Friday, December 8, 2017

Better security defaults for Office 365 Groups and document collaboration

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After working with Office 365 Groups for a while now and helping customers tailor their Office 365 Groups, I have developed a mantra I call Better Defaults. This involves exchanging default settings for more sensible ones – at least in my opinion.

One of the strengths of a SharePoint site is the ability to set very granular permissions. This security strength is also a pain for end-users. Over the years teaching classes and helping customers, getting to grips with AD groups, SharePoint Security groups, permission levels, and all the places you can set them is one of the top three hardest topics. When you tack the simple owner/member permission structure of an Office 365 Group on top of a SharePoint site, it does not help the confusion.

In this post I’ll offer two tips for better defaults regarding content access, one for public groups and one for private groups.

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Considerations when creating an Office 365 Group using app-only tokens

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When you create a new Office 365 Group using the Microsoft Graph using app-only tokens, the Group will not have an owner – which is expected as you are creating the group as an application.

After the creation of the group you need to explicitly add an owner, and make sure you also add the same person as a member.

Summarized steps:

  1. Create the group
  2. Add a person as owner
  3. Add the person in 2) as a member

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

A workaround to setting default slicer values in Power BI

There’s a User Voice issue to add an option to set a default slicer value in Power BI, but the feature is not there yet.

There is however a workaround which is not too hard. When you add a slicer to a report you can select values in it, and the selected values will be selected by default when the report is first opened. Next is to hide the slicer control.

First add a slicer to your report, and select the values you want to filter on.

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Next, add a white rectangle, which you overlay on top of the slicer to hide it.

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Publish and you’re all set :) You might see a small fade where the slicer is visible for a second, but at least the user cannot change it. To reduce this effect you can reduce the size as much as possible before overlaying with the white box, or move it more off the screen.