Lee Ford's Blog

The running joke when having a poor user experience with applications is to “blame the network”. As it turns out, there is some truth to that. You see, if your network is not configured correctly or capable it may well be the cause of common complaints - especially when using real-time communication applications such as Teams. At Symity we are helping more and more customers shift from on-premises Skype for Business to Teams, with that comes network considerations that were not previously needed. [Read More]

Backup-TeamsChat Disclaimer: This tool is provided ‘as-is’ without any warranty or support. Use of this tool is at your own risk and I accept no responsibility for any damage caused. Backup Teams chat messages (not channel messages) for safe keeping - messages are saved in to a HTML report for easy viewing. Written in PowerShell Core and using Graph API (no modules required), it can be used on Windows, Mac and Linux. [Read More]

Disclaimer: This tool is provided ‘as-is’ without any warranty or support. Use of this tool is at your own risk and I accept no responsibility for any damage caused. Backup-Team Backup-Team is a tool used to backup and recreate Teams from Microsoft Teams. A backup from the tool can include items such as settings, channels, tabs, owners, members, conversations and files. Teams can be recreated, including on a different tenant for a pseudo migration scenario. [Read More]

Introduction Recently, I’ve been wanting to use PowerShell Core more often with Graph API. But what has held me back was having to use WinForms or WPF to display the Microsoft login page to authenticate the user. Searching around, it appears you can authenticate Azure AD users with a device code too - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/v2-oauth2-device-code By doing this, your script/tool/app/device can generate a device code to be entered on another device (that has a web-browser). [Read More]

Introduction I’ve been asked a few times if there is an easy way to report on all web pages in use within Teams. The two main reasons are: Intrigue in to what sort of web pages users are attaching to their Teams A way of policing users to ensure the feature is not being abused (perhaps a website is blocked using a web-browser but works via Teams) Pre-requisites As with a lot of my posts, out comes PowerShell and Graph API. [Read More]

Disclaimer: This script is provided ‘as-is’ without any warranty or support. Use of this script is at your own risk and I accept no responsibility for any damage caused. Introduction Backup-TeamsConfig is a PowerShell script allowing you to backup various parts of Microsoft Teams configuration and package it up in to a single file for safe keeping - this includes policies, configurations and voice applications (inc. audio files). Why? - Doesn’t Microsoft already keep copies of this? [Read More]

I’ve previously blogged about the Office 365 Service Communications API before and how it can be used to obtain the service status/health of services in your Office 365 tenant. The API also allows you to get historical status along with messages (from message centre, incidents etc.). In my previous post I showed how this could be done in Flow using a standard HTTP call within each Flow. It works, but it also means you need to set up authentication and each API call manually (even if in the same Flow). [Read More]

When first using Graph API a feature I missed was that data was paged. For example, if I want to retrieve all the groups in a tenant, I would use the following endpoint: HTTP GET: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups This worked fine for me in the demo tenants I was using – I would get all the groups back. However, I found out there is a limit to results returned (for groups it is 100)! [Read More]

One project I have been working on recently at Symity is a global roll out of Teams Direct Routing. This has resulted in SBCs being installed in different configurations based on local connectivity and requirements. One such requirement is where sites have multiple internet connections for resilience - can the SBC make use of this? It makes perfect sense especially when using cloud-based service – if one ISP has an issue, you want to be able maintain service with the other. [Read More]

Microsoft have recently announced that they will be retiring Skype for Business Online on 31st July 2021. After this time, you will no longer be able to access Skype for Business Online. If you’ve been paying attention this isn’t a massive surprise. Teams is the new-ish kid on the block, getting all the attention and had been earmarked as Microsoft’s communication and collaboration tool moving forwards. Once ‘feature-parity’ was announced, Skype for Business Online’s days were numbered. [Read More]