Happy New Year! January is here – new year, new you, right? Personally, I don’t believe in all that new year’s resolution stuff. Every day is a new opportunity to live your best life. How about we stick to new year, new updates for Office 365? There are some changes that will increase security, a change that may affect network traffic, best practice guidelines, and as always, an exciting new feature to highlight. Regarding security, Microsoft is retiring 3DES in Office 365, and sharing links that block download have begun rolling out. If you have configured your network to restrict resource access to Azure AD IP address ranges, make sure to read the piece on Azure AD updating IP Addresses. PowerApps users will be happy to see the release of a white paper on coding guidelines and standards. And finally, the exciting new feature we are highlighting this month is reminders in SharePoint.
Category: SharePoint
Not So Bold Predictions for Office 365 in 2019
As we start a new year it’s always good to reflect on what we’ve accomplished but the real fun is in trying to figure out where we are going😉. Disclaimer: I am in no way, shape or form privy to the inner workings of the various product teams at Microsoft and the views expressed within this post are my own. With that out of the way, here are my not so bold predictions for Office 365 in 2019. Continue reading “Not So Bold Predictions for Office 365 in 2019”
WHAT’S NEW IN OFFICE 365 (DECEMBER 2018)
December is upon us – the lights, the music, the shopping; but don’t let that distract you from the exciting things happening in the world of Office 365! There is something for everyone – new options for site branding in SharePoint, the ability to manage MS Teams in the Teams & Skype Admin Center, new MS Teams Administrator roles, licensing updates for PowerApps/MS Flow, and a way to restrict users from creating Office 365 groups. Continue reading “WHAT’S NEW IN OFFICE 365 (DECEMBER 2018)”
Restricting Users from Creating Office 365 Groups
Microsoft is very permissive when it comes to creating Office 365 groups. The default is that everyone can create Office 365 groups. Users can create groups from several different applications, and each user can create up to 250 groups. With this kind of freedom, things can get out of control pretty quickly. Before you know it, your environment can have a plethora of Office 365 Groups that may not be useful or even used. Sometimes the old adage is true – just because they can, doesn’t always mean they should.
Continue reading “Restricting Users from Creating Office 365 Groups”
WHAT’S NEW IN OFFICE 365 (NOVEMBER 2018)
October was a great month for those of us in the IT Pro space in Office 365, especially with the SharePoint Online Admin center enhancements. Unfortunately, we have yet to see the Teams Administration Dashboard in our tenant or any of our customers tenants but hopefully by typing this up we will assure ourselves of sticking our foot in out mouth and it will pop up. While many of the “big” developments from October are geared towards IT folks, there were still a couple noteworthy updates for the user base as well.
Side-note: If you plan to be in or around Chicago, IL in the beginning of December and want to increase your knowledge on Office 365/SharePoint head over to the SharePoint Fest Chicago event being held 12/3/2018 – 12/7/2018. Don’t let the name mislead you, they cover a lot of SharePoint items, but you will also see many other Office 365 applications covered as well as Azure topics. The event has different levels of sessions for end users, power users, IT professionals and developers so it really is for everyone. Continue reading “WHAT’S NEW IN OFFICE 365 (NOVEMBER 2018)”
Office 365 Licensing Finally Got Me
I’ve been working in SharePoint for an eternity and in Office 365 long enough to know better yet here we are. We had a customer request a dirt simple MS Flow to dump an Excel from SharePoint to a local file share on their network so that it could be pulled into a 3rd party tool. We had just done something far more complex for a similar size/type of customer, so I just glanced at the Flow Pricing page to make sure the on-premises data gateway was listed for Office 365 as I’m always paranoid about licensing, sure enough it was there. Verified permissions were good to go and I was confident we could knock this thing out in an hour…wrong! Continue reading “Office 365 Licensing Finally Got Me”
MS Flow and Azure: Creating Parent and Sub sites
The Assignment
Recently we were asked by a client to develop a MS Flow that creates a sub site when users enter a new item into a SharePoint list. What we found was there’s no simple, out of the box way to have the new sub site inherit the top navigation of the parent site. As a result, we needed to create an Azure Function to preform this function. Continue reading “MS Flow and Azure: Creating Parent and Sub sites”
