Musings on Cloud, BigData, AI, Machine Learning, Containers and IOT

How to setup multi-factor authentication in Office 365

In this post, we’ll see how we can enable multi-factor authentication for Office 365. The concept of multi-factor authentication has be become increasingly popular nowadays for bringing the additional layer of security hardening. Multi-factor authentication is a form of authentication, which enforces more than one form of authentication to verify the legitimacy of the transactions performed by a user. Nowadays, the most common form of second-form of authentication in to validate the Authorization code by sending it to the user’s mobile devices.

Let’s see the steps to enable multi-factor authentication in Office 365.

Log in to Office 365 admin portal, go to Users –> Active Users.

Click setup and you will be presented with the following screen.

Click ‘Enable’ link on the bottom right and the following screen will pop-up.

Click ‘enable multi-factor auth’.

Now you will get a confirmation that multi-factor authentication is enabled for selected accounts.

When I log in next time, it asks for me to setup the second form of authentication.

Click ‘Set it up now’.

It sends a 6 digit verification code to the registered mobile number. You are all set for multi-factor authentication enabled Office 365 tenant. This wraps up my quick how-to article.

At this point of time, the multi-factor authentication is available for Office 365 Midsize Business, Enterprise plans, Academic plans, Nonprofit plans, and standalone Office 365 plans, including Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. It is not available for Office 365 Small Business and Office 365 Dedicated plans as of now. The detailed Faqs about multi-factor authentication is available here. 

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How to get list of Fields in a SharePoint List in SharePoint 2013 Online using CSOM

In this post, we’ll see how we can get the list of Fields in a SharePoint List in SharePoint 2013 Online using CSOM. I’ll be using a Console application for the purpose of demonstration.

Open Visual Studio 2013.

File –> New Project –> Visual C# –> Console Application and name it as ‘GetFieldsCSOM’

Add a reference to the ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Client’ and ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime’ assemblies

Import the following namespaces

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Client;
using System.Security;

The following code will invoke the GetbyTitle method of Lists class and access the Fields property collection.

namespace GetFieldsCSOM
{
    class Program
    {
        
        private static SecureString GetSecureString(String Password)
        {
            SecureString oSecurePassword = new SecureString();

            foreach (Char c in Password.ToCharArray())
            {
                oSecurePassword.AppendChar(c);

            }
            return oSecurePassword;
        }

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            //Replace it with the url of your tenant or your site-collection
            string SiteUrl = "https://yoursite.sharepoint.com";
            System.Uri oUri = new System.Uri(SiteUrl);
            using (ClientContext oClientContext = new ClientContext(SiteUrl))
            {
                //Replace it with your user id for SharePoint Online
                string UserName = "userid@yoursite.onmicrosoft.com";
                //Replace it with your password
                string Password = "password";
                //Create a SecureString object from password string, needed for SharePointOnlineCredentials class
                SecureString SecurePassword = GetSecureString(Password);
                oClientContext.Credentials = new SharePointOnlineCredentials(UserName, SecurePassword);
                oClientContext.Load(oClientContext.Web.Lists.GetByTitle("TestList").Fields);
                oClientContext.ExecuteQuery();
                FieldCollection oFieldCollection = oClientContext.Web.Lists.GetByTitle("TestList").Fields;

                foreach(Field oField in oFieldCollection)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(oField.Title);
                
                }
                Console.ReadLine();
            }
        }
    }
}

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How to get Users and Groups in SharePoint 2013 Online using CSOM

In this post, we’ll see how we can retrieve users in a SharePoint group in SharePoint 2013 Online using managed .NET Client Side Object Model (CSOM). We’ll create a Console Application in Visual Studio for the purpose of the demo.

Open Visual Studio 2013.

File –> New Project –> Visual C# –> Console Application and name it as ‘GetUsersInGroup’

Add a reference to assemblies ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Client’ and ‘Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime’.

Import the following two namespaces.

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Client;
using System.Security;

In the client object model, the list groups in a site-collection needs to be fetched first and then based on the groups another call needs to be made to SharePoint Online to get the list of users. The following code snippet explains it all.

namespace GetUsersInGroupCSOM
{

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            //Replace it with the url of your tenant or your site-collection
            string SiteUrl = "https://yoursite.sharepoint.com";

            System.Uri oUri = new System.Uri(SiteUrl);

            using (ClientContext oClientContext = new ClientContext(SiteUrl))
            {
                //Replace it with your user id for SharePoint Online
                string UserName = "lavsunswe@yoursite.onmicrosoft.com";


                //Replace it with your password
                string Password = "yourpassword";

                //Create a SecureString object from password string, needed for SharePointOnlineCredentials class
                SecureString SecurePassword = GetSecureString(Password);
                oClientContext.Credentials = new SharePointOnlineCredentials(UserName, SecurePassword);

                //Load the site-collection groups using CSOM
                oClientContext.Load(oClientContext.Web.SiteGroups);
                oClientContext.ExecuteQuery();

                GroupCollection oSiteCollectionGroups= oClientContext.Web.SiteGroups;
                Console.WriteLine("List of groups in the site collection");
                Console.WriteLine("-------------------------------------");

                foreach (Group  oGroup in oSiteCollectionGroups)

                {
                    
                    Console.WriteLine(oGroup.Title);
                    Console.WriteLine("n");


                                
                }

                //Load the users collection in the Group 1

                oClientContext.Load(oSiteCollectionGroups[1].Users);
                oClientContext.ExecuteQuery();

                Console.WriteLine("List of users in the first group of site-collection");
                Console.WriteLine("-------------------------------------");
              foreach(User oUser in oSiteCollectionGroups[1].Users)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(oUser.Title);
                    Console.WriteLine("n");
                
                }


               
                Console.ReadLine();



            }



        }

        private static SecureString GetSecureString(String Password)
        {
            SecureString oSecurePassword = new SecureString();

            foreach (Char c in Password.ToCharArray())
            {
                oSecurePassword.AppendChar(c);

            }
            return oSecurePassword;
        }

    }
}

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List of Azure services that can be moved from one subscription to another subscription

I have a requirement to transfer the entire SharePoint 2013 Farm on  Azure with Virtual Network, Cloud services, Storage accounts, Virtual Machines, Subnets and Availability sets to a different Subscription on Azure. I did some analysis and in this migration process i have learnt that the following Azure services (as of today 07/29/2014) can be transferred from one Azure subscription to another Azure subscription without data-loss and downtime, by raising a support ticket with Microsoft Azure Support :-

• Virtual Machines
• Cloud Services
• CDN
• Web sites
• Media Services
• Service Bus
• Storage
• Multi Factor Authentication
• Traffic Manager
• Mobile Services
• Virtual Network
• Access Control Service (ACS)
• Caching – we need to work with Engineering Team for migrating caching service
• Reserved IP Address and the Reserved IPs under the list

However, there are certain Azure services that cannot be moved from One subscription to another subscription (as of today 07/29/2014):-

a) Active Directory (AAD)
b) BizTalk Services
c) HD Insight
d) Backup 
e) Hyper-V Recovery Manager
f) Azure Store
g) Import / Export
h) Scheduler
i) Management Services 
j) SQL Reporting

The following pre-conditions should be met before initiating a subscription transfer with Microsoft Azure support :

• Source and destination subscription should be active
• Selective service transfer is not feasible as of today, it might come in future. It has to be all or nothing.
• The destination azure subscription should be empty, otherwise it will be overwritten during upgrade
• Source and destination subscription should have same server administrator assigned until the migration is complete.

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