Public Folders in Office 365 are designed for shared access and provide an effective way to collaborate in your Organization. It can be accessed by multiple users depending upon the permission given from the Exchange Admin Center. Public Folder is available on Outlook on the web, Outlook 2007 or later and on Outlook for Mac. Note: Before creating a Public Folder from Exchange, you first need to create a public folder mailbox. Public folder mailboxes contain the hierarchy of information and content for public folders. Create a Public Folder Mailbox: From Exchange Admin Center, go to Public folders > Public folder mailboxes > Click Add (+). Creating a Public Folder mailbox through PowerShell. Connect to Exchange Online through PowerShell. Enter the command “New-Mailbox -PublicFolder -Name <Name>”, provide the name of the public folder mailbox in place of As I had already created Public_Folder as a public folder mailbox, if I try to create a new one from the PowerShell, it will be a secondary hierarchy public folder mailbox. Below I had created a new one with the name of “twitter”. Creating a Public Folder: Creating a Public Folder through EAC. Go to Public folders > Public folders (on the right-hand side) Click Add (+) and give a name to the Public folder. Creating a Public folder through PowerShell. Connect to Exchange Online through PowerShell. Enter command “New-PublicFolder -Name twitter”, these commands create a public folder on the parent path. Mail-Enable Public Folder: Once you have created a public folder, you can mail-enabled it which will allow users to post to the public folder by sending an email message. When the public folder is mail-enabled additional settings to become available. For example – Mail delivery options, mail delegation, etc. Using EAC to the mail-enable public folder. Navigate to Public Folder > Public Folders. Select the Public folder for which you want to mail-enable. In the details pane, Mail settings, click Enable. To check other additional settings, select the public folder and click Edit. Mail-Enable Public Folder through PowerShell. Connect to Exchange Online through PowerShell. Enter command “Enable-MailPublicFolder -Identity \twitter” Public Folder Permissions: You can add or remove users who can access the public folder and you can also edit the permission level. Go to EAC > Public Folders > Public Folders. Select the public folder for which you want to provide access to a user and edit the permission level. In the details pane, go to Folder Permissions > Manage. For editing the permissions level, click on the user added and then click edit.

After creating a Public Folder, the default reply address for that Public Folder will be with the initial domain (onmicrosoft.com). To change you default email address please follow below steps. Go to EAC > Public Folders > Public Folders. Select the Public Folder you created, check whether it is mail-enabled (If it is mail-enable, then only you can see the additional settings and email address is assigned). Click Edit. Address you can see for Public Folder (Twitter) is twitter@cloudcfs1.onmicrosoft.com. However, you can add SMTP over here, but that will not be your default reply address. Connect to Exchange Online through Windows PowerShell. Once you are connected, you will need to disable to Email Address Policy. Enter command “Set-MailPublicFolder -Identity “\<foldername>” -EmailAddressPolicyEnabled $False” (Provide you public folder name in place of <foldername>. After disabling Email address policy, you will see that “Make this the reply address” option will appear and hence you can enter the new SMTP address and make this as default reply address. Allow anonymous users to send email to a mail-enables public folder: Any emails sent from anonymous user to the Public Folder you created, will bounce back if this permission is not given. Connect to Exchange Online using PowerShell. Enter command “Add-PublicFolderClientPermission “\FolderName” -AccessRights CreateItems -User Anonymous” (provide your public folder name in place of \FolderName).

Domain verification in Office 365 is a very simple task, you just need to add a custom domain, add the TXT or MX record by provided by your tenant with your domain registrar and then verify it. However, sometime you might face issues verifying a domain and end up getting an error like “We have confirmed that you own <DOMAIN_NAME>, but we cannot add it to this tenant at this time. The domain is already added to a different Office 365 tenant”. When you are unable to verify your domain through Office 365, you can also try adding domain from Azure Active Directory.   Basically, If you already manage a tenant with Azure services or Office 365, you cannot add a custom domain name if it is already verified in another Azure AD tenant. What we can do over here is to use the ForceTakeover option with Azure AD PowerShell. Connect to Microsoft online services. 2. Get the domain list currently associated with your O365 tenant. 3. Add the domain which you want to verify and after adding that domain, you can see the status and it will be in the ‘unverified’ stage. 4. Now, you have to get the DNS TXT record for the domain, you need to add the TXT record in your domain registrar. Verification sometimes might now happen immediately because it takes time for the record to propagate. 5. Add the -ForceTakeover needs to be added to the cmdlet only when .forcing an external admin takeover. This method can be used at last after you have tried each method for verifying your domain but still can’t verify it. 6. Once you run the -ForceTakeover cmdlet, the status of the domain will get verified.

Before getting into details, firstly I would like to talk about Microsoft Teams. If you’re familiar with MS Teams, you know that it is chat and collaboration platform – a place to manage all your conversations, files and important tools in one team workspace. You can access SharePoint, Power Bi and now Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement right from the Teams app and can collaborate. Microsoft Teams comes with the Office 365 subscription and is present with both web and desktop version as well. Dynamics 365 page can be added as a tab on Microsoft Teams channel they are working on to allow easy access to the customer information. The tab added on MS Teams channel is a fully functional page that means you can edit any records or navigate to related records without leaving the app. You can also use Dynamics 365 Bot for quick updates on records. Before getting started,  enable Microsoft Teams integration feature from Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement: Sign in as a System Administrator. Go to Settings > Administration > System Settings > General. Enable Microsoft Teams integration. Let’s get started: I hope you already have Microsoft Teams App installed on your system. Go to the Teams channel where you want to add a Dynamics 365 page as a tab, add a tab by clicking on the + button. Search for Dynamics 365 App. After clicking on the Dynamics 365 App, you will be asked to select the Organization and the App module. Select the same from the dropdown accordingly and click on SELECT. Search for the entity you want to connect the to this channel and click on SAVE. It is done, you can now edit the record details or navigate to the related records in Dynamics 365 from MS Teams app. Once you complete the above steps, you will see a notification of record is successfully connected (see above image). Any changes done here will be synchronized with the Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps. Once the integration is done, Teams also provides the feature to associate files. Any related documents uploaded in the Files tab in Microsoft Teams will also appear in D365 Customer Engagement apps under Documents for the record. Similarly, any documents added in D365 for Customer Engagement apps will appear in the Files tab on Microsoft Teams.Below images is of Microsoft Teams Files tab: Below image is of D365 for CE app > Documents: In the below images, you can see various locations for documents, this is because I have also enabled SharePoint integration. You can select the specific location or All File to view each file related to this record. As you can see in the below images the files uploaded on Microsoft Teams appears over here. If you want open a record in Dynamics 365 for CE and you are in Microsoft Teams currently, don’t bother to enter the URL. Click the Go to Website icon. Setting up the Dynamics 365 Bot: You can set up the bot feature to interact with Dynamics 365 Apps. You can also use Dynamics 365 bot to look up and make a quick update on any record. For setting up please follow the below steps. You can go to the Chat on the left side of the Teams app, and then select Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps. In the welcome message from Bot, it provides some abilities of the bot. You will need to click on Sign in. Select Org and then Click on NEXT. Enter credential and Sign in. The Dynamics 365 bot setup is complete and some option is already loaded to get started.

Introduction: As you know that SharePoint Online can be used as a document management platform and with the help of Document Id’s you can effectively manage your documents by providing an easy way to track irrespective of their location. Document Id’s are automatically assigned to the documents uploaded on document or record management platform. Before using the Document ID features for our document management system, you must enable it for each site collection in which your documents are located. You must be a Site Collection Administrator for enabling this feature in SPO. Activate, enable and configure Document ID’s: Go to the top-level Site collection > Site Settings. Under Site Collection Administration, click Site collection features. Next to Document ID, click Activate. Activate icon will appear once the feature is activated. Go back to the Site Settings page and under Site Collection Administration, select Document ID settings. You will have to assign a prefix for the Document ID’s and the prefix should be between 4 to 12 characters with no special character. If you want all the documents within the Site Collection, to be assigned with a Document ID with the specified prefix, check the box “Reset all Document ID’s” (See above image). Once this feature is enabled, any new document created or uploaded to any document library in this particular Site Collection received a unique Document ID. Document Id’s can be viewed from the document properties, these are the hyperlinks that you can copy and use it to open a document in Office. Moving and Copying a file with a Document ID: When you move a file in SharePoint Online, Document ID will move with the file. It basically depends on whether the service is enabled or not at the destination site. So, if the service is not enabled at that site then the document will no longer have the Document ID. When a copy of the document is made, a new Document ID is created for the copy and obviously, the service needs to be enabled at the site where you are copying the file.

Introduction: This blog explains how to Count No of files in SharePoint folder using MS Flow. Steps to be followed: Select “Send an HTTP request to SharePoint” from Actions.  Enter below details:Site Address: Select the site address from the list. Method: GETUri: _api/web/GetFolderByServerRelativeUrl(‘LibraryTitle/foldername’)/ItemCountExample: _api/web/GetFolderByServerRelativeUrl(‘account/CFS Organization_584732FD1267E911A997000D3AA2C8D1‘)/ItemCount-> It will count the no of files in “CFS Organization_584732FD1267E911A997000D3AA2C8D1” folder. Output of above request:  Accessing value of ItemCount: Add Compose Action. Add below expression in Inputs: body(‘Send_an_HTTP_request_to_SharePoint_’)[‘d’][‘ItemCount’]

Introduction: In this article, we are going to take a quick overview of the Microsoft Teams PowerShell module and will cover a few things which we can perform in Microsoft Teams with the help of PowerShell. There are two different PowerShell modules to manage Microsoft Teams. 1. Microsoft Teams PowerShell Module – You can get this module from here: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/MicrosoftTeams/1.0.0 2. Skype for Business PowerShell Module – You can download it from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39366 Teams PowerShell module contain all the cmdlets needed to create and manage teams whereas Skype for Business module contains the cmdlets to manage policies, configuration, and other tools. Connecting to Microsoft Teams PowerShell:   1. Install the Microsoft Teams PowerShell Module. Open Windows PowerShell and run the command “Install-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams” and then enter Y. Module was already installed on my system, that’s why I got the messages highlighted in the above image. The version was old, so I re-entered the command and added the -Force parameter “Install-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams -Force” 2. Connect with Microsoft Teams. Run command “Connect-MicrosoftTeams” and enter the credentials. After login, you will be able to see your tenant details. 3. After the PowerShell Module relates to your Microsoft Teams, you can use the cmdlets for creating and managing teams. For e.g, To get all your teams list, run command “Get-Team” For creating a new team, run command “New-Team” For managing Team users, run command “Add-TeamUser”. You will be asked to provide GroupId. After providing the GroupId, it will ask to provide the user, which needs to be added to the team. 4. Similarly, you can remove the user from a team, create a new channel or remove any team channel or else remove any group, etc. All these cmdlets can be run as end users, but it will only work for the teams you own, or you are a member of that team. As a global admin, you will be able to act on all the teams. Managing MS Teams policies via PowerShell:   1. Download and install Skype for Business PowerShell Module. 2. Connect with Skype for Business PowerShell Module. Open Windows PowerShell and run the following commands: “Import-Module SkypeOnlineConnector” “$userCredential = Get-Credential” “$sfbSession = New-CsOnlineSession -Credential $userCredential” “Import-PSSession $sfbSession” Now you are connected to Skype for Business PowerShell Module. 3. There are basically 5 commands to manage the policies. GET – Get the details of the policy. NEW – Create new policies. SET – Lets you set particular values on a given policy. REMOVE – Delete the customs policy. GRANT – Assign policy to particular user.For e.g, you want to get the details of all the meeting policy, run command “Get-CsTeamsMeetingPolicy” You will be able to get the details of the all the meeting policy whether it has been created by Microsoft or it is a custom policy that will be shown. Similarly, for Messaging policy run command “Get-CsTeamsMessagingPolicy” Managing configurations via PowerShell:   Connect to Skype for Business PowerShell Module. You have seen above how to connect to Skype for Business PS Module. Run command “Get-CsTeamsClientConfiguration”. This is basically your Teams settings in the admin center. Conclusion: Administrators can manage a good set of tools in Microsoft Teams through Microsoft Teams admin center and also through PowerShell. In this article,  we have seen how easily we can connect through PowerShell and can manage things.

Many times you find issues like one of your users are unable to set up their Office 365 Email account in Microsoft Outlook or Outlook suddenly stopped working or it is taking too much time to setup account after the credentials are entered. What will be the steps you will be performing at that time to resolve that issue? The best and very simple solution, in this case, would be to run Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant. I was facing one similar issue one day. Let me go through the steps below which I performed and the issue what I found and how easy it became to resolve the issue. Before I proceed, let me provide you some info on SARA tool and how to install. Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant work by running tests to figure out what’s wrong. It can fix many problems or can tell you how to fix them. SARA can fix several issues such as Office setup, Outlook (for MAC as well), Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, etc. Installing SARA: Go to Outlook Support Center, click Download now. Click RUN when you are prompted on your system and then click Install. SARA will get downloaded. Click on I Agree after you have read the service agreement. And now you are ready to use the tool. How I resolved the Outlook issue for one of my users? Open SARA application or if you had just installed select Outlook and then click NEXT. You will be asked to confirm that you are on the affected machine, select Yes and click NEXT. You will be asked for the user credentials, enter the Office 365 account credentials and then click NEXT. After the validation process, the scan begins automatically. Below is the screenshot my Outlook scan results on the affected system. You have seen how I got the issues found with the help of SARA. So, in this case, the issue was that the “Use a proxy server for your LAN” option was checked on this system and I fixed that. After doing the same my issues got resolved. What if you are unable to understand the issues after scanning? SARA also provides an option to view the detailed report of the issue and if you are unable to understand the issue, you can always raise a support ticket with Microsoft. SARA also provide you with the feature of sharing your scan results to Microsoft. So, if you are working with a Microsoft support engineer, this option is very helpful. What if I am using other email system and not Office 365 with Microsoft Outlook App? Sara also provides support to accounts who don’t have Exchange Online, instead, they are using some other email system with Microsoft Outlook app. You will be able to authenticate and start the scanning for your Outlook app and can view the issues or detailed report. The only difference is, you won’t be getting the option to share your data with Microsoft instead you can share the logs with the person who is responsible for your Outlook issues, for example, your helpdesk person.  

Introduction: In Microsoft Teams we create several teams, managing teams and channels is also very important so that you can work in a compliant way. When you create a team a SharePoint site and an Office 365 Group is also created.  With the increased use of O365 Groups, admins and users must have some way to clean up unwanted or unused groups. Here comes the need of setting up Team or Group Expiration Policy from Azure Active Directory and as you know Teams is based on Office 365 Groups, it is influenced by Group Expiration Policy. In this article, we will see how we can effectively manage teams or groups with the help of Group Expiration Policy. Let’s get started: 1. Go to Microsoft 365 Admin Center > Azure Active Directory. 2. In Active AD, go to Groups > Expiration Policy. 3. You can then set an expiration policy for a group by providing Group Lifetime. 4. You can set a default group expiration as 180 or 365 days else you also select custom and enter the number of days as per your requirements, but it should be more than 30 days. 5. When the expiration policy is in place, once a group ages to 30 days before their lifecycle period lapses, group owners receive notifications for renewal (3 notifications are sent on 30, 15 and 0 days respectively). If it is renewed the lifecycle extends for a defined period and if not renewed O365 soft-deletes the group when it expires. If there are no owners of that group, you can provide an email Id of someone who will be receiving the notifications. Note – Owners can recover the soft-deleted groups during the next 30 days. 6. Select the groups and save the policy by hitting the Save button. FAQ’s:- Is Group Expiration Policy available with a free or basic subscription of Azure AD? Answer – Group Expiration Policy is a premium feature and is only available with Azure AD Premium subscriptions. What happens if a Team or Group owner fails to check the expiry notifications? Answer – Teams also shows the expiry information on Teams settings. Open the team for which you are the owner and select manage team and then go to settings. At the bottom, you can see Team Expiry option. In addition,  If O365 soft-deletes the team or group, owners have 30 days to recover the group and when a team is expiring, a warning triangle is displayed alongside the team name which is only visible to team owners. Conclusion: In this way, you can effectively manage your team or groups. The policy helps to remove inactive groups from the system and make things cleaner.  

Introduction:   Since the release of Microsoft Teams on March 2017 which was designed for business for all sizes, it is now being used by almost 500,000 organizations worldwide. Microsoft Teams is a big hit in the messaging app market after having such huge competitors like Slack, Facebook, Google, etc. Microsoft released its free version in July 2018 which is designed for small businesses or groups of people within a company who doesn’t have commercial Office 365 subscriptions or a couple of people working together. In this article, we are going to discuss the feature comparison between MS Teams ‘Premium’ and ‘Freemium’. I have written several articles on Microsoft Teams which comes with Office 365 subscriptions (Refer blogs on https://www.cloudfronts.com/category/azure-office365/) but asked by many users to provide some info on Microsoft Teams free.   Sign Up for MS Teams – Any person with corporate or consumer email address can sign up for Teams. People who have commercial O365 subscription will already have access to MS Teams and those who don’t have the commercial subscription can sign up for the Microsoft Teams Freemium from this link – https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/free Maximum no. of users – Free Teams brings up the features for up to 300 people. This number is similar for the commercial subscription as well, excluding Enterprise plans for which the max no. if users are unlimited. Online Apps in MS Teams – Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote are available online with a free version of Teams. With Office 365 commercial subscriptions the desktop versions of apps are available for Office 365 Business Premium and Enterprise plans (excluding E1). Like the premium MS Teams, the free version of Teams can also be integrated with more than 140 different apps. Note – Office 365 services like SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and other Office 365 services will not be available with free MS Teams as it doesn’t have Office 365 subscription. Guest Access – This is a very awesome feature introduced by Microsoft in Teams with the help of which you can collaborate with external contacts, clients or with partners. Guest access is available with MS Teams free version as well. We can invite users with corporate or consumer email address and the users with commercial Office 365 subscriptions using Teams as well (see below image for sending an invite from MS Teams free). Audio & Video calls, Screen sharing and chat – Audio, video calling, screen sharing, and one to one chat are some of the key features any communication and collaboration platform. So, of course, these features are available with Microsoft Teams free version as well otherwise what would be the use of the free version. Scheduling meeting and Audio conferencing – Feature of Scheduling meetings, Audio conferencing and then depending upon your SKU, things link phone number calling and dial-in conferencing is not available in Microsoft Teams free version which we get with the paid version of MS Teams. Security and Compliance – Paid version gives you a full set of powerful IT capabilities, compliance and security controls and developer options to manage and scale Teams all as part of Office 365. Plus, you also get support and guaranteed uptime which you don’t get in free MS Teams version. Of course, security features such as Data Encryption and region-based data residency is available with free Teams, but we don’t have features like MFA, Auditing, reporting, etc which are there with a paid subscription. Custom status message – Presence status we can set in free MS Teams version which is awesome, but we don’t have an option to set custom status message compare to that we have in paid Teams. Storage – With free MS Teams you get 2 GB of storage per user and 10 GB of team storage (Shared storage) whereas with paid Teams you get 1 TB per user. Conclusion:   Microsoft Teams Freemium is an awesome way for the people to start using Teams whether they are a couple of co-workers, small business or a group of people working together. It is easy to use and has all the major functionalities a messaging and collaboration app should have but if you want all the features with discussed above you can of course upgrade to the paid version and have a commercial Office 365 subscription. Hope this article helps you to understand the differences between Microsoft Teams ‘Premium’ and ‘Freemium’.