Now that Microsoft Ignite has come and gone, I have had time to digest some of the news from the week and want to share some thoughts…specifically about Skype and Teams for now. Ignite 2017 overall was the best/most productive Microsoft conference I have attended. The logistics of a conference this size have to be crazy – 30,000 people, 1600+ sessions, vendors, food, celebrations, etc. Kudos to everyone involved.
The first day of Microsoft Ignite brought a staggering amount of announcements, most of which I have yet to read about in detail. With the number of product groups represented at the conference, I am sure there are still some that I haven’t heard about. In all of the sessions I attended today, I saw Microsoft’s mission throughout. It is clear that they are really focused on ensuring users have the tools they need to be productive.
Microsoft Mission: Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
Microsoft Ignite kicks off on Monday, and I can’t wait for another year of immersion in all of the enterprise technologies that Microsoft has to offer. If you are still struggling to sort through the 1500+ sessions available, let me persuade you to check out my top 5 anticipated sessions for the week.
While playing around with Office 365 Groups expiration and the AzureADPreview module in PowerShell, I ran into the error below:
The term ‘Get-AzureADMSDeletedGroup’ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program.
After a bit of trial and error, and some searching I found an important note in the Azure Active Directory PowerShell Module documentation. The documentation notes that the preview module cannot be installed on the same machine as the production module. I didn’t seem to have an issue actually doing the installation using the PowerShellGet Module, and tab completion for the cmdlets even worked, but the cmdlets would not work.
Indeed, after uninstalling the production module (Uninstall-Module AzureAD), I was able to work with the preview cmdlets.
Office 365 Groups, sometimes referred to as Unified Groups, have been around for a while now. Groups are excellent for collaboration, and allowing the end user to be in control of their own collaboration experience. Groups are bad news for IT workers who need control or are resistant to change. The latter group of IT workers will need to get on board though as it is evident that much of the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem will be intertwined with Groups going forward.
For the past year, I have restricted group creation in production. There are a multitude of reasons for not using Groups upon their initial release but, ultimately, it was lack of enterprise controls. Most of those limitations have been remediated and the time for Groups is now.
In an effort to keep some form of structure around Groups, using a multi-domain approach is useful.
It's Partly Cloudy 