Hi all, please see my latest blog post on Flow & Azure automation working in harmony. It’s truly awesome.
http://www.engagesq.com/flow-and-azure-automation-in-harmony/
6 tips to deploying Matter Center for Office365
Checkout my latest blog post exploring how to deploy Matter Center for Office 365 and what I’ve learned from many deployments.
http://engagesq.com/6-tips-to-deploying-office-365-matter-center/
Azure Automation – What is it? Why should I use it?
Check out my latest blog post as I provide my thoughts into Azure Automation and how it could be useful for your organisation.
http://engagesq.com/azure-automation-what-is-it-why-should-i-use-it/
Overlay an Exchange Online calendar to a SharePoint Online Calendar
Back in SharePoint 2010 Microsoft introduced the capability to display an exchange calendar over the top of a SharePoint calendar.
The exchange calendar has always had it’s limitations. But here is another I recently discovered.
If you are looking to configure a SharePoint online calendar to consume an exchange online calendar as an overlay, the short answer is you can’t do it! Why?
It was not an easy explanation from Microsoft to find. But see below a snippet and link to a support article from Microsoft.
“This issue occurs because the ability to use the calendar overlay in a SharePoint Online calendar that is retrieved from Exchange Online isn’t supported.
If you were to try to complete the calendar overlay following microsoft’s support guide you would receive an error
“The HTTP request is unauthorized with client authentication scheme ‘Ntlm’. The authentication header received from the server was ‘Basic Realm=””
It is a little disappointing that this cannot be completed, perhaps the introduction of Office 365 Planner & Groups will see this change in the near future.
Removing a SharePoint Server that no longer exists.
I was recently tasked with removing a server from a farm where the virtual server no longer existed, I knew that the best practice was to Disconnect the Server and uninstall SharePoint on the server itself. But what happens if there’s a catastrophic failure on the server and you can’t follow that process? Simple.
The following applies to SP 2010/SP 2013
Browse to Central Administration > System Settings > Manage Servers in this farm On this page you will see a list of the servers in the farm 
Click Remove Server You will receive a prompt but as the server is no longer available the only choice to remove the server is to click OK. What’s really important here is that Best Practice is not to do it via this method but because your server has been removed you have no choice but to remove the server in such a way. 
It is recommended that you uninstall SharePoint Products from the server, rather than removing the server from this page. Because the Remove Server operation does not delete information from the server, such as any registry keys that were set, use this operation only when the server is no longer available.
Click OK Refresh the page and the server will be removed. Voila done! Easy as.
Adding a user to a group in office 365 using PowerShell
This article will walk you through how to add your Office 365 Users to an Office 365 Group.
There are a few pre-requisites to do this. One of which is having ‘Windows Azure Active Directory Module’ installed on your machine. Second, that you are an Administrator.
Scenario:
I have 10 users who I would like each to be added to an Office 365 Group. I’m a little too lazy to add one by one so I’ll look to do this with Powershell.
So first up I’ll need to create the group to add my 10 test users into.
From the Office 365 admin centre click Groups, click the + for this demo. I’ve created a group called ‘Test Security Group’ and as you can see from the screenshot below no users have been added.
Below is a screenshot of the users I will be adding to the security group.
OK so now we have our users & group we need to open up the Windows Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell
Once the powershell window is opened you will need to connect to your tenant. To do this type-
Connect-MsolService
You will then be prompted to type in a tenant administrators username/password combination to proceed.
Once authenticated we need to get the ID of the group. Easy.
$groupid = Get-MsolGroup | Where-Object {$_.DisplayName -eq “Test Security Group”}
This line is finding a group that matches the Group Display Name of “Test Security Group” and putting it into the $groupid variable.
We can now leave the group for now. It’s time to start getting the users id’s in order to add to this group.
As I have a large number of users in my directory I conveniently named the users test1 to test10. Because of this I will get these users and put them to a variable so I can extract the information needed to add these users to a group.
$users = Get-MsolUser | Where-Object {$_.DisplayName -like ‘*Test*’}
It’s important to note that I am only filtering the users as I don’t want to add all users in the domain to this Active Directory. You can add and filter as you please.
It’s now time to add the users to the group. We are going to use the $users variable and run a foreach loop which will iterate through each user and grab it’s ObjectId and add to the security group.
$users | foreach {Add-MsolGroupMember -GroupObjectId $groupid.ObjectId -GroupMemberObjectId $_.ObjectId -GroupMemberType User} 
Depending on how many users you’re adding in bulk it may take a couple of minutes so be patient. Once it run’s, check back to your group and see if the users are added.
You can download the full script here
SharePoint Online – enabling latest features
As Office 365 but specifically in this case SharePoint Online continues to develop and grow you may be missing out on the latest updates;
Microsoft released a configuration change a little while back that allows you to turn on ‘Preview Features’, Preview Features are the latest changes that haven’t been released to all tenants yet so it really in my opinion should be used in dev environments only to test and release changes before arriving at a production environment
So How do I enable the preview features?
Easy, navigate to your admin tenant (https://yourtenant-admin.sharepoint.com)
Click Settings, scroll most of the page down and you will see a section called ‘Preview Features’ .
Enable the feature and click OK
Once done the latest Preview features should be available to you.
Learn more about Preview Features here
Using Office 365 Video for the first Time
Microsoft Office 365 have recently added the Video Functionality to their subscriptions a cool new set of features indeed, but a new adventure of learning that is needed – hopefully this blog post can assist with the learning.
Depending on your Preview status options in your Microsoft Tenant you may not have the Video feature available to you:
To turn on the Preview option please follow this blog post:
Expand the new Top Nav display button and click Video , if you click the elipses button (…) you can pin to nav bar !
Your video page will start to load for the first time so this may take a while (Up to 10minutes)
Once Completed you will receive this nice Welcome Message , click Let’s go
One of the first things to note is the URL of the Video Portal
https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/portals/hub/_layouts/15/videohome.aspx
So let’s create our first Channel
Click the Create Channel Button , Give your channel a name and color:
Click Create
Once created you can now upload videos and share with your Security Groups, SharePoint Groups or even unauthenticated users(everyone)
Which I will take you through in my next blog post.
Additionally, I found the below link an informative look into the new Video Portal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXSZ0jYBKlM&feature=youtu.be
Hide OneDrive link from Navigation
A common question that I am asked on a daily basis is how can we hide ‘One Drive’ or ‘Newsfeed’ from the Top Navigation bar?
Well Thanks to an update a few month’s back it’s now extremely simple to do so:
Browse to:
https://companyname-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/online/TenantSettings.aspx
Scroll down to the bottom of your page Save your changes and you are done
Bulk updating a column in SharePoint Online
Ever had this situation where you need to bulk update a specific column in a list or library, you have 100’s or even 1000’s of items and need to set the same information for all the items, although rare I’ve seen it needed and while there may be a couple of way’s to do it here is a little application I have put together to do so.
I have this test library in my site collection, I’d like to update the title column to all be the same, let’s now use the Bulk Updating Column Console App to do so.
You can find the Application uploaded to the TechNet Gallery here , which has the source code for those wanting to see the nuts and bolts to it all ( there isn’t whole lot to it!
Please note you will need the SharePoint Online Management Pack installed or else the App will error
1. Open the Console Application Executable;
2. Enter in the following info:
- Your site collection URL
- Your username
- Your Password
- The List Title you would like to interact with
- The Column Name you would like to update
- The columns new value
The App will begin to run and update the specified column for all List Items,
The Application will run and update the Column accordingly –
And we’re done 🙂
Tech for everyone 
