SharePoint can be intimidating, especially for those of use who don’t work with it everyday. In this episode, @WonderLaura tells us why SharePoint isn’t so scary and we discuss some of the SharePoint announcements at Ignite.
For more information on The Cloud Architects podcast, check us out on SoundCloud. We are also available on your favorite podcast app:
Change can be difficult for any organization. Changing the working culture of your user population and driving product adoption can seem overwhelming, especially when applying traditional principles and adoption practices to today's cloud world. Nic and I sat down with Patience Wootton from Dentsu Aegis Network at Ignite recently to understand what it means to be an Office 365 Product Owner and talk about change, driving user adoption and being an early Microsoft Teams adopter.
For more information on The Cloud Architects podcast, check us out on SoundCloud. We are also available on your favorite podcast app:
OneDrive for Business has come a long way since it was initially launched and has earned it's place as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Content Collaboration Platforms. Nic and I sat down with Stephen Rose from the SharePoint/OneDrive team at Ignite recently to talk about some of the exciting new things that will be coming to OneDrive soon.
For more information on The Cloud Architects podcast, check us out on SoundCloud. We are also available on your favorite podcast app:
Better late than never.. I'm delighted to annouce that I'll be joining The Cloud Architects Podcast as a co-host. Started by fellow MVPs Nicolas Blank and Warren du Toit, the Cloud Architects podcast is about best practice, guidance, news and cutting edge Microsoft cloud technologies - I'm really excited to be involved.
Microsoft Ignite gave us a great opportunity to connect with and talk to some really interesting people - those episodes will be published soon, but in the meantime, we recently recorded in introductory episode where we talk about some of the complexities of adopting cloud technologies at scale:
For more information about the podcast, visit us on the web or twitter. We are still getting started and experimenting with show formats, etc. and would love feedback so feel free to get in touch and let us know how we are doing.
The last few weeks have been incredibly busy.. I spent a week in Europe and presented a couple of sessions at Office 365 Engage in The Netherlands and after a quick laundry stop at home I headed off to Washington D.C were I presented two sessions at a small technology conference for overseas schools (K-12). That’s two conferences and four sessions in two weeks – I was pretty exhausted at the end of it all but was super excited when I received an email from the Microsoft MVP program informing me that I had been awarded my fourth Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award.
I’m truly honored to be part of this great community and have some ambitious plans for the next year, so stay tuned!
Last week, I was fortunate enough to speak at the inaugural Office 365 Engage conference in Haarlem, Netherlands. I had been looking forward to it for months, not only because it was my first time visiting the Netherlands, but I had heard about how picturesque the city was and had been told that the conference venue, the Philharmonie, was something quite special. I can honestly say that no description could do it justice, it really is the nicest conference venue I’ve ever seen.
The conference itself was extremely well organized and I definitely have to compliment the organizers for the level of thought that went into every detail. There were more than 40 speakers, 31 of which were Microsoft MVPs. We were encouraged to call on our real world experience and be independent voices so this was a true technical conference and not just another marketing junket. There were 6 tracks with plenty of great content to go around:
My sessions on Office 365 management and mobile device management were well received and I even managed to pull off an elaborate demo using a couple of devices. A special thanks to MVH for helping me getting around the need for multiple HDMI inputs, it definitely made the demo flow more smoothly.
After a few great days, I can only imagine that Office 365 Engage 2018 will be even better. If you are looking to build your skills and network with some of the best in the business, I’d definitely encourage you to check out Office 365 Engage in 2018 – I hope to see you there!
I’m really excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at Office 365 Engage in Haarlem, Netherlands 19-22 June 2017.
Office 365 Engage is Europe’s foremost conference on Office 365 and will be hosted at the Philharmonie Theatre in the energetic picturesque city of Haarlem.
I am thrilled to be one of more than 30 Microsoft MVPs speaking at the event so if you are interested in learning all about Micrsoft Office 365, it isn’t too late to register today!
Use discount code ‘SPRCG378’ to receive a 20% discount when registering.
I'm excited to announce the release of Connect-365! Back 2012, I put together a basic script with a GUI to simplify connecting to Exchange Online via remote PowerShell. I had never intended to make the script publicly available and it was just something I used myself. After a couple years I realized that it had been shared with so many colleagues and clients that I decided to clean it up and publish it on the TechNet gallery. Connect-EXO was born! Here's a screenshot of the original first version:
Over time the script matured into what Connect-EXO is today. One of the challenges in the early version was that I used WPF for the GUI, this was problematic for older versions of PowerShell so I made the decision to port it to Windows Forms for backward compatibility. Forms is old and added a lot of bloat and since backwards compatibility is no longer a concern, I decided to move back to WPF. Connect-365 is essentially the next version of Connect-EXO, I renamed it so more accurately reflect it's purpose and this will allow me to continue to maintain Connect-EXO.
Connect-365 features a GUI that will prompt for your tenant credentials and then connect to various Office 365 services using remote PowerShell. The built-in prerequisite checker will check to ensure that the correct modules are installed and provide a download link for those that are not.
The current version of the script allows connectivity to:
Requirements:
This script will work natively in PowerShell 4.0+
Usage:
There are no parameters or switches, simply execute the script: .\Connect-365.ps1
Execution Policy:
This script has been digitally signed and will run just fine under a "RemoteSigned" execution policy
Screenshots:
Roadmap:
Download:
I have published it to the TechNet Gallery, it can be downloaded by clicking here…
Yes! it is finally possible to connect to Exchange Online from PowerShell installed on MacOS. I noticed some tweets about this being possible on Linux earlier in the week so I thought I’d re-visit testing it on MacOS. PowerShell remoting has been available in the MacOs version since powershell-6.0.0-alpha.15, but it didn’t include the ability to specify a “ConnectionUri’ as the endpoint – it only worked with server names and IP addresses. powershell-6.0.0-alpha.17 which was recently released now includes this functionality.
The first thing you need to do it download and install the latest release from here, you’ll want to download at least powershell-6.0.0-alpha.17
Next launch PowerShell and confirm the version:
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$PSVersionTable
We are now ready to run establish our remote session. First let’s define our credentials:
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$UserCredential = Get-Credential
Then create the session:
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$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
And finally, import that session:
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Import-PSSession $Session
Once connected you have all the Exchange Online cmdlets available to you:
I haven’t thoroughly tested it yet, but I look forward to spending some time using it soon!
Since starting this blog in 2008, I have been using Google Feedburner to publish my RSS feeds and enable 'subscribe by email' functionality. At the time it was a great platform and it provided many benefits, but after nearly 9 years that is no longer the case.
Feedburner has been pretty stagnant since 2012 and I have recently started to notice RSS validation errors in my feed which in-turn cause issues with some of the current and planned integrations I have running on the blog. Over the next month, I will be making some changes to the way RSS feeds work on the blog. I will not remove RSS feeds entirely but will be transitioning them from Feedburner.
My analytics data shows that I do have a bunch of subscribers using RSS and email and I do expect the transition to be fairly smooth. Unfortunately, those subscribing via email will need to resubscribe once the transition is done - I figure that an 'opt-in' strategy would be best in this instance. All in all, I'm hoping for minimal disruption.
TLDR; I will continue to offer RSS feeds, but some upcoming changes may mean that you need to resubscribe.