Choose when and how you want to receive Office 365 updates (all about rings)

On December 15, 2018February 2, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Microsoft Cloud, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Product Updates, Microsoft365, Office 365, SharePoint Online, SharePoint UpdatesLeave a comment

One of the best thing you get from Office 365 or, any Microsoft Cloud stack related product for that matter is that, you are eligible to receive product updates (enhancements, fixes, security updates, new features and so on) regularly for no effort or massive costs on platform migrations every few years. It means Microsoft enhances your experience almost every month now, for no additional cost. ! Yes you go that right !

With this post, we will see how we can change the way cookie crumble !. Let’s find out how you can change the update ring so that your tenant will receive updates earlier than the other who are waiting for public release.

Important note (Microsoft): The Office 365 updates mentioned in this blog applies to Office 365, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online. And do not apply to Skype for Business and related services. These release options are targeted, best effort ways to release changes to Office 365 but cannot be guaranteed at all times or for all updates.

There are 4 rings in Microsoft release management strategy. This is also known as Release Validation.

Any new update is first goes to the respective feature teams and then to the entire Office 365 product team. The entire Microsoft team is the next to receive this to validate the solidness before it goes out to customers. 3rd ring is the Targeted release who will receive it right after Microsoft’s. Finally the Worldwide release (general availability) to those who are waiting for the finest. 3rd ring here (or Targeted) has the advantage here to receive it earlier than the others in the final ring.

Important Note (Microsoft): It can take up to 24 hours for the below changes to take effect in Office 365. If you opt out of targeted release after enabling it, your users may lose access to features that haven’t reached the scheduled release yet.

From the app Launcher –> Head on to Admin and click “Show all” to expand blades.

Expand Settings –> Click on “Organization Profile”. If you have not done this before, you would immediately see the release preferences stays in Standard release mode which means you are in the last ring.

There are a few things to be aware before you choose your option here:

If you setup target release for everyone, it’d better be a test (or POC, UAT) subscription as the change is going to affect for all users in the organization.
3rd option is the best ! you do not need to have a dedicated test subscription here, as you have few set of users to enable this so it won’t affect to production users. In my case, I only have 5 users in my tenant and I will change the track for my account only. It means, you can have mixed experience users in a single organization (single O365 tenant). Once you choose the best for you, hit “Next” to proceed here.

You have to say “Yes” to this.

In just a second you will get this message if everything went well. 99,99 it does !

By adding people you can define the group you set as target release users. These are the only users going to get the latest during the ring 3 releases (Target) so in my case, it’s just going to be me only. Hit “Save” to complete it.

Close the message. And head back to Organization Profile.

You should notice the change here. And, you can change the target group of people by adding one or more people under Action menu.

To Add more, next to Release preferences, click Actions –> + Bulk add people for first release under the Standard release heading.
Choose Browse to select a file containing each person’s email address –>
Click Next and then Close.

Until next post, enjoy the updates !!

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

Find and export the list of users who has not completed About Me section in their Office 365 profile

On November 26, 2018February 6, 2019 By Manoj V KarunarathneIn Delve, Microsoft Cloud, Microsoft365, Office 365, Office Delve, PowerShell, SharePoint, SharePoint Knowledge, SharePoint Online, SharePoint OOTB Features, SharePoint Shell8 Comments

This is the article 08 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 EMPTY ABOUT ME SECTION 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 filled “About Me” section 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 both SharePoint Online Admin Centre and 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 filled the About me field).

$NoAMUsers = @()

Now we will dig in through each user, and check if they hold a SharePoint profile (This is because About Me field is hosted in SharePoint online, not in Azure AD). If the property exists, and empty, it simply means the About me section has not filled by this user.

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

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

$NoAMUsers | Select DisplayName, UserPrincipalName | Export-Csv -Path "C:\Tools\reports\NoAMUsers.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 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.

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Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure Technical Journal

Category: Microsoft365

Choose when and how you want to receive Office 365 updates (all about rings)

Find and export the list of users who has not completed About Me section in their Office 365 profile

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

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

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