Remember the old comments in SharePoint Lists? I am sure there are tons of lists that use the Append-Only Comments. They are implemented using versioning. The problem is that it is hard to export the comments, unless you know the tricks. The trick I want to share comes from a colleague of mine. The reason why we need export all the comments is that we need to document and save/archive the decision making process that took place in the comments field.

Hello World

Now I have moved my blog. chuvash.eu is a static site. I’ll share more details and insights later.

Update 2022-02-10

It has passed a few months since the move from Wordpress to a static site. Now it is time to summarize the insights.

Why I moved

Here are the reasons why I switched from Wordpress.com to a static site

1. To be honest, the main reason was that I was curious about static sites.
2. It appealed to me to have a fast and secure website (because there is no database that slows down or gets hacked).
3. I finally got rid of the annoying ads from Wordpress.com. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate Wordpress.com, as a matter of fact, I sacrified some really neat functions (such as the comments and the community) when moving to a static, but on that later.
4. It finally got free from the vendor lock-in. Now I have all my blog posts as markdown files in a git repository. I can build them to any static website or even consume as they are, no fiddling with a database (if it were a own hosted wordpress site). I find it also easier to collaborate on my blog posts since I can grant access to the git repository to people I want to work together with.
5. Speaking of git, now I have real version history of my content, no more accidential deletions.

Well, there might be more reasons, but these are the most important ones.

Recently my role assignments in Azure AD were switched from permanent to eligible ones. This is part of PIM - Privileged Identity Management, you can read more about it on MS Docs:

• Start using Privileged Identity Management

To activate your eligible assignment you can use Azure Portal, Graph API, and PowerShell. The activation in the portal and Graph API is described on MS Docs:

• Activate my Azure AD roles in PIM

The new permission in Graph API - Sites.Selected - is a step in the right direction. Since long we have been looking for ways of scoping the accesses to live up to the least privilege principle. It was either nothing or everything. I have tried out the new Sites.Selected permission and here are my findings.

First of all, if you haven’t heard about Sites.Selected, please visit these pages to find out more. I am skipping the introduction, since there are already good resources on that out there.

Have you also got a legacy powershell script that loads SharePoint dlls and runs CSOM code directly? It’s quite easy to convert to PnP PowerShell. But if you run out of time and just need to execute the script, then I have a quick tip for you.

First of all, a CSOM script can be recognized by Add-Type commands (or Import-Module) plus the SharePoint dll paths.

Loading the dll the old way.

Have you also got some old huge scripts that run on a server locally? Have you also considered moving them to the cloud? Here comes an idea of how to do it quickly and easy.

In my case I have some older powershell scripts that are harder to convert to serverless applications:

• They use MSOnline module in PowerShell, hence they require rewriting to AzureAD before using them in an Azure Function
• They take around 15 minutes to complete, Azure Functions Consumption Plan is limited to 10 minutes. Of course I can split them in several parts, but I am looking for an easy way right now, I have to postpone refactoring because I am not sure if there is a real need for this script solution.
• They process a lot of data and consume more that 400 MB memory which makes it crash when I put it in a Azure Automation Runbook.

Well, maybe a Windows Server VM in Azure is the only way? While recently setting up a minecraft server and following a blog post that proposes auto shutdown and logic apps to start the server, I came up with an idea to use exactly the same approach to make it as cost effective as possible.

I would like to show you my recent hobby project with a raspberry pi, a unicorn phat and the powerful cli-microsoft365: A simple monitoring solution of Microsoft 365 Services.

Status of some important services in Microsoft 365

In essence, I put the unicorn phat onto the raspberry pi zero w and wrote this python script:

• unicorn03_m365.py

The python script checks the service status every five minutes and shows it with colors on the unicorn phat.

This post is a techy one. It’s about running git commands in Azure DevOps Releases in order to finalize a deployment job to production.

Let me first describe our scenario:

We use Azure DevOps for code and for deployment. Our branch strategy a simplified Gitflow model, where all the current work is merged to the “develop” branch. The code from the “develop” branch is then built and released to staging environments and production. After a release to Production and regression tests the develop branch needs to be merged into the “main” branch (or “master”). So simply put, the git merge into main is what we mean by finalizing a production release.

You want to calculate your storage capacity in SharePoint Online? Here is how:

• Every 1TB is 1024GB (it might be confusing, see my previous post, but it’s how it is calculated)
• A tenant gets 1024GB by default
• For every user license of a product that includes the service plan called “SHAREPOINTSTANDARD”/SharePoint Online (Plan 1) you get 10 GB extra
• For every user license of a product that includes the service plan called “SHAREPOINTENTERPRISE”/SharePoint Online (Plan 2) you get 10 GB extra
• For every user license of a product that includes the service called “ONEDRIVEBASIC”/SharePoint Online OneDrive Basic you get 0.5 GB extra

Products vs. Service Plans

A product (a.k.a. SKU) consists of service plans. E.g. Office 365 E3 (product) consists of SharePoint Online Enterprise among others. It is a Service Plan that gives you additional storage, not a product. The information on “SharePoint Limits” page is (over-)simplified. Simplified for a good reason of course - to give a rule of thumb for calculating your storage.

Den här bloggposten är ett (en aning större) användar- (eller verksamhetsutvecklar-)tips om hur man kan sätta upp smarta utskrifter till SharePoint Online - utan några extraappar eller lösningar.

Först och främst, stort tack till min kollega Shahram som har presenterat idén för mig. Tänk dig ett följande scenario:

Du har en mall i Word som du fyller i, skriver ut på papper. Låt säga, det är en plockorder. Du vill digitalisera processen genom att skicka pdf:en till ett gemensamt dokumentbibliotek i SharePoint eller Teams.