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Showing posts from 2018

How to Get Internal Policy Acknowledgement via Microsoft Forms and SharePoint Pages

Recently I was asked to find a way for a HR manager to circulate a new policy and collect acknowledgements from staff members. In the domino world, we'd already have custom databases to do this (or we could whip one up in a matter of minutes) but I needed to find an Office 365 equivalent.  I put the idea to the excellent Office 365 facebook group  and got a number of good suggestions that I'll follow up later to see where they lead me. I was also reminded of the Voting Buttons in outlook which are certainly the fastest method, though not the prettiest. Since I'm determined to use mainly "the new things" in Office 365, I wanted to see if there was a really simple way to do this without getting too technical for my users. The way I found involves SharePoint and Microsoft Forms (but I'm sure that you could just as easily swap out Yammer or even Teams for SharePoint). Procedure 1. Go to a (Modern) SharePoint site that all staff members have access to

How to Get your Microsoft Teams to Appear for mail and calendar operations

Depending upon your settings and circumstances, there's a chance that groups created in Microsoft Teams might play so well together.  Specifically, your team might not be available for email.  As it turns out, the teams ARE available... they're just hidden.   and a little PowerShell is enough to coax them out.  Our Example In our example, the site is called Application Redevelopment and you can see from the screenshot that it appears in teams but not in outlook. The PowerShell Commands Session Setup The setup is as per usual; Start PowerShell in Administrator Mode. Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned Press Y and Enter. $UserCredential = Get-Credential Enter your user name and password. Create the session. $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection and activate it. Import-PSSession $Session Th

Nesting Groups in Office 365

Nesting Groups has been a bit of a pain in Office 365 for a while now but there's apparently a few answers (and some updates on the way).   Here's a PowerShell method.  The Setup To start with, we're going to create a group in Office365 Admin. It should be a mail enabled security group . In our example the group will be called; GRP MotherGroup and it will have an email address of MotherGroup@mydomain.com (obviously the domain will be different at your location). For the purposes of this exercise, you'll also want to create several groups to be nested. These are distribution groups and their names and emails for the purposes of our demonstration will be; GRP BabyGroup1  babygroup1@mydomain.com GRP BabyGroup2  babygroup2@mydomain.com GRP BabyGroup3  babygroup3@mydomain.com GRP BabyGroup4  babygroup4@mydomain.com The PowerShell Commands As usual, you'll want to run PowerShell in Administrator Mode. Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned Press

What can OneDrive, Synch and SharePoint File Libraries offer Business?

I do a lot of reading on the Microsoft tech boards and I find the information that Microsoft provides around OneDrive to be both confusing and lacking in detail. I wrote this post as a means of clearing up some of the confusion.   So, here's my interpretation and opinions on what OneDrive and File Libraries in SharePoint (via a proper Office 365 E3 or E5 subscription) can offer; The Sync Client isn't all that Important SharePoint file libraries can replace all of your networked drive needs and these facilities have come a long way in the last few years. In fact, for the most part, SharePoint has finally eclipsed the need for the OneDrive Sync client.  There's a few minor exceptions to this rule. You still can't easily "link" files, so if you have an excel file which updates its data from other excel files, it a real pain to add and install those connections -- and it's much easier if you have a local synced connection. Saving files in Offi

How to Get the Members of an Office 365 Group via PowerShell

If you have a few big groups, you'll probably be asked to provide a list of their members on occasion. Like Notes, if you don't have a CRM on the front of your system, it's hard to get a list of group members that includes anything apart from their name... unless of course, you use PowerShell. Note: If you're copying and pasting from this blog entry, it's worth pasting into notepad so that you can rejoin any lines before pasting into PowerShell. I only give you one command at a time, so it should all be on one line. The Procedure Start PowerShell (in Administrator Mode) and connect to Office 365 Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned (and press Y ) $UserCredential = Get-Credential Enter your email address and password. If you're using 2 Factor Authentication... You'll need to open the Microsoft Exchange Online Powershell Module which should be on your desktop if you've followed the instructions ( see this post ). Enter the following command (c

If you use Multi-Factor Authentication, you need another Module to connect PowerShell

Last week, following best practice guidelines, we switched to Multi-Factor Authentication. While it was a little painful at first, it's working well now for our admin team. I'm not sure if or when we'll push this out to our users. It might be too difficult for them. (in fact, personally, I think that Google's token system might be far easier) In any case, as it turns out, we can't login to PowerShell now that MFA is running. A little searching provided the answer. We had to install an extension for PowerShell.  The process is already very well documented , so I won't go over here except to add one observation; You must install it via Edge (or possibly IE) -- it won't install via Chrome. 

Updating Contact Information in Office 365 from CSV via PowerShell

Some time ago, we did an export of our Domino contacts into the Office 365 address book. It was mostly successful and we got the users and their email addresses but missed a lot of detail on the phone numbers, company names and fax numbers.  At the time it didn't matter but recently we reached a point where we needed this information to be present.  The process was much fiddlier than it should have been, so here's how we did it. Exporting out of Domino This was easy, literally a five minute job for about 5000+ contacts. Domino has menu options to export as CSV, so I won't go into detail here. The end result is that you should have a CSV file that looks something like this; ExternalEmailAddress,FirstName,LastName,Name,Title,Company,Phone,MobilePhone,Fax,StreetAddress,City,StateorProvince,PostalCode,CountryOrRegion atano@clonewars.com,Ashoka,Tano,Ashoka Tano,,Cartoon Network,08 8988 9889,,,,,,, ynotfar@dagpbah.com,Yoda,Not Far,Yoda Not Far,Jedi Master,Food of th

How to Change the Domain of an Office 365 Group

It's not an unfamiliar scenario with all of the rebranding that's happening these days. Your Office365 group has the wrong mail domain and now you want to change it. It's the kind of thing that you'd expect to be able to change via the admin portal. After all, there's a neat little domain selector box on the page. Alas, that's not how Office 365 groups work. You need PowerShell for that one. PowerShell to the Rescue PowerShell, the interface you have when you don't have an interface...  Here's how to change the domain on your group. Run PowerShell as an Administrator and type the following commands; Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned $UserCredential = Get-Credential $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity " Group English Name " -PrimarySmtpAddre

It's Easy to Send Attachments from SharePoint - Here's How.

Attaching files from SharePoint has gotten a little easier of late. I'm not quite sure when the changes happened but they're very welcome.   The new functionality is available in the outlook client and outlook web access. It's available for most SharePoint groups right now, with SharePoint groups created via Yammer following at the end of May 2018. Attachments in the Outlook Client Use the following steps to attach a file via the Outlook client; Create a new Email On the Message Tab, click Attach, Below the list of recent documents, click Browse Web Locations When this expands to show a list, choose Group Files You should see your SharePoint libraries appear in a list. There's a few reasons why you might not see all of your libraries.  If this is the first time that you're using this feature, or if you're using a new installation of Outlook, it may take a while (up to 20 minutes) to fully populate the list of sites. You don't have to w

Archiving Mailboxes in the Office 365 World

In the Domino world, we used to just change the access controls on NSFs and copy or replicate them directly from the server to a PC but since we've moved to Outlook, and specifically  to Office 365, getting those mail files from the cloud has been an increasingly difficult business.  To be fair, this was difficult under IBM as well, once we moved into the Verse cloud.  Your Current Procedures aren't Working When I first started trying to get backups of files, I had a lot of people tell me how easy it was. I followed their advice -- and yes, it was easy.  After all, there's a menu option inside outlook that lets you export directly to a PST file. It was too easy. I was suspicious though. Suspicious that a person with a 10 year occupation could have a mail file that was a mere 400 MB. I looked into it and sure enough, the outlook method only gives you a recent subset of your data. If you've been backing up PSTs from the cloud using outlook, you're missing a