Cloud Decoded - Lets Understand Cloud Better

Export/Archive Microsoft Teams Chat Messages

July 29, 2020 14 Comments

Article updated on 31st Oct 2020 to use v1 API instead of Beta one to get the list of chats Recently I came across a requirement about being able to export all the chat messages. The expectation was to get something like the Conversation History in Outlook, we used to have in Skype days. Quick google search made it evident that there is no such feature available as of date. So, it was time to start a fun journey of finding it out and getting it done! Initial Findings As it goes, some initial googling led to a few articles […]

Azure DevOps

Deploy Solutions to On-Premise Servers using Azure DevOps

June 1, 2020 4 Comments

Recently I came across a requirement in which one of my teams had to deploy some code to servers hosted on AWS using Azure DevOps. Initially, it looked like not an issue as many articles are there explaining how to deploy solutions on AWS servers using Azure DevOps. However, there was a catch, none of those AWS servers were exposed over internet, i.e. there was no public IP assigned! And of course the servers were behind a firewall, essentially similar to any on-premise environment. To make things even more interesting, the solution required to be deployed had a mix of […]

MS Teams, Office 365

Using Tags in Microsoft Teams

May 4, 2020 2 Comments

As the Microsoft Teams usage grows, so does the number of teams workspaces and list of members in each of those. Users quickly started to look for ways to just refer a smaller subset of the all the members of a team/channel. Recently, Private Teams Channel feature was rolled out and that served some purpose, but I see that doing more harm to actual “collaboration” then helping it. Mostly because many business users just started to create private teams to isolate their sub teams even though the purpose was just to ensure that larger team doesn’t get bothered with unrelated […]

Flow, Office 365, Power Automate

Get Instant Office 365 Health Status Notifications with Power Automate Using Service Communications API

April 5, 2020 5 Comments

I have written a couple of articles about this topic earlier like this which explains how to monitor the office 365 health status using PowerShell and this one which does the same using Power Automate. But I kept thinking about that both of these solutions are more like “Pull” status. Meaning, we check every 30 minutes and see if there are any new messages in the health center. Not very efficient if you want yourself to be kept updated and take actions quickly. Why this Article This article is about following a similar approach as already described in the previous […]

Flow, Office 365, Power Automate

Automate Office 365 Health Status Monitoring with Power Automate/Flow Using Service Communications API

March 16, 2020 24 Comments

This article is outdated now since Microsoft retired the Service Communication API in Dec 2021. Please look at this article instead, which uses Microsoft Graph API to achieve the same. I wrote an article on the same topic a couple of weeks ago that explains how to monitor Office 365 Health Status with PowerShell. I know, like me, there are a lot of other Power Automate/Flow enthusiasts who would prefer to achieve the same without writing any lines of scripts. So, here is it. Before you get started, ensure that the account you are using with Power Automate/Flow at least has a […]

Office 365

Automate Office 365 Health Status Monitoring Using Office 365 Service Communications API

March 2, 2020 14 Comments

This article is outdated now since Microsoft retired the Service Communication API in Dec 2021. Please look at this article instead, which uses Microsoft Graph API to achieve the same. I wrote an article on how to Automate Office 365 Health Status Monitoring using PowerShell a couple of years ago, which was found very useful for many Office 365 Admins. It was based on the API “shdtenantcommunications”, which has now been discontinued by Microsoft. I have put an update on that article about this, so that you can save your time by NOT attempting to try n make that work […]

MS Teams, Office 365

Using MS Teams Message Broadcast for Faster User Adoption

November 23, 2019 2 Comments

In many organizations, MS Teams has been received fairly well. Wouldn’t it be interesting to broadcast some small tips and tricks directly over Teams chat than bugging users with frequent emails, which they tend to ignore?

MS Teams, Office 365

Enable/Disable Guest Access in Individual MS Teams

September 15, 2019 9 Comments

In SharePoint Online, you can enable Guest access at tenant level and then control it at each site collection level whether you want that to be enabled/disabled in individual site collections. Wouldn’t that be nice to be able to control guest access in teams in a similar way as it’s done in SharePoint – at Individual team level?

Office 365, SharePoint Online

Enable Google Federation for External Access in SharePoint Online

August 5, 2019 11 Comments

In combination with “SharePoint and OneDrive integration with Azure AD B2B”, google federation makes external sharing of SharePoint Online and OneDrive content/sites a piece of cake.

Office 365, PowerApps

Suppress User Consent Popup in PowerApps

July 24, 2019 13 Comments

By default when you deploy any PowerApps application which uses connections to various data sources like SharePoint, Azure AD etc, it would show a popup to all the users trying to access the application and ask for their consent to be able to connect to the backend data sources on their behalf. In general, from security point of view, this might still be acceptable to some organizations. Since also, this appears to be a one time consent granted by end users. But is it? Everytime, you make any update in the PowerApps application related to those data sources, the consent […]