Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

A while ago I published this post on accessing the Graph directly from an Arduino, this made use of the "resource owner password credentials grant" (meaning it used a hard coded username and password). Once you have enabled MFA (multi factor authentication) on an account this grant no longer works because you have no ability to provide the other factors for the Authentication to succeed.  For devices like Arduino's or most IOT devices that have very limited UI capabilities this is where device code authentication can be used. The way Device Code Authentication works is instead of posting the user credentials to the token endpoint to get an access token, you make a post first to the /v2.0/devicecode endpoint which will then give you a specific user code to use to authenticate with on another device. You then visit http://microsoft.com/devicelogin (on a pc or mobile device) enter the user code and authenticate as the required user doing any extra MFA authentication. In ...

Calendaring formats in Messaging Clients tend to all follow much the same approach whether its Outlook, Outlook on the Web or Mobile, Gmail or Microsoft Teams .  Like email data, calendar data can be random and complex in its volume and type (recurring appointments etc) so a simple year at a glance calendar for someone designing a mass market client is hard to do well for all the data types and volumes that you could encounter, therefor its not something you see in mail clients by default (lets face it who wants to support that). In the absence of year at a glance calendars  I was surprised to see people using Excel to create yearly aggregated calendars in Microsoft Teams for events (for data that already existed in shared Calendars). But more surprisingly is that it actually kind of worked well when there wasn't a lot of data that needed to be shown. The one thing that sprang to my mind was if you could automate this it  would be really good for people who use the Bir...

The Azure AD business-to-business (B2B) platform is the underlying tech that drives both guest access in Microsoft Teams,Office365 Groups and also other Azure resources. If your someone who collaborates across a number of different organization or potentially different Community or even school or university groups you might find your MSA or Office365 account starts to accumulate Guest access to different tenants. Depending on what type of access your accruing eg If it just Microsoft Teams access you will see your guest tenancies when logging on to Teams, another way is if you logon to the Azure Portal and hit switch directory you will get a list of Azure Directories your account has an association with.  However and easier way of doing this is using PowerShell along with the ADAL, Azure Resource Management and Graph API's. I put together the following script that uses first the Azure Resource Management API to make a request that gets all the Tenants associated wi...

Group calendars have always been one of the big asks for in any group collaboration programs back from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange and now Microsoft Teams. There are a few ways of getting a Group calendar working in Teams, one is hosting the OWA web apps see or some other people advocate using a SharePoint calendar and hosting that similarly. Here is a different method you can use by taking advantage of being able to call the Graph API in a  Tab application. The getSchedule Graph action (still currently in beta) allows you to query up to 62 days of Freebusy information on up to 100 calendars in a single call this makes it a good option for this type of application. So as long as users can view each others calendars or have detailed freebusy permissions the action should return the le vel of detail required for a Group calendar.   The other thing you can do with the Graph API is get the users photo and build a nice legend for the Group calendar also. To make this visu...

One of the things you maybe considering in the new year is migrating from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. In this post I'm going to demonstrate how you can use the UCWA api (which is the REST API you can use to talk to a Skype for Business server either in Office365 or OnPrem) to access Skype for Business from within the Teams Client via a Teams Tab application. (For those unacquainted with UCWA this the API that is used to Access Skype within OWA). Why would you want to do this ? its one way of easing migration friction by providing a different level of interoperability (outside of using both clients) and also a way of adding functionality into the Teams client that isn't there currently.  In this post I'm going to look at showing the users Skype conversation history, while this information is also stored in a users Mailbox and also a ccessible via the Graph API, in this app I'm going to use the UCWA API to access the conversation logs via the Skype for Busin...

Guest access is one of the ways in Office365 of collaborating between different organizations which allows you to give certain people who are outside of your company access to a limited subset of the resources you have in the Cloud. This can be an Office365 unified Group or Microsoft Team but also other workloads like SharePoint and OneDrive can utilize this. When it comes to scripting there are a number of value add things you can do to automate tasks for different people who have guest accounts in another tenant. The first step to automating with Guest Access is to Authenticate and generate an access token in the Guest tenant. Getting the Guest Tenants Authorization Endpoint Before you can authenticate you need to first obtain the Guest tenants Authorization endpoint for the tenant where the Guest Account exists in. To do this you can make a simple Get Request like the following Invoke-WebRequest -uri ("[https://login.windows.net/{0}/.well-known/openid-configu...