Session I held at the Ignite 2018

Since we, in the company I work for, have rolled out 65,000 Office 365 licenses and are one of the most successful companies ever with Yammer and Teams, I had the great luck this year to be invited by Microsoft as a speaker to the Ignite 2018 in Orlando. Together with my colleague we held a total of 3 sessions and were interviewed in a podcast.

In the meantime the sessions are available on YouTube. The links to the videos can be found here:

Find out how one of the biggest retailers in Europe is using Microsoft Teams - BRK2366

With approximately 48,000 frontline workers spread across 5,000 stores around Europe, dm drogerie's employees communicate with each other by smartphone and Microsoft Teams. The introduction of modern communications tools based on Office 365 has led to a productivity increase felt by every employee and ultimately by our customers. We describe how we encouraged adoption by taking away the fears of colleagues who weren’t IT-affine and showing them the value to be gained from the new tools. Across the entire company, communications skills, team and project work has been taken to a new level. We tell the success story from the first pilot through the tsunami of demand to the roll out in production.

Build your communities using SharePoint and Yammer - BRK2076

Learn how SharePoint and Yammer bring together modern content and conversations to deliver a best-in-class community solution. Understand what's new and coming next for building communities across your organization using Microsoft 365. Leaders from Rolls Royce and DM share how to champion a community approach to business challenges for accelerated business transformation. Learn how you can empower community leaders to support a strategic approach to community management.

Success with Teams Customer Panel – Best practices for large scale enterprise - BRK2189

Learn from key customers about how they are moving to Microsoft Teams. This session includes real world guidance for planning, delivering, managing and driving adoption of Microsoft Teams at scale.

The Office 365 Secure Score

Keeping track how secure your Office 365 tenant is can be a bit of a hassle. To make it easier for you, Microsoft created the Office 365 Secure Score.

In this 4-minute overview of Office 365 Secure Score, you will learn about a new tool that helps you to automatically assess the security posture of your Office 365 accounts, data, and devices. You'll discover the security features and best practices available to you to implement based on your overall security and productivity goals.

Connect to Office365 via Office PnP behind a proxy

How do you connect to your SharePoint Office365 tenant with the PowerShell if you are locked behind a proxy? This hint will probably work for all kind of PowerShell scripts, not only for Office PnP. I tried this with the Microsoft SharePoint Online extensions as well and it worked.

So my problem was, the company I was working for, had a proxy which could not be bypassed. The proxy settings have been set by a GPO and the network settings where fine so far. However the proxy used user authentication to access the internet. Now if I want to use the SharePoint Online tools, I must authenticate my PowerShell session at the proxy so the tools can access the internet too.

The trick to get your PowerShell connected is quite simple. You only need to enter the following line:

[System.Net.WebRequest]::DefaultWebProxy.Credentials = [System.Net.CredentialCache]::DefaultCredentials

Now you should be able to connect to Office365 SharePoint without problems. If you don't want to enter this line every time you open a new PowerShell, you could add it to your PowerShell profile.

ise $PROFILE
then add this to the profile file:

#Set user default credentials for any webrequest
"Setting the users default credentials for WebRequests..." | Write-Host -ForegroundColor White
[System.Net.WebRequest]::DefaultWebProxy.Credentials = [System.Net.CredentialCache]::DefaultCredentials

A certificate validation operation took nnn milliseconds and has exceeded the execution time threshold

After installing a new SharePoint 2013 farm, I noticed a few messages in the Windows event log:

A certificate validation operation took 14988.6926 milliseconds and has exceeded the execution time threshold. If this continues to occur, it may represent a configuration issue. Please see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=246987 for more details.
Source:	SharePoint Foundation
Event ID:	8321
Level:	Critical

As Microsoft states in their knowlege base article KB2625048:

The SharePoint server does not have access to the Internet, or the server is protected by a firewall that has limited ports open. In this situation, users intermittently experience long delays when they perform certain operations, such as logging in to the site or performing a search. Users may also encounter HTTP timeouts when they perform these operations.

The mean you must either let your server access the internet, what most of the time won't be possible due to policy reasons, or we need a other solution. Good for us that the knowlege base article offers two possible solutions.