It's been a minute, but I am back with some absolutely exciting news. Just the other day, I came across an announcement that is sure to send shockwaves through the Microsoft 365 community - the implementation of Microsoft 365 Local: Microsoft's answer to keeping your M365 data sovereign. Over the past little while, more and more companies and organizations have been pivoting towards local alternatives to Microsoft 365 as the lines between data ownership and residency are getting blurred. Given that a plethora of countries in the EU started to pull away from Microsoft 365 and Azure due to lack of control over where their data was going, Microsoft has announced Microsoft 365 Local, which gives organizations the ability to bring the best of the Microsoft 365 environment into their own environment. What does this mean for organizations? Instead of hosting the infrastructure required on servers in the cloud - companies can now opt to host the services on their own infrastructure, p...

 Long time no see! The reason for this is because while I was away, I was working on a brand-new tool for administrators to audit their environment for shadow IT apps. This idea came after I wanted to be able to audit my own environment for shadow IT and didn't have a way to do it in a comprehensive manner. Thus, my PowerShell tool was born; I introduce to you, Shadowman! What is Shadowman? Shadowman in a nutshell is a tool designed to get you all the information that you need on the service principals in your Azure environment. Administrators have the option to conduct a basic audit that will capture all information and flags that are available through the application, as well as a targeted mode that will give administrators the ability to filter applications based on the following flags: Service Principal Properties Property Description DisplayName Name of the service principal AppId Application ID ObjectId Object ID in Azure AD ...

Working in an IT department, you're always making changes and doing things. However, the plethora of platforms that allow you to communicate these things are also constantly changing as well as expanding. One feature I have discovered in the Microsoft 365 admin center is the ability to send organizational messages. If you haven't already, I highly recommend looking into how organizational messages can positively impact your org-wide communications. In this post, I will talk about this feature and how you can get the most out of it. What is Organizational Messages? Organizational Messages in Microsoft 365 are targeted, branded communications delivered directly within Microsoft apps and Windows environments. They help organizations share timely updates, onboarding guidance, policy changes, and training resources—right where users work. With customizable visuals, audience targeting, and performance tracking, these messages ensure important information reaches the right people at t...

 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...

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...

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...

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...