PSTeams PowerShell module has been on the market for a while now. It supports sending notifications to Microsoft Teams channels via Incoming WebHooks. You could send a pretty message to the team’s channel with just a few lines of code. With PSTeams 2.0, support for Adaptive Cards, Hero Cards, List Cards, and Thumbnail Cards was added.
Office 365
Today, I’m introducing a new PowerShell module called Mailozaurr. It’s a module that aims to deliver functionality around Email for multiple use cases. I’ve started it since native SMTP cmdlet Send-MailMessage is obsolete, and I thought it would be good to write a replacement that adds more features over it as things around us are changing rapidly.
Office 365 has a lot of options and applications to choose from. Enabling one E1, E3, or any other license gives the user a lot of features, including Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams. But what if you want to make sure that the user can access only Microsoft Teams? By default, you can do it manually during the assignment of the license. Simply choose only Apps you want to assign to a user.
Christmas time is upon us, and I’ve decided that my PSTeams module needs some love. I wrote it in late 2018 and updated it a few times at the beginning of 2019. This release hopefully is worth of having 1.0 version number. I don’t do that often and usually go for build numbers changes only, but Microsoft Teams message cards have their limits on functionality. Therefore, there are not many things that can be added unless Microsoft opens up and gives us all the cool features of Adaptive Cards. PSTeams module uses Webconnector to send messages to Teams. That method only supports Message Cards, which even Microsoft calls Legacy. But legacy doesn’t mean fully functional with some cool features of their own. If you’re new to PSTeams you may want to read those 2 posts below to get information how to set it up.
In the last few days, I’ve got two reports that my PowerShell module for Office 365 Health suddenly started giving errors. This was a bit weird because it worked perfectly fine on my end. But while I could understand one person having an issue of their own, with their network or firewalls, if the second person comes along with the same report, that means something else is going on.
Today I had a need to connect to Microsoft Graph and do some tasks on Office 365. Since I have already done similar stuff for my PSwinDocumentation.O365HealthService PowerShell module that I’ve described in PowerShell to get all information about Office 365 Service Health, I thought this will be easy run as I’ll just reuse the code I’ve done for that module. As always for Graph related tasks you need to register your application and assign correct permissions. I’ve used my own article for that with changes to which API I want to access. Now that I’ve done all that I’ve extracted my Connect-O365Graph function from my module and started connecting.
Office 365 is an excellent cloud service. But like any service, there’s some infrastructure behind it that has to be cared for. Since this is Cloud, Microsoft does this for you. But any problems Microsoft has to have some impact on your end users. And you may want to have that visibility for your users. Microsoft provides this to Admins when they login to the portal, but while useful you may want to use that data in other ways than those planned by Microsoft.
I’ve been managing mail service for users for a lot of years now. I don’t do it daily but I’ve spent my fair share of time analyzing spam emails. Mail vendors are doing what they can fighting spam, but it’s not easy. Each month, each year spam is getting more sophisticated. Spam emails either look like a legit email, or worse someone is targeting your company trying to get them to transfer money into a wrong account. While most of those end up in spam, there are those that come thru. It’s even worse if the company you work with has not implemented SPF or their SPF is configured to soft fail which can’t be treated as spam.
One of the tasks I often get when setting up new Office 365 tenant or installing Exchange Servers is to change the visibility of Room Mailboxes or in some cases even standard users. There’s nothing hard about it, and there are plenty of articles about it. It’s just three simple steps.