Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

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...

A little background The LAPFID property is an extended property that gets set on an Exchange Store Item when its deleted (any type of delete soft or hard) that is the enabler for the original folder item recovery feature that rolled out to both Exchange Online and Exchange OnPrem (2016) last year. If you where to look at this property in a MAPI editor it would look like the following To understand what that property Id value represents you need to first understand a little bit more about the Folder EntryId format (PR_EntryId) that exchange uses which is documented in this Exchange Protocol Document https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee217297(v=exchg.80).aspx . A different visual representation of this with the individual components highlighted would look something like this Hopefully from this you can see that the LAPFID is comprised of the DatabaseGUID and GlobalCounter constituents of the FolderEntryId. To make sense of the  LAPFID you need to resolve it back ...

For a long time now Public Folders have been a good way to share information and have threaded conversations across organizations. However time and technology have surpassed them somewhat of late, if your using Office365 there was first the introduction of Unified Groups and now Microsoft Teams has come to maturity both of which offer a better user and technical solution to needs Public Folders fulfil. The benefits of these newer technologies is they allow you to do more in the same context while not giving up on the existing features that Public Folders may have been giving you (outside of access in Outlook). But where the rubber meets the road at the coal face its not always as easy to migrate from one solution to another, so in this post I'm going to look at how you can access data (email etc) in an Exchange Public folder from within a Team's Tab application. This type of approach may give you some flexibility and options while your dealing with a Migration between the two o...

In my last post I went over the new Graph function called  getSchedule and how this can be used to get the FreeBusy information for a User (or Meeting Room, Resource Mailbox etc) and display that as a table like the schedule assistant in Outlook. In this post I'll show you how you can do the same thing in a Teams tab application which will give you an output something like the following The steps this app takes to display this is firstly Step 1. Authentication - The app authenticates to the Microsoft Graph API using the javascript ADAL using the silent Authentication flow for tab applications which is explained in detail here . Step 2 Get the Group Members - Once it has an Access-Token it then Gets the members of the current Team from the Graph by first getting the Id from the Context of the team currently in focus from the Teams Client SDK and then making a request to the Groups Endpoint https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups/ Step3 Schedule Request ...

One of the recent additions to the Graph API for Exchange in Office365 has been getSchedule action https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/docs/api-reference/beta/api/calendar_getschedule . What this action allows to do is get the FreeBusy information from one or more mailboxes in your Office365 environment. If your new to Exchange (or for those that have forgotten) FreeBusy information is essential what is used to produce the Schedule Assistant in Outlook and equivalent in OWA The above is built by Outlook using the EWS GetUserAvaliblity operation which is what the getSchedule action in the Graph is the equivalent of. GetUserAvaliblity has been in use in Outlook since Exchange 2007 where we went from using Public Folders to hold the freebusy information in previous versions to the Public Folder free utopia we have today. In the preceding years features such as Suggested Meeting times have been added to this EWS operation this feature is available in the Graph via the Graph i...