SharePoint 2013 and the app model was brought forward. The Internet had solved identity for the Internet (no one really likes leaving port 88 open on the Internet for Kerberos tickets to be passed between realms mind you). Developers were now free to roam about and develop where they wanted, how they wanted. And it was good.

Then Microsoft took a page from it’s competitors and started offering experiences and building out a Framework that would allow developers to interact with the underlying components of SharePoint and Office 365 using REST API calls. Gone were the days of requiring developers to know C#… the day of the JavaScript developer (and really any other developer that knows how to make REST calls) was here.

Experiences like PowerApps and Flow though have also largely taken away the needs and desires to learn a “hard” language (actually, thinking about it, if you don’t know how to construct the logic of a program, JavaScript becomes all out hacking in some cases… not that people didn’t copy others C# code and wonder why it didn’t work).

So where do we find ourselves? Well, as a SharePoint admin, I must say that there’s less and less I find myself worrying about. Sure I still have my concerns about opening up Access Services on my 2013 farms that are still operating and having developers create app after app watching the SQL server backend topple over. And sure, in the 2016 environments I’ve embraced MinRoles with open arms.

But why should I continue to build on-premises when Microsoft has Office 365 / SharePoint Online available with SLAs that I can’t match on-premises? What’s a trusty admin to do? It’s time to take some time and REST… just kidding, it’s time to help organizations migrate to SharePoint Online where it makes sense and make use of Hybrid to help them make use of some of the tools (ala PowerApps and Flow) that make their end users lives a little bit easier.

And maybe also learn some REST… because you never know when some prototyping will come in handy.

Categories
Office 365

Office 365 Home Device Limits…

In case you missed it, Jared Spataro recently announced that the Office 365 Home and Personal subscriptions will no longer have install limits on devices as of October 2, 2018.  A caveat to this is that you can only be logged into five devices at a time.  In the past it was 10 devices in total (across five users for the home plan, or two installs for the personal account).

Additionally, Office 365 Home is upping the number of seats from 5 to 6.  While that may seem pretty insignificant, that’s an additional license to software essentially as well as the services that come along with it and a terabyte of storage on OneDrive.

More about this can be read yonder on the Microsoft Technical Community here:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Blog/You-re-about-to-get-even-more-from-your-Office-365-Home-or/ba-p/234907

Categories
Azure Cloud Office 365

Don’t lose your identity in the Cloud…

If you happen to log into your Office 365 Admin Portal on a regular basis good on you – though perhaps you can get most of your alerts through the Office 365 Admin app on your phone. If you do happen to log in though and you’re using Directory Synchronization by way of either Azure AD Connect or Microsoft Identity Manager, you hopefully don’t stumble upon a message like this on the Home page.

Screenshot 2018-03-24 23.31.07

If you do though, don’t worry, it’s not just a red highlighted bit of text, but it’s a link to your Directory Synchronization status (not DirSync is no longer around… AAD Connect is the way to go these days). What does it mean to your end users if Directory Synchronization is failing? Well, any change that they happen to make to their profile within your on-premises Active Directory won’t be synchronized with Azure Active Directory until the issue is resolved. Not a big deal – right? Well, just think if you changed your password on-premises, you’ll still be using your old password through Office 365.

If you happen to click the error message though you’ll come to a page with this displayed, you’ll note that you see something like this:

Screenshot 2018-03-24 23.28.11

If you’re not familiar with the above, it’s the Sync Status Health page. Typically if things are working good then you’ll see the last time that you sync’d successfully in addition to other pertinent information about your Office 365 tenant’s synchronization status as well as a less stormy picture of the cloud. 🙂

In this case though, the troubleshooting tips are fairly helpful and link to https://support.office.com/en-us/article/fixing-problems-with-directory-synchronization-for-office-365-79c43023-5a47-45ae-8068-d8a26eee6bc2?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

In this case, it just happens to be that I turned off the server that the Azure AD Connect tool was running on. Turning the server back and on and the error messages go away and identity changes begin to synchronize once more – life is good.

Categories
Cloud Office 365 Office 365

How do I remove my domain name from Office 365?

So you have a proof of concept Office 365 instance and you realize that you want to take things to Production, but you also realize that you want to keep your POC tenant up and oeprational. Caveat, you went through and applied your Domain Name to your tenant thorugh another registrar.  How do you get your domain back?

Well, it’s not as difficult as you might think.  Simply wander into the Office 365 Admin Portal over at https://portal.office.com/adminportal/

Under the “Setup” section of the Admin Center, you should see “Domains“. That will show you what domains you currently have associated with your Office 365 Tenant.

Screenshot 2018-03-25 21.32.07.pngIn my case I’ve got a custom domain, “potatoe.cloud” associated with my Office 365 tenant but still have my “onmicrosoft.com” domain as the default.

Step one to removing a domain is setting another domain as default. It’s pretty quick and easy, click on the other domain (in this case spsvabeach.onmicrosoft.com) and click “Set as Default.”

Next, within potatoe.cloud, I need to click on “Remove.” This should be simple enough.

Screenshot 2018-03-25 21.34.44.png

Crikey! What’s this message at the bottom yammering about being enabled in the region? So essentially, I get to write a quick PowerShell script using some of the Azure AD components available over at the PowerShell Gallery – https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/MSOnline/1.1.166.0

The gist of the script was running get-msoluser and feeding that to an array. From there looping through and modifying the UserPrincipalName’s domain name. Required a little more work than expected but in the end, worked quite nicely.

If you’ve only got a few users, probably easy enough to make this change through the Office 365 Admin UI. If you’ve got more than a few, PowerShell is your friend – working with arrays and foreach clauses to filter out the users you need to update to the “onmicrosoft.com” domain or another domain you’ve established and working.

Screenshot 2018-03-25 22.57.27

After you get below a certain number of users (unknown what that is) with the non-offending domain remaining in the UPN, you can delete the domain from the tenant.

From there you can change your DNS settings back within your DNS registrar to continue making use of the domain or setting it up on your new Office 365 tenant that you’re actually switching over to use for production.

Nevertheless, be sure to try this all out in a test tenant and be mindful that if you’ve got a provider hosted app that’s looking for a specific domain name associated with a user and it’s changed, the user’s access may also have been changed with it. This is similar to if you have an on-premises application and you modify the user’s User Principal Name on-premises – applications that used to rely on that begin to break.

Bottom line – TEST! TEST! TEST!

After you’ve worked out the kinks, you should be good to go! Best of luck!

 

Categories
Azure Infrastructure Office 365

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

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 your tenant name after you’ve created it – at least not right now.  But you can mask it using custom DNS names.

If you’re a little leery of Azure, then perhaps this will help to peel back the onion and bring tears of happiness to your face.

Step 0 – realize what you’re doing 🙂 and also that you probably want to make certain that you have permission to use the domain name that you’re setting up on the Office 365 / Azure instance that you’re going to perform these configuration changes on. Note that if you’re using a domain name already for something else that it might be wise to create a subdomain to tinker with rather than making “adjustments” to the main domain that you’ve got (e.g. something.danusher.com rather than danusher.com).

Step 1 – Head on over to your Office 365 admin portal (https://portal.office.com/adminportal/) and go to the bottom left corner to expand the “Admin Centers” section and click on “Azure Active Directory” (https://aad.portal.azure.com/binarybrewery.onmicrosoft.com). This will launch you to your Azure Active Directory admin center within Azure (alternatively, you can go to portal.azure.com and click on Azure Active Directory from the left most blade to open these settings).

Step 2 – Expand “Azure Active Directory” from the left most blade and then select “Custom domain names” from the blade that appears. This will list out the default tenant name that you have with your Office 365 tenant that was built out with your tenant when it was provisioned.

Screenshot 2018-03-27 21.52.54.png

Step 3 – Add a custom domain by typing in the name of the domain and then determining if you want to use a TXT record or an MX record to verify that you own the domain. If you’re not familiar with how to edit your TXT or MX records, Microsoft has some handy documentation on this over on the Office 365 support documents – https://support.office.com/en-us/article/gather-the-information-you-need-to-create-office-365-dns-records-77f90d4a-dc7f-4f09-8972-c1b03ea85a67

Screenshot 2018-03-27 21.57.20.png

Step 4 – Wait a while. Or as Spence would say while provisioning your User Profile Application, get a cuppa coffee.  DNS sometimes can take a while to provision.

Screenshot 2018-03-27 21.58.58.png

Sadly there are no exciting fireworks through the Azure Portal when you verify ownership of a domain.Screenshot 2018-03-27 22.31.19.png

Just a quick toast that briefly appears in the upper right hand corner of the Azure Portal.

Step 5 – Determine whether you just want to setup Azure AD Connect to get started with Directory and Password Synchronization, or go back to the Office 365 portal and setup the remaining DNS entries to be able to fully recognize the capabilities of Office 365. Nevertheless, you’ll see this screen within Azure upon completion of domain verification.

Screenshot 2018-03-27 22.14.05.png

Back in the Office 365 Admin Center however, you’ll notice that the domain says that it’s still being setup.

Screenshot 2018-03-27 22.34.09.pngStep 6 – Complete the setup of the domain by clicking on the line item associated with the domain name that has been verified by Microsoft Azure.

If I point my name servers from this domain through my registrar to be managed by Microsoft’s name servers, a lot of things just go away as Microsoft manages the domain for me at that point. If I however want to perform these configurations on my own as I have a complex DNS environment, I can do so by adding the values similar to these (fairly standard where you simply replace “potatoe-cloud” with your DNS name)word:

screenshot-2018-03-27-22-35-13.png

After you’ve updated your DNS within your registrar, you’ll see something like this if you happen to have an incorrect record…

Screenshot 2018-03-27 22.48.11.png

In my case I accidentally had an extra character in there – simple cut and paste error. 😐

After making my corrections and verifying settings I received a nice note that all was configured and ready to go.

Screenshot 2018-03-27 22.54.53.png

From there, any new user I create within Office 365 will make use of the @potatoe.cloud domain name rather than the Tenant name.

Congrats on having your Office 365 email accounts now masked as well as user login’s. I’d recommend learning how to setup and use Azure AD Connect so that you’re able to move forward with having your domain identities provisioned with Office 365 / Azure Active Directory to enhance your end user’s experience.

Remember – DNS isn’t that difficult. But it’s easy to mess up and also then make things more difficult.

Categories
Azure Office 365 PowerShell

Office 365: Managing your users through PowerShell

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 curious, Office 365 makes use of Azure Active Directory behind the scenes for user managment. As Azure Active Directory is an enterprise resource for identity management for cloud hosted applications, Microsoft has gone to great length to create several interfaces to it. Granted, I could just use a REST call through the Microsoft Graph API to create or delete a user through a POST command, but I can also use PowerShell from a Windows based device.

For user management, our first step is to download the appropriate PowerShell Module.  This can be done simply by installing the module through PowerShell running

install-module -name azuread

This will install the PowerShell module specifically for Azure AD and allow you to manage your users. From there before you can make any changes to your user base you’ll need to authenticate. An easy way to do this is as follows:

$creds = get-credential -credential
connect-azure-ad -credential $creds

From there you can parse your users and make modifications to your hearts desire. Running “Get-AzureADUser” enumerates all user objects.  Load it into an array and work with the users as you wish.

Nevertheless, for more on this topic, check out the Microsoft Support docs over at:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/enterprise/powershell/connect-to-office-365-powershell

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/AzureAD/2.0.1.3