Introduction: Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based chat and collaboration platform, designed to simplify group work. It is customizable in many ways your teams work today. Whereas Site 24×7 is an integrated solution for cloud monitoring. It is a platform designed with full-stack monitoring and analysis tools to enhance user experience. Site24x7 users can integrate with Microsoft Teams to receive critical status alerts and RCA from their Site24x7 account as chat messages in selected Microsoft Teams Channel. In this article, I am going to show you how we at CloudFronts benefitting with this awesome integration. We are using Site24x7 for monitoring our client’s server and our own ISP services.  With the help of this integration, I don’t have to go to Site24x7 each time for checking the status and everything is being done from Teams only. One important benefits of this integration are that we don’t have to add other responsible members in Site24x7 account instead we can add them directly to a team which I have created in Microsoft Teams for Site24x7. You can receive chat messages for the following Site 24×7 events: Monitor status alerts Incident Root Cause Analysis (RCA) To Start this Feature Integration, login to Site24x7 portal account before accessing your Microsoft Teams account via the login link provided in your Site24x7 integration form. Login to Site24x7 Portal Dashboard > Admin > Third Party Integration.                                           Click on Add Third Party Integration and fill up the required details (see below image). Integration Name, Message Title, Integration level     After you are done with the process, Microsoft Teams integration will be listed in the Third-Party Integration dashboard. You can set up multiple integrations.                 Adding Site 24×7 connector in Microsoft Teams: Navigate to the Teams tab and select the team and channel which you’re looking to integrate with Site24x7. click on the three dots and select Connectors from the dropdown as shown in below image.                         A new window will pop up. Search for Site24x7 and click the Configure button after it shows up.   You’ll be navigated to a new window, click on Visit site to install (see below image).   After that, you will be automatically redirected to the Microsoft Teams Integration form in Site24x7’s web client. Adding a Site 24×7 dashboard in Microsoft Teams: Log in to your Microsoft Teams. Open Teams channel and click the ‘+’ icon on the top layer of your channel window to add a tab.                   In the add a tab windows, search for Site 24×7 and click the icon.                   You will get a pop-up to connect to Site 24×7. Log in using your Site24x7 credentials or use your Office365 credential.                                     After login, you can see your Site24x7 custom dashboard.                                       Now you will receive and monitor all alerts on your Site24x7 MS Teams channel. If you want, see full report about monitor status you can click on “View Online Reports”                                   You can also see Real-time alert, Memory/CPU utilization, Availability Chart, Monitor Status, Troubleshooting Status etc. (see below image)                 This is how you can integrate Site 24×7 into Microsoft Teams. Now we will see how to monitor the alerts through MS Teams chatbot. Setup Site24x7 bot for Microsoft Teams: Site24x7 Bot is an automated program based on an advanced AI-engine that gives a quick reply and share updates and notifications about your monitor’s status, availability, performance, outages, SLAs, RCAs, and alarms within your Microsoft Teams channels or private chat. You can interact with bots in private chats and channels within a team. Go to the Microsoft Teams app store and search for the Site24x7 app.                                           In the pop-up window, pick the Team where you wish to install the Site24x7 Bot and click install.                                       After the installation is done you will be able to Open the chatbot (see below image).               From your personal chat window, you will be able to communicate with the Bot.                           After the successful authentication, you can initiate conversation with the Bot.                   For example, if you want to know the status of all your monitors, send a message What is the status of all monitors and you will be getting a revert (see below image).       One more example, type – Availability Summary for Monitor Name.   Bot commands in Microsoft Teams (see below image).             Conclusion: Hope this article will help you for integrating Site24x7 into Microsoft Teams. Similarly, there are many more applications which can integrate with Microsoft Teams to make your life much easier. Microsoft Teams is consistently growing since its release and giving us with some awesome features.      

Introduction: When you check your Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Entity records, you might think where your documents related to specific entities will get stored. Here, SharePoint comes into the picture. The built-in integration between Dynamics 365 and SharePoint is mainly focused on managing & storing documents in SharePoint and ultimately then surfacing these in the context of a CRM record. Apart from storing the documents in SharePoint, you might also wonder that is your stuff secure on SharePoint Online. In this article, we are going to see how you can store the documents on SharePoint Online and how we can secure those documents through SharePoint Online security features. For using the document management functionality, you need to enable the server-based SharePoint integration on a Site Collection in SharePoint Online. Note – Installing Microsoft Dynamics 365 List Component was used for SharePoint On-Premise earlier versions and is not required for SharePoint Online and later versions of SharePoint on-premises. IT Considerations: No additional software is required to install on SharePoint You need to have System Administrator Security role in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Make sure that the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and SharePoint Online in under the same Office 365 tenant. Steps for enabling server-based SharePoint Integration: Login to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement services > Settings > Document Management. Under Document Management, go to Enable Server-Based SharePoint Integration. Check out the changes (in the below image) which you will notice if you have used the previous SharePoint integration and click on Select between Online & On-Premises depending upon the SharePoint infrastructure you have and click NEXT (check below image). Now you must enter the URL of your SharePoint site where you want your Dynamics 365 entity records documents to be stored. Here, I have entered the URL of my root site collection ‘https://o365talks.sharepoint.com’, you may want to have a different Site Collection for your D365 documents as per Organisation requirements. For that, you can create a new Site Collection, such as https://o365talks.sharepoint.com/sites/Dynamics365You can create Site Collection from the SharePoint Online admin center. Here it will show the site URL validation status. Click on NEXT after the validation succeeds. So we are done with the SharePoint integration. Now we need to enable document management for specific Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Entities. Enable SharePoint document management for specific Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement apps entity records.   Go to Settings > Document Management Settings. Select the entities (for eg, Accounts, Lead, Opportunities, Projects) for which you wanted to store the documents in SharePoint Online and click on NEXT. Check Based on Entity and select Account or Contact to create a folder structure based on a specific entity (Account or Contact), or else you click on NEXT without checking if you don’t want your folders to be automatically created based on the Account or Contact entity. Now you can see the SharePoint Online Document Library has been created as the status is Succeeded. Click FINISH. You can see in the below image Document Libraries has been created for the entities under the SharePoint site (https://o365talks.sharepoint.com). You can access the same by going to Site Contents. Keep your D365 Customer Engagement documents safe While having the integration done for document management in SharePoint Online, it is also important to secure these documents. For that, there are several features which you can use to keep your SharePoint Online documents secure. Using Permission Level: – Microsoft already provides a set of default permission levels which is very useful, but you can also create new permission levels in SharePoint Online. You can then create Groups for that Site Collection for e.g. https://o365talks.sharepoint.com, associated with the permission level. For e.g., you can create a permission level called Contribute (Not delete) which means the users associated with this permission level will not be able to delete anything. Note – Never modify or delete a default permission level. Retention policy from Office 365 Security & Compliance center: – Create a Retention Policy for all or chosen SharePoint Online sites, so that if accidentally or by purpose if the documents are deleted from SharePoint Online it can be recovered. Restricting access for certain records: – You might not want that all the users should have access to all D365 for Customer Engagement records. You can basically customize permission for that SharePoint Document library to achieve the same. By default, all sites, list, libraries within a site collection inherit permissions from the parent site break the inheritance from library settings and then add only those users whom you want to provide access. Alerts: – Alerts can be set in two ways for SharePoint Online. a. Setting up alerts from SharePoint Online – You can set alerts for a specific document library within SharePoint Online, so if there is any modification or deletion you can get email or SMS alert.b.  Alerts from the Security & Compliance center in Office 365: – Here we can set alerts whenever there is any activity in SharePoint Online defined by you. We can only get Email notifications in this case and not an SMS, unlike SharePoint Alerts. Audit in Office 365 Security & Compliance center: – With the help of Audit you can search for Users and Admin activities. Before you can start searching for the audit logs it needs to be turned ON. To turn it ON, just click Start recording user and admin activity on the Audit log search page in the Security & Compliance center. Here, we can get the audit logs for the activities defined by you. Access Control in SharePoint Online admin center: – With the help of access control, you can restrict or allow all the users to access SharePoint Online contents on basis of network location, which can do in just a few clicks. This helps to prevent access from untrusted locations. Conditional Access using Azure Active Directory: – You can either restrict access or enforce Multi-Factor Authentication for specific users or group of users whenever SharePoint Online is accessed from an … Continue reading Manage and secure Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement documents in SharePoint Online →

Setting up custom status messages in Microsoft Teams was awaited for long but it is finally here. As Microsoft released Teams as Skype for Business replacement it was also right to say that Microsoft Teams must have the useful features of Skype for Business. Since the feature of setting up custom status messages was available in Skype for Business, it was long awaited in Microsoft Teams but it is here finally. Now, Teams users can set their own status messages to inform colleagues about their status for the next few hours, days or on a continuing basis.  This status is different from the user’s presence status (Available, Away, Be right back, etc). In this status message you, an add up to 280 characters and can provide more detailed information. To set the status, hover over your profile picture at the top right-hand corner and select Set status message. You can mention your status message and then you can select till when you want to display the status messages to your colleagues. Guest users can also set the status message in Microsoft Teams. For viewing the status message on Teams, you can view the users’ card. You can also view each users’ card from the Manage team option of a Team so that you can see the whole members and then hover over each member. In the below image, you can see I have set my status message as ‘break’ and when one of the user viewed my people card, status is reflected.

I have led several Office 365 implementation projects from scratch like from migrating emails to Office 365 to implementing various features of Office 365. When it comes to choosing the Office 365 subscriptions, I have seen that many of the organizations go with Office 365 Business Premium or Office 365 Business Essential subscriptions as both of these subscriptions are almost identical, the only difference is Office 365 Business Essential doesn’t contain Microsoft Office applications. In the below table you can find the list of features available with Office 365 Business Premium & Business Essential subscriptions. While in this article I am not actually highlighting the difference, I am just trying to provide the list of features available in these two subscriptions. I have also mentioned the Security & Compliance features which I have seen that most of the organizations don’t actually use but are very beneficial and I always try to convince my clients to use all these features. S. No. Features Features (Office 365 Business Premium) Features (Office 365 Business Essential)     1 Office Application Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote Not included     2 Services Included Exchange Online, Skype for Business, OneDrive, SharePoint, MS Teams Exchange Online, Skype for Business, OneDrive, SharePoint, MS Teams     3 Max Users 300 300     4 Mailbox Size 50 GB (Exchange Online Plan 1) 50 GB (Exchange Online Plan 1) Security & Compliance Features 5 Protect access to data and service Configure Multi-Factor Authentication Configure Multi-Factor Authentication Device Management (Enroll devices, Device Wipe) Device Management (Enroll devices, Device Wipe) 6 Prevent data loss Not Available Not Available 7 Manage data governance Import Data Import Data Archiving feature for Emails Archiving feature for Emails Retention for SharePoint & OneDrive Retention for SharePoint & OneDrive Retention (EAC) Retention (EAC) 8 Protection against threats Anti-Spoofing Anti-Spoofing Anti-Spam & Anti-malware Policies Anti-Spam & Anti-malware Policies Email encryption Email encryption Quarantine email messages Quarantine email messages Submitting malware to Microsoft for analysis Submitting malware to Microsoft for analysis 9 Search for content Content Search in Office 365 Content Search in Office 365   10 Manage legal investigations eDiscovery in Office 365 eDiscovery in Office 365   11 Audit Log Audit Log search in Office 365 Audit Log search in Office 365 Enable mailbox auditing Enable mailbox auditing 12 Monitor Security & Compliance Alerts in Office 365 Alerts in Office 365 Quarantine in Office 365 Quarantine in Office 365 Check secure score Check secure score Office 365 Service Health Office 365 Service Health Monitor reports (access and usage reports) Monitor reports (access and usage reports) Note: Many security features are not available within the subscription, but we can procure add-on licenses to enhance the security. Apart from these features, Microsoft also offers other services with these subscriptions. MS Teams– Platform that combines workplace chat, meetings, collaborate on files and especially the guest access feature in Teams is awesome. Exchange Online– Exchange for email services, also there is a lot you can do with Exchange Admin Center. OneDrive for Business– Storage for documents SharePoint Online– Document Management & Real-time Collaboration with attractive modern sites, document versioning, web parts & lot more. Hope this article helps you to easily find out the list of all features so that you can implement the same when you purchase any of the subscriptions and keep your organization secure.

I had one of my clients recently asked about the Office 365 Apps on their MacOS, of course, I guided him to download the same from Microsoft’s website but now I can easily tell the client to go to the Apple’s Mac App store and download Office 365 apps directly from there. It became so simple, isn’t it! Microsoft has finally announced that Office 365 is now available on Mac App store from where Apple users can directly download Office 365 Apps such as PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Outlook, OneDrive & OneNote. You can download these apps individually or as a bundle and the packages are free to download but as Office 365 is a subscription-based you will need to pay a subscription fee to use the apps. Microsoft Office has been available on Mac already, but it is available through Microsoft’s website, but people are nowadays preferring handy things! For e.g.: YouTube on the web or YouTube on the app? YouTube on the app, right? So as to have a smooth and flawless experience! This is exactly the case with MS Office now on App store. Microsoft finally releasing these apps on the Mac App store will be surely a huge hit. It will also be easier than ever to get the updated version of Office 365 for Mac, iPad & iPhone as we all know that with Office 365 we always have the best version of Office Apps.

Here’s your guide to quickly setup a multi-factor authentication for an Office 365 user. Manage Multi-Factor authentication Multi-factor authentication can be managed for the O365 under Services and add-ins. If you are in O365 Administrator, find the Services as shown below. You can find this service called ‘Azure multi-factor authentication’. Select it. Open the same and click on Manage multi-factor authentication. Also, I recommend you go through ‘Learn more about Azure multi-factor authentication’ before you proceed for licensing details. Please go through these links: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/active-directory/authentication/concept-mfa-howitworks You’ll see a list of users who can be enabled for multi-factor authentication. In this example, I’ll select myself – Priyesh Wagh to enable my multi-factor authentication. You can either directly enable for the user of invite them to register from the link provided in the screenshot – And that’s it. Multi-factor authentication is enabled for the user. Setting up MFA for the user When the user then logs into the system, they are asked to enter, they will prompted to enter additional log in information to setup MFA. I will be asked to enter the phone number and select the preference or either phone or text message. And you can proceed with your selected preference of text message or phone call. I’ve selected phone call in this case. And finally, it will be setup Logging In As usual, when you log in. You’ll be asked to enter password. Post that, 2-step authentication will take place and as I had selected Phone Call. The system will make a call on my phone and I’ll follow the instructions as asked (asked to press the # key to confirm) Or, alternatively, it can ask you to enter the code received on your phone in text message. That’s it. Simplest way to get started with MFA. Furthermore, you can make the users to create App Passwords and enter contact methods etc. among other features as shown below – Hope that was easy!

Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based chat and collaboration platform, designed to simplify group work. Whether you prefer any chat options available across the markets, if it is not user-friendly, it won’t make any sense. For being user-friendly, the first and foremost requirement is the notifications. Of course, you would not want the hassle of logging and checking into the app every moment. So, we all rely heavily on notifications on the chat to persuade us to open it. This ensures you are updated in the real time. Such kind of wonderful notifications features is available in MS Teams. Now, having said this, let’s check out all the fabulous notification features one by one. Channel notification: To turn ON notifications for any new activity or messages on channels in Microsoft Teams, you need to follow the channel. You will not be able to follow the Team (Team is a group of personnel’s together for work, projects, etc and team are made up of channels), so you need to follow the channels within that team. Once you follow the channel, for any new message or activity in the channel you will be getting a notification (see below image). Chat notifications: You will be automatically getting a notification for one to one chat (see below image). Customize your notification settings: To further customize your notification settings, click your profile picture at the right-hand top of the application and then click Settings > Notifications. You can select, how you want your notifications from the given options (see below image). Do not disturb: As we know that if we are in a Do not disturb mode, we do not get notifications for any messages. In Microsoft Teams, we have this feature that we can still receive notifications from people who have priority access when your status is Do not disturb. You just need to add those people to Manage priority access. Click your profile picture at the right-hand top of the application and then click Settings > Privacy Mobile Notifications: Turning ON notifications on MS Teams mobile app, go to the Menu option (Hamburger button) and then click on Settings > Notifications. And then you can select from given options, how you want the notifications. To ensure you are updated in the real-time, we heavily rely on the notifications. And this is how we can manage notifications in Microsoft Teams.

Introduction: Activity alerts play a very important role while setting up Security & Compliance. You can create an alert that will send you an email notification when users perform specific activities in Office 365.  In this article, you can see how we can get alerts if someone accesses any document in SharePoint Online. Similarly, you can also set alerts for different activities such as common user activities, file & folder activities, file sharing activities, synchronization activities & also for administration activities. Difference between Alerts and Audit logs search in O365 Security & Compliance? Activity alerts are similar to searching the Office 365 audit log for events, except that you’ll be sent an email message when an event that you’ve created an alert for occurs. In Audit logs search, we can see the results as soon we search for it within the period of 90 days since the activity occurred (retention of the audit records depends on the subscription you have). Creating Alerts  Office 365 Security & Compliance center > Alerts > Dashboard You can also go to Office 365  Security & Compliance center using URL – https://protection.office.com Name your alert, add description, severity & select category. Next, you will need to choose an activity & when to trigger an alert. So, in our case alert needs to be triggered whenever a file is accessed from SharePoint Online. You can also add a condition, for this alert. Such as in this case you can mention the Site Collection URL so that if the file is accessed in SharePoint Online from that Site Collection an alert will be triggered. After that click on NEXT. The last step is setting up your recipients & daily notification limits. You can choose a user to whom the alerts will be sent. After the alert is all set, you can now review your settings, turn ON the policy and click FINISH. Alert result – If any user tries to access any file in SharePoint Online, the recipients (the user which has been mentioned as a recipient in the alert policy) will get an email notification (see below image). Conclusion: In this way, we can create different types of alert policies with respect to Security & Compliance of any organization and this is how you can monitor each activity within your organization. We can create alert policies for different activities like common user activities, file & folder activities, file sharing activities, synchronization activities & also for administration activities.

Introduction: This blog explains how to Authenticate Dynamics 365 Online with Client Credentials. Steps: Steps in Azure 1. Register a App in Azure Active Directory. Login to portal.azure.com Navigate to Azure Active Directory –> App Registration –> New Application registration 2.  Create App with Application type -> Web app/ API. Copy the Value of Application ID. 3. Give permission to Dynamics 365 Online. Go to Settings –> Required permissions –> Add –> Dynamics CRM Online –> Select  Select the following permission. 4. Click on Grant Permissions –> Yes 5. Generating client secret key. Go to Settings –> Keys Create a new key and copy its value Steps in D365 Sales Create Application user. 1. Add a user from Portal.office.com 2. Go to settings -> security -> users. Change the view to Application Users. Add New user. 3. Enter User name and Application ID. Value of Application ID is obtained from MS Azure. 4. save 5. After Saving values of Application ID and Azure AD Object ID will come automatically. Steps in Azure 1. Add this user as Owner of the App which we created in MS Azure. Settings –> Owners –> Add owner 2. Obtain tenant id Azure Active Directory –> Properties –> Directory ID   Making a Request using Postman POST URL: https://login.microsoftonline.com/<tenant id> /oauth2/token Header:Content-Type: application/json Body: Key Value client_id Application ID of the registered app in Azure resource https://trial.crm.dynamics.com (Dynamics 365 Online Insance URL Client_secret Key value from the registered app in Azure Grant_type client_credentials Below screen shows how to use above given keys to generate the access token. This token has expiration time. You need to refresh this token.

Introduction: Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based platform which includes business messaging, calling, video meetings and file sharing. A lot of people have been demanding for a feature on MS Teams user voice forum, which is to initiate screen sharing through Microsoft Teams without calling. So guys, it is finally here. Process: Now share your entire desktop or a specific window from a private chat session and you can even let the other to take control to team up and collaborate. For sharing your screen during a private chat, you just need to click the open share tray icon on the top right of the screen and pick one of the available window options. (see below image) After clicking the share tray icon, you can choose the windows to share. The user on the other side is required to accept the session. A user can also request for the controls by clicking on the Request Control button. (see below image) Conclusion: That’s it, folks. You can access the screen sharing right away. Microsoft Teams is continuously undergoing updates and this newly rolled out features will create wonders while communicating with partners, colleagues, and clients and help to resolve key issues more effectively.