Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

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...

I've had some time recently to do some much needed updates to my Exch-Rest module so it now supports both Azure Cloud Shell and PowerShell Core on Linux (tested on RHEL,CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu). So now you can logon to an Office365 Mailbox using this Module with Powershell on Linux and send Email or a Skype for Business Message or do some mailbox reporting eg The requirements on Linux is you need to be using the latest version of PowerShell core installed as per  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/setup/installing-powershell-core-on-linux?view=powershell-6 .This ensures that all the required .net Core libraries will be available as older version of .Net core didn't have some of the libraries I'm using and I didn't want to backport for older versions.  Also because there are no Linux forms to interact with for authentication you need to pass in the credentials to use via a PSCredential and the code will use the password grant to get the Token e...

For those that follow the RSS feed on my blog I've published this article on Medium in the hope of getting a little more exposure and hopefully some work which I could really use at the moment. Check it out here  https://medium.com/@gscales_52503/how-to-create-a-presence-based-distribution-list-in-office-365-67d2daca7ce4?_branch_match_id=588962753274621730

Skype for Business (and formally Lync before that) uses the Conversation History folder in an Exchange mailbox to store the history of your IM conversations. One message in your mailbox may represent many messages in an IM conversation where the conversation is broken out itself into an XML string in the Message in the "ConversationXml.{CA2F170A-A22B-4f0a-B899-93439DEC3FBC}" extended property which looks something a little bit like this if you dumped its values Which comes from the below underlying MAPI property While Instant Messaging hasn't been around as long as Email the statistics and Reporting on its usage even from third party vendors is pretty underwhelming as the data made available for reporting is limited. If however we take advantage of a Mailbox API like EWS or the Graph API and delve into the above information you can start to produce some more useful statistical reporting about your IM traffic. This could be especially useful at the moment if you w...