I've been working with a company that uses When I Work for employee scheduling and time tracking. This week, they wanted to onboard the service to Entra ID so that users can have a seamless sign on experience through their Microsoft account and the IT admins can secure logins with Conditional Access and other features in the M365 platform.
In my experience, every time I setup SAML Single Sign-On with SaaS apps in Entra ID, the language to get the integration setup is all over the place. Entity IDs, ACS, Issuer URLs, Endpoint URLs, Consumer URLs, Authority URLs, OAuth token endpoints—it's very confusing and changes for each service.
For this project, we couldn't find a guide for onboarding WhenIWork to Entra ID for Single Sign-On, so I wanted to write these steps down for other admins who need it. Big thanks to Sam Guerra for figuring this out.
A client I've been working with needed a way to check the warranty status of thousands of Lenovo laptops they own. The end goal was to import the warranty expiration dates into Freshservice so they can estimate device lifecycles and find out which users needed laptop replacements.
Right now, Lenovo doesn't offer an API that could do this and I would need to look up each laptop one-by-one.
To solve this problem and avoid manual lookups, I wrote a short PowerShell script that takes the serial number, scrapes Lenovo's warranty check page and gets the warranty information for the device, then outputs to a PowerShell object with the regular and upgrade warranty statuses and the end dates.
In my use case, I exported all devices from Intune into a .csv file, filtered on all Lenovo devices, then ran the Get-LenovoWarrantyInformation script against all of them in a for loop. I exported to a clean .csv file that I could then upload into the Freshservice inventory.
I recently received a request to update the Azure Data Factory Linked Service connector to Salesforce. When they login, they get the following warning message:
Your Data Factory has pipelines that are still utilizing the legacy connector versions. Please kindly upgrade to the latest connector version at your earliest convenience. For your reference, you can view all the relevant linked services here.
When I click on the “View all” link, I can see that there's a Linked Service with the “Salesforce (Legacy)” type listed:
This post will discuss the steps for upgrading this connector to use the modern OAuth method for authentication and how to update your Azure Data Factory flows with the new Salesforce connector.
Over the weekend, I finished coding a demake the New York Times Connections game in Pico8.
There are a lot of bugs in the code right now, but it's playable and I was able to squeeze in the puzzles from July, August, and the first week of September and came right under the Pico8 cartridge size limit.
Earlier this week, I volunteered with my coworkers at CREO to sort donations at Book Harvest, a local non-profit that provides families and businesses with free children's books in the Durham area.
It's great to get away from the meetings and see everyone in-person.
Recently, I upgraded my home network to 10gbps switches and routers. I purchased a 10gbps Thunderbolt 3 adapter with ethernet from Amazon for my PC that only had 2.5gbps ethernet. After it arrived, I plugged it in and it worked great with a full 10/10gbps connection.
After a reboot, however, my PC running Windows 11 wasn't able to see it anymore in Network Connections and it wasn't connecting to my network.
This post has a PowerShell script to fix the issue and a brief explanation of where the setting might be coming from.
My company recently performed a domain name change in SharePoint and Entra ID/Azure AD. Among other things, this migration required us to re-install and re-deploy Orchestry from scratch.
After re-installation, some sites did not have the correct “Team Information” tab listed in the General channel. “Team Information” is a critical tab that is installed/added to a Team when the Team is provisioned through the regular Orchestry workflow. Without the tab, regular users can't request or add new Guests to the Team, which is a huge headache if your tenant is configured for Orchestry governance and have dis-allowed any Guest additions, aside from admins. The tab appears like this:
In the case of our migration, this tab wasn't showing the correct information and wouldn't load on all sites that were created with Orchestry. This tab was also missing on all other Teams that weren't provisioned using Orchestry.
To fix this issue, I wrote a PowerShell script that adds the tab to the General channel on all Teams in bulk.
Earlier today, a user was looking for recommendations for which file shortcut to use that would be cross-platform compatible. The user wanted everyone who was invited to a shared folder to be able to click links to other locations without much hassle. If you've used OneDrive, Teams, and/or SharePoint across different devices, you may have run into issues where shortcuts work on certain devices and other shortcuts are un-openable. This can be really confusing if you're working with a group of people that have a mix of device types.
I did a little bit of testing and I can say that right now, the best option for cross-device compatible shortcuts is to use the .url format created on the web in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams.
This post will go into different file shortcuts across platforms and how to create these .url shortcuts. I'm not focusing on mobile devices because hopefully your users only access files through the official Microsoft apps and are not directly downloading files. This post may save you some headaches going forward.
I received a request from a client that was struggling with using Shared Mailboxes in Exchange Online. They wanted to be able to see all sent email messages in the Shared Mailbox “Sent” folder instead of the user's email address.
For example:
A user has “Send As” permissions on a Shared Mailbox named “Finance@example.com”.
The user composes a new email in Outlook and changes the “From” setting to “Finance@” and clicks the Send button.
The email is delivered to recipients from “Finance@”.
A copy of the sent email is stored in the user's “Sent” folder.
The issue with this process is that there is no record inside the Shared Mailbox that an email was sent from the account. Only the original sender has a copy of the message, but other users who have access to the Shared Mailbox cannot see which email messages have been sent out or which items in the inbox have been replied to.
To fix this issue, I wrote a quick PowerShell script to update all Shared Mailboxes with 2 attributes.
