Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

Calendaring formats in Messaging Clients tend to all follow much the same approach whether its Outlook, Outlook on the Web or Mobile, Gmail or Microsoft Teams .  Like email data, calendar data can be random and complex in its volume and type (recurring appointments etc) so a simple year at a glance calendar for someone designing a mass market client is hard to do well for all the data types and volumes that you could encounter, therefor its not something you see in mail clients by default (lets face it who wants to support that). In the absence of year at a glance calendars  I was surprised to see people using Excel to create yearly aggregated calendars in Microsoft Teams for events (for data that already existed in shared Calendars). But more surprisingly is that it actually kind of worked well when there wasn't a lot of data that needed to be shown. The one thing that sprang to my mind was if you could automate this it  would be really good for people who use the Bir...

Something that can be useful from time to time when looking at email delivery issues or email threats is to be able to see the Geographical regions that an email has traversed in its delivery. Usually this information gets stored in the Email Header in the received headers but also depending on the client and services being used the Source IpAddress of the client and other intermediaries may get written in other properties. Because I needed something last week to do this and couldn't find any other addins to do this I created a pretty simple Outlook addin that Gets the headers from a Message using the REST API in Office365 Uses a RegEx to get all the IPAddresses from that header Uses a Set in JavaScript to then de duplicate these IPAddresses Then I used one of the many free GeoIP web services out there to query each of the returned IPAddresses from the Regex matches and finally display the result in a table but to Outlook For example here is what it returns where run aga...

One of the more interesting announcements from the recent Microsoft Build conference was the ability to get the MimeContent of Messages in the Microsoft Graph API  https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/blogs/mime-format-support-for-microsoft-graph-apis-preview/ . This is a much needed feature as it was something that a lot of people use in EWS application, it still comes with a few limitations the Graph has a 4GB underlying limit for REST  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/post-post-attachments?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=javascript and its export only at the moment so you can't import messages using it. One other thing is that its only in the Graph endpoint not the Outlook Rest endpoint so its not that easy to use from a Mail Add-in (without additional security config). One thing I do a bit when developing code for Exchange and Outlook is to look at the MimeContent of Messages as well as the MAPI properties using a MAPI editor like OutlookSpy of MFCMapi. T...

Group calendars have always been one of the big asks for in any group collaboration programs back from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange and now Microsoft Teams. There are a few ways of getting a Group calendar working in Teams, one is hosting the OWA web apps see or some other people advocate using a SharePoint calendar and hosting that similarly. Here is a different method you can use by taking advantage of being able to call the Graph API in a  Tab application. The getSchedule Graph action (still currently in beta) allows you to query up to 62 days of Freebusy information on up to 100 calendars in a single call this makes it a good option for this type of application. So as long as users can view each others calendars or have detailed freebusy permissions the action should return the le vel of detail required for a Group calendar.   The other thing you can do with the Graph API is get the users photo and build a nice legend for the Group calendar also. To make this visu...

For a long time now Public Folders have been a good way to share information and have threaded conversations across organizations. However time and technology have surpassed them somewhat of late, if your using Office365 there was first the introduction of Unified Groups and now Microsoft Teams has come to maturity both of which offer a better user and technical solution to needs Public Folders fulfil. The benefits of these newer technologies is they allow you to do more in the same context while not giving up on the existing features that Public Folders may have been giving you (outside of access in Outlook). But where the rubber meets the road at the coal face its not always as easy to migrate from one solution to another, so in this post I'm going to look at how you can access data (email etc) in an Exchange Public folder from within a Team's Tab application. This type of approach may give you some flexibility and options while your dealing with a Migration between the two o...

In my last post I went over the new Graph function called  getSchedule and how this can be used to get the FreeBusy information for a User (or Meeting Room, Resource Mailbox etc) and display that as a table like the schedule assistant in Outlook. In this post I'll show you how you can do the same thing in a Teams tab application which will give you an output something like the following The steps this app takes to display this is firstly Step 1. Authentication - The app authenticates to the Microsoft Graph API using the javascript ADAL using the silent Authentication flow for tab applications which is explained in detail here . Step 2 Get the Group Members - Once it has an Access-Token it then Gets the members of the current Team from the Graph by first getting the Id from the Context of the team currently in focus from the Teams Client SDK and then making a request to the Groups Endpoint https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups/ Step3 Schedule Request ...

Over the years I've created a few different versions of In/Out boards like this that have used Exchange FreeBusy information to present the In/Out status for Users. In this post I am going to look at how you can create the same thing in Microsoft Teams using a Team's tab application that will call some Microsoft Graph endpoints that will first get the members of a particular Team, then there OOF MailTip to determine if they have an AutoResponse set and finally get there userphoto. The end results is a board that looks like this Team's Tab Applications Team's tab apps are very simular to the Add in's framework used across other Office365 products that utilize JavaScript and html to provide a consistent approach across desktop and web clients. However because teams is fairly new the underlying client SDK isn't as feature rich or mature as you would find for example with Exchange/Outlook. Some examples of this is there is no way to get the members of a Team...