Oh, hey everyone!

June 9, 2022 Leave a comment

Hey folks! This blog has gone a little stagnant for a while. I’ve been busy, and have not been able to dedicate many of the working day hours to upkeep here.

But I hope to change that going forward. Within the past two years I have started up a YoueTube channel for some of my many hobbies (woodworking, metalworking, leatherworking, and just about ever other maker-thing you can think of, and some you have not) here at The New Janky Workshop. So, check that out (and subscribe!) if you’re into that sort of thing!

With that personal endeavour, I’ve also REALLY gotten into video editing and publishing (because yes, I need MOAR hobbies). So, I am going to try to semi-regularly post to my new channel, for things Microsoft, SharePointy, and other M365 topics (and also Azure, PowerShell, and other goodness). So, if you’re interested in that stuff (which, by the sake of you being on this post at all, likely means that you are). Please check it out: The SharePoint Yankee (and also subscribe there too!).

It’s brand new (so new, in fact, I just posted a quick short video today on it as my first one…). So, follow along, leave comments there or here on how you like the videos, what you’d like to see, and more, and I’ll get cracking on it.

Cheers!

Filed under Azure, Microsoft 365, Office 365, PowerApps, PowerAutomate, PowerShell, SharePoint Tagged with Azure, M365, Microsoft 365, O365, Office 365, PowerApps, PowerAutomate, SharePoint, SharePoint Online, spo

Creating an Azure Run As Account

April 2, 2019 Leave a comment

I have to ship this information to various people from time to time, so, instead of having to go grab screenshots each time and detail out the process, just going to throw this here.

In my previous post (and subsequent presentations on the subject of Azure Runbooks), I often gloss over the use of an Azure Run As Account, as for the purposes of those presentations, this was not required. Azure Run As Accounts provide a means for authentication in Azure, so that your Azure Runbooks can manage Azure resources. Otherwise, you would need to authenticate to Azure in your Runbook scripts as you would from your own computer remotely. For more in-depth information, here’s a link to the documentation on it.

To create an Azure Run As Account in an existing Azure Automation account, perform the following actions.

First, go into your Automation Account

Then, scroll down to Account Settings, and choose Run as accounts

Then click on Create under Azure Run As Account (not the Classic one… unless you need a classic run as account)

Then click on Create, and Azure will handle the rest…

Then, in your code, you can easily authenticate to Azure using the following code in your scripts:

#region ConnectToAzure
try {
    $ServicePrincipalConnection=Get-AutomationConnection -Name "AzureRunAsConnection"

    "Logging in to Azure…"
    $AzureRmAccount = Add-AzureRmAccount `
         -ServicePrincipal `
        -TenantId $ServicePrincipalConnection.TenantId `
        -ApplicationId $ServicePrincipalConnection.ApplicationId `
        -CertificateThumbprint $ServicePrincipalConnection.CertificateThumbprint
} catch {
    if (!$ServicePrincipalConnection)
    {
        $ErrorMessage = "Connection $connectionName not found."
        throw $ErrorMessage
    } else{
        Write-Error -Message $_.Exception
         throw $_.Exception
    }
}
#endregion ConnectToAzure

Filed under Automation, Azure, PowerShell Tagged with Automation, Azure, Run As, run as account, runbook, runbooks

Slides from the North American Collaboration Summit 2019

March 15, 2019 Leave a comment

As promised, here are my slides from the North American Collaboration Summit 2019 presentation from yesterday, “Using Azure Runbooks to Automate SharePoint Tasks”

Using Azure Runbooks and Microsoft Flow to Automate SharePoint Tasks from Geoff Varosky

Filed under Azure, Azure Automation, Events, Flow, North American Collaboration Summit, PowerShell, SharePoint, SharePoint Online

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday San Juan

October 4, 2018 Leave a comment

I am pleased to announce I will be speaking at SharePoint Saturday San Juan on November 3rd.

The Microsoft Office 365 and Cloud community invites you to the second 365 & SharePoint office on Saturday to be held in San Juan.

It is a totally free event in which you will find technical and development sessions focused on Microsoft Collaboration tools such as SharePoint, Office 365, Integration with Azure, Power Apps, Flow, Project, Planner, OneDrive, Delve, SharePoint Framework, Power BI, Dynamics CRM, Blockchain among others. We will have the company of MVPs and specialized technical leaders in each of the different types of talks.

I will be presenting Using Azure Runbooks and Microsoft Flow to Automate SharePoint Tasks

Session Abstract

Runbooks are a feature of Azure Automation that allow you to execute workflows from within Azure or remotely to automate processes. Microsoft Flow allows you to attach to certain activities in SharePoint and across other platforms, to perform a task when a certain condition is met. In this session, you will learn how to link SharePoint Online, Microsoft Flow, and Azure Runbooks in order to execute scripts automatically against your SharePoint tenant, or really, perform or automate any task.

Hope to see you there!

Filed under Azure, Azure Automation, Events, Flow, Office 365, PowerShell, San Juan, SharePoint, SharePoint Saturday Tagged with Azure, Flow, PR, puerto rico, runbook, runbooks, SharePoint, SharePoint Saturday, SharePoint Saturday San Juan, speaking, SPS, SPS San Juan, spssj

Disable Minimal Download Strategy Across All Sites and Site Collections via PowerShell

March 20, 2018 Leave a comment

Minimal Download Strategy… the bane of pretty much everyone’s existence… well, at least in SharePoint. Especially if you’re using JavaScript (who would do that?!). It’s useless. And while it was created for a good purpose, I have yet to come across a client that actually needed it over the pains it generally causes.

I recently had a client ask me to remove it from everything (hear that large cheering section in the stadium?)… so I threw together a script that will disable it from every site in a web application. Here she is!

# Load the SharePoint PowerShell Module… if not running this in the SharePoint Console…
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell –ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

# URL to our web application
$WebApp = "https://sharepoint.sharepont.sharepoint.com"

# Get all webs within a web application
$Webs = Get-SPWebApplication $WebApp | Get-SPSite -Limit All | Get-SPWeb -Limit All

# Loop through said webs
foreach ($Web in $Webs)
{
    # Is MDS enabled?
    $MDSEnabled = Get-SPFeature -web $Web.URL | Where-object {$_.DisplayName -eq "MDSFeature"}

    # If it is… disable it!
    if ($MDSEnabled -ne $null)
    {
        Disable-SPFeature –identity "MDSFeature" -URL $Web.URL -confirm:$false
    }
}

Filed under PowerShell, SharePoint Tagged with mds, minimal download strategy, PowerShell, SharePoint, stuff, things

Getting the Job ID of an Executing Azure Runbook

March 2, 2018 2 Comments

If you’re calling an Azure runbook, it is sometimes useful to be able to get the Job ID, say, to report back and update the source that initiated the call to a runbook. This is a quick post on how to access that ID in PowerShell.

You can access it via the following:

$PSPrivateMetadata.JobId.Guid

And the output:

Filed under Azure, Azure Automation, PowerShell Tagged with Automation, Azure, Azure Automation, azure runbook, PowerShell, runbook, runbooks

Getting the Plain Text Value of an Azure Key Vault Secret with PowerShell

February 28, 2018 Leave a comment

Related image Azure’s Key Vault is a great way to store certificates, usernames, passwords, for use in your Azure applications, infrastructure operations, and more.

This is just a quick post to tell you how you can get at the value of a stored Secret in the Key Vault with PowerShell and the Azure module.

You can see, I have a Key Vault named gvkeyvault, and a secret named geoffv

Now, to get it, we can use the Get-AzureKeyVaultSecret cmdlet. By giving it our VaultName and our key Name, we can see the key. However, that does not get us the value of our Secret.

To do that, we need to get the SecretValueText property of the Key Vault Secret.

(Get-AzureKeyVaultSecret –VaultName “gvkeyvault” –Name “geoffv”).SecretValueText

You can see we get the value out of “12345”…

Now I need to go change the combination of my luggage.

Filed under Azure, PowerShell Tagged with Azure, azure key vault, azure powershell, combination, key vault, key vaults, keyvault, password, plain text, plain text value, plaintext value, secret, spaceballs, username

Importing PowerShell Modules into Azure Automation

February 26, 2018 2 Comments

I have only probably a small number of PowerShell scripts that I have written that do not need to import some library/module (I refer to them as both libraries and modules in this, as they are libraries of cmdlets). More often than not, I am working with SharePoint or Azure, and need to utilize cmdlets from one of those libraries to do what I need to do. So, what if you need to use PowerShell modules in your Azure Automation runbooks?

In this post, I am going to show you how to import and use PowerShell libraries in your Azure Automation Accounts.

Creating an Azure Automation Account

First, we’re going to need to create an Azure Automation Account, if you don’t already have one…

In the Azure Portal click on New, and then search for Automation, and click on it in the drop-down.

It should select the Automation Account

So scroll down to the bottom and click on Create

Give it a Name, select the Subscription, give it either a new Resource Group or use an existing… and a Location (what Azure region is this going to run in?) and I do not need a Run As account for this, so I am going to select No… and then, I click on Create at the bottom.

If you don’t have Automation Accounts in the list of blades (the main left hand side menu in the Azure Portal), you can click on All Services at the top, find it under Monitoring and Management, and click on the star next to it

You should now see it in the list of Favorites

Click on the blade, and you should see your new Automation Account

Click on LibraryImportTest, the Automation Account we just created.

Viewing and Adding Modules

Now that we have our Automation Account, lets take a look at the modules. Scroll down under the Automation Account, and look under Shared Resources

You’ll see Modules and Modules gallery. Click on Modules.

You can see that there are quite a bit in there already:

You can also see the version number, so you know what version, say, of the Azure library you are using. You can also Update Azure Modules (if you have a Run As account enabled, which we didn’t do for this test).

You can also click on a module, such as Azure, and you can see that there are 673 cmdlets, or Activities in this module. By clicking on See more at the bottom of the Activities window, you can see the full list of cmdlets.

So, by default, we get the following modules provided by Azure:

Azure
Azure.Storage
AzureRM.Automation
AzureRM.Compute
AzureRM.Profile
AzureRM.Resources
AzureRM.Sql
AzureRM.Storage
Microsoft.PowerShell.Core
Microsoft.PowerShell.Diagnostics
Microsoft.PowerShell.Management
Microsoft.PowerShell.Security
Microsoft.PowerShell.Utility
Microsoft.WSMan.Management
Orchestrator.AssetManagement.Cmdlets

Which makes sense… because we’re using PowerShell in Azure. Now, what if we need something more? Click on Browse Gallery. There are MANY modules available in the gallery, so you may not need to import them yourself.

For example, the SharePoint Patterns and Practices library is one I have used in several blog posts recently about Azure Runbooks… search for SharePointPnP

You can see all 3 (Online, 2013, and 2016) libraries are available! Click on one of them…

To import the module into your Automation Account, click on Import at the top

And then click OK. When completed, you will see a notification that it was imported successfully

That doesn’t mean its there yet… it is still importing. It will bounce you into the module import screen

And once its complete, it will give the overview as well as the list of cmdlets (Activities)

Easy right? This is the same as the PowerShell Gallery.

You can also notice, when you’re in the PowerShell Gallery, you can also deploy to Azure Automation

When using this method, you can either import it into an existing Automation Account, or, create a new one:

Now… what if the module you have is NOT a part of the PowerShell Gallery?

Importing Third Party Modules Into the Gallery

Now lets say, there are come cmdlets I need that are not in the gallery, such as Gary LaPointe’s PowerShell-SPOCmdlets.

A search does not return anything…but I happen to have the module installed locally. So, I first zipped up the folder (the default location for this particular library is C:\Program Files (x86)\Falchion Consulting, LLC\SharePoint Online PowerShell)

Back in Azure, under Modules, click on Add a module

Select the file from your computer, and click on OK

And click on it in the Modules list, it will likely still say Importing…

Now we wait for the import to complete… this takes a few minutes…

And once complete… you can see that you now have the module and all associated cmdlets for use in your Automation runbooks:

Import-Module xxxxx-yyyyyzzzz

“Do I still need to import my modules in my Azure Automation PowerShell scripts?” No. If you have a module loaded for that specific Automation Account, it will be automatically available, so there is no need to specifically import the module in the script itself.

References

Filed under Azure, Azure Automation, PowerShell Tagged with Azure, Azure Automation, azure automation account, azure module, azure powershell gallery, azure runbook, azurerm, modules, Patterns & Practices, Patterns and Practices, pnp, powershell gallery, powershell module, powershell modules, runbook, runbooks, SharePoint, sharepoint patterns & practices, sharepoint patterns and practices, sharepoint pnp

Azure Automation Credentials

February 23, 2018 Leave a comment

I have been playing around with Azure Automation Runbooks as of late. For one I was working on, I am using a SharePoint list to kick off a flow, and that flow reaches out to my Azure Runbook via a Webhook, which in turns runs some PowerShell using the SharePoint PnP Library to create some list entries, as well as a site or two, depending on the request.

Since I have just been testing this functionality out, I’ve had my credentials under which the script runs and connects to SharePoint under a few variables.

$username = "geoff@domain.com"
$password = "!!!MySuperSecurePassword!!!~)()_($!@)(&$_)*($&@)*"

And then converting those to PowerShell credentials

[SecureString]$securePass = ConvertTo-SecureString $password -AsPlainText -Force
[System.Management.Automation.PSCredential]$psCredentials = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential($username, $securePass)

And then connecting to SharePoint

Connect-PnPOnline -Url $url -Credentials $psCredentials -ErrorAction Stop

Now that I have my testing near completed, I no longer wanted to store my username and password for my service account in the script itself as variables. In fact, I want to be able to use multiple credential sets if needed, depending on the tasks that need to be completed. In comes Azure Automation Credentials.

Creating Azure Automation Credentials

I’ll skip the step of creating an Azure Automation account, I covered that in my last post related to this. Since the

If you go into the Azure Portal, and go into your Azure Automation account, you will see under Shared Resources, a section called Credentials

Click on Add a credential

Enter in a Name, Description, and then the User name and Password for the credentials you wish to use.

And then click on Create

Using Azure Automation Credentials

Now that we’ve created our credentials… we can use them! In this example, I am just using a test script to ensure it works…Let’s go over to our runbook.

You can see here in my example script, that instead of the code I used above, I am using:

Get-AutomationPSCredential -Name "MyAccount"

Where MyAccount is the name of the credential we just configured. Let’s now go test it out… go over to the Test Pane and click on Start

I am showing some output just to confirm that the script is indeed running, and it is getting PS Credentials, etc.

And did we get context?

Indeed we did! It works! I surprise myself sometimes… so there you go, this is how you can use Azure Automation Accounts and Automation Credentials to store and retrieve username and password pairs and use them in your Automation Runbooks.

References

Filed under Azure, Azure Automation, PowerShell, SharePoint, SharePoint Online Tagged with Azure, Azure Automation, azure automation account, azure runbook, azure webhook, azurerm, Patterns & Practices, Patterns and Practices, pnp, runbook, runbook webook, runbooks, SharePoint, sharepoint patterns & practices, sharepoint patterns and practices, sharepoint pnp, webhook

Delete All Versions of a SharePoint File Using PowerShell

February 6, 2018 1 Comment

There may be instances where you need to remove all previous versions of a file. Well, this is the PowerShell script to do it. This will only work for SharePoint on-premises however.

param(
[string] $UrlToFile
)

$Site = New-Object -Type Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite -ArgumentList $UrlToFile
$Web = $Site.OpenWeb()
$SPFile = $Web.GetFile($UrlToFile)

Write-Host “Deleting all versions for file $($UrlToFile)…”

# Remove all versions for file…
$SPFile.Versions.DeleteAll()

# Dispose of the web object
$Web.Dispose()

# Dispose of the site object
$Site.Dispose()

Save this off as something rememberable, such as Remove-FileVersions.ps1, and pass it the full URL to the file you wish to remove all versions from, for example:

.\Remove-FileVersions.ps1 “http://mysharepoint.com/sites/foo/Documents/Document_1.docx”

Enjoy!

Filed under PowerShell, SharePoint Tagged with delete, On-Prem, On-Premises, PowerShell, remove, SharePoint, version, versions

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Geoff Varosky's Blog

Oh, hey everyone!

Creating an Azure Run As Account

Slides from the North American Collaboration Summit 2019

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday San Juan

Session Abstract

Disable Minimal Download Strategy Across All Sites and Site Collections via PowerShell

Getting the Job ID of an Executing Azure Runbook

Getting the Plain Text Value of an Azure Key Vault Secret with PowerShell

Importing PowerShell Modules into Azure Automation

Creating an Azure Automation Account

Viewing and Adding Modules

Importing Third Party Modules Into the Gallery

Import-Module xxxxx-yyyyyzzzz

References

Azure Automation Credentials

Creating Azure Automation Credentials

Using Azure Automation Credentials

References

Delete All Versions of a SharePoint File Using PowerShell

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