Category: Information

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Testing a variable with the value of zero

Tonight, while working on my previous script, I ran into an interesting problem when testing the presence of a value.

Consider this:

PS C:\> [int]$IntValue0 = 0
PS C:\> [int]$IntValue1 = 1
PS C:\> [string]$StringValue0 = "0"
PS C:\> [string]$StringValue1 = "1"
PS C:\> $IntValue0
0
PS C:\> $IntValue1
1
PS C:\> If ($IntValue0) { "exists" }
PS C:\> If ($IntValue1) { "exists" }
exists
PS C:\> if ($StringValue0) { "exists" }
exists
PS C:\> if ($StringValue1) { "exists" }
exists
PS C:\> if ($IntValue0 -eq $null) { "null" }
PS C:\> if ($IntValue0 -lt 1) {"less than 1" }
less than 1
PS C:\> $IntValue0.GetType()
… [ Continue reading ]
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Managing a corporate blog site with SharePoint Online and Office ProPlus

As I help organizations transition to think cloud-first, one of my goals is to help them get the most out of their Office 365 investment.  In this post, we’ll talk about tackling a corporate blog.

SharePoint Online comes with a number of out-of-the-box templates, and the one that most closely maps to the blog requirement is … wait for it … the blog site template.… [ Continue reading ]

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Update to the Get-UserHoldPolicies tool

While working with a customer last week, it came to my attention that the Get-UserHoldPolicies script I had put together to enumerate retention policies and eDiscovery cases that put a hold on content wasn’t displaying policies that were global.  The types of policies I checked for were enumerated in a user’s InPlaceHolds mailbox property, but apparently, that field is populated only if a Security & Compliance retention policy explicitly specifies the mailbox.… [ Continue reading ]

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ATP: Safe Attachments, Safe Links, and Anti-Phishing Policies or “All the policies you can shake a stick at”


With the advent of scammers, spammers, phishers, and other types of baddies, and the complementary rise in anti-malware, anti-spam, domain and sender verification techniques, we’re in a perpetual cat-and-mouse game.  I’ve had several customers over the past few weeks ask me about best practices for configuring some of the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) features.… [ Continue reading ]

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Connecting Splunk to Office 365 – Part 2: Microsoft Office 365 Reporting Add-On for Splunk

In Part 1 of this blog series, I went through the setup of the Splunk Add-On for Microsoft Cloud Services, which you can use to extract, query, and analyze data provided by the Office 365 Management Activity API.  In this particular post, we’re going to explore the Microsoft Office 365 Reporting Add-On for Splunk, which you can use to review message trace data from Office 365.… [ Continue reading ]