Tag: Office365

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Microsoft Teams – How to enable Guest access

Teams

Yesterday Microsoft announced they enabled Guest Access. At that time I didn’t have it yet so I wasn’t able to show you how to enable it.

By default Guest Access, guests outside your own Office365 tenant, is disabled. To enable it you need to enable it in the admin settings. To do so log in to your tenant with an admin account (I created a different user in the admin role only so if I need to admin some functions or features I log in as the other user and do what I need to do).

Under Settings – Services & add-ins there is these days an Microsoft Teams entry:

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You already used this simply to enable Teams (unless this is the first time you use it). So if all is ok you already see that Teams is enabled.

Teams Admin II

Under “Settings by user/license type” you see a combo box with (in my case) “Business & Enterprise” or “Guest”. If you already enabled Teams for your tenant the “Business & Enterprise” option had the checkbox “Turn Microsoft Teams on or off for all users of this type” set to On.

Now you received an extra option, you can now check “Guest” as user/license type and also turn the checkbox “Turn Microsoft Teams on or off for all users of this type” to On.

Teams Admin

After enabling this you the team owner should be able to add users from other tenants. Yes you read it correctly … only from other tenants. The users must have a valid Work or School account:

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If your guest really has an Office 365 work or school account all is well:

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and a mail is sent to the guest:

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Enjoy your guest access in Microsoft Teams!

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Microsoft Teams Guest Access

Teams

Microsoft introduced Microsoft Teams a while ago, scaring Slack having a potential competing product in a way that Slack printed a page size advertisement in the New York times and online on Slacks blog:

https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft-8d20965d2849

The community was extremely enthusiastic around the release … until they found out that only team members could be added from their own tenants. Another thing was that Microsoft Teams is only available for paying Office 365 (so called business accounts) and EDU accounts (free for education).

Especially the limited team member scope was reason for the community to compose a UserVoice request:

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/16911109-external-access-and-federation

Well, Microsoft heard it and promised to solve it in June, delayed it twice but (partially) delivered today:

https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/09/11/expand-your-collaboration-with-guest-access-in-microsoft-teams/

It is a first step, you now should be able to invite guests from other tenants. I just tried and still not possible hear, but I’m sure it will be soon. The delivery method on Office 365 often is trickled down in segments so I’m apparently not in the first batch.

Next in line will be guest access for MSA (Microsoft Account) types of guests. Another improvement, who doesn’t have an MSA (especially if you want to use Microsoft Teams Smile).

Interesting part of all of this is that the UserVoice specifically requested NOT to limit guest access to MSA accounts:

“Finally, making external parties sign up for a Microsoft account (such as Hotmail) to authenticate against any collaboration service does not work, and better approach is required and needed.”

In other words, the request was to open Teams up for all types, not only Microsoft based accounts. From a business point of view, there is something to say for limitation to Azure AD accounts (and eventually MS accounts) to be able to at least getting some user context en improving security to where potential critical business information can be shared.

From a developer’s perspective I guess we can expect interfaces to automate team member management and extended APIs. For now let’s wait for the next step, adding MSA guest access first.

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SDN Cast 58 – Inspire, API’s en Web Assembly

SDNCast 58-800

Last week it was the week of the Microsoft Partner Conference called Inspire, the conference where Microsoft invites all partners to come over to the special partner conference to get into the new fiscal year and to realign the partner plans for the upcoming year. It appears there is a slight change in policy where the Microsoft wants to include the partners more in their sales flow for selling their cloud products like Azure and Office 365. In previous years much of the sales was often done directly through Microsoft. The new strategy is to include the partners more in this process sharing the revenue processed by these sales initiatives. An important change is thinking in scenarios of specific industries.

Microsoft was always very much integrated at the level of the technology specialists, but when it came to selling the product at the board level there was an issue. The new strategy is to explain more how Microsoft fits in the process of the business itself. How can they extend their services in a way where the business improves by providing better quality and better services to their customers together with Microsoft.

New was the announcement to bring Microsoft 365 to the market for business and enterprise subscribers. An extension to the Office 365 program where Windows is now included next to several other services like security services. In our Dutch webcast we dive into this, this week.

This week we also bring the annual list of free e-books published by one of the Microsoft guys who made a hobby of collecting all the available free e-books and this is a huge list by now! Look at the links from the show-notes below for the URL to get the e-books. The link also contains a couple of links for instance to download the full list to your local machine. Not that this is advised, it really is a huge amount of data to pull in, but if you really want you can do it.

Also two AI APIs became available, one for General Availability (the Bing Entity Search API) and one in preview (Project Prague). The links are like all others in the list below. We discussed the APIs in depth, but in Dutch … sorry for that .

Fanie prepared another demo for us, and this week he is showing the Web Assembly and what you can do with it. If you want to explore by yourself here are some links:

WebAssembly Community Group

https://www.w3.org/community/webassembly/

Github:

https://github.com/webassembly

Where can you find our 58th episode of our Dutch SDN Cast?

https://youtu.be/TuNcLjT1RlA

Did you subscribe our Dutch SDN Cast channel already?

Subscribe your YouTube channel if you don’t want to miss a single broadcast. Usually we will broadcast on Thursday evenings at 8 PM but there can be a change of plans where we need to move to another time or day. So to be sure Subscribe to our channel on YouTube or go to http://www.sdncast.nl to see when the next episode is due.

Other news:

 

More layoffs
https://www.scribd.com/document/35351…

Community Leader Zone
http://clzinvite.kickoffpages.com/?ki…

Largest FREE Microsoft eBook Giveaway
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/mssm…

Introducing Microsoft 365
https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/0…
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/micro…
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/micro…

Announcing UWP Community Toolkit 1.5
https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapp…

Samsung Releases 4th Preview of Visual Studio Tools for Tizen including support for .NET Core 2.0 Preview
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visu…

The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2017
https://www.jetbrains.com/research/de…
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/su…

Calling all game devs: The Dream.Build.Play 2017 Challenge is Here!
https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapp…

Bring rich knowledge of people, places, things and local businesses to your apps
https://blogs.bing.com/search-quality…

Project Prague
https://labs.cognitive.microsoft.com/…

Events

This week’s events

Inspire July, 9-13 – Washington D.C.
https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/inspire/
https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/inspire/sessions

Next Week events

Faculty Summit 2017: The Edge of AI – July 17,18 Redmond, WA
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/event/faculty-summit-2017/

Upcoming events

Agile 2017 – August 7-11 2017, Orlando FL

https://www.agilealliance.org/agile2017/

Wazug – September 7 2017, Hilversum

Ignite 2017 – September 25-29 – Orlando
https://ignite.microsoft.com

Hybrid IT Event – September 26 – Maarssen, NL
https://events.global.fujitsu.com/r7/runtime/fujitsu/events/registration.php?event=raqvmqdf125d&l=en&s=login&ref_s=registration

SDN Event 3 – 6 October 6, Zeist, NL

https://www.sdn.nl/EVENTS/6-oktober-2017

TechDays October 12-13, 2017 RAI Amsterdam

http://www.techdays.nl/
https://techdays.msnlevents.net/content/eventselection.aspx?eventid=26152

SharePoint Unite – October 24-26 2017, Haarlem

https://sharepointunite.com/

Visual Studio Live! November 12-17 2017 Orlando, FL

https://live360events.com/events/orlando-2017/vslive.aspx

As usual we are always looking for presenters for our own events and Meetup’s so if you want to share something about hot technologies or just about something you implemented at work or in an App that could be interesting to our audience let us know so we can schedule you for one or our next SDN events or Dutch .NET Group Meetups.

This off course also goes for if you want to write a great article for us to publish in our SDN Magazines or at our SDN Website. The downside of publishing a magazine article is that there can be some time between writing the article and publishing the magazine. So, if it is time critical sometimes the best option is to publish it on the www.sdn.nl website to get more speedy attention to the article.

As you see, options enough to address your audience with top notch information. You can even, if you like, be our guest in our SDN Cast shows to discuss the projects you are working on or other topics you master. We will instruct you how to connect with us and what it is you need to join the show.

Hopefully we will see you at our weekly web cast, for the schedule go to www.sdncast.nl for next week’s announcement to find out the day and time of our next broadcast or go to www.sdncast.nl/youtube to watch old episodes and videos that we recorded at our events. Don’t forget to subscribe our YouTube channel www.sdncast.nl/subscribe or go directly to YouTube not to miss any of our shows!

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Office Development at //Build/ 2016 – 2 – Graph Changes

snip_20160419224647

Microsoft Graph is a gateway to data and insights in Office365 allowing you to easily traverse over objects and relationships to access the information that is sitting in the Office365 services using web standards. Microsoft Graph is an open platform accessible through a secure data access mechanism.

Microsoft Graph API developer stack.

At Build, with regards to Microsoft Graph the following changes have been announced for General Availability:

  • Webhooks on Outlook Entities
  • Access to consumer services OneDrive and Outlook.com
  • OneDrive large file upload/download

The following, but not only this – there is more, went in preview:

  • Excel REST API
  • Administrative Units
  • Find Meeting Time API
  • Get/set out of office
  • Online meeting links
  • Updates to People API
  • Updates to trending APIs

Documentation on Microsoft Graph can be found at:

Microsoft Graph: The easiest way to call

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Happy wishes and some Office predictions for 2016

MVP_Horizontal_FullColor

Another year has gone, a new year started … this is 2016. Welcome!

My year, for the eleventh time already, started with receiving the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award again.

After nine years of receiving the award for Visual Studio Tools for the Office System (VSTO), one year of Office365 I now, after the award update, received the award in the award category “Office Servers and Services”. This is where all former Office365, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business and Yammer are grouped today. As of October 2015 the MVP Award categories have changed, there are now less categories and in theory you can get the MVP Award in multiple categories.

So what will bring 2016 to you and me? Well nobody knows… so I don’t know either, but let’s see if we can make some educated guesses here.

2015 was the year Office Microsoft released some early updates on the Office 365 APIs. Starting with the outer ring of Office365 we got access to files, contacts and much more. Access to the documents itself (the structure of the document, in VBA the Object Model) was fairly limited.

In 2016 I expect to see much more APIs providing access to the Office document model. This will give you the functionality, but now cross-platform, like you used to see with VBA, COM-Addins and in VSTA/VSTO solutions.

Let’s see how the Office365 APIs progresses in the year of 2016. Join me in the process of learning the ‘modern’ ways of developing Office solutions on x-plat. Keep an eye on my blog …

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Want to upgrade but what version of Office am I using?

Office%20graphic

Now Office 2016 is available you want to upgrade, but you are not sure what version of Office you are currently running. In my blog post yesterday I already provided a couple of links where to go if you upgrade from Office365 Personal/Home or Business. But to do so you need to know what is installed on your machine today.

To help you a bit with this Microsoft put all the version information for the various versions into one location:

What version of Office am I using?

Now identify your version and upgrade to the right edition.

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Back to Blogs … Installing Live Writer 2012

I lost my blogging tools in the process of testing Windows 10 and or reinstalling machines. I now finally came to install Live Writer back on my machine.

I am working on getting my way around Office365 Development. It appears that developing using VBA and VSTO Add-ins is soooo year 2000, time to move forward Winking smile.

Well, the real story is that in my day job I’m still on VSTO but it probably doesn’t come as a surprise if I say that Microsoft already spent at least four years (plus) by now on creating a new Add-in platform that is ready to target X-Platform (Windows, IOS, Android) development.

They still have a long way to go, many items within the current (COM) object model still needs to be addressed, but as time is moving forward the Office Development Team is making great progress in adding new features every day hopefully in the end getting in par with the VSTO capabilities. And let’s be real, the Office365 scope of today is so much bigger than the scope of the ‘old’ Office.

Anyway, I got rebooted, and if you can read this I was able to get Live Writer 2012 installed and to be ready for future posts.

Oh, and this is how I installed Live Writer – in case you want to join me and start your own blog:

[Thanks to Stefan to help out here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_stranger/archive/2015/07/24/installing-windows-live-writer-on-windows-10.aspx]