Add a button in to a SharePoint List/Library to trigger a Flow (part 01)

On February 8, 2019February 17, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Digital Transformation, Flow, Microsoft Flow, Modern Collaboration, Modern Workplace, SharePoint, SharePoint Knowledge, SharePoint Online, SharePoint OOTB Features6 Comments

Part 01 (This article)

Microsoft Flow together with PowerApps undoubtedly revolutionizing the process automation in modern work places. You may have a Flow attached to a document library or list but there is no easy access to initiate that flow from the list/library itself. People have to dig in a little bit to initiate it and that’s a little bit of time consuming for constant usage.

With this article, we will find out how we can overcome this struggle using a little bit of JSON stuff (Don’t worry about that word, you don’t need to be a developer here). Using the Modern SharePoint capabilities, we can embed a button right in front of every item in a list or library so that people can trigger a Flow right there. New column formatting is a cool out of the box capability to get this done.

Now let’s get this started. First and foremost, you need to have a Flow created in place and have the GUID of it.

We’ll get a Flow created really quick in case if you don’t have one. If you have a Flow already in place, you can skip these basic steps

Open up your SharePoint Library and click on the “Flow” drop down on the ribbon as below. Then go to “Create a Flow”

You’ll see a list of available templates. You can utilize these templates if your requirement matches with them. Or simply feel free to create your own. Thankfully, there are a lot of templates published by Microsoft and the community which you can re-use on various scenarios. Unless the requirement is very specific or you are really keen on creating one your own, there is no point of designing a Flow from the scratch.

I am adding a simple “Request Manager Approval” flow here. Pretty straight forward.

Next, go ahead and check if the flow is added to “My Flows” section. If so, you are good to go.

Now go inside the created Flow by clicking on it and copy the highlighted GUID form the address bar of your browser. We need this for our new Button.

https://asia.flow.microsoft.com/manage/environments/Default-f50d518a-e13c-4359-85f6-ef76484f4c32/flows/e290feff-0013-41f2-97dd-91a37fb84ea0/details

Now to add the button but before that we need a new column for this button. From the list or library, go to the very end horizontally and add a new text column to this list/library.

It should be like below after adding. You can edit this view by dragging and dropping the desired column across the library if you wish to. I’m calling mine “Approval” so it makes scenes for a column contains buttons.

Now, go ahead and format this column. Click on the little arrow on the newly created column and go to format mode.

And paste the JSON code below. replace the GUID using the target flow which you have copied to the clip board.

Here’s the code (you will have it provisioned as you go to format mode itself).

{
  "$schema": "https://developer.microsoft.com/json-schemas/sp/column-formatting.schema.json",
  "elmType": "span",
  "style": {
    "color": "#0078d7"
  },
  "children": [
    {
      "elmType": "span",
      "attributes": {
        "iconName": "Flow"
      }
    },
    {
      "elmType": "button",
      "style": {
        "border": "none",
        "background-color": "transparent",
        "color": "#0078d7",
        "cursor": "pointer"
      },
      "txtContent": "Send to Approval",
      "customRowAction": {
        "action": "executeFlow",
        "actionParams": "{\"id\": \"e290feff-0013-41f2-97dd-91a37fb84ea0\"}"
      }
    }
  ]
}

That’s it and you will immediately notice the button applied to your column. This is how my library looks like after adding the button. It still doesn’t look like a button because of the border, background and colors of it.

Cool thing is ! you can customize the button to look like as you want it to be. Further more, you can also make it a logical button which has a condition behind it. (e.g. – show a button only when an item pending for approval).

Read the part 02 of this article series to further customize the button and apply conditions.

Detailed Microsoft article for this is here

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor.

Microsoft Flow in a real world scenario: using Office Quick Parts to fill out documents (part 02)

On January 20, 2019February 2, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Digital Transformation, Microsoft Flow, Microsoft Office, Microsoft365, Office 365, Productivity, SharePoint Online, SharePoint OOTB FeaturesLeave a comment

Part 02 (This article)

After the last step in the part 01 of this article series, we are resuming with this flow. We now can save this, and quickly give it a test run if it delivers what we need.

Hit “Save” button and check the flow for any errors from “Flow Checker” option on the top right corner. Also, you can test any flow straightaway from here.

Let’s do a dry run here. You have two options to test it out. Use data from the last run or trigger as a new instance. Hit “Save and Test” to begin.

And hit “Continue” to start it.

Inputs to be done here for the metadata fields we mapped and then simply hit “Run”

Flow also has an wonderful activity tracker. A cool new interface allows you to monitor your Flow activities from a one place.

Click on “See flow run activity” to find out the status of this instance. This run has been succeeded.

We can go back to the library and open up the document to see if our Quick Parts have been updated as per this run. Bare in mind that Word Online might have an issue when you open this kind of a document. Quick parts are working well with Office Desktop Application and Word online Preview Mode but, unfortunately having some issues in Word Online in edit mode. Therefore, make sure you test it with Word Application before you wonder where it went wrong as quick parts may still show empty in online mode even after running the Flow successfully.

Here’s how it should look like after the execution.

Sending Email Alerts up on completion

After composing of the document, we can configure the flow to send out email alerts. In this scenario, I’m going to send alerts to the person who triggered this flow, alerting him with the composed document as an attachment.

Let’s go ahead and add a new step as usual.

Search for “Get file content” SharePoint action

We have to rename it as “Get file content new” so it makes better sense as we already have a step with the default name.

Next up, parameters. Choose the appropriate site URL from the drop down and file identified has to be the ID. Leave the “Infer Content Type” with its default and that’s it.

Now, add another new step which we will be using to configure the email alert. search for “Send an email” and select the “Send an email (V2) (Preview)”

Parameters to be configured as shown below. search for “User email” attribute for Receiver field and choose it.

My subject line will be “Text: customer name field” concatenated. Feel free to have your own here. Type the text and look for “Customer Name” attribute and place it next to the text in the subject line as shown below.

The Body will be just a plain text which indicates the purpose of this mail. Again, it’s all up to you to insert anything here.

For the attachment name, use File name with extension, from the Update file properties section. For the File Content, get that from the Get file content new file section.

You can extend the content section by adding more attachment/content but that’s optional. just leave the “Importance” as normal here which depends on your situation though. Feel free to adjust these parameters as required.

Now the exciting part !. We can run our full flow to see if everything works as expected. So I will go ahead and kick it.

Click on “see flow run activity” to see the status of this instance.

And click again on the latest instance from the history of this flow.

You will see the entire history of the instance selected. And best of all, in just a simple click you can see the action result in a handy dandy UI ! Isn’t this amazing ?

Now let’s switch to our outlook account. In my case it’s my account which was used to kick the Flow. And, I can see the latest item with all our parameters including the attachment which means the hard works have paid off !!

In addition to that, Flow Dashboard is a great place to keep up with all your things around Flows across the entire tenant. You can turn on/off a flow with just a button swipe!. Statuses and other handy dandy stuff all brought in to a one place to make your life more easier.

Until next flow post, Happy Flowing !

Start over with part 01

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor.

Microsoft Flow in a real world scenario: using Office Quick Parts to fill out documents (Part 01)

On January 18, 2019January 31, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Digital Transformation, Flow, Microsoft Flow, Microsoft Office, Modern Collaboration, Office 365, SharePoint Knowledge, SharePoint Online, SharePoint OOTB Features1 Comment

Part 01 (This Article)

Yes ! a simple and yet solid Microsoft Flow can be configured to fill-out a Word Document stored in your SharePoint library in conjunction with Quick Parts.

Image Courtesy: brookfieldinstitute

With this blog series, I’m going to demonstrate, how you can utilize legacy and yet famous Office Quick Parts with Microsoft Flow to optimize your content creation!. Well, Quick Parts aren’t new, they have been in Office suite since 2010 but still being famous among content creators due to its usability.

To get started, you need the following fundamentals:

Office 365 subscription with SharePoint, MS Flow Capabilities
A document library to store documents
Microsoft Office Application Installed in your PC or Mac

Once you have them, simply log in to SharePoint online and open up the desired site. You need a document library to store documents and also relevant fields (metadata) to be created to match our quick parts (Date, Company Name, Project Name etc..).

In my case, I have a simple library with few metadata fields created as below.

Following fields in blue, are our quick parts that we will be linking with the SharePoint library fields. They can be belong to a content type (centralized) or a specific to an library, nevertheless we can use quick parts in a document so that anyone can easily fill them out as part of a process.

Once you have added columns in to the library (much more easier in Modern SharePoint experience!), create a new Word document in that library or if you already have a document, just upload it to the library (just drag and drop). my library is the default “Shared Document” and the columns are “Customer, Project name, Date, Project value”, just four, simple !

Once you have uploaded, open it from Word application as shown below.

From Word, direct to Insert –> Quick Parts –> Document Property –> Choose the desired field/s

Here I’m adding Customer field which looks like below once added.

You have to click on each spot where you want Quick part to be placed and it will insert accordingly. I have added some fields multiple times here which is perfectly fine. Normally, a single field value can be used in various location across a document.

Changes are usually saved automatically. If you notice the save icon on the top bar of Word Application. So just go ahead and close this now.

Let’s head back to our library and get started with building the Flow for this scenario. Its easier to work with any office 365 tool nowadays due to the ultimate UI enhancements Microsoft have recently done.

Click on Flow –> Create a flow, from the Library

You will now be redirected to Flow web site and you must sign in using your O365 account to be able to go ahead from here onwards.

Once you signed in, choose New –> Create from blank from the Microsoft Flow home page. Pretty simple right ?

Type in “Manual” and hit “Enter” to search. Select the “Manually triggered button” as shown below.

Next up, we have to choose our SharePoint action. Type in “Get File Content” and select the highlighted action to proceed.

On the trigger options, Choose appropriate input types to match your fields. Keep in mind that your trigger can be whatever you want it to be, in my scenario, I’m using a manual trigger which is easy for me to demonstrate the use case.

Now to format our input parameters in the trigger. In my case, I’m adding 4 input types (Date, text and number) according to the Quick Parts I have. You can have more or less, inputs based on your story.

Customer: Text Field | Amount: Number | Doc Date: Date | Project: Text

Next up, is to configure our 1st SharePoint action to act as we want. we have to bind our SharePoint library to the flow. Choose the site where you have the library from the dropdown. I am using SharePoint because, in this case that’s is where my data resides, but, you can use various other services such as Salesforce, or PowerApps to bring inputs in to the file. The idea of this post is to demonstrate that how data coming from (anywhere) can be automatically entered in to a Word document.

And select the document library from the listed ones. Leave “Infer Content Type” as Yes as well.

Now let’s add a new action here. Click on “New” and add the Create File SharePoint action as below.

This action will update the file properties when the flow is triggered. Select the Site address and folder path (Library). Define the File name by choosing the appropriate fields as you wish. File content should come from the File Content Action itself.

Once this is done, the Flow so far would look like this. make sure you map the fields properly so you wont have any errors during the first run. A positive first impression is something awesome you know that !!

Then, click on “New” and search for “Update file properties” SharePoint action from the list to add our next action.

In here too, we have to configure some parameters to reflect fields and quick parts appropriately. Choose the same site and libraries and Item ID should be “Item ID” from create file. I am using Customer Name field as the title here but its up to you to have your own choice.

Continue to read part 02

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor.

Find and export list of users with no Skills Defined in Office 365 profile

On November 25, 2018February 6, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Digital Transformation, Modern Collaboration, Office 365, Office Delve, Productivity, SharePoint Online7 Comments

This is the article 07 in this series.

Having a complete profile in Office365 is not just a benefit for user himself, but for the entire organization which directly impacts on productivity. A finished profile leads to better visibility and eventually results in faster communications across hundreds of thousands of employees in an enterprise setup. Ultimate idea of Office Delve (latest interface of profile comes with more capabilities such as recent activities) is to provide overall insights of a user information and his activities/engagements which makes obvious sense for anyone.

Nevertheless, none of these would be in action unless you have a complete profile with basic details entered in. No matter how much HR would try to push, we still spot a lot of random users who haven’t completed their profiles.

With this short and sweet article series, I’m trying to give you the steps that we followed during the identifying process as requested by our HR. screenshots may differ than our production setup, but you surely will get the point here.

I had to use some PowerShell scripting to get this list out from Office 365 and generate a CSV file for each criteria so that HR can directly reach out to the user via emails and advice to take an action to update the profile on the spot. As a result, we were able to get 100% completeness of profiles across a 5000+ employee organization.

There is no out of the box reporting when it comes to Profile Completeness in Office 365, therefore we have no option other than PowerShell. PowerShell is the ultimate tool for O365 administration, whenever graphical interface has a barrier, hence, make sure you dig around it to understand its capabilities to go beyond.

FINDING USERS WITH NO SKILLS DEFINED IN THEIR PROFILE (This Article)

Defining someone’s skill sets in their profile is vital when it comes to collaboration and team work. It allows others to reach out to the right person on a specific subject. With the Skills field left blank, the organization will not benefit of expertise finder in Office 365.

In this article I’m trying to explain the steps it takes to find out the users who has not set their skills in their Office 365 profile (or simply, delve profile). So here we go, following are the requirements before we get started:

Azure AD PowerShell Module – download here
Azure AD Administrator Rights
SharePoint Online Administrator Rights
SharePoint Online PnP Module – download here

Script steps breakdown:

First and foremost, we need to fetch the Office365 credentials and then connect to Azure Active Directory.

$cred = get-Credential

Connect-AzureAD -Credential $cred

Connect-PnpOnline -Url https://mantoso-admin.sharepoint.com/ -Credentials $cred

Then let’s fetch all users in this tenant, who are internal to the company and that have at least one license assigned to them.

$Users = Get-AzureADUser | Where {$_.UserType -eq 'Member' -and $_.AssignedLicenses -ne $null}

Now to create an empty array in which we will later store the output (user list who has not set skills).

$NoSkillsUsers = @()

Now we will dig in through each user, and check if they have a SharePoint Online profile. This is because this property is stored in SharePoint and not in Azure AD account. If a profile exists, I will check their Skills property is filled or not. If not, I will add them to the array I just created in the previous step, and export them to a CSV file called “NoSkillsUsers.csv”. Similar to the ones we did in the previous articles of this series.

foreach ($user in $Users) 
{
    $SPProfile  = Get-PnPUserProfileProperty -Account $user.UserPrincipalName -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
        if ($SPProfile -ne $null)
        {
          if ($SPProfile.UserProfileProperties.'SPS-Skills' -eq "")
            {
               $NoSkillsUsers += $user
            }
        }
}

And, finally we can export the SharePoint result to a CSV through below part.

$NoSkillsUsers | Select DisplayName, UserPrincipalName | Export-Csv -Path "C:\Tools\Reports\NoSkillsUsers.csv" -NoTypeInformation

If you need to obtain a similar report on other user criteria’s, here are the other articles of this series which would help you to achieve it.

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor.

Find and export list of users with no Department set in Office 365 profile

On November 25, 2018February 6, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Delve, Digital Transformation, Microsoft365, Modern Collaboration, Office 365, Office Delve, PowerShell, Productivity, SharePoint7 Comments

This is the article 06 in this series.

FINDING USERS WITH NO DEPARTMENT SET IN THEIR PROFILE (This Article)

In this article I’m trying to explain the steps it takes to find out the users who has not set the relevant department in their Office 365 profile (or simply, delve profile).

So here we go, following are the requirements before we get started:

Azure AD PowerShell Module – download here
Azure AD Administrator Rights

Script steps breakdown:

First and foremost, we need to fetch the Office365 credentials and then connect to Azure Active Directory.

$cred = get-Credential
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $cred

Then let’s fetch all users in this tenant, who are internal to the company and that have at least one license assigned to them.

$Users = Get-AzureADUser | Where {$_.UserType -eq 'Member' -and $_.AssignedLicenses -ne $null}

Now to create an empty array in which we will later store the output (user list who has not set a mobile)

$NoDepUsers = @()

Now we will dig in through each user, and check if their Department property is filled or not. If not, I will add them to the array I just created in the previous step, and export them to a CSV file called “NoDepUsers.csv”. Similar to the ones we did in the previous articles of this series.

foreach ($user in $Users) 
{
    if ($user.Department -eq $null)
    {
        $NoDepUsers += $user
    }
}

And, finally we can export the SharePoint result to a CSV through below part.

$NoDepUsers | Select DisplayName, UserPrincipalName | Export-Csv -Path "C:\Tools\Reports\NoDepUsers.csv" -NoTypeInformation

If you need to obtain a similar report on other user criteria’s, here are the other articles of this series which would help you to achieve it.

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor.

Find and export list of users with no Country set in Office 365 Profile

On November 23, 2018February 6, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Delve, Digital Transformation, Microsoft365, Modern Collaboration, Office 365, Office Delve, Productivity7 Comments

This is the article no 05 in the series.

FINDING USERS WITH NO COUNTRY SET IN THEIR PROFILE (This Article)

In this article I’m demonstrating the steps it takes to find out the users who has not set their relevant country in Office 365 profiles (or simply, delve profile). This isn’t sort of a blog I wanted to write but since this daily requests comes from HR to find users (not criminals though !), this might be a common case in most places and why not write down the steps right?

So here we go, following are the requirements before we get started. Make sure you setup your environment with these:

Azure AD PowerShell Module: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/AzureAD
Azure AD Administrator

First and foremost, we need to fetch the Office365 credentials and then connect to Azure Active Directory.

$cred = get-Credential
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $cred

Then let’s fetch all users in this tenant, who are internal to the company and that have at least one license assigned to them.

$Users = Get-AzureADUser | Where {$_.UserType -eq 'Member' -and $_.AssignedLicenses -ne $null}

Now to create an empty array in which we will later store the output (user list who has not set the relevant Country)

$NoCountryUsers = @()

Now we will dig in through each user, and check if they have any value set in their Azure AD user profile. If not, we will save them in to the array we crated. And then finally export these set of users in to a CSV file called “NoCountryUsers.csv“.

foreach ($user in $Users)
{
    if ($user.Country -eq $null)
    {
        $NoCountryUsers += $user
    }
}

And, finally we can export the SharePoint result to a CSV through below part. This line will save the data that we extracted and stored in the array we created as “NoCountryUsers”

$NoCountryUsers | Select DisplayName, UserPrincipalName | Export-Csv -Path "C:\Tools\Reports\NoCountryUsers.csv" -NoTypeInformation

If you need to obtain a similar report on other user criteria’s, here are the other articles of this series which would help you to achieve it.

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor.

Find and export list of users with no Profile Picture set in Office 365 Account

On November 21, 2018February 6, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Delve, Digital Transformation, Modern Collaboration, Office 365, Office Delve, Productivity, SharePoint, SharePoint Online7 Comments

This is the article no 04 in the series

FINDING USERS WITH NO PROFILE PICTURE SET IN THEIR PROFILE (This Article)

Profile picture on a name helps recognizing coworkers easily among thousands of other people in a organization. Not setting a picture in a profile would not look nice as it reflects to most of the productivity, communication and collaboration apps such as SharePoint Online, Delve, Teams and Exchange. A gray sample placeholder like below, is not suitable for a corporate setup and not the optimal experience, so let’s find out how we can fetch such users so our HR can alert them to take action.

In this article I’m trying to explain the steps it takes to find out the users who has not set Profile Picture in Office 365 accounts. This isn’t sort of a blog I wanted to write but since this daily requests comes from HR to find users (not criminals though !), this might be a common case in most places and why not write down the steps right?

So here we go, following are the requirements before we get started. Make sure you setup your environment with these:

Azure AD Administrator
Exchange Online Administrator
AzureAD PowerShell Module
Exchange Online PowerShell Module (only if MFA in use)

Script steps breakdown:

First and foremost, we need to fetch the Office365 credentials and then connect to Azure Active Directory and the Exchange Online.

$cred = get-Credential
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $cred
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session

Then let’s fetch all users in this tenant, who are internal to the company and that have at least one license assigned to them.

$Users = Get-AzureADUser | Where {$_.UserType -eq 'Member' -and $_.AssignedLicenses -ne $null}

Now to create an empty array in which we will later store the output (user list who has not set a Picture)

$NoPicUsers = @()

Now we will dig in through each user, and check if they have set a picture as part of their profile.If not we will add that user in the newly created array. and Then lastly we will export these set of users in to a CSV file called “NoPicUsers.csv“.

foreach ($user in $Users)
{
    $Picture = Get-UserPhoto -Identity $user.UserPrincipalName -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
    if ($Picture -eq $null)
    {
        $NoPicUsers += $user
    }
}

And, finally we can export the SharePoint result to a CSV through below part. This line will save the data that we extracted and stored in the array we created as “NoPicUsers”

$NoPicUsers | Select DisplayName, UserPrincipalName | Export-Csv -Path "C:\Tools\Reports\NoPicUsers.csv" -NoTypeInformation

If you need to obtain a similar report on other user criteria’s, here are the other articles of this series which would help you to achieve it.

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor.

Find and export list of users with no Birthday set in Office 365 profile

On November 21, 2018February 6, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Delve, Digital Transformation, Microsoft365, Modern Collaboration, Office 365, Office Delve, Productivity8 Comments

This is the article 03 in the series.

FINDING USERS WITH NO BIRTHDAY SET IN THEIR PROFILE (This Article)

In this article I’m trying to explain the steps it takes to find out the users who has not set their Birthdays in Office 365 profiles (or simply, delve profile). This isn’t sort of a blog I wanted to write but since this daily requests comes from HR to find users (not criminals though !), this might be a common case in most places and why not write down the steps right?

So here we go, following are the requirements before we get started. Make sure you setup your environment with these:

Azure AD PowerShell Module
SharePoint Online PnP Module
SharePoint Online Administrator
Azure AD Administrator

Script steps breakdown:

First and foremost, we need to fetch the Office365 credentials and then connect to Azure Active Directory and the SharePoint Online Admin Center with the PnP cmdlets.

$cred = get-Credential
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $cred
Connect-PnpOnline -Url https://mantoso-admin.sharepoint.com/ -Credentials $cred

Then let’s fetch all users in this tenant, who are internal to the company and that have at least one license assigned to them.

$Users = Get-AzureADUser | Where {$_.UserType -eq 'Member' -and $_.AssignedLicenses -ne $null}

Now to create an empty array in which we will later store the output (user list who has not set Birthday).

$NoBDUsers = @()

Now we will dig in through each user, and check if they have a SharePoint online profile as this property is stored in SharePoint, not in Azure AD. If profile is available and the SP-Birthday property is null, it simply means the particular user have not set the birthday. Then lastly we will export these set of users in to a CSV file called “NoBDUsers.csv“.

foreach ($user in $Users) 
{
    $SPProfile  = Get-PnPUserProfileProperty -Account $user.UserPrincipalName -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
        if ($SPProfile -ne $null)
        {
          if ($SPProfile.UserProfileProperties.'SPS-Birthday' -eq "")
            {
               $NoBDUsers += $user
            }
        }
}

And, finally we can export the SharePoint result to a CSV through below part. This line will save the data that we extracted and stored in the array we created as “NoBDUsers”

$NoBDUsers | Select DisplayName, UserPrincipalName | Export-Csv -Path "C:\Tools\Reports\NoBDUsers.csv" -NoTypeInformation

If you need to obtain a similar report on other user criteria’s, here are the other articles of this series which would help you to achieve it.

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor.

Find and export list of users with no Manager Name set in Office 365 profile

On November 20, 2018February 6, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Digital Transformation, Modern Collaboration, Office 365, Office Delve, Productivity7 Comments

This is the article no 02 in this series.

With this short and sweet series of articles, I’m trying to give you the steps that I followed during the identifying process as requested by one of my client’s HR team. screenshots may differ than our production setup, but you surely will get the point here.

FINDING USERS WITH NO MANAGER NAME SET IN THEIR PROFILE (This Article)

Setting Manager property in the user profile is important as it reflects to Organization Chart and Workflow Steps where Manager property is fetched and Many other productivity features of Office 365 which are daily utilized. Therefore, its not a good idea to keep it empty !

In this article I’m showing you how to extract the users who has not set manager’s name in their Office 365 profile (or simply, delve profile). This isn’t sort of a blog I wanted to write but since this daily requests comes from HR to find users (not criminals though !), this might be a common case in most places and why not write down the steps right?

So here we go, following are the requirements before we get started:

Azure AD PowerShell Module : https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/AzureAD
Azure AD Administrator Rights

Script steps breakdown:

First and foremost, we need to fetch the Office365 credentials and then connect to Azure Active Directory and the SharePoint Online Admin Center with the PnP cmdlets.

$cred = get-Credential
Connect-AzureAD -Credential $cred

Then let’s fetch all users in this tenant, who are internal to the company and that have at least one license assigned to them.

$Users = Get-AzureADUser | Where {$_.UserType -eq 'Member' -and $_.AssignedLicenses -ne $null}

Now to create an empty array in which we will later store the output (user list who has not set a mobile)

$NoMNGUsers = @()

Now we will dig in through each user, and check if their Manager property is filled or not. If not, I will add them to the array I just created in the previous step, and export them to a CSV file called “NoMNGUsers.csv”. Sounds great right !

foreach ($user in $Users)
{
    $Manager = Get-AzureADUserManager -ObjectId $user.UserPrincipalName
    if ($Manager -eq $null)
    {
        $NoMNGUsers += $user
    }
}

And, finally we can export the result set to a CSV through below part.

$NoManagerUsers | Select DisplayName, UserPrincipalName | Export-Csv -Path "C:\Tools\Reports\NoMNGUsers.csv" -NoTypeInformation

If you need to obtain a similar report on other user criteria’s, here are the other articles of this series which would help you to achieve it.

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor.

Configure OneDrive access delegation up on account removal

On September 22, 2018February 9, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Digital Transformation, Modern Collaboration, Office 365, OneDrive, SharePoint Knowledge, SharePoint Online, SharePoint OOTB FeaturesLeave a comment

When you remove a user from Office 365 or Active Directory, you can decide what to do with this user’s content, e-mail account and related product licenses. For more information on this refer to my previous article- Things to consider when deleting a user account from an Office 365 subscription.

With this article, we will discover how we can configure OneDrive to automatically delegate access to someone else up on a user’s departure (after the removal of the account). In simple terms, let’s configure delegation.

Default setting for a deleted user is- the access granted to the Manager of the particular user for 30 days period (unless you have customized the retention period). But, what if a user has no Manager defined and access delegation is disabled, too ? In that case, OneDrive will follow the steps described in my previous article (Things to consider when deleting a user account from Office 365). So make sure you read through that, too.

Here are the steps:

Sign in to Office 365 Admin Center as an Global Admin. If you are prompted with a Access message, probably you do not have Global Admin rights. You may either have to request or perhaps you may not be the right person to do this task in your organization so refer to the right guy.

Next up, Expand the navigation with “Show all” option.

Head on to “All admin centers”

And choose “SharePoint Admin Center”

From here let’s head on to Classic SharePoint Admin site because these settings we are going to manage are not yet available in Modern SharePoint Admin Interface.

Once you are in the classic page, go to “User profiles” tab.

Then “Setup My Sites” from My Site Settings tab.

Now scroll down to the bottom of Setup My Sites page till you see the following screen.

Enable the access delegation here and define a secondary owner as well. As it described well in the description:

Access delegation option allows OneDrive to automatically delegate the control to Manager up on any user identity removal.
If you define a secondary owner, that might be useful in a scenario where the Manager of a particular user is unavailable but OneDrive is still delegated to the secondary owner.

Additionally, you can enable this option as well. It simply means that you can have a one person who is the secondary owner of all user’s Mysite/OneDrive content.

Read my previous post to understand the fundamental things to be considered when deleting a user account from Office 365 and Customize OneDrive retention period article to set your own retention period for OneDrive accounts.

DISCLAIMER NOTE: This is an enthusiast post and is not sponsored by Microsoft or any other vendor.