Written by Keith Tuomi on . Posted in Compliance, Office 365, Security. Leave a Comment
Written by Keith Tuomi on . Posted in Cloud, Compliance, Office 365, Security, Security. Leave a Comment
Moving to the Cloud can introduce new concerns. In this post, i’ll help you address your unique organizational security standards, framed against the products and capabilities of your Office 365 services.
While Microsoft has invested heavily in securing their platforms against cyber attacks, they operate with a shared responsibility model in which the customer is responsible for ensuring their users take precautions to protect information. Many organizations have an information gap where the IT security team does not have visibility into everyday high-risk activity occurring within these services. They often do not know about misuse until it escalates into a major data loss incident.
As a result, many IT security teams need actionable intelligence around a wide range of internal and external threats and security vulnerabilities that can lead to data loss including:
The information gathered in this report can help mitigate those types of scenarios, based on Microsoft’s own best-practice foundational security goals:
Let’s assess risk and implement the most critical security, compliance, and information protection controls to protect your Office 365 tenant. The goal is to prioritize threats, translate threats into technical strategy, and then take a systematic approach to implementing features and controls.
At core to Office 365 Security:
Data Loss Prevention
Auditing and Retention Policies
eDiscovery
Data Deletion
Data Spillage Management
Question: “What are the main differences between security on-premises and security in the public cloud?”Answer: “You still need to do most of what you’re doing now.
Ensuring that the data and its classification is done correctly, and that the solution will be compliant with regulatory obligations is the responsibility of the customer. Physical security is the one responsibility that is wholly owned by cloud service providers when using cloud computing.
The remaining responsibilities are shared between customers and cloud service providers.
Considering the aforementioned Security Responsibility & Threat patterns, a key conclusion can be drawn as to what your Organizational security focus with Office 365 should be:
Start with a set of standards that can be applied across your organization. Here is an example of what this can look like.
Start with a set of standards that can be applied across your organization. Here is an example of what this can look like:
Goal | Description |
Establish information protection priorities | The first step of protecting information is identifying what to protect. Develop clear, simple, and well-communicated guidelines to identify, protect, and monitor the most important data assets anywhere they reside. |
Set organization minimum standards | Establish minimum standards for devices and accounts accessing any data assets belonging to the organization. This can include device configuration compliance, device wipe, enterprise data protection capabilities, user authentication strength, and user identity. |
Find and protect sensitive data | Identify and classify sensitive assets. Define the technologies and processes to automatically apply security controls. |
Protect high value assets (HVAs) | Establish the strongest protection for assets that have a disproportionate impact on the organizations mission or profitability. Perform stringent analysis of HVA lifecycle and security dependencies, establish appropriate security controls and conditions. |
Four levels is a good starting point if your organization doesn’t already have defined Data Sensitivity standards:
Sensitivity Level | Description |
Confidential | Only those who need explicitly need access must be granted it, and only to the least degree in order to do their work (the ‘need to know’ and ‘least privilege’ principles). |
Restricted | Subject to controls on access, such as only allowing valid logons from a small group of staff. ‘Restricted’ information must be held in such a manner that prevents unauthorised access i.e. on a system that requires a valid and appropriate user to log in before access is granted |
Internal Use | Can be disclosed or disseminated by its owner to appropriate members of your organization, partners and other individuals, as appropriate by information owners without any restrictions on content or time of publication |
Public | Can be disclosed or disseminated without any restrictions on content, audience or time of publication. Disclosure or dissemination of the information must not violate any applicable laws or regulations, such as privacy rules. |
This table is an example of how capabilities can be mapped to data sensitivity levels:
Service Capability | Description |
Data is encrypted and available only to authenticated users | Provided by default for data stored in Office 365 services. Data is encrypted while it resides in the service and in transit between the service and client devices. |
Additional data and identity protection applied broadly | Capabilities such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), mobile device management, and Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection increase protection and substantially raise the minimum standard for protecting devices, accounts, and data. |
Sophisticated protection applied to specific data sets | Capabilities such as Azure Rights Management (RMS) and Data Loss Protection (DLP) across Office 365 can be used to enforce permissions and other policies that protect sensitive data |
Strongest protection and separation | Customer Lockbox for Office 365, eDiscovery features in Office 365, and use of auditing features to ensure compliance to policies and prescribed configurations. |
Secure Score analyzes your Office 365 organization’s security based on your regular activities and security settings and assigns a score. Think of it as a credit score for security.
Anyone who has admin permissions (global admin or a custom admin role) for an Office 365 Business Premium or Enterprise subscription can access the Secure Score at https://securescore.office.com. Users who aren’t assigned an admin role won’t be able to access Secure Score. However, admins can use the tool to share their results with other people in their organization.
Secure Score figures out what Office 365 services you’re using (like OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange) then looks at your settings and activities and compares them to a baseline established by Microsoft. You’ll get a score based on how aligned you are with best security practices.
Using Secure Score helps increase your organization’s security by encouraging you to use the built-in security features in Office 365 (many of which you already purchased but might not be aware of). Learning more about these features as you use the tool will help give you piece of mind that you’re taking the right steps to protect your organization from threats.
If you want to improve your score, review the action queue to see what you can do to help increase security and reduce risks.
Expand an action to learn about what threats it’ll help protect you from and how you’ll get the job done.
To see the impact of your actions on your organization’s security, go to the Score Analyzer page and review your history.
Click any data point to see a breakdown of your score for that day. You can scroll down to see which controls were enabled and how many points you earned that day for each control.
Office 365 Secure Score is a great security analytics tool that you can access at https://securescore.office.com. However not everyone knows how to access Secure Score. You can make it easier to discover and quickly review your security position by adding a Secure Score widget to the home page of the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center.
The widget will show your latest score and the maximum points you can obtain. To get more information about your score you can click the “Go to Secure Score” link and it will take you directly to Secure Score to review the additional details.
Offerings
Office 365 Secure Productive Enterprise
Getting Started
New technologies and services enhance Microsoft’s unique approach to cybersecurity
Address your CXO’s top five cloud security concerns
Take control of your security and compliance with Office 365
Learn how Office 365 security and compliance leverages intelligence in a cloud first world
Secure Office 365 like a cybersecurity pro—assessing risk and implementing controls
Own your data with next generation access control technology in Office 365
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
How Does Microsoft IT Secure Office 365?
Keep calm and automate: How we secure the Office 365 service
Office 365 Secure Score
Introducing the Office 365 Secure Score
An introduction to Office 365 Secure score
New Office 365 capabilities help you proactively manage security and compliance risk
Advanced Threat Analytics
Learn how Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics combats persistent threats
Plan and deploy Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics the right way
Advanced Security Management
Overview of Advanced Security Management in Office 365
Get started with Advanced Security Management
Gain visibility and control with Office 365 Advanced Security Management
Advanced Threat Protection
Introducing Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection
Advanced threat protection for safe attachments and safe links
Learn about advancements in Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection
Data Loss Prevention
Protect your sensitive information with Office 365 Data Loss Prevention
Customize and tune Microsoft Office 365 Data Loss Prevention
Customer Lockbox
Announcing Customer Lockbox for Office 365
Office 365 Customer Lockbox Requests
Developer
Building security and compliance solutions with the O365 Activity API – a Microsoft IT case study
Exchange
Implement Microsoft Exchange Online Protection
Get an edge over attackers – what you need to know about email threats
Understand how Microsoft protects you against Spoof, Phish, Malware, and Spam emails
Learn about advancements in Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection
Advanced eDiscovery
Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery
Video: Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery
Reduce costs and challenges with Office 365 eDiscovery and Analytics
Azure Information Protection
What is Azure Rights Management?
Collaborate confidently using Rights Management
Adopt a comprehensive identity-driven solution for protecting and sharing data securely
Mobile Devices
Secure access to Office 365, SaaS, and on-premises apps and files with Azure AD and Intune
Deliver a BYOD program that employees and security teams will love with Microsoft Intune
Manage BYOD and corporate-owned devices with MDM solutions
Encryption
Introducing Office 365 Message Encryption: Send encrypted emails to anyone!
Encryption in Office 365
Challenge cloud encryption myths and learn about Office 365 BYOK plans
Advanced Data Governance
Advanced Data Governance overview
Take control of your data with intelligent data governance in Office 365
Applying intelligence to security and compliance in Office 365
Written by Keith Tuomi on . Posted in Delve, Flow, Groups, Lync, Office 365, OneDrive for Business, Outlook, Performance, Planner, Power Apps, Power BI, SharePoint, SharePoint Online, Skype for Business, TechNet, Video, Yammer, Yammer. Leave a Comment
This is a follow-up to my 2015 post about the recommended IE Internet Security Zone settings for maximum user authentication happiness.
On the post https://tuomi.ca/2014/06/23/overcoming-sticky-logouts-office-365-azure-windows-intune-web-browser/, I tried to rationalize IE security settings relating to Office 365.
Here’s a good explanation of why we should care, as quoted from the more recent MSFT post:
“Starting with Windows Vista , Internet Explorer has a new security zone protection feature, called protected mode, and that is set up by default for Internet, Intranet and Restricted Security zones.
Understanding and Working in Protected Mode Internet Explorer
The effect of the protected mode is that the sites in these zones will not have access to the folders available to other application (i.e. data available in other zones). This means the cookies available for one session for a site in a Protected mode zone will not be accessible to a site that resides in a separate zone (and the other way around), which will trigger behind the scene repeated authentication attempts.”
Net result: persistent login prompts, hair pulling, annoyances. The fix? Either manually or through group policy, apply the following settings to your Windows workstations:
Trusted Sites Zone:
https://*.microsoftonline.com
https://*.sharepoint.com
https://*.sharepointonline.com
https://*.outlook.com
https://*.lync.com
https://*.office365.com
https://*.office.com
https://*.microsoftstream.com
https://*.sway.com
https://*.powerapps.com
https://*.yammer.com
Intranet Zone:
*.microsoftonline.com
*.sharepoint.com
*.sharepointonline.com
*.outlook.com
*.lync.com
*.office365.com
*.office.com
*.microsoftstream.com
*.sway.com
*.powerapps.com
References:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/victorbutuza/2016/06/20/o365-internet-explorer-protected-mode-and-security-zones/ – Latest new URL’s added e.g. PowerApps.com
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2507767/problems-when-signing-out-of-office-365–azure–or-intune-in-a-web-bro – Original official reference.
Written by Keith Tuomi on . Posted in Search, SharePoint Online. Leave a Comment
Recently I was asked if search in SharePoint Online would return two results for words separated by hyphens, dashes, or other characters. For example, we’d like to know if entering the search phrase “committal” will return both “noncommittal” and “non-committal”
The answer is, it depends on the specific Search scenario and configuration. It’s indeed an under-documented topic so I thought I’d try and give you good context here.
Here’s the inventory of the special characters used for tokenization in the context of using SharePoint Document Libraries as the Search Result source:
Character | Is Wordbreaker? |
– hyphen | Yes |
_ underscore | Yes |
. period | Yes |
& ampersand | Invalid |
% percent | Invalid |
+ plus | Yes |
# pound | Invalid |
There are other possible root content source types as well: File Share, Exchange and Open Search, and they have their own idiosyncrasies regarding word breaking. For example, ampersand would work as a word breaker in the context of a File Share search.
So, in conclusion, yes, a search of OOTB SP Document Libraries for “committal” will return both “noncommittal” and “non-committal”, with higher relevance given to an item with both portions of the string present.
Written by Keith Tuomi on . Posted in SPS Vancouver, User Groups. Leave a Comment
Attendees will be able to register for a variety of sessions presented by seasoned speakers and Microsoft MVP’s presenting a wide range of SharePoint and Office 365 topics.
Our Call for Sponsors and General Registration are CURRENTLY OPEN, so sign up for this FREE event today! We look forward to welcoming you all to another great day of learning, networking and fun!
Location:
UBC Robson Square located at 800 Robson St, Vancouver, B.C. Canada
Today’s workforce is mobile, and if you want to get the best work out of your people, you need to give them every tool it takes to be productive on the go.
You’ll learn how to bring forms and mobile together in your Nintex Workflow platform, helping you cut costs, save time, eliminate manual processes and boost productivity. You’ll also see how to:
Give your team access to content from everywhere.
Make it easier for your employees to collaborate.
Keep your people productive when they’re not behind their desks.
Any form. Any device. Anywhere.
Demo/presentation illustrating how Nintex Workflow, Forms and Nintex Mobile lets you:
1. Design forms quickly and easily.
2. Generate forms for browsers, including tablets and mobile.
3. Publish to the cloud in one click.
4. Build comprehensive mobile business applications.
5. Create and manage auditable workflows to automate and standardize your business processes
Join Perry Underdown, Manager of SharePoint and Web Tools at Expedia and Michal Pisarek, Director of Product at Bonzai Intranet, to learn how Expedia recently launched a SharePoint Intranet to over 27,000 employees worldwide. Utilizing SharePoint 2016 and Bonzai Intranet, the travel-tech giant quickly deployed their new intranet across multiple continents to unite the organization and over 17 of its subsidiaries.
In this engaging and interactive session, you will learn about the challenges Expedia faced in this massive undertaking. Specifically, Perry and Michal will focus in on the learnings that made the project a major success including governance, change management, and strategic execution. They will also uncover the technology and methods they used to cut costs and decrease the project’s time-to-delivery.
This session is a must for anyone who wants to successfully deploy an Intranet on SharePoint or Office 365 or understand how to better leverage the platform for communication, collaboration and engagement.
The introduction of Office 365 Groups has created waves in recent months. As the adoption of Groups begins to grow and the offering matures, numerous individuals have begun to ask: “How do I manage groups?” “Are groups different from Teams?” “Is Yammer obsolete?” Excitement about new features comes mixed with concerns on how to incorporate Groups, combining Groups with existing business workloads and the other functionality of Office 365.
This is a 100-200 level session focusing on everything you need to know to get started with Groups and how to avoid the top pitfalls in the early stages of adoption.
Once upon a time, there lived a sad mutant frog who felt he had no purpose in life. Until one day, he was discovered by the SharePoint team to give magical High Fives to employees throughout the land. Everyone rejoiced about how simple it was to recognize their fellow workers and everyone lived happily ever after using SharePoint.
Follow Tom as he tells the story of how they used SharePoint to develop a recognition and rewards program for their company. They took a stated need from the business and brainstormed a solution from concept to theme to functionality in 30 minutes. Less than 24 hours later, they were demoing the site for the business owners. With our mutant frog giving out “High Fives”, the feedback was overwhelming positive, and the site is now available for use to over 5000 employees.
In this session, you will learn:
– How to set up your team and the mindset you need to have to be able to effectively brainstorm
– How to develop a theme for your site that helps drive adoption
– How to build the initial recognition list and custom form using out-of-the-box SharePoint components
– How to set up the workflows and dashboards
– How to keep the site fresh by delivering continual incremental improvements
Delivering business value doesn’t have to take months and be dull or boring. With SharePoint and a bit of magic, you can have fun and find your own mutant frog.
Today’s workforce is mobile, and if you want to get the best work out of your people, you need to give them every tool it takes to be productive on the go.
You’ll learn how to bring forms and mobile together in your Nintex Workflow platform, helping you cut costs, save time, eliminate manual processes and boost productivity. You’ll also see how to:
Give your team access to content from everywhere.
Make it easier for your employees to collaborate.
Keep your people productive when they’re not behind their desks.
Any form. Any device. Anywhere.
Demo/presentation illustrating how Nintex Workflow, Forms and Nintex Mobile lets you:
1. Design forms quickly and easily.
2. Generate forms for browsers, including tablets and mobile.
3. Publish to the cloud in one click.
4. Build comprehensive mobile business applications.
5. Create and manage auditable workflows to automate and standardize your business processes
Join Perry Underdown, Manager of SharePoint and Web Tools at Expedia and Michal Pisarek, Director of Product at Bonzai Intranet, to learn how Expedia recently launched a SharePoint Intranet to over 27,000 employees worldwide. Utilizing SharePoint 2016 and Bonzai Intranet, the travel-tech giant quickly deployed their new intranet across multiple continents to unite the organization and over 17 of its subsidiaries.
In this engaging and interactive session, you will learn about the challenges Expedia faced in this massive undertaking. Specifically, Perry and Michal will focus in on the learnings that made the project a major success including governance, change management, and strategic execution. They will also uncover the technology and methods they used to cut costs and decrease the project’s time-to-delivery.
This session is a must for anyone who wants to successfully deploy an Intranet on SharePoint or Office 365 or understand how to better leverage the platform for communication, collaboration and engagement.
The introduction of Office 365 Groups has created waves in recent months. As the adoption of Groups begins to grow and the offering matures, numerous individuals have begun to ask: “How do I manage groups?” “Are groups different from Teams?” “Is Yammer obsolete?” Excitement about new features comes mixed with concerns on how to incorporate Groups, combining Groups with existing business workloads and the other functionality of Office 365.
This is a 100-200 level session focusing on everything you need to know to get started with Groups and how to avoid the top pitfalls in the early stages of adoption.
Once upon a time, there lived a sad mutant frog who felt he had no purpose in life. Until one day, he was discovered by the SharePoint team to give magical High Fives to employees throughout the land. Everyone rejoiced about how simple it was to recognize their fellow workers and everyone lived happily ever after using SharePoint.
Follow Tom as he tells the story of how they used SharePoint to develop a recognition and rewards program for their company. They took a stated need from the business and brainstormed a solution from concept to theme to functionality in 30 minutes. Less than 24 hours later, they were demoing the site for the business owners. With our mutant frog giving out “High Fives”, the feedback was overwhelming positive, and the site is now available for use to over 5000 employees.
In this session, you will learn:
– How to set up your team and the mindset you need to have to be able to effectively brainstorm
– How to develop a theme for your site that helps drive adoption
– How to build the initial recognition list and custom form using out-of-the-box SharePoint components
– How to set up the workflows and dashboards
– How to keep the site fresh by delivering continual incremental improvements
Delivering business value doesn’t have to take months and be dull or boring. With SharePoint and a bit of magic, you can have fun and find your own mutant frog.
SharePoint is slow. Pages take ages to load. The throbber spins forever. “Working on it…” becomes the SharePoint motto.
How can you tell if your SharePoint farm is under-performing? Why is it slow? What can you do to improve SharePoint’s performance?
In this talk we’ll look at tools available to SharePoint and IT administrators to help them assess the performance of their SharePoint farm to come up with a plan for improvement.
Join Perry Underdown, Manager of SharePoint and Web Tools at Expedia and Michal Pisarek, Director of Product at Bonzai Intranet, to learn how Expedia recently launched a SharePoint Intranet to over 27,000 employees worldwide. Utilizing SharePoint 2016 and Bonzai Intranet, the travel-tech giant quickly deployed their new intranet across multiple continents to unite the organization and over 17 of its subsidiaries.
In this engaging and interactive session, you will learn about the challenges Expedia faced in this massive undertaking. Specifically, Perry and Michal will focus in on the learnings that made the project a major success including governance, change management, and strategic execution. They will also uncover the technology and methods they used to cut costs and decrease the project’s time-to-delivery.
This session is a must for anyone who wants to successfully deploy an Intranet on SharePoint or Office 365 or understand how to better leverage the platform for communication, collaboration and engagement.
The introduction of Office 365 Groups has created waves in recent months. As the adoption of Groups begins to grow and the offering matures, numerous individuals have begun to ask: “How do I manage groups?” “Are groups different from Teams?” “Is Yammer obsolete?” Excitement about new features comes mixed with concerns on how to incorporate Groups, combining Groups with existing business workloads and the other functionality of Office 365.
This is a 100-200 level session focusing on everything you need to know to get started with Groups and how to avoid the top pitfalls in the early stages of adoption.
Heard the hype around serverless architectures and Azure Functions? Come to this session to hear about what they are, how to get started, and understand the scenarios where they are most powerful.
This session will show scenarios that will be extremely useful for SharePoint/Office 365 developers around Microsoft Graph webhooks, scheduled timer jobs, and much more!
Once upon a time, there lived a sad mutant frog who felt he had no purpose in life. Until one day, he was discovered by the SharePoint team to give magical High Fives to employees throughout the land. Everyone rejoiced about how simple it was to recognize their fellow workers and everyone lived happily ever after using SharePoint.
Follow Tom as he tells the story of how they used SharePoint to develop a recognition and rewards program for their company. They took a stated need from the business and brainstormed a solution from concept to theme to functionality in 30 minutes. Less than 24 hours later, they were demoing the site for the business owners. With our mutant frog giving out “High Fives”, the feedback was overwhelming positive, and the site is now available for use to over 5000 employees.
In this session, you will learn:
– How to set up your team and the mindset you need to have to be able to effectively brainstorm
– How to develop a theme for your site that helps drive adoption
– How to build the initial recognition list and custom form using out-of-the-box SharePoint components
– How to set up the workflows and dashboards
– How to keep the site fresh by delivering continual incremental improvements
Delivering business value doesn’t have to take months and be dull or boring. With SharePoint and a bit of magic, you can have fun and find your own mutant frog.
Things are moving fast. Sometimes you might even feel that you own comfort zone is getting of control. But in a Mobile-First, Cloud-First world, things are changing to a crazy pace and to stay on the top of your game, you need keep up with the latest and greatest technologies that are available out there. By staying up to date, you will give to yourself new options that will let you be more productive, write better code and push you in a more open and more collaborative world.
With the official shipment of Angular 2 and the current preview release of the SharePoint Framework, it is now the time to start moving towards those new technologies in your SharePoint Solutions.
In this session, we will cover the modern tool belt of the SharePoint developer by covering the SharePoint Framework as the new surface to express yourself, Angular as a Framework to enable you to build complete applications within your SharePoint modern experiences and Azure Function as the perfect server-side companion for all your Office 365 & Azure development.
This very demo-intensive session will make sure that at the end you get those 3 key takeaways :
– Understand the role of the SharePoint Framework, Angular and Azure Functions in this Cloud-First, Mobile-First world
– Have a complete sample where the modern tool belt is relevant and useful in a real-world scenario
– Change the way you will think for your next SharePoint project
When Microsoft released the Office UI Fabric, they enabled SharePoint developers to quickly build custom webparts, controls and applications that could inherit the innate look and feel of Office 365 and SharePoint with simple to use structured code. With Office UI Fabric React, we can quickly build sophisticated controls, tightly bound to SharePoint, such as command bars, color pickers, people pickers, panels, buttons and much more all tied in with React, the default rendering engine for the SharePoint Framework.
In this session we will introduce the Office UI Fabric and learn how to use include it in our current or next SharePoint projects. After a quick introduction of the basics and how to get started, we will dig into code samples so as to see we can build our own applications that look to be a part of SharePoint.
Benefits of this Session:
• Overview of Office UI Fabric
• Learn how to use Office UI Fabric with React to leverage repeatable components and controls.
• See how you can begin using Office UI Fabric React now
Written by Keith Tuomi on . Posted in Excel, Visio. Leave a Comment
Although first announced back in October, i’d like to bring awareness to the following awesomeness coming from the Visio team. They are still looking for people to try out the new smart diagrams feature and provide valuable feedback:
We are pleased to announce an early preview of smart diagrams for the first time in Visio, brought to you exclusively by the Office Insider Program. To preview and give your feedback directly to the team, sign up for smart diagrams today!
Do you currently spend hours connecting shapes, placing the shapes into the right Swim lanes to create the perfect layout? Looking to save time while creating your process diagrams from data every day?
With Visio’s smart diagrams feature, now you can automatically create a Basic Flowchart or Cross-Functional Flowchart from your process map in Excel, in no time. The process metadata you capture in Excel now gets stored in Visio shapes as shape data for you.
Written by Keith Tuomi on . Posted in Errors, Office, Office 2013, Office 365. Leave a Comment
Here’s a shortlist of some useful troubleshooting techniques, divided into two sections according to the two main types of MS Office Installations:
MSI: “Traditional” Windows installer
Click-to-Run: Office 365 installed MS Office
“Verbose logging” is a setting that exposes more information during the installation process. It will capture “warning” as well as “error” messages that provide us with clues to your problem. To do onetime verbose logging:
Diagnosing When Setup Stops Responding At times, Office Setup stops responding (hangs), and you do not receive any error message. The best thing to do in this situation is to restart your computer, and run Office Setup again with complete verbose logging turned on (with one additional option). To do this, start Office Setup. To do so, follow these steps:
pathSetup.exe /L*v! C:Verboselog.txt
Note that Path is the full path of your Office source location.
To enable Windows Installer logging yourself, open the registry with Regedit.exe and create the following path and keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SoftwarePolicies\Microsoft\WindowsInstaller
Reg_SZ: Logging Value: voicewarmupx
The letters in the value field can be in any order. Each letter turns on a different logging mode. Each letter’s actual function is as follows for MSI version 1.1:
v – Verbose output
o – Out-of-disk-space messages
i – Status messages
c – Initial UI parameters
e – All error messages
w – Non-fatal warnings
a – Start up of actions
r – Action-specific records
m – Out-of-memory or fatal exit information
u – User requests
p – Terminal properties
+ – Append to existing file
! – Flush each line to the log
x – Extra debugging information. The “x” flag is available only on Windows Server 2003 and later operating systems, and on the MSI redistributable version 3.0, and on later versions of the MSI redistributable.
“*” – Wildcard, log all information except for the v and the x option. To include the v and the x option, specify “/l*vx”.
Note This should be used only for troubleshooting purposes and should not be left on because it will have adverse effects on system performance and disk space. Each time you use the Add/Remove Programs tool in Control Panel, a new Msi*.log file is created.
When looking through the MSI logs we will typically want to look for a value 3 entry in the logs. Windows installer returns codes during the install which will indicate if a particular function was successful or not.
Value 1 = Success
Value 2 = Cancel
Value 3 = Error
Note: make sure to turn off verbose logging after you are done.
Enable verbose logging before collecting the log files.
Now try to install Microsoft Office 2016 to get the error message so that the log files get created.
Follow the steps below to access the ‘Temp’ folder.
The following are the log files that may be present in the %windir%temp folder (c2r is for Click to Run):
Bootstrapper*.log
c2r_*.log
C2RIntegrator*.log
Firefly*.log
Integratedoffice.exe_c2r*.log
Interceptor*.log
*.exe.log
*_c2rdll*
For MSI, “Normal”, installations the log files will look like MSI****.LOG
Further References:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2545723 – “Fix Its” to turn logging on and off
http://blogs.technet.com/b/odsupport/archive/2010/12/30/trouble shooting-office-installation-failures.aspx Office 2003-2010, analyse log
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223300 – “Fix It” enable XP, Server 2003-8
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/826511 – help interpretting logs
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc978342.aspx
The following steps show you how to enable verbose logging to help you troubleshooting Office 365 install/update failures.
To enable verbose logging, launch cmd as administrator and run the following command:
reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ClickToRun\OverRide /v LogLevel /t REG_DWORD /d 3
ULS log file is created both in the %temp% folder and the %windir%\temp folder. The file name is of the following format:
<machinename>-<date>-<time>.log
For example Keith-201420141610-1434.log. Once these logs have been retrieved and analyzed, verbose logging should be disabled by running the following command from an administrative command-prompt:
reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ClickToRun\OverRide /v LogLevel /f
The log output is in ULS format. Opening the log file in Excel will help you with filtering the data. First, you want to look for is the term “unexpected”. You can look for “Fail” and /or “Error”
Most end user issues with installing/activating Microsoft Office 365 from the Office Portal are proxy/firewall related. Follow the steps above to review log files.
Process Monitor and Fiddler are also great tools to use for troubleshooting Office 365 ProPlus installation and activation errors. If possible, try to test using a less restricted proxy/firewall. If the activation is successful on another network, you may need make adjustments to your proxy/firewall settings.
The following article can help you with determining the IP address and URL exceptions you might need to add:
Start by white listing or adding exceptions for the IP addresses and URLs under “Office 365 ProPlus”. If you continue to have problems, add the URLs under the “Office 365 portal and identity” section.
If still have problems, try the following:
“Verbose logging” is a setting that exposes more information during the installation process. It will capture “warning” as well as “error” messages that provide us with clues to your problem.
To do onetime verbose logging:
Diagnosing When Setup Stops Responding At times, Office Setup stops responding (hangs), and you do not receive any error message. The best thing to do in this situation is to restart your computer, and run Office Setup again with complete verbose logging turned on (with one additional option). To do this, start Office Setup. To do so, follow these steps:
pathSetup.exe /L*v! C:Verboselog.txt
Note that Path is the full path of your Office source location.
To enable Windows Installer logging yourself, open the registry with Regedit.exe and create the following path and keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SoftwarePolicies\Microsoft\WindowsInstaller
Reg_SZ: Logging Value: voicewarmupx
The letters in the value field can be in any order. Each letter turns on a different logging mode. Each letter’s actual function is as follows for MSI version 1.1:
v – Verbose output
o – Out-of-disk-space messages
i – Status messages
c – Initial UI parameters
e – All error messages
w – Non-fatal warnings
a – Start up of actions
r – Action-specific records
m – Out-of-memory or fatal exit information
u – User requests
p – Terminal properties
+ – Append to existing file
! – Flush each line to the log
x – Extra debugging information. The “x” flag is available only on Windows Server 2003 and later operating systems, and on the MSI redistributable version 3.0, and on later versions of the MSI redistributable.
“*” – Wildcard, log all information except for the v and the x option. To include the v and the x option, specify “/l*vx”.
Note This should be used only for troubleshooting purposes and should not be left on because it will have adverse effects on system performance and disk space. Each time you use the Add/Remove Programs tool in Control Panel, a new Msi*.log file is created.
When looking through the MSI logs we will typically want to look for a value 3 entry in the logs. Windows installer returns codes during the install which will indicate if a particular function was successful or not. Value 1 = Success Value 2 = Cancel Value 3 = Error
Note: make sure to turn off verbose logging after you are done.
Enable verbose logging before collecting the log files.
Now try to install Microsoft Office 2016 to get the error message so that the log files get created.
Follow the steps below to access the ‘Temp’ folder.
The following are the log files that may be present in the %windir%temp folder (c2r is for Click to Run):
Bootstrapper*.log
c2r_*.log
C2RIntegrator*.log
Firefly*.log
Integratedoffice.exe_c2r*.log
Interceptor*.log
*.exe.log
*_c2rdll*
For MSI, “Normal”, installations the log files will look like MSI****.LOG
Open the command prompt (run as administrator), and use the following command to import the manual proxy settings from IE:
netsh winhttp import proxy source=ie
Now rerun the install/update
To reset winhttp back, run the following command:
netsh winhttp reset proxy
Most failed installs directly from the Office portal that are proxy related, usually fail pretty quick and usually with an error like this:
“Sorry, we ran into a problem Go online for additional help. Error Code: 30174-4.”
Or When attempting to update a client that is looking to the Office portal for updates will get something like this:
“Something went Wrong: We’re sorry, we ran into a problem while downloading updates for Office. Please check your network connection and try again later. Error Code: 30088-28 or 30088-27”
Written by Keith Tuomi on . Posted in Branding, CSS, Navigation, SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013, SharePoint 2016. Leave a Comment
Having usable and accurate navigation is essential to the success of your SharePoint site. SharePoint’s default navigation can be used to create concise main navigation menus, and can even support taxonomy via Managed Navigation. Visually & functionally, however, you’re limited to a simple 4-level deep flyout/dropdown menu for the main navigation. In the side Quick Launch menus, hierarchy can be implied with simple indenting of the text links.
In both of those main navigation areas of SharePoint, the out-of-the-box experience does have some definite UI and UX constraints.
Now, mega menus are probably well familiar to anyone and everyone by now- it was an up and coming design trend back in the late 2000’s. Old hat – but let’s review the fundamentals of this design pattern first:
Typically, a mega menu:
They can succeed because:
Mega menus done right
Mega menus gone WRONG
Mega menu best practices
Mega menus in Ecommerce – design Trends from 2011 vs 2014
Now, in the SharePoint world, there arose a number of solutions to be able to implement mega menu-style navigation systems in response to the growing demand. Some examples:
SharePoint Mega Menu from a DVWP and a List
BindTuning – How to use BindTuning’s Mega Menu
Mega Menu for SharePoint
Finally, here’s a gallery of some SharePoint sites using mega menus, which are either custom coded or leveraging commercial mega menus:
SharePoint sites using mega menus
There are a plethora of other articles, posts and products relating to mega menus & SharePoint, for sure this particular links list could be a couple screens long. The vast majority do require a good knowledge of Javascript/CSS custom code, so in this review i’m focusing on the one commercial product I know of that offers a good compromise between ease of use and technical functionality.
The Archetonomy Mega Menu system is a farm solution for on-premise SharePoint 2010, 2013 & 2016, and has the broadest feature set of any 3rd party solution that I know of in this vein for SharePoint. After positive experiences with the product, I figure it’s time to give it a review.
License Manager Installation Guide
Mega Drop Down Installation and User Guide
Product Release Notes
Video Tutorials
Although it’s a shame there’s not a SharePoint Online version of this, it’s still a powerful menu system for those with on-premise SharePoint. The ability to visually design the menu layouts and content is a big win, especially for rapid prototyping – although one needs to consider carefully how much the design should be controlled by manual activities vs how much should be put on rails by creating formal CSS rules.
Being able to add complex controls like Search Inputs, or deliver link content based on Content Search queries can help create truly useful navigation systems. With mega menu powers, comes mega responsibilities: putting everything including the kitchen sink into a menu navigation system also can create it’s own user experience issues, so one has to to be mindful that underlying usability is paid attention to.
Written by Keith Tuomi on . Posted in Flow, Jquery, SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Online. Leave a Comment
The default Search Center in SharePoint is quite minimalist- just an empty page layout with a search box. This post will show you how to use the workflow logic of Microsoft Flow to grab a reference to the Bing image of the day, copy it’s URL to a SharePoint list, and then use clientside scripting to set the image as a background to your search center or use elsewhere in your portal.
There’s been plenty of tutorials posted over the years in terms of SP image rotaters, jazzing up search centers, etc. – the focus of this post is really more about using Flow to parse external RSS data into a SharePoint list on an ongoing basis, and then do something with that data.
In order to not have to query an external RSS feed every time a user hits a page where we want to display referenced images, we’re going to use a SharePoint list as a repository for the image links as they come in each day.
We’re going to use Jquery and some of the SharePoint REST API to query our Daily Images list, and grab the latest image. We’re going to run with the assumption you already have your Jquery reference set up. If you don’t have Jquery in there already, you can either bake it into your page layouts (if you’re using custom branding) like this, or add a one-off reference on the page where you’re embedding this Daily Image code, like in this example.
Go to your Search Center homepage (https://yourTenant.SharePoint.com/Search by default), Edit the page, and add a Script Editor web part with the following code. It renders the latest image of the day as the CSS background image of the #DeltaPlaceHolderMain div. Note that we are doing a string replace to change the original image URL’s provided via the RSS feed, which just happened to be non-SSL http://. Since we’re displaying this image on a secure SharePoint Online page, we’re changing the http:// to https://. Bing, in this case, serves both versions happily- not all image sources may play along like this so double-check they can render https:// before committing.
<script type="text/javascript"> var Module = {} || Module; Module.GetImages = (function () { var pub = {}, _images = [], _options = { listName: "Daily Images" }; pub.init = function () { var url = "https://yourTenant.sharepoint.com/_api/lists/getbytitle('" + listName + "')/items?$top=1&$orderby=Created desc" $.ajax({ url: url, type: "GET", headers: { "accept": "application/json;odata=verbose", }, success: function (results) { createImageView(results, listName); }, error: function (error) { console.log("Error in getting List: " + listName); $(_options.container).html("Error retrieving your " + listName + "."); } }); }; function createImageView(results, listName) { _images = results.d.results; $.each(_images, function (index, task) { var imageURL = task.Title; imageURL = imageURL.replace("http:","https:"); $('#DeltaPlaceHolderMain').css('background-image', 'url(' + imageURL + ')'); $('#DeltaPlaceHolderMain').css('background-repeat', 'no-repeat'); $('#DeltaPlaceHolderMain').css('background-position', 'center'); }); } function _onQueryFailed(sender, args) { alert('Request failed. \nError: ' + args.get_message() + '\nStackTrace: ' + args.get_stackTrace()); } return pub; }()); $(document).ready(function () { SP.SOD.executeFunc('sp.js', 'SP.ClientContext', function () { Module.GetImages.init(); }); }); </script>
When all is working, you’re going to get a new Bing image of the day each day, as the background to your search center page:
This technique could be applied to any instance where there’s a list of images delivered by an RSS feed, for example:
NASA Image of the Day
Flickr daily interesting image
Wikimedia Image of the Day
..etc.
For the Bing Image and any other source, make sure to check that you’re obeying the copyright & author attribution & usage requirements of the image provider – the above technique implies nothing about such nuances, it’s only intended as a technical proof of concept/demo.
Written by Keith Tuomi on . Posted in Delve, Groups, Office 365, OneDrive for Business, Outlook, Planner, Power Apps, Power BI, SharePoint, Skype for Business, Video, Yammer. Leave a Comment
You just know you’re in a complex business when even having a good oversight of the major tangents of what you do, is hard to come come by. In Office 365, we have a lot of new services being added on to plumbing/infrastructure backbone of the already massive SharePoint framework.
Conversely, recent changes to SharePoint itself have consolidated some of the user experience scenarios, addressing BIG day to day problems for information workers – file collaboration, CMS-style content publishing and getting away from a “one-size fits all” intranet scenario.
So what IS the mile high perspective? Naming the services is one thing, but showing their intended relationship with each other is crucial. It’s said you don’t really understand something unless you can explain it in simple terms- here’s two awesome takes on it:
..and here’s a different perspective, from Ben at ShareGate:
Crafted by: Sharegate, The SIMPLEST Office 365 and SharePoint Security & Management tool suite.