Hey there! Today, I wanted to introduce you to one of the small but excellent module I’ve created called the O365Synchronizer. This module focuses on synchronizing contacts and users. If you’ve ever been tasked with synchronizing Global Address Lists (GAL) across different Office 365 tenants or just wanted to sync GAL with user mailboxes so they can access contacts directly on their phones, this tool is for you.
office 365
Being a Microsoft MVP has quite a few benefits. You get to be part of unique offers that help you enhance your knowledge even further. Microsoft Learning team decided to provide free training on Microsoft Fundamentals for MVPs and the Microsoft community, so I’m sharing this with you! Starting next week, Microsoft will run each activity from 9 AM to 5 PM Eastern Standard Time (EST) or 15:00 to 23:00 in Europe (CET).
When you’re using Office 365 and want to send an email, you have two choices SMTP or Microsoft Graph API, which is a “new” kid on the block. For some time, I’ve used Microsoft Graph exclusively to send emails in favor of SMTP as it’s much easier to manage and generally works over HTTPS. If you type in google “Send email graph API PowerShell,” you will get lots of hits as bloggers, and Microsoft has already covered this topic. It’s even more critical than ever because Basic Authentication is deprecated in Office 365. To help out with the transition, Microsoft even released its PowerShell module. With Send-MgUserMail proposed as a way to send emails via Graph API, you will notice it’s far from being easy & user-friendly. Over two years ago, I released a PowerShell module called Mailozaurr (some people may not like my modules’ naming – but that’s how I roll!). In a blog post, Mailozaurr – New mail toolkit (SMTP, IMAP, POP3) with support for oAuth 2.0 and GraphApi for PowerShell, I’ve shown a basic functionality on how to send emails using SMTP OAuth 2.0 or Graph API, which aims to be drag & drop replacement over Send-MailMessage and is supposed to be as simple as possible to send an email with a low effort and high readability. You can also read on sending emails using Graph API by Tony Redmond in his blog post Moving on from Send-MailMessage: Sending Email from PowerShell using the Graph API.
PSTeams is a PowerShell module that helps simplify sending notifications to Microsoft Teams via Incoming webhooks. It’s easy to use and doesn’t require playing with JSON. Since version 2.0, it started to support Adaptive Cards; in version 2.1, I’ve added the ability to mention people. Today I’m introducing an easy way to send data as a table and a quick way to add a line break.
PowerShell language allows you to work and build complicated objects. There are multiple ways to save them, such as XML or JSON, but sometimes using them is impossible or inadequate. Sometimes you want to use HTML or CSV or any other single dimension output.
Two years ago, I wrote a PowerShell module called PSWinDocumentation.O365HealthService. The idea was simple – replicate Health Service data Microsoft offers in Office Portal so you can do with data whatever you want and display it however you like. I’ve written about it in this blog post. A few weeks back, someone reported that the module stopped working, and I’ve confirmed it indeed no longer works! Initially, I thought that maybe some data format changed, as it changed multiple times, or perhaps the date format was wrong again, but no. Microsoft has deprecated Office 365 Service Communications API reference and instead tells us that Service Health is now only available via Microsoft Graph API. Is it only me who didn’t get the memo about this?
Microsoft Teams over the last few years have grown into an excellent and flexible tool for both small and big companies. Having the ability to chat with users, store files or have all sorts of data in one place makes it easy and functional. Of course, it has its fair share of issues, but it’s getting better. One of the cool features of Microsoft Teams is being able to send notifications to Microsoft Teams Channels using WebHook Notifications. In the beginning, this feature was pretty limited, but after a few years, it got much better with support for Adaptive Cards, List Cards, Hero Cards, Thumbnail Cards, and Office 365 Connector Card.
Office 365 is a huge beast. It has so many services that it’s hard to track all of them. It’s even harder if you want to manage Office 365 using PowerShell. Microsoft makes many different PowerShell modules available for you, such as AzureAD, AzureADPreview, ExchangeOnline, MicrosoftTeams, and recently, Microsoft.Graph. But even with so many different modules, there are still tasks that Microsoft won’t let you do from PowerShell. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to do it. I’ve spent some time tracking how Microsoft does things while you click thru the interface and created an O365Essentials PowerShell module that can do it in an automated way.
Sending emails in Microsoft Exchange world using an alias for an account has always been a pain. It required working with workarounds such as setting up Shared Mailbox or Distribution Groups and using SendAs permissions. For years admins around the world were asking Microsoft to change this, and finally, in April 2021, they did! It’s a new feature of Office 365, and it requires action from Office 365 Administrator.
A few weeks ago, I posted a concept migration diagram for Office 365 to Twitter and Facebook. Today I thought I would show you how you can do it yourself using PowerShell and PSWriteHTML PowerShell module. When I started working on this, I’ve thought I want to create before and after infrastructure to see how it will look when migration ends. I’ve initially planned to assign myself an Office 365 Visio Plan 2 license and do something manually, thinking it may be just much easier. Unfortunately for me, there were no free Visio licenses in my tenant, and my laziness took over, so I’ve decided to give it a go using PowerShell only.