Squidworks Office365 UM Evolves

“New Flash we are now at version 1.8.6 and have added many great features since the writing of this blog, come check out all the new stuff when your done reading.”

Today Version 0.1.7.0 is launching, the 7th release of the first plugin in Labtech to manage Office 365 in the cloud.

In the beginning

If you are in the Labtech community then you should know about Cubert’s Office365 Plugin but did you know that it has been evolving?

Back in the beginning our plugin looked a little like this:

In the  first version publicly available V 0.0.11 you could only see your users and change their passwords but this was a big step. We were now using remote Powershell CMDs in Labtech scripting and bringing the collected data back into Labtech’s database. This was the first steps to building a plugin for Labtech and getting the data from the cloud into Labtech. We now had a method and a functional process to import data from the cloud and the possibilities opened up for all sorts of new things to come.

It wasn’t long before we were trying new commands and adding some features to our new plugin. Shortly there after we had release a new version that provided the ability to manage some basic permissions like Send As and Send on Behalf As. We started working on added the ability to setup a forwarding email address and full level permissions to allow access for users to other users mailboxes. Version 0.1.4 was released which added the final pieces to our Office365 UM or so we thought.

Moving Day

The Office365 tab’s face was full, no space left to really do anything new but the requests kept coming in for new features. Cubert can you do this was the common theme in the forums. We asked ourselves where are we to put all this new requested functionality? We were out of space and something was going to have to change if we were going to move this plugin any further.

In version 0.1.5.0 we introduced some tabs of our own:

We redesigned the face of the plugin giving us the ability to spread out our functions across different tabs. This gave us the space we needed to really start making this thing preform.We added some new features like adding new users to Office365 , deleting users and also restoring deleted users, converting user mailboxes to shared mailboxes and improving the data collection and error management on the back end.

Our look was getting notice

Cubert heads to Labtech’s Automation Nation 2014 for the second year to see whats in the pipeline in the skunk works at Labtech. Speaking with several people at AN2014 we discovered that there were people using the plugin and had some insight in to how we could make it better and we were determined to do just that.

Our plugin was starting to take shape and the download counts were starting to roll in but with the users comes the problems. The first real wide spread issues started to arise with how Labtech was executing Powershell scripts. This process did not always produce the same results. We found that across platforms that some users were experiencing execution errors with the Data Miner scripts we had designed. We decided a rewrite of the collector was needed, a design that would use the native Powershell application on the PCs instead of the one provided with the Labtech Agent.

We re-crafted the entire data collection process and called it of course “Collect Data” aka “Office 365 Collect Data” . The new method incorporates all user data mining in a single session and adds our newest feature to the Office 365UM Distribution Group Management.

Come and get it

So today we announce our 7Th release of the Office365UM plugin for Labtech available for download now at Squidworks Office365 Plugin for Labtech . We hope you enjoy our products and post  here at Squidworks, your experiences with the plugin. This will help drive the development in the direction that is most useful to you and helps us build a better plugin.

Here is what we can do today:

1. Add, update and delete user accounts and email addresses
2. Manage Send As, Send on Behalf As and Full Permissions on Mailboxes for other users
3. Set and delete Forwarding email addresses for users
4. Restore soft deleted users (30 day limit on retention)
5. Convert User Mailbox to Shared Mailbox
6. Set/reset users password
7. License/unlicense user
8. Add and delete distribution groups
9. Add,delete and view group members
10. Add/Remove groups from Global Address Lists
11. View License counts and type

Thanks to everyone involved!

Cubert