Have you ever wanted to automate sending email to anywhere via your SendGrid account? Maybe you have moved to the Office 365 and now that you don’t have an Exchange server on-prem anymore, you don’t have the luxury to use your own Exchange server as an SMTP server. You can’t use Office 365 Exchange Online as an SMTP server….. SendGrid to the answer – below is some PowerShell which will assist you in the automation of sending email using SendGrid. This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review,…
Azure News – Build 2017
Microsoft Build in the US was just on from May 10 – 12, 2017 held at the Washington State Convention Center, Seattle, WA. On Episode 153 of the Need To Know podcast we discuss all the Build 2017 announcements. There were stacks of announcements: Storage Service Encryption for Azure File Storage Azure File Storage uses the SMB 3.0 version and is like a normal file share where you can map drives to it. Like normal blob storage which already benefits from Storage Service Encryption, Azure Files Storage is now the first fully managed file service offering encryption of data at rest….
Azure News – Week 19
New on-premises data gateway and new Azure VM sizes as heard on the latest Need to Know podcast recorded May 10, 2017 AEST. On-premises data gateway in Azure The on-premises data gateway is now generally available in Azure. This gateway helps you securely connect your business apps in the cloud to your data sources on premises. You can use the gateway to move data to and from the cloud while keeping your data sources on premises. The gateway currently supports Azure Logic Apps. To access data sources on premises from your logic apps, set up an on-premises data gateway that…
Azure AD Disable Password Expiration
Imagine you had a specific user setup (a service account) to run all your Azure Automation runbooks. Then all of a sudden things stopped working, no runbooks worked anymore. You then troubleshoot and find that the password for the Azure AD account used in your runbooks has expired. By default when creating Azure AD account the password is set to expire and if you try to logon to PowerShell with an account which has an expired password, this is what you would see: Login-AzureRmAccount : AADSTS50055: Password is expired Previously this was fixed using the old MSOLUser cmdlets: Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName powershell@<tenant>.onmicrosoft.com…
Scheduled Task to run as any User
The following script will setup a scheduled task to run as any user by running the task as the ‘Users’ group. Please note, this is using the .Net method of creating the task, as there’s more options using the .Net method rather than using the PowerShell cmdlet: New-ScheduledTask The information to help build the below PowerShell script was taken from the website which covers all the information you need https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa383607(v=vs.85).aspx This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden…
Azure News 2017 – Week 18
This time around in Azure news, we have Synonyms in Azure Search, Azure revenue soars, New Enhancements to the Azure AD Pass Through Authentication, Microsoft Cognitive Services and new Azure monitoring and diagnostics capabilities. We also speak to @danielmar268 @ThomasMaurer and @Wally_Mead, live on the spot interviews from ExpertsLive 2017 Melbourne at the beginning of April. Azure Search releases support for synonyms (public preview) Microsoft have announced public preview support for synonyms in Azure Search, one of our most requested features on UserVoice. This allows for Azure Search to not only return results which match the query terms that were typed into the search box, but also…
Azure News 2017 – Week 16
Azure’s Hybrid Use Benefit is easier to implement in Azure, Azure AD B2B Vs Azure AD B2C, Azure Instance Metadata Service and Azure Architecture Center is all part of the news this week on the Need to Know podcast. A change in the Azure portal Microsoft are allowing users to activate the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit directly in the Azure Management Portal rather than manually tagging VMs using PowerShell. With the hybrid use benefit you can save up to 40% on virtual machine running costs if you bring your own Windows Server licensing such as software assurance. On the subject…
ExpertsLive 2017 – Melbourne
I just got back from ExpertsLive 2017 in Melbourne hosted at the Crown Promenade. It was a great turn out with lots of great presenters including myself – I did a session on Operations Management Suite titled: “OMS is your best friend” and I’ll update this post later which will include a recording of this session. We had a mix of Microsoft Regional Directors, MVPs and Microsoft folk themselves there covering 3 tracks – Cloud Track, Datacenter Track and Enterprise Client Track. I got my presentation out on the first day, which left a free day on Friday for me…
Azure News 2017 – Week 15
Alibaba using Microsoft’s open source software, Citrix Essentials now in Azure, Azure Stack TP3 refresh and more as heard on the Need to Know podcast. Alibaba is using Microsoft’s Azure networking switch for its public cloud Last year, Microsoft contributed its Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONIC) to the Open Compute Project datacenter foundation. Almost exactly a year later, Alibaba announced that it is starting to use SONIC for its own public cloud datacenters. More Info. Azure surpasses AWS as the public cloud of choice A new survey of IT professionals shows Microsoft Azure has overtaken Amazon Web…
Azure News 2017 – Week 12
Azure AD B2C Access Tokens, Azure SQL hybrid, IOT Camp in Sydney and General Availability of Geographic Routing capability in Azure Traffic Manager all news items this week in the Need to Know podcast – Episode 146 – also on http://podcasts.needtoknow.cloud. Azure AD B2C Access Tokens now in public preview You now have greater control over your web API’s when you secure them using Azure AD B2C. Microsoft have announced the public preview for using access tokens with web API’s. With this in-demand feature it makes it possible to create web API’s that can be accessed by different client applications. You can grant permissions to…
Marc Kean 
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