Cloud Decoded - Lets Understand Cloud Better

Optimize SharePoint Search Results using Auto Tagged Content

June 26, 2019 No Comments

Sometime ago, I wrote an article explaining how to use Azure Text Analytics Service to Automatically Tag Documents stored in SharePoint document libraries. The expected outcome would be that most of your SharePoint documents would be “Tagged” with keywords extracted from the content of the corresponding documents. But what next? How does it help? Let’s take a look at how can we benefit once we have most of the documents properly tagged. Target State Before we jump in to the benefits, let’s establish what we are trying to achieve here Create an additional field, say Content Area(s), in the document […]

Office 365

Disable Delve for Selected Users using PowerShell/MS Flow

April 9, 2019 12 Comments

Office 365 users seem to have love and hate relationship with Delve. Some love it for ease of access to content which would otherwise be difficult to find and others hate it for the very same reason, that it opens up the fault lines in their SharePoint setup where sites permissions are not kept updates when users move around various teams. Problem Statement The best way to define it would be – The “fear of unknown”, like “I don’t know which of my files will start appearing to everyone else”, is common among senior management and some users working in […]

Azure

Redirect to SharePoint Online URL using Azure Web App

March 17, 2019 2 Comments

With all the ongoing applications migrations to cloud, specially to SaaS destinations like SharePoint Online (SPO), at times it becomes necessary to provide a period of URL redirections between Old and New applications. For example, in an on-premise environment, we can use any URL like https://companyportal.company.com, but when the same content is migrated to SharePoint Online, we can’t retain the same URL. In SPO, the closest matching URL we can get would be something like https://companyportal.SharePoint.com. Also, because in the on-premise environment there are numerous site collections/subsites hierarchy, so just redirecting the root site may not be enough. Many business […]

Office 365

Automate On-Premise AD Account Creation with MS Flow

November 29, 2018 32 Comments

I was recently asked to work on Automating the on-premise Active Directory Account creation. The idea was simple – Hiring manager fills up a form with the required details about the new joinee and submits and then the account should get created in On-premise AD and eventually be synced with Azure AD with required licenses assigned. The obvious expectation was to use available tools only which come as part of Office 365 E3 license suite. Unfortunately Custom HTTP calls to Microsoft Graph became a Premium Connector in February 1, 2019 and now requires a P1 or P2 license. Implicit Requirements […]

Office 365

Access On-Premise Extension Attributes from Azure AD in MS Flow

October 26, 2018 4 Comments

I recently came across a requirement where I needed to read SamAccountName and some ExtensionAttributes from Azure AD which are synced with On-Premise AD. I thought since all the On-premise attributes are being synced using Azure AD Connect, it should be easy enough to read those values from Azure AD using PowerShell or Microsoft Graph APIs. Unfortunately Custom HTTP calls to Microsoft Graph became a Premium Connector in February 1, 2019 and now requires a P1 or P2 license of MS Flow. Getting Started Before I jumped into the solution, I wanted to be sure that Extension Attributes are indeed […]

Office 365

Easily Switch Between Multiple Accounts in Office 365

October 5, 2018 15 Comments

More often than not, in Office 365, IT workers find themselves using multiple accounts. Like one account for normal user access, another with Tenant Admin permissions and so on. Even though, the interface for switching logged in accounts in office 365 has become better now, than it used to be few months ago, it still leaves a lot to be desired. If you use Microsoft Edge Browser, look at this article instead, which explains how to achieve the same with Egde. What’s the Problem Let’s take a look at what we are talking about. Suppose you have 2 different accounts, […]

Office 365

Automate License Assignments in Office 365

September 5, 2018 4 Comments

License assignments has been one of the core governance concerns in Office 365 . With ever growing list of Office 365 Services and mix of license types (like E1, E3, E5 and a combination of those), this has created another world of processes (and PowerShell scripts) to keep up. So, what can we do to help reduce the amount of efforts spent on this? Yes, you got it right, Automate! Why bother about it? Before we jump into the solution, let’s spend some time on understanding “why” it is required in the first place. In most medium to large size organizations, […]

SharePoint Online

Send Meeting Invites to SharePoint Online Calendar

August 28, 2018 41 Comments

Sometime ago, I wrote an article about How to enable Incoming Mails in SharePoint Online. In that article, I talked about how can we use Microsoft Flow to achieve the functionality. But there is another common functionality available in SharePoint on-premise versions which allows us to send meeting invites to SharePoint calendars. This functionality has been widely used to make a SharePoint calendar as Leave Tracker or to track important events. Let’s take a look at how this can be achieved in SharePoint Online. This solution makes use of Power Automate/Flow. If you want to know about some of the […]

Office 365

Implement Custom Alert Policies in Office 365

August 1, 2018 1 Comment

Alert Policies are a bit of hidden gems in Office 365. There are a wide list of activities which can be tracked using these alert policies and a notification can be received when such activities/events occur. As per the official definition, we can use alert policies to track user and admin activities, malware threats, or data loss incidents in Office 365. After choosing the activity you want to be alerted on, refine the policy by adding conditions, deciding when to trigger the alert, and who should receive notifications. Alert Policies Alert Policies are part of Office 365 Security & Compliance […]

Office 365

Office 365 Management Activity API to Automate SharePoint Governance

June 7, 2018 12 Comments

In one of my previous articles, I talked about How to use Azure Text Analytics Service to Automatically Tag SharePoint Documents. One of the alternatives for implementation I pointed out was using Office 365 Management Activity API to identify when a document gets uploaded and trigger the metadata tagging. In this article, I am going to go in a bit more detail about how that can be achieved. However, by the end of this article, it should be fairly clear to you that similar solution can also implement various different scenarios to automate SharePoint governance. Introduction Summarizing the introduction from […]