Microsoft Releases Office 2019 in Preview for Commercial Customers

If you’re interested in deploying Office 2019 in your company, this is your lucky day. Microsoft is making available Office 2019 for on-premises customers.

Predictably this is the last version of Office for on-premises users, so it is expected that the new versions to come, will be based on O365 services. Office 2019 will only run on supported versions of Windows 10 (Semi-annual Channel), Windows 10 LTSC 2018, and the next LTSC version of Server. If you are running an older version of Windows or Server, you will not be able to install this version of Office.

If you want to try this beta version, you have to visit the following link and follow the steps mentioned there.

 

In case you want more info, you have it here

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How to Permanently Remove Deleted Users from Office 365

What happens when you delete a user from the Office 365 control panel? Automatically they are moved into a recycle bin for 30 days, so if you needed, this objects can be recovered easily if the deletion was not intended.

However, if you want to permanently remove a deleted user in Office 365 you can use PowerShell.

First, connect to your Azure Active Directory by running Connect-MsolService and entering your admin credentials in the dialog box that appears.

Configuring Proxy PACs

Being immersed in Office 365 pilots and adoptions, a lot of questions are fired by the customers, some of them are related with networking requirements. Most of the times, I am able to give them some guidance on how to configure environments and give to them some best practices, but in occasions, happens that they had a lot of customizations in the proxy servers in order to control the server communications to the outside.

But I have found some posts in the technet blogs about how to automate the configuration of ProxyPac. With these scripts, we’re able to configure the proxies and configure the bypass list in the server as well as configure the outbound firewall rules to allow to access to the appropriate IPs and URLs.

I’m sure that with all this stuff, we will able to save enough time to be focused in other important things.

So, if you want to automate the configuration of ProxyPac’s and do you want to automate it, I strongly recommend visiting the follow links and extract the info from it:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/undocumentedfeatures/2016/08/18/updates-to-office-365-proxy-pac-generator/

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/undocumentedfeatures/2015/11/16/office-365-pac-file/

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/undocumentedfeatures/2016/04/06/deploying-the-office-365-proxy-pac-to-manage-your-users/

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Office-365-Proxy-Pac-60fb28f7

 

What is Secure Score?

Office Secure Score is a new tool that allow us to measure all the Office 365 security configuration and the security features available. Furthermore Secure Score analyzes if best practices have been applied to the tenant.

From the url https://securescore.office.com it is possible to access to the Secure Score Portal. Each one of the rules has some points in function of severity. Once the report has been applied, the rules are categorized into the following:

• Category: if its necessary to apply an action to a user, service or globally to the tenant
• Effort to implement
• Impact to the users
• Points assigned to the action

In the following video it is possible to see more features about this new portal:

Till next time!

Uninstalling Access from Click to Run deployments

Hi all!

This question was fired by a client, they had installed the office C2R Office version from the O365 portal, but some of the included applications such as Access, need additional approval from the IT side. So, they need to uninstall some of the components.

At the beginning, the were claiming that was not possible to uninstall a single product, because, each time they tried, they were uninstalling all the suite of Office.

After further investigation for me side, I discovered that it is not possible to uninstall some products from the C2R version, except Visio or Project that are licensed in another way, so if we want to uninstall Access it is not possible.

At first glance, I was thinking in Office Deployment tool to control how the software is implemented in the company, by configuring a XML, it is possible to exclude some of the Apps and avoid this kind of problem.

Normally, this kind of deployments are centralised by IT, but a nominal user can install ODT in his computer and run the program to only install the programs that they need. Ok, we solved half of the problem, we know that we cannot uninstall Access and we know how to implement from scratch Office. But I wanted to go a step further and try to uninstall Access from the computer, so I found the following program in GitHub: https://officedev.github.io/Office-IT-Pro-Deployment-Scripts/XmlEditor.html

From here, it is possible to configure the XML to help the admins to deploy ODT installations, so I was trying to play with the program. In my case I went to the last option “Install Toolkit”

I downloaded the program, and in the first screen I selected the option “Manage your local Office 365 ProPlus installation” which loads your current configuration in your computer, and allows to modify it, yes! This app rocks!!

So, I went to Products, and you’ll able to see an option called, excluded, where you can exclude certain programs from being installed or also Uninstalled 😊

You can review the rest of options inside the app and configure them as you need it. Finally, you can go to Local option and then select “Modify the existing installation”, this will fire the setup program and will begin the Office Wizard, remember to close all your Office applications before clicking “Rerun setup” option

Once the wizard has finished, you can check if Access or the application you have selected, remains in your computer (in my case have been uninstalled successfully).

Hope it helps!

Audit logs for OneDrive

Last week, a colleague asked me what possibilities of auditing that Onedrive has, but to be honest, no one likes being audited.

At the beginning, I was not sure about what to aswer, because I was sure that the Admin center has information about the tenant, but at the same time I was sure enough that the Admin center will not fulfil the requirements of the project.

I started digging into the O365, and I realize that exists and amazing feature called O365 audit log report inside the Compliance Center, it allows to seach the audit log to view user activity in the O365 organization, for example:

· User activity in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

· User activity in Exchange Online (Exchange mailbox audit logging)

· Admin activity in SharePoint Online

· Admin activity in Azure Active Directory (the directory service for Office 365)

· Admin activity in Exchange Online (Exchange admin audit logging)

· User and admin activity in Sway

· User and admin activity in Power BI for Office 365

· User and admin activity in Yammer

If you want to know all the activities that you can select per category, visit: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Search-the-audit-log-in-the-Office-365-Protection-Center-0d4d0f35-390b-4518-800e-0c7ec95e946c?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Knowing how to audit your information, it is an important feature and skill. Therefore, I want to introduce you how to activate all this data:

Access to you O365 tenant, Inside the Admin, go to Security section:

Then click on Office 365 audit report to access Audition and reports, take into account that before you are able to create new reports, you will need to activate the record. So, let’s begin:

And select “Turn On”

Then, you will need to wait for some time… After this time, you will be able to create activity reports, with many other filters (like date range, folders, etc…)

Currently, the audit history is retained for 90 days, I suppose that will be possible to tell MS to extend the audit log, but take into account that it is possible to export results to CSV.

Another wonderful feature, is to create activity alerts to automate process, imagine that you need to keep an eye on specific events, so you can execute a search, and then click on add an alert, you will need to specify a recipient for the alert

Therefore, when the audit detects a match between the alert and an event, it will trigger an email to the recipient specified.

As you can imagine, there are other options to detect events from the compliance center, for example using the APIs of Office 365.

Hope it helps!!

O365 – How to renew your certificates

Hi! Today I will talk about something that happens recently in one of our O365 deployments. We renewed our SSL certificates in our ADFS server, but when any administrator user Access to the O365 portal they were receiving the following alert inside the poertal:

Renew your certificates
One of your on-premises Federation Service certificates is expiring. Failure to renew the certificate and update trust properties within XX days will result in a loss of access to all Office 365 services for all users

Solution: This error can be caused if any of the three primary SSL Certificates that are required to federate to an external identity are nearing their experation date. In this case we know that this was a false positive, and automatically the certificate in the O365 tenant will be replaced, but some people at o our company were complaining about this message, so we decided to force to update the certificate.

So once again, we need some powershell to do that, let’s start

Open up the Windows Azure Active Direcotry Module for Windows PowerShell as an administrator.

Execute the following command: Connect-MsolService and enter your Office 365 administrator credentials

Execute the following command: Update-MsolFederatedDomain -DomainName yourdomain.com -SupportMultiDomain

Is it necessary to replace “yourdomain.com” with your federated domain. In case you have multiple domains you are federating with Office 365, add the optional -SupportMultiDomain parametyer as well.

Hope it helps!

Restore a deleted Site Collection in SharePoint

Today I will post about a problem that happen in one of our development farms. My colleagues sent me emails about the can’t Access to a site collection, and I was very surprised when I accessed to Central Administration and saw that the ste collection has been dissapeared.

So, If you have deleted a site collection and you want it back again it really is quite straight forward. It’s the same process for both SharePoint 2010 and 2013.

In case, you are using Office 365 then it’s all through the admin interface for SharePoint. Under the section where you manage your site collections there is a recycle bin icon on the ribbon, just go in there and restore!

If you have SharePoint on-site fire up PowerShell on the server (make sure it’s either the Management shell or you have the SharePoint modules loaded)

Then run the following:

Get-SPDeletedSite

This will list all the deleted site collections, only you have to localize the SC that has been deleted and copy the ID (SiteID) which is is necessary for the following Powershell command

Restore-SPDeletedSite –Identity <siteId>

It will ask if you sure, so just say yes.

There is no output to say “success” but if you browse to your site it will now exist again!

HTH!