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Using Power Automate to Update Contact Information

 We've all been there- you have a large organization who has out-of-date contact information. What do you do? You could go around to each department and ask them nicely to update their information, or send out an org-wide email prompting people to do so. However, this is tedious and oftentimes a pointless task. By the time you update one department, you're running to fix another. What if you could put the power back in the department's hands to do so? This is a struggle I faced recently as I was trying to find was I could conjure up some updated contact information for each department. As I did my research, I found that I was not alone in this endeavour as it seems that many IT professionals would love to make this process a little bit less painful. With this in mind, I introduce to you my latest flow! This flow will allow you to encourage users to update their contact information, without the overhead that comes with manual effort. In addition to this, this flow utilizes t...
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My Honest Thoughts on Windows Recall

Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably have heard about Windows Recall which is available for Copilot+ capable PC's. I came across this feature a couple of months ago and I wanted to give my honest opinions on the whole situation. So strap in, because this one is going to be interesting. Forewarning This post is just my opinions, and my opinions about this feature alone. They do not reflect my opinions about the Microsoft 365 platform or the other products that are offered. Remember those old blurbs on TV that said "The thoughts and opinions presented in this program do not reflect those of this station" ? Apply that same thought process and allow your mind to be open. What is Windows 11 Recall? To put it in layman's terms—it is a feature designed specifically for Copilot+ capable PCs, enabling users to retrace their steps with the help of Microsoft Copilot. By securely capturing snapshots of their activity, this tool allows users to revisit past act...
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Using Custom Connectors and Microsoft Graph API's to Manage Licenses in Power Automate - Part Two

Hello again! Didn't I promise you that I'd be back to wrap this up? Well, here I am to give you the second tidbit of information that you need to get this started. If you haven't already, take a look at my previous post where I go into depth about creating a custom connector in Power Automate to retrieve the latest sign-in and also gather the user's licenses. Now that we have the custom connector ready, we can now get into the meat n' potatoes of this series. In this post, I will show you the flow that makes this possible and how you can use the custom connector you have created to tie it all together! Hope you enjoy. Understanding the Logic Before we can begin creating the flow, we should first understand how the flow will work. I designed this to flow to be triggered manually, but you may want to schedule it or use another trigger. The trigger will depend on your organization's policies, so please adjust accordingly. Once triggered, the flow will use the Entra...
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Using Custom Connectors and Microsoft Graph API's to Manage Licenses in Power Automate - Part One

Happy June folks! I come to you with another post, but this time I wanted to change it up and show you something else I have just finished working on. As a SysAdmin, one of the most common issues we run into is managing licenses. Working at a post-secondary institution makes this an even greater challenge, as you have both students, staff and faculty constantly coming as well as going. Managing to keep up with this constant change can introduce great administrative overhead which takes away time from important upkeep of other systems and initiatives. You may also notice this same issue in large corporations or in other government organizations. To help combat this, I wanted to create a flow that can do the following: Get the user and their licenses Determine their last sign-in and the date Conditional to determine if the user is past the "cutoff" date Remove the user from a group where the license is assigned The only problem with doing this is that Power Automate does not ha...
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PIM-IT Ver 0.0.2: More features and Activation Packages

Hello everyone! Hope you're having a great long weekend so far, while I type this I am in my bed with my dog and pushing the latest updates to my GitHub. It's been a minute since I last posted but I wanted to take the opportunity to give you all an update on the PIM-IT project, the PowerShell tool for streamlining Privileged Identity Management. Consider this if you will a changelog of sorts, in which I will talk about the latest features, some takeaways, and what is next in the project. Let's get started! PIM-IT Ver 0.0.2 Latest Features The first major update is the ability to deactivate and update roles. This is a major step towards giving users full control of managing PIM roles from initial activation to deactivation. Updating PIM Roles To update a PIM role, the user selects option "U" from the menu, which will then display currently active roles: From here, the user will select the PIM role they wish to update, which will allow them to adjust the duration to...
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