Microsoft Teams

Version 2.7.0 of the Microsoft Teams Apps generator is now available

Happy Easter everyone, I have fantastic news. After seven preview versions (and even a skipped version - 2.6) the Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator 2.7.0 is now available for you to use! Just like tons of others do; there’s been over 6.000 downloads of the generator, it’s generating a handful of new Teams projects every day and it’s done from all parts of the world! Join the movement! As usual it is just a simple npm command to install:

Microsoft Teams

Creating a Bot for Microsoft Teams using Microsoft Flow

Imagine you want to create a chat bot for Microsoft Teams in order to automate tasks, enhance the discussion or just feeling lonely and want someone to talk to. There’s many ways of doing this; you can start from scratch building a bot, using the Microsoft Bot framework and/or using the Microsoft Teams Yeoman generator, you can use the Azure Bot Service, you can use the FAQ bots to essentially create a no code solution.

Microsoft Teams

Announcing Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator 2.5.0

A long overdue update of the Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator – we’re now up to version 2.5.0! It’s a fairly substantial update both in the generator and in the generated code – this update will make future updates a lot smoother and will allow for enabling more features going forward. Thanks to all who provided feedback and input and has tested the generator over the last few months.

SharePoint Framework

SharePoint Framework and Microsoft Graph access – convenient but be VERY careful

SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is a fantastic development model on top of (modern) SharePoint, for user interface extensibility, and it have evolved tremendously over the last year since it became general available. The framework is based on JavaScript extensibility in a controlled manner, compared to the older JavaScript injection mechanisms we used to extend (classic) SharePoint, that comes with a lot of power. Using SharePoint Framework our JavaScript has access to the whole DOM in the browser, meaning that we can do essentially what we want with the user interface – however, of course, we shouldn’t, only certain parts of the DOM are allowed/supported for modification.

Microsoft Teams

yo teams: a full Microsoft Teams extensibility Yeoman generator

A couple of weeks back I published a Yeoman generator to build Tabs for Microsoft Teams. Since then I’ve continued to add stuff to it as the Teams team has continued to add features to their extensibility story. So, this generator is not only for creating Tabs, but now also for adding Bots and Custom Bots to Microsoft Teams. With that I decided to rename the generator to yo teams (generator name is generator-teams).

Microsoft Teams

Congratulations to the Microsoft Teams team on an excellent delivery

A big round of applause for Microsoft and the team behind Microsoft Teams for now being general available (GA) worldwide. Today, they lit up the Teams icon in the Office 365 waffle for all tenants (unless your admins are being boring and has turned it off). It’s been awesome to be a part of this preview journey, which started last summer. Avanade was selected as one of the TAP members, in a preview program shrouded in a secrecy I’ve not seen at Microsoft before.

Microsoft Teams

yo teams-tab: A Microsoft Teams Tabs Yeoman generator

I’m happy to announce that today at SharePoint Saturday Munich I presented a new Yeoman generator for building Microsoft Teams Tabs projects. Tabs in Microsoft Teams is a great way to extend the user interface and to do integrations to other systems and provide visualizations. Tabs are based on a JavaScript framework, a set of web pages and a manifest describing the Tab. It requires a set of manual steps to both build out the pages, configuring CSS, hooking up the JavaScripts, deploying it all to a web site hosted in the cloud, writing the manifest, packaging the manifest into a zip file and more.

SharePoint Framework

SharePoint Framework has now reached General Availability - such a great journey

Let me start with congratulating the SharePoint Framework team on an amazing job and an amazing journey reaching this GA milestone. A Big Thanks from the team here in Redmond to everyone who helped us to get to GA! #SPFx #SharePoint #SharePointFramework pic.twitter.com/czo2Duon7z — Chakkaradeep (@chakkaradeep) February 24, 2017 The SharePoint Framework plays a significant part of the SharePoint future, yes - this is only the first version with a lot of new features on the way, and it is a part of the new SharePoint wave.

Office 365

Configuring Office 365 Groups creation the right way

Over the last few days the issue on how to prevent users to create Office 365 Groups has popped up in all sorts of conversations. This blog post will show you how to do it in the correct way, and serve as a future reference. I’m not the only one who have blogged about this, it’s in many places including official documentation. But in many places both scripts and some caveats are either wrong or outdated.

Office 365

The end of my Office 365 Roadmap updates

As many of you have noticed I have not been posting my What’s new on the Office Roadmap updates. Well, I’ve been on a vacation not trying to think of Office 365 to start with, and then also, I’m ending my series of these posts. Sorry. I have to start with saying that I love the amount of changes we see now in the Office 365 service. The team(s) is/are doing an amazing job with kicking out new features and updates in some areas.

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2016-05-20 - SharePoint Saturday Stockholm Edition

Happy Friday and welcome back to another Office Roadmap update. This time the day before the big SharePoint Saturday, here in beautiful Stockholm, where we all are going to indulge on the goodness that was announced a couple of weeks back at the SharePoint Futures event. Lot of new stuff in the mobile space this time around. Changes 2016-05-20 Launched Windows Universal App: OneDrive UWP (Universal Windows App) are now launched and live (new) User Activity Reports: Compliance center improvements for OneDrive/SharePoint on document views/edits/downloads etc (from in development) Intelligent Discover for Android: Discover (Office Graph) view in the Android OneDrive app (new) Mobile Access to SharePoint Online for iOS: Access your SharePoint files from the OneDrive app (new) Office 365 Groups: easily add users from a distribution list to a group: this is cool, now you can add all members from a DL to an O365 Group instead of one user at a time (new) Self-service NGSC setup and goove.

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2016-05-13

Hey, happy Friday the 13th! Here’s a small Office Roadmap update for all of you Jason fans! Not that many changes this time around, but still interesting, and a lot of Outlook 2016 for Mac releases. Changes 2016-05-13 Now Launched eDiscovery Case Management, Hold & Permissions: the new eDiscovery features are now fully rolled out (from in development) Enter full screen view in Outlook 2016 for Mac: the full screen view for Mac Outlook as announced in January are now out.

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2016-05-06 (Future of SharePoint edition)

The Office Roadmap updates with the new announcements from the Future of SharePoint event has arrived (they arrived May the 4th to be precise). I’m back from the event and San Francisco and I’m full of the energy that the SharePoint team transmitted. You should specifically take a look at the In Development part here. That’s where we got the new and fresh stuff from the Future of SharePoint event.

SharePoint

Web Parts are back at the center of SharePoint development!

Today at The Future of SharePoint event Microsoft have announced the next iteration in SharePoint development - the SharePoint Framework. As one of the old ones who started with the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit, to the COM+ event handlers in SharePoint 2001, over to custom built DDFs, to WSP’s to Apps and Add-ins - this new framework is a very welcome change. For years SharePoint Developers have been forced to walk in shame in the outer rims of the developer guild.

SharePoint

SharePoint Team Sites are back - stronger than ever!

About a year ago I wrote a blog article called SharePoint Team sites are dead. An article that stirred up many feelings in the community and started an interesting (and somewhat harsh) discussion - which was kind of the point. Fast forward to May 2016 and this is a totally different ball game! SharePoint Team Sites are back! Modern team sites Jeff Teper, CVP at Microsoft, writes in the just now published The Future of SharePoint blog post: “Team sites has always been at the heart of collaboration with SharePoint”, a statement I absolutely agree with.

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2016-04-17

Updates, updates and updates. This time around there’s a great deal of clean up on the Office Roadmap. Mayhaps they are adding space for all the neat SharePoint things we expect to see next week at the SharePoint Future event. There’s also a bunch of new stuff added to the In Development category, scroll down and learn something. Also worth noticing is that the Yammer team has started to catch up on the feedback they received over the last few years.

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2016-04-18

Here’s some really big updates of the Office Roadmap this time around. Two major themes of this update, part from the now more or less traditional copy paste errors; Planner - the Planner team have tons of nifty and neat stuff coming our way. Edu - Microsoft is all in on school and Edu features at the moment! Check the “In Development” section - you will like it. Wonder how much more good stuff they are saving for the May 4th event!

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2016-03-28

Here’s some more updates on the Office Roadmap. A couple of days late due to me being offline and chasing bunnies and chickens. Highlights of these updates are the awesomeness going on in the Office 365 Video team and also that the OneDrive sync team is back! Changes 2016-03-28 Launched Class Notebook Add-in for OneNote: The Class Notebook add-in for Onenote is released. (NEW) February Updates in Office Mobile Apps for Android devices: Android apps received some updates with auto-save and collab authoring in Word and PowerPoint (NEW) February Updates in Office Mobile Apps for iOS: And iOS got some as well with Box integrations (NEW) February Updates in Office Mobile Apps for Windows devices: And Windows Phone did too (these users can be counted on one hand nowadays); inking and Excel updates was on the menu (NEW) Office 365 Admin app - Group functionality: Group admin options in the admin app, nice but for me the UX works fine with 10-15 groups, imagine an enterprise with thousands (from in development) Office 365 Admin app - Push Notifications for Message Center: Get them push notifications from the admin app and always know when there is Office 365 issues.

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2016-03-17

I got some news for you. The Office Roadmap is updated, actually it was updated yesterday but I had other stuff to do. Let’s jump right into the changes and look at them Groups thingies!! Changes 2016-03-17 Launched Dark theme for Outlook 2016: Somehow someone thought this was important. Personally I’m not a fan of the dark theme in Office, specifically not in Outlook - it looks all weird and funky since e-mails have a white background.

Office 365

What’s new on the Office Roadmap - 2016-03-01

Spring is closing in, astronauts are returning from a year in space, the US has an election going on and there’s update on the Office Roadmap. The roadmap mess saga continues…with Microsoft making even more fools out of themselves!!! Changes 2016-03-01 Launched No new things are rolling out…instead they are rolling them back! Rolling out All of the following was previously Launched but are now rolling out instead. Microsoft, you need to think about how you update this page.

Office 365

What’s new on the Office Roadmap - 2016-02-14

Updates! Updates! Updates! Yup, that would happen if Stevie B was still in the house rocking the Office Roadmap. Another round of updates, this time it looks like a fixup of the mess that happended last time. So some things are reported as NEW in here, but they aren’t really new, they just disappeared for a week or two… Changes 2016-02-13 Launched Apps for Project Pro for Office 365 write support: If you’re building Apps, sorry Add-ins, you can now do write back for Project Apps/Add-ins (from Rolling out) Auto Generated Project IDs in Project Online: more control of the ID’s generated in Project (from Rolling out) Cloud PBX in Skype for Business: Enterprise voice is now live (from In Development) Data Loss Prevention (DLP) in SharePoint Online: DLP features in SPO is now Launched, from Rolling out Designer: The new Designer feature in PowerPoint should be in your desktop application by now (from rolling out) DLP in SharePoint - Policy Management: It says private preview only and public in september 2015, we’re already way beyond that, so I guess nobody bothered update the text.

Office 365

What’s new on the Office Roadmap - 2016-02-01

Here we go again! The Office team keep a steady pace of updates coming to the Office Roadmap. This time it’s a bit weird, but we have a lot of things being rolled back!? Also I noticed that the site was down today for maintenance. So, is this just a DR solution and they lost data or have they just messed things up? I smell that someone actually MANUALLY updates this list, but hey, they can’t be that crazy, can they?

Office 365

What’s new on the Office Roadmap - 2016-01-26

Time for some updates on the Office Roadmap again, these updates was actually published yesterday, but since writing these blog posts isn’t what pays for the bread on my table I needed to do other stuff before writing this. Last week the location of the Roadmap changed and today there seems to be some issues with the site; you can now find it at https://fto365siteprod.azurewebsites.net/roadmap. There are some real highlights here and as usual some Yammer funkiness…

Office 365

What’s new on the Office Roadmap – 2016-01-14

Hello and welcome back to an awesome new year – 2016 is here and we have our first Office Roadmap update. First things first; the Office Roadmap URL has changed. The new home for the Office 365 Roadmap is: http://fasttrack.office.com/roadmap. As usual when it comes to changes on the Office level - the communication is kinda poor. Ye olde URL just now gives you an error. Didn’t someone think about having a redirect or something from success.

Office 365

What’s new on the Office Roadmap – 2015-12-18

A christmas update to the Office Roadmap! It looks like Microsoft has abandoned their bi-weekly update schedule and is now updating whenever they can (please, I got a job to do!). This time it’s a few new thingies but mostly a clean up of old released stuff. Happy holidays everyone! Changes 2015-12-18 Now Launched Analyze Office 365 data with Equivio Zoom: the eDiscovery features now allows you to integrate Equivio machine learning capabilities.

Office 365

What’s new on the Office Roadmap–2015-12-11

Third update in about a week on the Office Roadmap, and just as the last update this one isn’t that big. A couple of “fixes” and two new things Changes 2015-12-11 Rolling out Multi-select Attachments in Outlook 2016: This was “Launched” a couple of weeks ago, but now it’s not. Perhaps a new category – “Rolling Out”? (from Launched) Public Folder eDiscovery & In-Place Hold: Compliance search on public folders.

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2015-12-09

More updates on the Office Roadmap! This time around just a few ones but also some interesting things to notice. But before we list the updates let’s take a look at the actual roadmap site that has received an update which should make it easier for you to filter and find out what’s new. This is a very welcome update and could possibly make the roadmap site useful, but I’m sad to say unless they have a proper change log.

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2015-12-04

December updates incoming! The Office Roadmap has once again been updated and this time with quite a few new additions to the roadmap. Note that there is very anticipated and important updates to Office 365 Groups - have a read and enjoy!! Changes 2015-12-14 Now Launched Capacity Management capabilities in Project Online: Colored heatmaps and stuff in Project Online (from Rolling out) Compliance Search Conditions: Improved search experience in the compliance center (from Rolling out) Data Loss Protection (DLP) for Office desktop: Data loss prevention features in the Office client (Excel, PowerPoint and Word).

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2015-11-20

Updates! Yes, updates! After some awesome announcements at the Connect(); 2015 conference the Office Roadmap is updated with some news, and a decent bunch of additions, specifically some nice new stuff in the In Development bucket. Love the Yammer updates - looks like someone has been listening after all, or have they - read the fine prints… Changes 2015-11-20 Now Launched Contact sync for Outlook for Android: Outlook for Android now syncs contacts to the native contacts application.

Office 365

Enhancing your Office 365 Groups using custom Connectors and Cards for Groups

Wow, what a day for developers in the Office 365 land! Tons of new features was announced at the Microsoft Connect(); 2015 virtual conference. We’ve seen the GA of the Microsoft Graph and a bunch of new API’s added to the Microsoft Graph beta end-point and more. One of the features that I really have been waiting for is the Office 365 Connectors for Groups and the Office 365 Connector Cards.

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2015-11-05

Office Roadmap updates again! This time I’m reporting this from the MVP summit in Redmond. A couple of new and exciting things added to the In Development list! Changes 2015-11-05 Now Launched Clutter for your inbox on by default: For tenants/users that have the Clutter feature it will from now on be on by default Create and collaborate on Visio diagrams using Office-like experience: Visio is getting even sexier with dark themes, Delve and High DPI support FastTrack | Providing the customer success service: Get Microsofts help to start your Office 365 experience Getting started experience in Visio: Visio n00b improvements Information Rights Management (IRM) protection now added for Visio files: We now have direct support in Visio to protect our most valuable assets Keyboard access for Shape Panel in Visio: use F6 to work faster in Visio Optimized file picker in Outlook on the web: Pretty soon OWA will be favored over Outlook Outlook for Android opens IRM protected emails: Really important feature rolled out for Android Quick data linking in Visio: Make your Visio diagrams rock Refreshed stencils and smart shapes in Visio: New and slick stencils for architecture draqwings SharePoint Online will start to transition to using TLS to send email securely in our datacenters: internal service change but a really important one Sway for Windows Document Import: Something with Sway Yammer to use Azure Media Services for Video Encoding: Ooops, a Yammer update Rolling out Compliance Search Conditions: Improved Compliance search is rolling out Delve People Experiences - Praise: The Praise features is now rolling out in the Delve experience.

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2015-10-20

Almost a month has passed since we had the last update on the Office Roadmap and quite a lot of things has happened. There are some new things this time and also some clean up of the items. Make sure you read through the In Development section, there are some hidden gems as well as the stuff that has disappeared!! Changes 2015-10-20 Now Launched Automatic Relationship Detection: Make it easier to detect relations between two models with no relationships configured Automatic Time Grouping: All these new Power* are rolling out now.

Yammer

Has Yammer played out its role?

And is Yammer dead? It is now three and a half years since Microsoft acquired Yammer and I think this is the end of Yammer, as a product/service. Let me explain myself, to avoid the flame war and hate mails that happened when I shared that my thoughts in the Team Sites are dead post. I think Yammer as a brand will stay for a while, it’s a strong brand and it’s worked into so many PowerPoint decks from Microsoft that it would be hard to wash that away.

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2015-09-28

Hey, look at that - a surprise update of the Office Roadmap! This time around we just have a couple of minor updates AND a couple of features that actually is removed from the Roadmap - all related to FastTrack. My guess someone was to trigger happy earlier this month when releasing this… Changes 2015-09-28 These features are no longer listed on the roadmap! FastTrack | Yammer Onboarding Expansion FastTrack | Project Online onboarding FastTrack | Azure Rights Management Onboarding FastTrack | Adoption planning services FastTrack | Skype for Business Onboarding Expansion FastTrack | Data migration to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business All that is left of the FastTrack items are

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2015-09-25

The second update of the Office Roadmap this months is now live. This time a huge set of features that are rolling out, most of them has to do with the updated Office ProPlus client (2016). There are some hidden gems in this such as the “Likes” in OWA, huge Sway licensing changes and (the not so hidden) announcement of Office 365 Planner. Changes 2015-09-25 Now Launched Cortana & Office 365 Productivity Scenarios: The Cortana and Office 365 feature should now be launched (from rolling out).

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2015-09-09

Almost a month has gone since Microsoft did an update to the Office Roadmap. But fear no more, it is here stuffed with new and interesting stuff. It’s quite a long list this time around. A lot of them are just Office 2016 features that we’ve known about for some time, but now added to this Roadmap. But also some really interesting FastTrack features, with very sparse descriptions. Changes 2015-09-09 Now Launched About Me Update and New Authoring Tool: The updated About Me, part of Delve, is now fully launched, including the new Stories authoring tool.

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2015-08-13 (Yammer Edition)

Updates to the roadmap, again! This time around it is all about Yammer. This major update of Yammer features that’s already rolled out or in development just shows how disconnected the Yammer and Office 365 teams are. Changes 2015-08-13 These are the changes since yesterday. Now Launched New Capabilities for Yammer iOS app: better photo and file sharing, better search, better this and better that. Directly to launched Real-time Yammer group activity indicators: a feature that’s been rolling out for a while, but still new on the roadmap.

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2015-08-12

We have updates, and quite a few of them, to the Office Roadmap. Some clean up, some awesome Visio features rolling out and a set of new features in the In Development segment. Also noticeable quite a few of the “refresh” features and one cancelled item. Changes 2015-08-12 Now Launched NDR backscatter protection: has been rolling out for a while Office 365 Admin Center June Updates: the June stuff is launched Office 365 Store: launched.

Office 365

Take control of your Office 365 Theme!

It has been a while since Office 365 introduced the suite wide themes. These themes are applied on all services within the Office 365 suite, or at least the ones using the Suite Bar navigation. Up until the very last few weeks the suite wide theme has been something you can set but your SharePoint site owners and all end-users has been able to override them. Finally these things has been resolved and fixed (no info about this on the Office Roadmap, hence this blog post)!

Office 365

Office 365 Groups for Admins - simple reporting using PowerShell

In this post, in the Office 365 Groups for Admins series, I will leverage what we learned in the previous posts, combine it with some PowerShell magic and create some basic reports. You can use these reports as a base for your Office 365 Groups reporting in your organization. Note: all these reports require that you have connected to your Exchange Online tenant with appropriate permissions, see this post about more details.

Office 365

Office 365 Groups for Admins

As you might have noticed I’m a big fan of Office 365 Groups, aka Unified Groups. I do think they will play a major role in the future of Office 365 Collaboration. Office 365 Groups consists of many moving parts, some that are half baked, some that are not working at all and some that is a bit difficult to understand. In this series of posts, will be published over the next few weeks and after that when needed, I will describe how you as an Office 365 Admin can and should work with Office 365 Groups.

Office 365

Office 365 Groups for Admins - managing Group memberships with PowerShell

In the last post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I showed you how to manage the Unified Groups using PowerShell. Let’s continue on that journey and take a look at how you can manage the Group memberships using PowerShell. All membership management are done using the *-UnifiedGroupLinks cmdlets, you can access them using PowerShell and connecting to Exchange Online as shown in the previous post. The cmdlets is at the moment that well documented.

Office 365

Office 365 Groups for Admins - managing Groups with PowerShell

One of the loudest complaints I hear from people when we talk about Groups is the lack of management features, so in this post in the Office 365 Groups for Admins series we will take a look at how you can manage your Unified Groups using PowerShell. In the previous post I actually already showed you how to use PowerShell to create Groups, but let’s take a step back. Connecting PowerShell to Exchange Online To start working with the Unified Groups in PowerShell we need to connect to Exchange Online and we do that by establishing a PowerShell session to a specific Uri, see code sample below, and then import that session to our local session.

Office 365

Office 365 Groups for Admins - Creating Groups

In this post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series we will take a look at how you as an admin and your end-user can create Office 365 Groups. The option to allow end-users to create Unified Groups or not are determined by the Mailbox Policy, as described in a previous post. End-user creation of Office 365 Groups End-users have two ways of creating new Groups; either use the Office 365 web interface or using Outlook 2016 (works on the PC edition, not sure about Office on Macintosh).

Office 365

Office 365 Groups for Admins - Group creation policies

In this post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I will talk about the small but important policies we can apply to Group creation. At the moment there is very little control of the actual Office 365 Group creation in Office 365. And this tends to be one really important aspect of the Unified Groups discussion - can we allow them or not? I do hope that I over the time can update this post with new and improved governance features.

Office 365

Office 365 Groups for Admins - Enable and disable user creation of Groups

This is the third post in my Office 365 Groups for Admins series and it will focus on one of the primary tasks an Office 365 Admin has to do once their tenant is up and running; should we allow our users to create Office 365 Groups or not? I’m not going to give you an answer to this. It is something you need to evaluate properly within your organization, but I do recommend that you initially always turn off Groups, so that you can get some governance into the game before promoting it to everyone.

Office 365

Office 365 Groups for Admins - Groups entry points

In this first post of the Office 365 Groups for Admins series I will show you where you have the different entry points for the Unified Groups. It’s important to understand this as it is important in the posts to follow. Office 365 Mail (end users) The first and perhaps the most obvious point of Office 365 Groups is in the Office 365 Mail application (Outlook Web App, OWA). On the left hand side you will see the Groups heading.

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2015-07-22

Some “small” updates this week on the Office Roadmap Changes 2015-07-22 Now Launched Office 365 Groups: Power BI Integration: A new and easier way for teams/groups to collaborate in Power BI. Directly to launched. In Development Office 365 User Purchases: An interesting new option for the Store. Individuals can with this feature in place “purchase and individually own a subscription to additional software”. Looks like if your manager doesn’t approve of your Visio request, you can buy it on your own :)

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2015-07-16

A week has gone since last update to the Office Roadmap and it looks like the Office 365 team is on a good pace. Changes 2015-07-16 These are the changes I’ve noticed on the Roadmap, including my personal comments/take on some of them. One big shocker here and it’s in the Cancelled section, check it out! Now Launched Multi-Tier Cloud Standard for Singapore: something brand new that is just for Singapore that is launched?

Office 365

What's new on the Office Roadmap - 2015-07-09

Hello everyone and hope you’re not reading this, it’s summer time and great weather, except in Sweden of course. We have some updates to the Office Roadmap today, the first set of updates in FY16 for Microsoft. Last week I complained about Microsoft changing URL’s to the roadmap site - they are now fixed ;-) Changes 2015-07-09 This are the changes I’ve noticed since the 26th of June including my take on the additions and changes.

Office 365

What's new in the Office Roadmap - 2015-06-26

Some interesting summer news on the Office Roadmap this week. But first of all something that is not very cool at all; the Office roadmap URL has changed. I’ve used and linked to http://success.office.com/roadmap/, http://office.com/roadmap and http://success.office.com/roadmap/en-us but the only one that is working right now is http://success.office.com/en-us/roadmap/. Booh! Thou shalt not change URL’s without redirects… Changes 2015-06-26 This is the detected changes in the Roadmap. If you use the newly released feature on the Roadmap that shows the Recently Updated Features, you will see that it states about 50 changed features, since we don’t know their “algorithm” behind the feature, just ignore it and keep reading…

Office 365

What's new in the Office Roadmap - 2015-06-17

No updates to the Office Roadmap today! But - a new huge feature to the actual Roadmap page that might make these posts obsolete A new button has been added to the Roadmap page, called “Show only recently updated features”: Once you toggle the button it will show you only what has been updated since sometime (this is not specifically clear at the moment). Currently it only shows the last update from last week.

Office 365

What's new in the Office Roadmap - 2015-06-10

More updates to the Office Roadmap! This time around we have a few interesting new additions to the roadmap. Changes 2015-06-10 This is what has been added to roadmap since the last couple of days. Notice that all of these are new things on the Roadmap. Now Launched DMARC Support in EOP: DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, http://dmarc.org/) in EOP. Directly to launched! Rolling out OAuth and MFA for Outlook for iOS & Android: just as it sounds, the new ADAL based authentication is rolling out for iOS and Android In Development Advanced administrative controls for archiving: Enables SEC 17a-4 record retention.

Office 365

SharePoint Team Sites are dead!

SharePoint Team Sites are dead, there you have it! The era when SharePoint Team Sites was the king of SharePoint and web based collaboration are over. SharePoint Team Sites are dead, I said it again. Ok, you might think this is a link bait, a scam or something else - it’s not. This is how I foresee the future of online collaboration in SharePoint Online/Office 365. Team Sites are based on a decade old construct in SharePoint.

Office 365

What's new in the Office Roadmap - 2015-04-15

It was a couple of weeks since last, but this time we got some major updates on the Office Roadmap, following the recent announcement on the Office blogs. Changes 2015-04-15 Since the 26th of March, these are the changes. Quite a few of them… Now Launched Bulk Updates in Project Online: Directly to launched status Improvements to Demand Management in Project Online: Another Project thingie, directly to launched Changing support for LinkedIn in Outlook: LinkedIn connections in Outlook no longer supported, another that went directly to launched Clutter Control and admin capabilities: from rolling out Document deletion policies for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online: A really interesting and important feature, now live Lync Online Active User Activities Report: previously rolling out MAPI over HTTP for Outlook 2013 and Exchange Online: one of the oldest things on the roadmap now rolling out More control over Sent Items for Shared Mailboxes: from in development New preview features for Power BI: from rolling out Option for Passwords to Never Expire: new on the list the last time, but now launched Removing Deleted Items Retention Period: from in development.

Office 365

What's new in the Office Roadmap - 2015-03-26

Here we go, another round of updates of the Office Roadmap. Don’t we love them! And sometimes they roll out even before the roadmap is updated ;-) Changes 2015-03-26 These are the change since yesterday. Now Launched Office 365 Admin App Update: Directly to launched status Features now rolling out Office 365 Groups: adding Like to Conversations: New stuff on the roadmap. Seems like the Office 365 (Exchange) team is building a whole new Yammer… Office 365 Notification Pane: (from development) This feature seems to cause some disturbance in the force.

Office 365

What's new in the Office Roadmap - 2015-03-25

Another day with some changes in the Office Roadmap, and some really interesting ones actually! Changes 2015-03-25 These are the changes since last time. Now launched Compliance Center for Office 365: From rolling out. Now no one can be less compliant than anyone else, or… Office 365 Groups Notebooks: Coming from nowhere direct to launched. Each Office 365 Group now has a OneNote Notebook. Features now rolling out Edit Office 365 profile details page update: Another newcomer on the list, only this one didn’t make it directly to production :).

Azure AD

SharePoint Online and Azure AD Dynamic Groups

One very common requirement in SharePoint, and other portal solutions for that matter, is to have the possibility to target content to a dynamic audience of users and even secure information based on dynamic rules. Traditionally this has been done with Audiences in SharePoint. Audience is a dynamic set of users that is compiled, usually once a day, and at compile time the rules of the Audience is evaluated. A SharePoint Audience is used to target information, but cannot be used to protect content - ie as a security group.

Office 365

What's new in the Office Roadmap - 2015-03-19

Some small but interesting additions on the roadmap today. Changes 2015-03-19 New stuff on the roadmap Yammer support for Android Wear devices: (Directly to Launched) Yammer on your wrist! Ok, where’s the Microsoft Band app? Enhanced NDRs: (In Development) Microsoft will now help you understand the cause and reason of NDRs in a much easier way. ExpressRoute for Office 365: (In Development) You want your own redundant fat pipe to the Office 365 Data Centers - then this is your feature.

Office 365

What’s new in the Office Roadmap – 2015-03-13

It’s not easy to keep up on what is happening in the Office and Office 365 world. Everything is changing so fast. Fortunate for us Microsoft and the Office product group has created the Office Roadmap site (http://office.com/roadmap) with all (almost at least) the details on what is in development and rolling out etc. It became quite famous the other week when the new forms solution went from In Development to Cancelled.

Office 365

What’s new in the Office Roadmap – 2015-03-13

It’s not easy to keep up on what is happening in the Office and Office 365 world. Everything is changing so fast. Fortunate for us Microsoft and the Office product group has created the Office Roadmap site (http://office.com/roadmap) with all (almost at least) the details on what is in development and rolling out etc. It became quite famous the other week when the new forms solution went from In Development to Cancelled.

SharePoint

SharePoint Online: App Only policy PowerShell tasks with ACS

Here’s a little nugget that I’ve planned to blog about for some time, that I needed today for a small task. I needed to do a background job to SharePoint Online that at a scheduled interval downloads list data, process them and optionally updates some data in my site. This can of course be done by creating an executable storing username and password combos, and with the help of the TokenHelper.

Personal

Summing up the year of 2014 and embracing 2015

The time has come for me to do, as I’ve done now for eight years (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006), my annual post to sum up the year. It is always fun to look back to what happened the past 12 months. This past year has been a somewhat “in-betweeners” year. We (me, my clients, colleagues etc.) are standing on the edge of something big and the bridge over to the other side is really, really long.

Presentations

Presenting the new Office 365 APIs at TechDays in Sweden

I’m thrilled to be presenting at TechDays 2014 in Stockholm the 19-20 November. This is the 5th time the TechDays conference is held here in Sweden and I know that this years edition will be even more awesome than the previous times. As usual the best speakers from Sweden will be there and some international really interesting speakers, such as the well-known Mary Jo Foley. I will be presenting a session about the new and interesting Office 365 APIs.

SharePoint 2013

The SharePoint Team is listening - make your voice heard

There’s a lot of stuff happening right now at Microsoft, they innovate, create great software and services, the new CEO accepts and wins almost all challenges and the SharePoint and Office team is listening! This is the Microsoft that I like and this is how I want Microsoft to continue to be. But Microsoft and the SharePoint team can’t just listen in blind – they listens to us out here in the real world, customers, clients etc.

Conferences

Presenting at TechX Office 365 January 23-24 2014

This year has barely started but the conference season is already running at full speed. The first conference for me of this year will be the TechX Office 365, here in Stockholm, Sweden. This is a conference organized by Microsoft with sole focus on Office 365. There will be national and international speakers of top class. I will do two presentations, one about Building Apps for SharePoint [Online] 2013 and one about Building Apps for Office 2013.

SharePoint

Summing up the year of 2013 and embracing 2014

Wow, 2013 was an interesting year and the time has come for my annual blog post to sum up the year that soon has passed us and looking a bit into the crystal ball for the next one. This is my seventh summary post and it is always fun to look back at what has happened during the last 12 months (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006). For me the year has been really intensive on all levels; I don’t think I´ve ever experienced such a huge demand for my professional services as of now, there is so much new stuff to learn and it´s harder and harder to keep up, I have a hard time resisting doing tons of community stuff and at the same time we had a huge construction work at our house, and of course having two soon-to-be teenager girls takes its toll!

Website

Now running on Azure Web Sites and Orchard

YES! I’m finally alive with a new hosting provider - this time it’s Microsoft (who could have guessed that!). Thanks to the just released Azure Web Sites I have now moved my blog from my old custom blog implementation (that has been a fun project though), to running Orchard on Azure Web Sites using SQL Azure. This finalizes my cloud migrations - last year I moved e-mail and everything but the site to Office 365 and started with a hosted service for this site, but for running this little blog that was a bit to expensive (you’re not clicking the ads enough).

Visual Studio

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview with the new SharePoint Developer tools

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is now available for download für alles and it does not only include the Windows 8 stuff like the previous preview did - this one contains the thing we all want - the SharePoint Developer tools. Overall the performance of Visual Studio 11 is blazingly fast! I regret I tested it - since I will go back to 2010 tomorrow (or even tonight). They team has done a great job and included a lot of the PowerTools natively; such as the new Solution Explorer, the improved search feature etc.

SharePoint 2010

SharePoint Online and External Data using JSONP

It was some time since I did a real blog post and I have been fiddling with a specific topic, which I’m going to write about, for quite some time now. I’ve been working an Office 365 Intranet and been doing two conferences lately where I’ve demonstrated Office 365 and Windows Azure integration. One of the challenges (and boy, there are many) of Office 365 and SharePoint Online are access to External Data or services.

SharePoint 2010

You cannot create property based search scopes in Office 365 (SharePoint Online)

Post is updated, see comments at the end of the post. We’re really getting close to the go live of Office 365 and I am, and I guess a lot of you are as well, preparing to launch a couple of Intranets and sites. As you know by now there are some major differences between SharePoint 2010 on-premise and SharePoint Online in Office 365. And there are also some more subtle ones that jumps up right in your face.

SharePoint 2010

How to do active authentication to Office 365 and SharePoint Online

This is a post detailing how you perform active authentication to SharePoint Online in Office 365. Active authentication is required when you need to authenticate in code to programmatically access SharePoint objects, using for instance Client Object Model, web services or WebDAV from outside of Office 365. When you are “in” SharePoint Online or using the web browser this is not needed since you are either already authenticated and the web browser handles the authentication using active authentication.

Windows Azure

Presentations and code for Office 365 and Windows Azure sessions from TechDays 2011

Back in the saddle from another TechDays event here in Sweden. This year it was all about the cloud! It was as always a great show and an awesome party. Thank you Microsoft, all presenters, all attendees and sponsors. I did two sessions - or actually one session divided into two segments about Office 365 and Windows Azure. I tried to squeeze in as much cloud technology as I could in a one big demo.