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Many of you guys will probably know the ADFS page, which can be used to test the authentication. Most of the time this page is used after the installation of an ADFS farm or in error cases. With the introduction of ADFS on Windows Server 2016, many of us may have encountered the problem, which is shown in the following screenshot when browsing to the URL https://adfs.corp.com/adfs/ls/idpinitiatedsignon after the successful installation of a new ADFS farm:

With the GA announcement of Microsoft Stream yesterday, I thought of using it in a very cool and modern way. My idea was to create an interactive video platform within my Teams service. So let’s hit it and configure Stream and Teams in a way to watch Stream videos within your Teams client and build up a modern video streaming platform. First of all you need to create a new Stream channel.

Today I want to bring some light into the darkness and write down, what’s not written down as per today. I guess most of you know the MyApps portal, which is also feeding the Office 365 app launcher with enterprise applications. You can browse to that app panel directly via https://myapps.microsoft.com and it is a very useful service, which should be used in every cloud environment as it provides SSO to apps without the need of remembering credentials for those apps like the corporate Twitter acocount or the corporate Amazon account.

A couple of days ago I wanted to tidy up my Azure subscription and move the unneeded resources from my active subscription to my team’s subscription. At first I wanted to move a storage account, which I created a couple of years ago - needless to say that this was of type classic resource. The Azure portal now introduced a quite handy operation which can be used for many resources in order to move the resource either to another resource group or even to another subscription.

As I played around with Microsoft Flow and Teams I had the idea of creating a channel with news on Office 365. So I created a Teams channel and started creating a Flow, which was pretty easy. And as I was finished and I started the flow, the Teams channel which should show me tweets with the hashtag #Office365, soon was overfilled with tweets about Office 365 in all kinds of languages.

In the last post I tried to show how to make PowerShell life easier. You can read it here This post is picking up the same issue, but the tool is a bit different. All cloud admins may know that Visual Studio Code supports PowerShell scripts and in addition to that makes life easier by having a source control for those scripts via GitHub oder TFS. But still you may encounter the problem, that you have to login to every cloud service seperately in every VSCode session, which can be annoying.

In my previous post, which you can read here I showed you how you can simplify your life as an O365 admin, with Chrome profiles. With this post, I want to show you, how you can tune your PowerShell in order to establish PS profiles too, which can be used to automate common tasks, like login and connect to cloud services like Exchange Online, Office 365 or Azure. Therefore, if you haven’t created a PS profile already, just run the following command in the PowerShell or, what I personally prefer, in the PS ISE.

At the Microsoft Build 2017 there were a lot of new features announced. One, which was quite innovative was the release of the Azure Mobile Portal. With this app it’s now possible to manage your Azure resources (and I mean all your Azure resources) from your smartphone or tablet via an app. So here are my first tests with the new mobile portal app. So after starting the app and selecting your subscription, you can browse all your Azure resources, which have been created in that subscription and click on each of them to get the details:

This was one of my most awaited features, which should be unveiled at the Build2017 - the Azure Cloud Shell. And now, only a couple of hours later, it’s already here and can be used do to cool stuff within the Azure portal in your favourite internet browser. To start it, simply click on the PowerShell-like icon on the upper right corner and you’ll see the following: Now, you only need to select your subscription, where the according storage account and file share will be created.

In my career as an O365 consultant, I always had the challenge of login successfully to the different O365 tenants from our customers. As we have quite many O365 customers by now it’s not that easy to remember all the passwords (but therefore we have a password management solution) but also to open a new private browsing session for the customer in order to login and don’t get redirected to our ADFS, where I get authenticated via SSO.

As a consultant, working in a team of 6 people, task management is a crucial part in my daily business. In my team, it is very important to have a good task management, in order to decide about who does the workshop for a customer next week, or who can do the conception phase during the next few weeks. For this reason we decided to use Visual Studio Online (VSO) in order to manage our work items and keep an eye on the team members’ workloads, although we’re no developers or engineers, who need to manage code.

Microsoft recently announced that its newest task management app “To-Do", which shall be the successor of Wunderlist, will soon be available. I’m not going into detail about the functionality, because this is described here: https://blogs.office.com/2017/04/19/introducing-microsoft-to-do-now-available-in-preview/ and https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-to-do-list-app But as Microsoft announced the preview of To-Do, many people downloaded the app and tried to synchronize their Outlook tasks into the To-Do list - without success. The problem in most cases is that you can’t even login with a work or school account in the app.

Microsoft always claims, that all data from a customer is only stored in that region, where the Office 365 contract is bound to. Now that means, that all SharePoint Online data and Exchange Online data will only be stored in the EMEA datacenters, when the contract is bound to Microsoft Austria for example. Now if you take a look at http://o365datacentermap.azurewebsites.net/ there is already quite a big amount of datacenters existing (especially in the US and in EMEA).

As a consultant dealing with Office 365 onboarding projects, I got one question quite often from my customers and partners: “Is it possible to check, if my domain is already registered in an Office 365 tenant?” The reason, why I often get asked this question is that, many IT departments in most companies already did some research on Office 365 and the IT admins also often create a test tenant in order to check, what features are available and what can be done with O365.

Many companies, which use Office 365, especially Exchange Online, often do one thing during the onboarding phase: The companies import contacts into their Office 365 tenant, in order to feed the Global Address List (GAL) with users and contacts, which the already onboarded users can then address via the GAL. This setting is also helpful, when a multinational company decides to go for Office 365 (Exchange Online), where all users are not in one single Active Directory, but there is a multi-forest AD construct established.

As Office 365 groups are now more and more used in various Office 365 tenants, many administrators complain about a restriction setting. The problem is, that you can only allow or disable the creation of Office 365 groups for all users of your tenant. From an administrative point of view, this setting would be nice to have, because at the moment Microsoft is pushing groups but if you as an admin can’t control who is able to create groups and which groups can be created, this is nothing but a nightmare.

As DirSync and Azure AD Sync will soon be not supported anymore, you should migrate your old DirSync Server to the new Azure AD Connect service. And theAzure AD Connect tool, which is the successor of the Azure AD Sync Service has a couple of new and cool features. One of these features can develop to a real killer feature in some enterprises – Sync cloud users and groups to the on-premise Active Directory.