Microsoft Teams – Manage External and Guest Access communication for users

Microsoft Teams June 25, 2019 Comments: 2

Microsoft Teams becoming an unrivaled communication platform its been adopted by most of the corporate organizations right from small, medium and large scale businesses.

Teams adoption rate have been thriving a lot and there are organizations managing their daily operations and projects completely via better organized Teams and channels.

In this article we will have an overview and the options available to expose Microsoft Teams for communication to the external network and other office 365 organizations.

As an initial prerequisite we must ensure that all the Office 365 URL and IP Ranges are allowed.

Login to Microsoft Teams Admin center portal here we have 2 options.

  1. External Access
  2. Guest Access

For external access the screenshot is pretty much explanatory. The best way is to add only the allowed domains which would block the other external organizations.

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Create Customized App Package for Azure Bot and publish them in Microsoft Teams

Azure Bots, Microsoft Teams June 1, 2019 Leave a comment

In the previous article , we had an overview and example of how to start creating Microsoft Azure Bots and integrate with Teams. Furthermore once the bots are integrated with teams ,we would need to create application package for our Azure Bot, so that we can provide better end user experience.

To interpret further once the azure bot is available to the end users via teams it will not be showing to them as an application (example shown below). Providing them as vanilla format will not be more intriguing to the consumers.

In Microsoft Teams there is an option to create a customized app package for our azure bots. Once we create and publish them, it will be available for end users in the app section. From Microsoft Teams users can search and install them on their Teams Client.

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Create Microsoft Azure Bot and Integrate with Microsoft Teams

Azure Bots, Microsoft Teams May 22, 2019 Comments: 4

As we are heading towards the modern workplace model, we are thriving a lot on reducing the first level of tasks. One of the preferred feasible solution is to create a self-query knowledge base through which the end users can attempt to address their issues on their own before contacting the IT Team. Eventually API integrations with bots can reduce the first level of recurring tasks. Through Microsoft Bot Framework quite a lot of organizations are filling these requirements and increasing the operational excellence values.

In this article we will focus on how to create a bot in Azure and integrate them with Microsoft Teams.

In summary Bot usually comprises of three concepts dialog, channels and state. In my point of view dialog play a fundamental role in the Bot Framework. The dialogues will be organized in a natural sequence based on the input from the user it can respond, skip to next answer or even go in a sequential loop. In the back-end the programs will be configured to respond to the dialogues in a consecutive manner. Currently the underlying solution can be via C# , Node.Js or Rest API

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Plan and configure Azure Information Protection

Azure, Azure Information Protection April 21, 2019 Comments: 3

Corporate data leakage and losing critical confidential information is been often considered as to be an employee negligence. These days the corporate services are available to all end users from anywhere which makes the employee more productive and work from anywhere. On the flip side if there are no security enforced, for instance a sales officer might leave a confidential customers list on a shared computer in a public place. Its very important for the employers to classify, label and protect their electronic data based on their business models.

Using Microsoft azure information protection will augment and sheild all the office 365 and azure workloads. We have option to enforce the classification or to provide users the option to classify on their own. This article emphases on enabling the Azure Information Protection on Office 365 workloads.

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Office 365- Configure one drive for business file retention policy

Office 365, One Drive for Business April 3, 2019 Leave a comment

Its always better to configure retention for office 365 work loads in order to ensure that the data is available as per the company legal requirements. Usually we pay more attention to Email data and retention policies are applied to all mailboxes, however we might miss out to configure the retention on other work loads.

In this article we will be focusing on the options available to retain the data in one drive for business personal files of an office 365 users.

Essentially we see there are 2 level retention policies available for one drive for business. We will be looking at how to configure them and grant the permission for a delegated assignee when required to access the retained data for a terminated employee.

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Microsoft forms Error – Sorry something went wrong

Azure March 20, 2019 Comments: 3

Recently while accessing Microsoft forms users were getting the error. Sorry, something went wrong.

The issue was reported by all the users even they have required licenses assigned to them.

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Teams Upgrade- Important points to consider before teams only toggle mode

Microsoft Teams, Office 365 March 5, 2019 Leave a comment

Microsoft is investing and focusing on Teams for the Collaboration platform, Skype for Business have become volatile. We can see every day new features and enhancements are coming on the way for Microsoft Teams. Moreover, Microsoft have provided all the requirements and materials available for transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. This makes much simpler for any customers to completely move to teams only mode.

On a comparison of the road map improvements in Microsoft Teams the features have been enhanced and loads of new functionalities are being added very often. Currently the default configuration of all the tenants will be on Island mode which will make the users to communicate on both Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business. This might create more confusion for the end users to choose which platform to communicate for their daily activities since they are provided with couple of options.

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Delegate resetting azure MFA for helpdesk through azure automation run book and Microsoft Flow

Automation, Azure, Microsoft Flow, Office 365 February 1, 2019 Leave a comment

When a user with MFA enabled loses his mobile phone then he wouldn’t be able to login to new devices or in the old devices where the token life time have expired. 

Currently in this scenario the user have to report to help desk team. Unfortunately only the global admins can perform  the force reset of MFA account for the user to reset his Strongauthenticationmethods value to null to clear the  old lost device.  

There is a work around which can be used until we get a delegated RBAC role for performing this action. With Azure Automation account, creating a flow, integrating with flow and delegating this action to helpdesk admins will reduce the load on global admins performing this action. 

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Configure access panel in Azure Active directory

Azure, Office 365 January 22, 2019 Comments: 7

We can enable and provide self service application access to end users.If an organization is using Office 365 applications and the user is licensed for them, then the Office 365 applications will appear on the user’s Access Panel.Microsoft and third-party applications configured with Federation-based SSO can be added into this access panel.

We can create multiple groups example like HR,Marketing and required apps both internal corporate apps and social media apps can be published.

In order to logon access panel we must be authenticated using organizational account in Azure AD.We can be authenticated to azure AD directly or federated authentication and consume this service.

For organizations that have deployed Office 365, applications assigned to users through Azure AD will also appear in the Office 365 portal 

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Product Review: Stellar Repair for MS SQL Database

SQL, Tools January 14, 2019 Leave a comment

According to Embarcadero Technologies’ Database Survey Report, 83% of respondents say that they have Microsoft SQL database environment. The widespread adoption of SQL database is attributed to its growing application scope and relevance in the modern enterprise IT setup. However, like other database applications, SQL Server also faces tuning and performance issues despite the Database Administrators’ (DBAs) efforts to maintain optimal performance.

Hardware and software issues turn SQL database inaccessible, which is due to the following reasons:

  • Network failure issue when database is accessed by a user
  • Storage media corruption leading to corrupt MDF files
  • Changes on SQL server account
  • Corruption in File Header and more
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