If you have systems running on the Microsoft Azure platform and issues occur, check out this helpful status page!
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/
…and the history
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/history/
Tip: You can also subscribe to the RSS feed!
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/feed/
Hope this helps – just in case!
Today Microsoft announced that Microsoft Accounts “MSA” (formerly known as “Live-ID”) no longer can be created with a work email address. That’s important for millions of users.
What does this mean? Well, this article Cleaning up the #AzureAD and Microsoft account overlap explains all the details:
“Starting today, we’re blocking the ability to create a new personal Microsoft account using a work/school email address, when the email domain is configured in Azure AD.”
This shall prevent that users can have two accounts with the same email address, one in Azure Active Directory and one Microsoft account.
Nowadays this is handled at the login process as shown here: The login form asks if the username is a personal account (MSA) or a work or school account (ORG account):
The sign-up block only prevents the creation of new MSA accounts. It has no impact on users who already have a Microsoft account with a work email address.
If you are already in this situation, this support article provides help how to change the MSA username.
This is a good step to reduce the confusion with Microsoft’s private and organizational accounts.
Hope this helps!
We at atwork are now official Microsoft Authorized Education Partners (AEP). The AEP program authorizes atwork to purchase and re-sell academic priced products to Qualified Educational Users.
Microsoft informs about the details on https://www.mepn.com/MEPN/AEPHome.aspx.
The short description reads as follows: The AEP program authorizes partners to purchase and re-sell academic priced products to Qualified Educational Users. The program is designed to increase customer and partner satisfaction and to improve communication and service to our partners with a standard set of terms and conditions, improved training, and new resources and tools to keep the channel informed with up to date information on new products and events, in addition to guarding against channel miss-selling of academic licensing.
EDU’s welcome!
Recently, I wanted to do a cleanup in my various Azure subscriptions. A lot of websites and databases were created during the last months and years, so the idea was to cleanup and to combine websites into one (or just a few) App Service Plan(s) and to do the same with multiple SQL Databases into one Elastic Database Pool. The goal was to reduce costs from multiple App Plans and single databases into few ones. Here’s how this works.
In my scenario I had a lot of websites with a SQL database running in Azure. Well, in some webs there were more components used, for example Application Insights, Cloud Services and more. But I concentrated on the website and database because they produced the largest costs in the cloud services.
To make it very short, here are some Azure facts that help to save money:
Ok, now have a look into the optimization…
The goal is to host as many resources in one App Service Plan or in one Elastic Database Pool as possible. Of course, this is dependent on size and performance. See how to reduce costs as shown in these samples here.
So, basically, that’s it! Reorganize your resources to use these optimizations and you will reduce your Azure PaaS costs (dramatically).
I will post another article describing the stumbling blocks for this reorganization…
Nachdem ich schon einige Male gefragt wurde, wie das mit dem Support von Exchange 2016 auf Windows Server 2016 ist, hab ich mir erlaubt nachzusehen und folgendes entdeckt:
Ihr findet in den offiziellen Exchange 2016 prerequisites den oben gezeigten Absatz zum Support von Exchange 2016. Nachdem die Exchange Server Updates: build numbers and release dates dafür bereits einen Download Link zur Verfügung stellt kann man behaupten – JA. Mit Release von Windows Server 2016 (nächste Woche bei der Ignite Conference) wird wohl auch Exchange 2016 diesen unterstützen!
LG Christoph
Office 365 Groups are THE connection between the different Office 365 services. Office 365 groups are very useful for team collaboration, collaboration on ideas and projects, sharing documents within teams, have a team calendar and a lot more. They span like an umbrella around all Office 365 services and are the key connection point in Office 365. What I like most about them from an architectural perspective – they are where they belong to: in Azure AD. In some practical examples with my customers I learned how they love groups because they are easy to create, offer self service and provide a lot of additional value within Office 365. But there are probably also some things which especially IT administrators don’t like and topics which are challenging especially in large tenants: everybody can create groups and naming policies are hard to implement. As a first workaround Microsoft provided a possibility to disable group creation out of Exchange Online, which is definitely one of the most common usecases. But this did not avoid Office 365 Groups creation through Planner or other services.
So groups management through Azure AD was something I was really looking forward to since it appeared on the Office 365 roadmap. Finally its here now and here is how you can manage it:
The article Manage Office 365 Group creation describes the necessary steps. Basically. IN this article I try to explain a little more into detail and what to consider upfront. So here’s my step by step guide.
For the scenario I use a demo Office 365 tenant. There’s one Global Admin and a bunch of users. It’s necessary to use security groups for that purpose. So I created two security groups for Administrators, visualized in the blue boxes. Only users in these security groups (Alan and Christa in AdminGroupVienna and Dan in AdminGroupParis) shall be able to create Office 365 groups. All other users (Eric, Jeff, Molly, … in the green box) shall not have the permission to create new Office 365 groups.
I created these groups in the Office 365 portal as follows:
So there are three GroupAdmins in two security groups.
Without any specific settings, ALL users in an Office 365 tenant who have access to a mailbox can create a new Office 365 group or create a group through Planner.
This can be done in Outlook for the Web. Eric (who is NOT an Admin, he’s a standard user in the green box above) can create his “Erics Marketing Group”.
After adding members and the provisioning process, the new group is ready to use.
We want to restrict that as well as the groups creation through planner. So here we see how to remove the permissions so that group creation is just available for specific users (members of a security group).
The configuration needs to be done with Windows PowerShell by a Global Admin in Azure Active Directory.
First, download Microsoft Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell Preview. It’s important that you need to download the preview version “AdministrationConfig-V1.1.130.0-Preview.msi”. Currently, it’s mandatory to use the PREVIEW version (V1.1.130.0) and NOT the General Availability version (V1.1.166.0) since the required Cmdlets are simply not present in the GA version! Don’t get confused by the version number, I know it’s higher. Still, only the preview contains the cmdlets we need.
In case you already installed the GA version – uninstall it through add or remove programs.
After we installed the Windows PowerShell module we can now connect to the tenant: Connect-MsolService. Login with a Global Admin account.
Now we check the security groups by searching with Get-MsolGroup -SearchString "<Group Name>"
We get the ObjectID of the two groups. I would habe expected that the Windows PowerShell has also simple exgtensions like –identity or something similar. Unfortunately, this is not the case in this special scenario, so we do the Management through the ObjectID’s.
As next step, we need to select the Group settings template with DisplayName of “Group.Unified”. This can be modified afterwards.
$template = Get-MsolAllSettingTemplate | where-object {$_.displayname -eq "Group.Unified"}
We check the .values properties of the Unified Group template. As you can see, the DefaultValue for “EnableGroupCreation” is set to “true”.
Now that we have a valid template, we need to create a new settings object and apply the loaded template. This is simply done by creating a new SettingsObject variable.
$setting = $template.CreateSettingsObject()
Let’s check the values with
$setting.Values
Ok. We need to change the setting “GroupCreationAllowedGroupID” to our Admin Group and to set “EnableGroupCreation” to “false”. As GroupID I used the ObjectID of the “AdminGroupVienna” (c8388…).
$setting["EnableGroupCreation"] = "false"
$setting["GroupCreationAllowedGroupId"] = "c83888c4-8ce7-4e08-a36d-6cecc59f3407"
Let’s check with $setting.Values again.
Ok. The settings are set in my object. Now the settings must be applied to Office 365. This is done with that cmdlet:
New-MsolSettings -SettingsObject $setting
This takes some seconds and outputs a new setting for unified groups. The result can be checked anytime with Get-MsolAllSettings -TargetType Groups as well.
That’s it. The new settings are active within a couple of minutes.
In Outlook for the web, it can take a couple of minutes till the the “+” Icon is no longer available for the users (a page refresh after some minutes should help).
If the GUI still shows the Plus icon and users click it now (as Eric did to create another Office 365 group “Erics Second Group”), he gets an error message in Outlook. The group cannot be created and a message appears saying “Something went wrong and the group couldn’t be created…”. So the settings are working properly.
Usually, after some minutes, the users do not see the Plus icon anymore and cannot create a new Office 365 group.
Ok, now it’s time to test the group creation with an a member of the Groups Admin group. For that we use Christa, who is member of the Security Group “AdminGroupVienna”. She creates a new Office 365 group named “Vienna Support”.
As expected, members of that Security Group can create new Office 365 groups. The new Unified Group was created.
So, the settings work! Users no longer can create groups and only Office 365 groups admins can create Office 365 groups.
Nothing. They still exist as before (in our sample “Erics Marketing Group” is still here, of course, as shown in the screenshot above). If the group should be deleted, the owner or an Office 365 admin needs to delete them. Be warned, currently there’s no Recycle Bin (no soft delete) for the Office 365 group.
Oh, actually we wanted to have our second security group “AdminGroupParis” be able to manage Office 365 groups. So this group is not defined for allowing group creation. He still is a standard user and cannot create Office 365 groups.
The intention is to update the “AdminGroupParis” ObjectID (fa63…) and to add another setting. To make it short: This does not work.
The message says "A conflicting object with one or more of the specified property values is present in the directory."
For the documentation see New-MsolSettings. As far as I see, the “Unified.Group” setting can exist in one tenant only once. Even with -TargetType Groups and other settings only one setting is available per each type.
Therefore, you can only allow one security group to create new Office 365 groups. Hopefully this will change in the future, as I find it hard to give delegation permissions to selected security groups but cannot give the Office 365 groups creation rights to more than one group.
Since only one group can be defined, let’s create a new security group “AdminGroupAllowGroupCreation”.
So, you get the idea for a solution: Put the three users into that new group… as here. (We do not need the AdminGroupVienna and Paris groups any longer for that purpose…).
…and configure this in the Office 365 Admin Portal.
Now, let’s update the settings! In my humble opinion the easiest way is to delete the settings with Remove-MsolSettings and create them new. We only need the ObjectId of the Groups-Settings.
Get-MsolAllSettings -TargetType Groups
Remove-MsolSettings -SettingId 'd6ccfc23-2b32-4609-b97b-2a49b7daec5c'
Ok, now the settings are deleted and we simply can update the new Group ID. But first, we need the ObjectId of the new security group.
Get-MsolGroup -SearchString "AdminGroup"
Now we modify the settings (we still have them in our RAM storage) with that ID (d280…):
$setting["EnableGroupCreation"] = "false"
$setting["GroupCreationAllowedGroupId"] = "d280fa56-ebba-401f-8fc8-0592cfd5c62a"
And finally, we recreate a new group setting.
New-MsolSettings -SettingsObject $setting
Voila.Let’s check again with Get-MsolAllSettings -TargetType Groups.
Of course, the steps for removal and recreation are only necessary if you already have these settings in place and you want to update them as I did.
It can take some minutes until the Admins get the permission to create Office 365 Groups in their Outlook Web. A little bit later, Dan is able to create Office 365 Groups as well.
So my best practice is to create one Security Group and add the Admin users as members. Then use the PowerShell as above to restrict users to create new Office 365 Groups and allow just one Security Group as in my sample “AdminGroupAllowGroupCreation”. Don’t forget you need to have the Microsoft Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell Preview installed, otherwise you have some stumbling blocks with missing cmdlets.
I hope this article and many other resources in this blog help IT-Admins to customize their own Office 365 tenant for their needs. Please let me know your feedback! If you are at Microsoft Ignite in Atlanta, stop by on the Ask us anything session about Office 365 Groups on friday, https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/4098 where Eric Zenc, Darrell Webster, Christophe Fiessinger and I available to help you get answers around your Office 365 Groups questions.
It has been a busy week when we’ve been at Microsoft Ignite conference 2016 which took place in Atlanta from 26th to 30th September. This was Microsoft’s second Ignite conference (the first one happened in Chicago in May 2015, see here) with more than 20.000 people attending and more than 1.000 sessions. For us, it was our first time in the US South (in Georgia) and we enjoyed it very much.
Atlanta did welcome us with warm and sunny weather (about 85°F then, after a thunderstorm on Tuesday, it was cooler). For me the event started with a pre-event day about PowerApps on Sunday which was great to meet the members of the PowerApps & Flow product team. On Monday morning, Ignite started in Georgia Conference Center (GCC) which was just 20min away from our hotel and was a nice walk each day. To make it short: the walking distances were…. far. It took at least 10 minutes to walk from building A to building C where the lunch was prepared in sandwich boxes for take away. It was a clever idea to avoid the needle wholes and walk outside, along the buildings. My highlight was the park at building C with sun and live music.
Feeling the masses was not as bad as in Chicago last year. except for the keynote, some sessions and the connecting corridors, well and the Expo Hall at some times. The lunch boxes were ok, we sat outside in the sun and ate there.
Well, in my opinion there was not a large number of technical news, but very interesting ones. My personal highlights have been OneDrive (the new NGSC client, see here), the new SharePoint, PowerApps and Flow and, of course, Office and Office365, the Microsoft Graph, Delve is now named MyAnalytics, Azure services as Cognitive Services, GA of Windows Server 2016 and SCCM 2016 and sure, there was more. Microsoft shared the vision how they see the IT future from a strategic standpoint with connected services and the integration of services into everyday business and consumer life. See some of the topics here:
I need to remind myself that in future, I will avoid attending the keynote session at such large conferences. It’s hard to get a good seat, it’s tight and inconvenient and the Wifi hardly works (see the following left picture). The only reason for attending is to experience the vibe. At this Ignite, for me, there was no vibe (in opposite to the Microsoft Build conferences). So better to watch it online or in an overflow room (which was a hall with much comfort in the Georgia Conference Center, see the picture on the right) where there’s space, power and working Wifi.
Actually I remember, I was waiting for news for the first 45 minutes. This was more a redelivery that… Microsoft cloud is important (just to ensure, we’re all on the same path…). It started with announcements after that…
Funny enough, my notebook decided to update to the latest Windows version during the keynote.
The Twitter hashtag was #MSIgnite. We, @magrom and @atwork have been active in Social media as well. Have a look what happened in Social Media at https://bit.ly/IgniteTweets made by our MVP buddy John White.
In total, there have been more than 1.000 session. Happily, most of them they were recorded and are available online and for download at ignite.microsoft.com.
Ignite delivered sessions in all flavors and from packed (with overflow rooms) to relatively emtpy. Not all sessions which were full had an overflow room, but attendees could watch streaming sessions with their own device. See some snapshots here.
I could’nt resist to take some selfies in some sessions… (with Darrell and Martina).
If you wish to download the session videos, you can use this PowerShell script made by our MVP colleague Michel de Rooij here: Ignite 2016 Slidedeck and Video downloader.
Martina Grom took part in the Ask us anything about Microsoft Office 365 Groups interactive session on Friday, together with Darrell Webster, Eric Zenz and Christophe Fiessinger. Here’s some snapshots from that session.
Interestingly, the “Ask the experts” session about the new Office 365 groups was interactive, it was filled with interesting questions (and answers). I learned a lot of details about Office 365 groups.
Mostly, a lot of side events come along with such a large conference. We enjoyed it very much attending a couple of parties as SharePoint Community Social (AKA SharePint), the AvePoint Red Party, the Exchange 20th Anniversary event, the MVP Breakfast and more in cool locations!
Uber helped a lot to get to various locations and restaurants around the conference.
From a networking perspective, the conference was great. Besides of attending sessions, the Expo Hall provided a great way to meet with members of the Microsoft Product Groups (PG’s) and to ask the experts directly. There have been Theater sessions in the Expo hall as well, some of them had a huge number of attendees, others were relatively empty.
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We met friends and MVP colleagues from all over the world there. This was awesome.
Hope these impressions express that we had a lot of fun and enjoyed the conference very much.
The next #MSIgnite will take place in Orlando, 25th to 29th September 2017.
CU there?
“If everybody is thinking alike,
then somebody isn’t thinking.”
George S. Patton (1885-1945)
…found on Martin’s frig.
Last week, our third IT/DevConnections conference took place in Las Vegas. We had the pleasure to have several sessions there.
The IT/DevConnections conference took place from 10th to 13th of October in the luxurious Aria resort that is located right in the middle of the famous Las Vegas strip. That’s a very cool location for obtaining KnowHow transfer during the day and enjoying the nightlife of Vegas. Besides the networking at the conference, there were social events and parties.
We enjoyed the location in Aria Hotel very much and it was very convenient to stay there and walk to the conference center. As far as I know there were more than 100 speakers and about 1.200 attendees. The conference had 5 technical tracks and 1 sponsor track.
See all the sessions of IT/DevConnections here. Martina and I were presenters at these sessions:
All sessions have been recorded and will be available for conference attendees within the next two weeks for about a year.
Se here’s some visual impressions and snapshots from the conference and from around the event.
Besides Martina and me from Vienna, atwork germany and some customers also joined the conference.
And we had some nice parties. Our partner ENow threw a party at the roof top Ghost-Bar at the Palms Hotel with a stunning view over the city of Las Vegas. We met a lot of colleagues and amongst the Exchange community @ExchangeGoddess and more.
Also there have been parties for all conference participants, VIP parties and sponsor parties.
As always, the conference days have passed quickly. At the end, a raffle took place where Rod Trent acted as presenter of the prizes.
It was awesome to speak at IT/DevConnections and we had a lot of fun there. Next year, the conference will take place from 23th to 26th of October 2017 in San Francisco.
CU there?!
Project managers and IT personnel, pls. see this animated GIF about
“How long it takes to complete a task”.
Source: http://www.robbomb.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/tasks.gif
Thx, @adisjugo for that post! Awesome! 
Recently, Microsoft launched the Microsoft Regional Directors website at rd.microsoft.com. Finally!
Our CEO, Martina Grom, was awarded as Regional Director in 2015, see here. So we are more than happy that there’s now a place where Microsoft informs officially about the Regional Director program.
Check it out at rd.microsoft.com.
Since it’s not well known, what the Regional Director award is about, there’s a FAQ list at rd.microsoft.com/FAQ.
The most frequently asked questions are, if Regional Directors (RD’s) are employed by Microsoft, how they are selected or if they are also MVP. The FAQ’s answer these questions clearly, see the statements summarized here:
On the two-page website, Microsoft informs about the Regional Directors program and there’s a search function included. You can find RD’s easily and view the result in a map or in a list. When clicking on a person, there’s a link to the about.me page of the Regional Director, for example Martina Grom.
We are proud that Martina Grom is one out of two Regional Directors in Austria.
Rainer Stropek is the second RD in Austria. In the past, Christian Nagel held that award for about a decade.
We also congratulate our MVP colleague Carsten Rachfahl for being awarded as Regional Director in Germany recently.
Check out the Regional Directors website at rd.microsoft.com!
Need the new OneDrive (and SharePoint) Next Generation Sync Client on your computer? Download the bits directly from here:
https://oneclient.sfx.ms/Win/Preview/17.3.6673.1011/OneDriveSetup.exe
If you have an older version installed, this will be automatically overwritten by the new client.
The NGSC client supports OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online.
After the installation you see the blue icon in the System Tray. The About should show the latest version 17.3.6673.1011.
The cool part is that you can select the folders to synchronize for each site.
Find details about the SyncClient in Hans Brender’s blog.
hth!
Nice numbers of our two Office-AddIns “TagCloud Generator” and “Like for Outlook”.
Both Apps are available in the Microsoft Office Store.
TagCloud Generator is a simple to use tagcloud generator for Microsoft Word (working with Word 2013 and above) and delivers an overview of a document rapidly.
Like for Outlook enables users to send a Like with one click and works in Outlook 2013 or later, Outlook 2016 for Mac, Outlook on the Web.
We are currently thinking about updating and extending the existing versions with new ones.
So, maybe you will see these small apps updated in near future…
Anyway, check them out in the Office Store!
Today, one day after the US presidential elections, there’s an interesting read about coming together in IT industry in blogs.microsoft.com by Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer at Microsoft.
Moving forward together: Our thoughts on the US election
(My) very short extract:
Read the article here.
End of October, Martina and I have been at SharePoint days Conference (SPD) Slovenia. This was our first SharePoint conference in Slovenia in the beautiful small town of Bled which is just across the southern border of Austria. The location was very close from our home town Vienna (about 4 hours drive) and very close to our second home in Villach.
SPD Slovenia took place from 24th to 25th October 2016 at Hotel Kompas in Bled. IMHO, Bled is in maybe one of the most beautiful regions in Europe with a small lake and surrounding mountains. There were 5 tracks and about 50 sessions, presented in English, see more about this great event at SPD Slovenia.
We met so many great speakers from the SharePoint community there, check out the full agenda.
Our sessions at SPD Slovenia:
On Sunday, right before the conference start, the event organizer Branka Slinkar and her team from Kompas Xnet organized a great tour for the international speakers to show them briefly the beauty of Slovenia. After lunch time we went by bus to Blejski vintgar. The Vintgar gorge is 1600 m long and till 250 m deep gorge on the eastern part of Triglav National Park which is stunning. Then we went to Lake Bohinj and with cable car to the upper cable car station of to Vogel Ski Center where we had drinks, a typical slovenian stew and apple strudel, before we went on a boat ride with an original historic electric boat from one part of the lake to the other. In the evening, the day was closed by a speakers dinner in Bled. Wow, what an agenda for our community. Many thanks for that, Branka, it was awesome!
See some pictures from our trip here and from the conference in this Sway.
We had a blast at SPD Slovenia. Thanks for having us and we hope you all enjoyed the conference!
Since we were traveling much in the last weeks, it took some time to publish the Sway and this blog post. Anyway, we hope you enjoy the photos! 
Each year, Microsoft invites members of the MVP program and the RD program to their headquarter in Redmond, Washington state. This year, the MVP Summit took place from 7th to 10th of November. As in the previous years, for Martina and me this event was a great occasion to come to Seattle area, to connect with other MVPs and Microsoft product managers and to provide feedback on Microsoft technologies. We met friends and colleagues from all over the world.
Well, in this week we have learned a lot. Besides the technical sides, we had – you wouldn’t believe – good and relatively warm weather except for one day (exactly that day, we went for an outdoor trip….), the US presidential election took place, we attended events from Microsoft and partners, discovered some new and cool places, tried the new Microsoft Surface Studio and Surface Dial in the Microsoft Store in Bellevue Square and we had a lot of fun. See some visual impressions in this Sway.
As always, we had a great week at MVP Summit. Hope to be there next year, again.
The European SharePoint Conference took place in Vienna from 14th to 18th November 2016. We took this occasion to meet our friends from the Office 365 community in our home town Vienna for an informal come together aka #SharePintVienna.
Right after the MVP Summit week in Redmond, we invited about 60 persons and more than 40 came to our come together at "TheRoom" near the city center for some drinks and dinner on the 14th November. See some snapshots of the evening in this Sway.
Thanks for coming! Hope you all enjoyed Vienna!
Martina und Toni
Last week Martina and I have been speaking at Unity Connect in Haarlem in the Netherlands. Unity Connect is an IT conference about Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Skype, Yammer, and Azure and took place from 16th to 18th November 2016 in the beautiful city of Haarlem.
We arrived on Tuesday evening and entered the stunning inner city of Haarlem with so many cool restaurants and bars. The banner picture of Unity Connect just gives a brief impression of the beautiful buildings in that small town. The conference location was in Philharmonie Haarlem which is actually a concert hall but a very cool event location. With the inner city and the hotels around the corner, this event is - besides the conference offerings - one of my absolute favorite places to go in this region.
There was a great speaker lineup and an agenda with more than 75 keynotes, panels, sessions, and workshops.
The session length was 75 minutes, while there were 20 minutes overview sessions as well. Martina was content chair for the Office tracks. Our session topics were:
The presentations will be available for download soon. See some snapshots of the conference in this Sway.
Hope to see you at the next Unity Connect in Haarlem!
As covered in our blog post “Some snapshots around MVP Summit 2016”, we enjoyed the Microsoft MVP summit very much. We met many friends from all over the world and talked about various topics.
One talk ended in a very international podcast production, recorded at the famous Channel 9 studios in Redmond made by Aurélien Prévot (MVP from France), including Christophe Fiessinger (Microsoft Corp.), Martina Grom (RD and MVP from Austria), Adis Jugo (MVP from Croatia), Luc Labelle and Sébastien Levert (both MVPs from Canada). Follow this link here:
Podcast Spécial MVP Summit 2017
What to hear in that 29 minute podcast: Aurélien Prévot acted mostly as moderator and informed about upcoming community events. Christophe Fiessinger is Program Manager on Office 365 Groups and Teams at Microsoft and talked about the new Office 365 Groups and Teams, how to use them and about the Microsoft vision. Martina Grom spoke about the Regional Director program. Adis Jugo joined the podcast and spoke about Power Apps and Flow and the upcoming European Collaboration Summit in May 2017. Luc Labelle and Sébastien Levert announced the aOS Canadian Tour.
The recording was made on Wednesday, the 9th November at the Microsoft Campus. See some snapshots!
Many thanks, Aurélien for the effort and producing this talk!
No worries, the podcast is in english. Enjoy! 
From time to time (yes it’s almost that time of the year again, when we use this opening statement)… user’s have difficulties to connect to a SQL Azure Database with Power-BI. So I decided to post this article as a brief hint (and as reminder for myself), how to connect from Power-BI.
First of all, allow the connection with TCP port 1433 to your client IP address in the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com. Click “Add client IP” and add it to the firewall settings of the SQL server as in this sample here.
Check the SQL connection string. Here there are two methods: SQL credentials or Active Directory credentials usage. This article describes the access with SQL credentials (which are logins in the database).
Just for completeness, you can add a new user in the database itself as here (as db_owner or with another role):
CREATE USER myDBUser WITH PASSWORD = 'MyPassword';
ALTER ROLE db_owner ADD MEMBER myDBUser;
So far so good. If you already have a existing user and this is an ASP.NET web app, you find the connection string usually in web.config. This might look as here:
Server=tcp:MyDBServername.database.windows.net,1433;Initial Catalog=MyDBName;User ID=MyDBUser;Password=MyPassword;…
…where the MyDB* values represent your access data, just in case, you want to use the credentials from there.
Ok, let’s assume you have a valid username and password for the database and the Azure firewall allows the connection. You can try the connection with SQL Management Studio (or any other client) as well to ensure the connection works.
Now open the Power-BI Desktop, open the “Get Data” menu and connect to “Microsoft Azure SQL Database”.
Use the full Server name (tcp:MyDBServername.database.windows.net,1433) and the database name (MyDBname).
After “OK”, switch to “Database” and then add the credentials from before (MyDBuser and MyPassword).
Click “Connect”.
If the connection works, the following step allows to select the data you want to use in your Power-BI dashboard as in this sample.
Just as tip: We usually create an own user as above, add views and set permissions just to the report views to restrict the access for users who actually only want to do reports.
That’s it. Enjoy working with your data from your SQL Azure database in Power-BI.
