Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

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...

First a little news about Exchange Identifiers that you may have missed (its not often that something like this changes so its rather exciting) When you access an item in an Exchange Mailbox store whether its OnPrem or in the Cloud you use the Identifier of the particular item which will vary across whatever API your using. Eg MAPI - PR_EntryId eg NameSpace.GetItemFromID(EntryId) EWS -  EWSId eg EmailMessage.Bind(service,ewsid) Rest -   RestId  eg  https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/messages('restid') The advice over the years has always been its not a good idea to store these Id's in something like a database because they change whenever and Item is moved. Eg if an Item is moved from the Inbox to a Subfolder in the Inbox it will received a different Id so whatever you have stored in your database suddenly becomes invalid and its not easy to reconcile this. However a new feature that has appeared in Exchange Online in Beta with the Graph API is imm...

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...

For those that just follow my RSS Feed I've just published the following on Linked In  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/front-line-series-what-can-you-do-when-receive-malicious-glen-scales

Zero-hour auto purge is one of the features of Office365 that will detect malicious and Spam emails and move them to the Junk email folder for any email that has breached the first level defences and has been delivered to users mailboxes. There is a good description of how it works here but basically when the service learns a particular message was malicious/spam it can retrospectively detect and eliminate/move any simular messages that arrived previously and weren't detected. This is a good and much need feature as no AntiSpam or Malware solution is perfect (no matter what the vendor say) so there will always be the case where thing slip through. But this very fact is what causes an exposure point where the potentially malicious email sits in the Inbox of end user up until the time its gets zapped. What I wanted to present in this post is a few ways you can measure the amount of the time you may have been vulnerable for and show some methods you can use to look more at message...

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...