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)”
SharePoint Framework On-Premise Deploy via Gulp
SharePoint 2016 Server has support for SharePoint Framework, however there are some features missing that are present in SharePoint Online.
When first learning SharePoint Framework (SPFx), the tutorials provided by Microsoft are geared towards using SPFx in SharePoint Online. A lot of the knowledge and concepts transfer to SharePoint 2016 Server, however I found a key feature missing: Asset deployment.
SPFx solutions expect you to host your assets (html, javascript, css) in some location that is accessible from your SharePoint site. In SharePoint Online, the deployment gulp task that comes packaged with SPFx can (and by default, does) deploy your assets to the SharePoint Online App Catalog site. With SharePoint 2016 Server, asset deployment is your responsibility. I did not like this at all – I wanted a simple, configurable script/task to run that would deploy my assets where I wanted them to go.
First the setup. Continue reading “SharePoint Framework On-Premise Deploy via Gulp”
Review of How to Ensure Operational Governance for Microsoft Teams Session from Microsoft Ignite 2018
Microsoft Ignite was held September 24-28 in Orlando, Florida with more than 1600 sessions on all that Microsoft has to offer. This session, by Dux Raymond Sy, covered guidelines for proper governance of Microsoft Teams. Dux makes basic recommendations but cautions listeners that Azure Active Directory P1 is a requirement for some of the features he highlights.
Overall, it was an informative session. Dux does a great job explaining the relationship between Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups; and breaking down governance into 3 manageable areas: provisioning, operations and information cycle. Continue reading “Review of How to Ensure Operational Governance for Microsoft Teams Session from Microsoft Ignite 2018”
Employee Spotlight: Pradeep Arigue
Once the owner of a Quality Assurance business himself, Pradeep Arigue holds a Bachelors of Computer Applications, and has over 10 years’ experience in the industry. He first joined the IBS team in 2012 as a QA Analyst, eventually becoming QA Lead, and is now our QA Practice Manager.
Working onsite at client facilities in the US, Pradeep also manages the IBS offshore QA team based in Hyderabad India. When asked what he likes about working with IBS, Pradeep notes the work environment. “I love that there is always something new to learn. I consider myself very fortunate to work in a field that is always changing and growing with new technologies, capabilities and ideas.”
Initially from India, Pradeep first traveled to the US in 2014, making his 5th trip in September of 2018. Currently, he’s working with IBS’ insurance and finance clients, setting up their QA practices and creating automation proof of concepts. When he’s not researching the latest technologies, Pradeep enjoys playing cricket and seeking out the new best Thai and Mexican restaurants he can find!
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”
