Read data from Office 365 Active Directory - sharepoint

With the release of Office 365 can someone tell me the support available for custom visual sandboxed web parts created using Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Power Tools that fetches an Office 365 active directory attribute values for a particular user? E.g. If my company already has existing users in a local Active Directory environment when I subscribe to Microsoft Office 365, there are tools for synchronizing those users to Office 365 directory. Let say I have synchronized my local Active Directory to Office 365 Directory, now is it possible to programmatically or OOTB way to read Office 365 directory attribute’s value for any Office 365 Directory user? I have a custom attributes added to my local Active Directory one of the attribute is “CC Number” and I want to get the value associated with this attribute for some XYZ user.
We have an Office 365 SharePoint application to which we would like to add either (or both) a custom sandboxed web part and a OOTB web part that only reads a data from an Office 365 Directory for respective Office 365 directory user.
Is this type of functionality supported with the first/current release of Office 365?

it's a really common scenario that organizations will move parts of their systems into the Microsoft Cloud by using Office365. In order to get rid of the additional AD management overhead you have to build a federation on AD level.
You need a SecureTokenService which does the authentication for your users. Microsofts implementation of STS is ADFS (ActiveDirectory Foundation Services) which could easily be plugged into an existing AD structure. Your AD has to be 2008 I think.
There is a good ebook from Dominick Baier and some other security guys available. It's called "Guide to claim based identity", you can read it online on http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff423674.aspx or there is anywhere a download it think... can't remember sry.

Related

What service do I need to be able to let my users use Office 365 Cloud Excel

I am working on an accounting system where the system will generate an excel file using a template and then open it using embedded Office 365 Excel. I can do this with my personal account where I would use the OneDrive API to create an excel file and then use the Embedded option in the OneDrive to generate the iframe link and use it on my website. However, the iframe url exposes the auth token though which could be misused by the users.
In future when we have real customers, I would want my users to be able to edit the excel file with their own Office 365/sharepoint account (that we would create for them during onboarding). I believe embedded excel option is not available for business users of Office 365, and I learned that you could do that with sharepoint though for business use cases. What service do I need? Maybe sharepoint but I dont know what else I need and how to make the integration work.

REST API to manage users on Sharepoint

As a follow-up question to REST API to manage users on skype for business, I would like to understand how the Sharepoint Server User API differs from MS Graph API for Users. The Graph documentation indicates that we could use it to manage Sharepoint users the same way we would Office 365 users. However, there are standalone Sharepoint installations (like versions e.g. 2007, 2010, etc.,) which don't fall under Office 365 plans.
The Graph API Docs linked above says the User resource represents an "Azure AD user account". However, the Sharepoint User doc says it represents a "user in Microsoft SharePoint Foundation." Are these users entirely different from each other?
All we're looking to do is manage users for our clients some of whom have subscriptions to Office 365 and some who just use standalone Sharepoint setup. We are not bothered about application specific features like Accessing the sharepoint files, sites or even managing Word documents, Excel sheets, etc., So, does the Graph API support managing users in such cases as well?
That API is only for SharePoint 2013+
The user management REST API linked in your question is specifically for SharePoint 2013, and presumably works in SharePoint 2016 as well. This is regardless of whether the SharePoint environment is on premises or in the cloud.
Office 365 is currently a subset of SharePoint 2013/2016 in terms features and functionality.
Note that SharePoint 2007 and 2010 will not have this API.
SharePoint users and Azure AD accounts are not synonymous
Consider that SharePoint and AD can exist independently of each other.
SharePoint does not need to use Azure Active Directory for authentication. It can use a traditional on-premises or cloud-hosted Active Directory, or theoretically (starting with version 2010) can use any claims-based authentication provider aside from Active Directory.
SharePoint 2007 and 2010 could also support simple forms based authentication as well as custom authentication providers, but as noted previously, neither of those versions of SharePoint expose the REST API in question.
AD = Authentication; SharePoint User = Authorization
Azure AD is a claim provider. A claim provider is used for authentication; when you log on to SharePoint, SharePoint relies on Active Directory to determine that you are who you say you are. A user's SharePoint account is used for authorization; the SharePoint account is granted access to content within SharePoint on a site by site basis.
Information in AD vs information in SharePoint
When using Azure AD for authentication, there are usually some areas of overlap between the data in SharePoint and the data in AD.
SharePoint's user profile service is usually set up to synchronize data from Active Directory to SharePoint, so that AD serves as the master data set for things like user display name and title. However, not all information is necessarily sync'd from AD to SharePoint, and additional information can be tacked on to SharePoint user profiles.
Group Membership in AD vs Group Membership in SharePoint
In Azure AD, a user can be a member of multiple groups. Groups can include both Active Directory groups (which can be nested) and Office 365 (SharePoint) groups (which cannot be nested).
A SharePoint user can only be a member of SharePoint groups, since SharePoint does not keep track of membership of Active Directory groups. That said, a user may have access to content in SharePoint indirectly due to an Active Directory group having been granted access.
AD User Scope vs SharePoint User Scope
Unless you're working directly with the user profile service, when you work with SharePoint users programmatically, they need to be retrieved from a specific site in SharePoint. This is because each site collection has its own set of groups which cannot be used on other site collections within the SharePoint farm, so group membership is tracked only on a site-by-site basis.
Note that this means that a user's lookup ID number (which is different from their login name) may vary between site collections. This also means that a user's collection of groups will vary depending on the site from which the user object was retrieved.
An Azure AD user has no such silos.

Office 365 store restrictions and SharePoint online add-in permissions for creating sites

I submitted an office 365 SharePoint add-in app for certification in the Office Store, and was told that one of the changes required is that I remove the 'Full Control' permission for the app, as it is not supported in the store. My app enables the user to create a new web site based on certain criteria. The add-in works correctly with 'Full Control' permission, but does not work with lower levels such as 'Manage'.
 
If the store does not allow me to use 'Full Control', what permissions or options can I use in order to still be able to create sites on behalf of the user?
Is there a different way to go about having the add-in app create sites in an existing site collection? The trigger can be user initiated, or event based.
 
I would love to get any ideas or solutions for this - Thanks!
The only option I can think of is to create a web service that is external to SharePoint and create the site in the service.
Here are a couple of resources that may help you:
Walkthrough: Building a Custom Web API for use with SharePoint Online
PnP Webcast - Calling external APIs securely from SharePoint Framework

Can we call Office 365 API from Linux machine?

We've developed our own cloud-based email solution on top of Linux. We're providing Admin Interface to clients where they can create, modify, delete users/groups. Few of our clients are using Office 365 service for few mailboxes. We would like to make an API call to office 365 whenever there is any activity performed (Create, modify, delete user, etc.) by clients on our admin panel for office 365 users.
If you're looking to interact with user accounts and mailboxes, you should be able to do most of what you want with Microsoft Graph via REST calls:
http://graph.microsoft.io/docs/api-reference/v1.0/resources/user
Also see the Office 365 API reference:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/rest-api-overview#sectionLanguagesIDEs

Retrieve Office 365 directory information from SharePoint online

I was wondering if is it possible to retrieve Office 365 directory information (i.e. security group membership) from SharePoint online programmatically (for example through a workflow custom action)?
By the way, I am not looking for retrieving Sharepoint group membership information.
I know the custom development is pretty limited with SharePoint online since the code has to run as a sandbox solution. Is there any web service or any another solution available?
I have been looking for information about this matter but I could not find anything so I guess there is no way to do this.
In our case there is an active directory synchronized with office 365. So we will use a powershell script to read data from AD and update a sharepoint list every day.
Then we will be able to use this data from custom code (like a workflow custom action).

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