Real World Computing

Why would you do this? Sometimes you need to exchange files with external parties who for some reason are unable to email them. This can happen if the files are too large or if they trip virus scanners. It's quite common for people to resort to third-party tools such as DropBox but these can be insecure.  There is an easier way.  In this post, I'll walk through a way to temporarily share a folder with an external party so that they can submit a file to you . How To 1. Open your Personal OneDrive on the web (there's a link at www.office.com ) 2. Use the Menu to create a New Folder, click New then Folder 3. Give the folder a sensible name  and click  Create . If you're planning on sharing lots of folders with different people, you might want to nest the folder a few levels down, perhaps below a folder called Shared . That way you'll be able to reduce clutter in the top levels of your OneDrive. 4. Right-Mouse click on your newly created folder a...

Understanding MFA In today's world passwords and pin numbers are simply not enough and muti-factor authentication (MFA) is increasingly required to combat fraud. MFA means that you need to use a secondary form of authentication, such as an app on your phone, in addition to a password when signing into systems.  These instructions walk you through the process of setting up MFA for a user. You may need them if your user switches phones or has to have MFA disabled and re-enabled. In the Admin Portal While technically you could skip this step and go directly to the console via its url, it's probably easier for most people to find their way from the Admin portal, so that's where I'll start. Open the Office 365 Admin Portal . ( https://admin.microsoft.com/ ) Click on Users , then on Active Users Click on the dots at the end of the menu and choose Setup Multifactor Authentication . This will take you to the MFA console.  In the MFA console Click on the M...

This is probably a bit of an "oldie" but I have been asked about it a lot recently, so I figured it was worth documenting.  Why would you use this? There's a few reasons why you might need to do an email mail merge. You've got an email that you've got to send to a few people, perhaps it's an invoice or just a seasonal greeting. Whatever it is, you don't have a group to send it to and you don't feel like just pasting everyone's email address into the BCC field. You need to reference specific pieces of data in your email -- data attached to an individual. For example, on an invoice reminder run, you might have a due date, an invoice number, an amount and a project code.  The Procedure 1. Create an Excel Spreadsheet with your people's details in it.  You should use the first line to have column headings like Name, Email and FirstName.  You only really need name and email but if you want to refer to other things (eg: like th...

Office 365 Groups are No Longer Automatic Mail Groups Until recently, if you created an office 365 group (usually by creating a Teams or a SharePoint site), you would also be able to send that group mail directly via outlook. Unfortunately, with everyone having the ability to create teams and sites on demand -- and very few people following good naming standards, it's very easy to get your corporate address books cluttered. Microsoft received a lot of feedback about this clutter and as a result, they disabled the functionality. Existing Office 365 groups are unaffected but if you create a new one, you'll find that you can't locate them in the typeahead when you want to send mail. You can however, still have your cake and eat it too. You just have to use PowerShell. Procedure Since this is an admin feature and I'm presuming that all admins should be on Multi-Factor authentication now, the instructions are for MFA.  If you're not using MFA, you mig...

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...

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-PSSessio...

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 Remote...