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Todd Klindt's home page > Todd Klindt's Office 365 Admin Blog
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September 27
Simplifying Client Credentials with PowerShell: Add-ClientCredential

If you’ve been around the block with SharePoint or Microsoft 365 administration, you know that handling client credentials can sometimes feel like juggling with fire. When I start a new engagement with a client I generally get credentials to access their tenant. Of course they immediately go into our password management tool. I also do a lot of PowerShell scripting for my clients, so I save them to the Windows Credential store too, so that I can connect with Connect-PnPOnline without having to enter them each time. And while that’s not a lot of work, I thought I could streamline it. That’s why I’ve put together a PowerShell command, Add-ClientCredential, that makes it a little easier.

What Does Add-ClientCredential do?

In a nutshell, this PowerShell command is designed to streamline the process of adding client credentials in a SharePoint or Microsoft 365 environment. It stores your credential for https://tenant.sharepoint.com and https://tenant-admin.sharepoint.com. If you don’t specify any credentials when you connect with Connect-PnPOnline it will look for them in the Windows Credential Store. If you have one assigned for the root of the tenant, https://tenant.sharepoint.com, it will also use that for other sites in the tenant, like https://tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/ToddisTheBest, if a credential is not saved for that specific site.

Here’s a quick example:

Add-ClientCredential -TenantName "contoso" -UserName admin@contoso.com

I like this method because then my password will never show up in History or a Transcript if one is running. Since we didn’t pass it a password, it will prompt you for one. Then it will create credential entries for https://contoso.sharepoint.com, http://contoso.sharepoint.com, and https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com

To pass it a password, do it like this:

Add-ClientCredential -TenantName "contoso" -UserName admin@contoso.com -Password (ConvertTo-SecureString "YourPassword”
-AsPlainText -Force)

Keep in mind that will show up in plain text in PowerShell’s Get-History, or the Transcript file, if you have that running.

I built in some smarts so that if there is already a credential stored for “Contoso” it will let you know and ask you if you want to overwrite it.

If you want to get super fancy you can add the –TestCredential switch which will test the credentials you gave it by logging in with them. All of this is available if you run help Add-ClientCredential –Examples.

In the background this function uses Add-PnPStoredCredential to store the credentials for you. It adds them for the root of the tenant, and the –admin URL.

How to Get Started

To get your hands on this little beauty, head over to my GitHub repository. You can download addclientcreds.psm1 itself, or clone the whole repo. Use Import-Module to import it into your PowerShell host and you’re ready to go.

Wrapping Up

addclientcreds.psm1 is my attempt to put a little more simplicity and sanity into the world of SharePoint and Microsoft 365 administration. I hope you find it as useful as I do. As always, I welcome your feedback and questions. Drop a comment below or shoot me a message on Twitter @ToddKlindt.

tk

ShortURL: https://www.toddklindt.com/PoshAddClientCreds

July 13
Automating Attorney Files and Case Folders Creation in SharePoint

In my last masterpiece, Tackling SharePoint's 5000 Item Limit with PowerShell and Search, I show how to use PowerShell with Search to return more than 5000 items from a SharePoint list or library, even if SharePoint refuses to return more than 5000 items. Pretty impressive, right? When demonstrating something like that you need a list or library with more than 5000 items. There are are a lot of scripts out there that can create test data, but I needed something specific. So, I opened up a new windows in VS Code and got to coding.

The PowerShell function I wrote is Add-AttorneyFiles, which is designed to streamline the creation of attorney files and case folders. Lots and lots of them.

This function has a few parameters to tailor the files and folders it creates. It accepts two mandatory parameters, AttorneyCount and CaseCount, specifying the number of attorneys and case folders to create for each attorney.

There are also a few switch parameters that allow you to customize the function's behavior further. You can choose to create a file in each case folder using the CreateStaticFile switch, or specify that only closed or client case folders should be created with the OnlyClosedCases and OnlyClientCases switches.

You can also specify the name of the static file created using the StaticFileName parameter. If no name is provided, the function will default to creating a file named "readme.txt".

The function starts by checking if a connection to a SharePoint site exists. If it does, the function creates attorney files and case folders in a SharePoint directory. The names for these attorney files are generated randomly from a list of common first and last names. This randomness helps to create a more realistic environment for testing.

Once the list of attorney names is created, the function will loop through each attorney, creating the appropriate case folders, either client case folders, closed case folders, or both, based on the parameters passed in.

The function gives the folders and files it creates a randomly generated last and first name, along with a random case number, for a more realistic setup.

If the CreateStaticFile switch is present, a static file will be created in each case folder. The content of these static files is a random selection of words, downloaded from a free online dictionary. This randomization also contributes to a more realistic testing environment.

Here's an example of how you might use this function:


Add-AttorneyFiles -AttorneyCount 10 -CaseCount 5 –CreateStaticFile

image


This will create 10 attorney folders, each with 5 case folders. A static file named "readme.txt" will be created in each case folder. For my blog a created a whole lot of autorun.inf files.

By automating the setup of this testing environment, I was able to generate a high volume of test data, with a format that accurately represented my client’s data, without exposing any of it.

I’ve uploaded the code to GitHub. Check it out.

Happy PowerShelling, and as always, feel free to drop any questions or comments below!

tk

ShortURL: https://www.toddklindt.com/PoshAttorneyFiles

July 10
Tackling SharePoint's 5000 Item Limit with PowerShell and Search

In the world of SharePoint, the 5000 item per view limit is a well-known challenge, the stuff of legend. To recap, while a SharePoint list or library can have up to 30 million items in it, SharePoint refuses to show you more than 5000 of them at a time. That’s an API level control to protect the backend, so it won’t do this in a view in a web page, an API call through PowerShell or CLI, nothing. While there are several ways to navigate around this limit, such as using CAML queries, these methods often fall short when dealing with really large datasets. This blog post will explore a unique solution to this problem using PowerShell, specifically focusing on the use of Search to retrieve data.

The Challenge

Recently, I was working with a client, a law firm, who had a whopping 7.8 million items in a SharePoint document library. Of course not a great Information Architecture. We were helping them fix that. Among other horrors, over the years, attorneys had copied the contents of CDs and DVDs to various places in SharePoint, creating a massive and complex data structure. The challenge was to find all these so we could migrate them out or delete them. However, due to the sheer volume of data, there was no way to slice the data using the normal tools to get back fewer than 5000 results. This is where PowerShell swoops in and saves the day.

The PowerShell Solution

The solution came in two parts. We were looking for the DVDs by looking for the autorun.inf file in the root. I discovered I couldn’t using something like Get-PnPListItem to find all of the autorun.inf files because I couldn’t find a way with CAML, or anything else to pare the result set down below 5000. There were just too many files. However, I did discover that I could find them in the Search Center, which gave me the first idea. Get them from Search in PowerShell. I used the Submit-PnPSearchQuery cmdlet to send a search query to SharePoint and it retrieves all the results. It gets them in batches of 500 (the maximum for a single search request), with the option of making multiple requests if necessary to retrieve all results. This worked pretty well, but was tedious because I could only get 500 at a time and there were thousands. I had to modify the search, run it again, and append those results to the results from the previous searches. That was too much work, and led to the second part. I wrote a PowerShell function called Submit-PnPSearchQueryAll. This function uses the Submit-PnPSearchQuery cmdlet to send a search query to SharePoint and retrieves all results, paging through them and running multiple queries as needed. If the -ShowProgress switch is provided, the function will display the total number of results and a progress bar.

Before we look at the function itself, let’s see how it works. My usage looked like this:
$AllResults = Submit-PnPSearchQueryAll -query "autorun.inf"

That stored every file named autorun.inf in the variable $AllResults. There are 5046 of them:
$AllResults.Count

image 

Since that’s a collection of objects I can treat them like any old object:
$AllResults[1000]

image 

and

$AllResults | Where-Object {$_.ParentLink -like "*AttorneyFiles/Johnson, Michael*" }

image 

or

$AllResults | Where-Object {$_.ParentLink -like "*AttorneyFiles/Johnson, Michael*" } | select Path,ParentLink

image 

and

$AllResults | Where-Object {$_.ParentLink -like "*AttorneyFiles/Johnson, Michael*" } | Export-Csv .\mj.csv

See all the fun you can have? Since the object we’re getting back is a PnPResultTable object, it doesn’t have all the same properties as a PnPListItem. When I wrote the function I had to decide which ones I needed. If you use this, you might need something different.

How It Works

The function begins by initializing variables for the starting row and page size, set to 500. It then enters a loop where it performs the search query with Submit-PnPSearchQuery and retrieves the results. If the –ShowProgress switch is provided, it will display the total number of results on the first run and a progress bar for each subsequent run.

For each result, the function outputs a custom object with the desired properties. It then increments the $startRow by the $pageSize and continues the loop while the $startRow is less than the Total Rows.

Before I got this working I tried a couple of other approaches, but this one worked the best.

Grab the PSM1 file with Submit-PnPSearchQueryAll here.

Conclusion

This PowerShell function proved to be an effective solution to the SharePoint 5000 item limit, allowing us to retrieve all items from a massive SharePoint document library. It demonstrates the power and flexibility of PowerShell and SharePoint's Search functionality when dealing with large datasets. Whether you're dealing with millions of items or just want a more efficient way to retrieve data from SharePoint, consider giving this function a try.

tk

ShortURL: https://www.toddklindt.com/Posh5000ItemLimit

June 26
Supercharging PowerShell with a Little Help from AI

I know I have a checkered past with the Developer community. Back in the old days they could do some pretty awful things to my beloved on-prem SharePoint servers with their incessant BINing and GACing things. Fortunately for all of us (including those defenseless servers) those days are behind us.

So, I just got off this Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Development Community call, and boy, do I have some cool stuff to share with you. I got the chance to show off this neat trick I've been working on - using GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT (or any AI you're into) to give your PowerShell scripting a serious boost.

You're probably thinking, "AI and PowerShell, really?" But stick with me here. It's like having a co-pilot for your coding. Like someone smarter than you, looking over your shoulder, and there if you have questions. It's there to help you out, make things smoother, and let's be honest, who doesn't want to feel a bit like Tony Stark talking to JARVIS while coding?

During the demo, I took everyone on a little tour of how you can get GitHub and Copilot and ChatGPT into the mix with your PowerShell development routine. It's all about using AI to help with the heavy lifting - coding, debugging, repetitive tasks, and even the dreaded documentation. I'm telling you, this is next-level stuff, and we're just scratching the surface of what AI can do for us.

But hey, don't just take my word for it. Give it a whirl! Play around with adding some AI into your PowerShell development and see how it goes. I used ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot for the demo, but you can pick any AI you're comfortable with.

That's it from me for now. Keep an eye out for more cool AI posts.

Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Development Community call

My AI Demo

tk

ShortURL: https://www.toddklindt.com/PoshwithAI

June 22
Dynamic Parameter Validation in PowerShell

Hello, SharePoint and PowerShell enthusiasts! Todd Klindt here, and I've got something exciting to share with you today. I recently had the opportunity to present a developer-focused demo on the Microsoft 365 & Power Platform Community channel. The topic? Dynamic parameter validation in PowerShell.

In this 13-minute demo, I walk you through the process of creating your own PowerShell cmdlet. This cmdlet allows you to pull and tab through information from a site, list, text file, Azure, Graph, etc. within the PowerShell environment.

I utilize the power of ValidateSet, ValidateScript, and ArgumentCompleter. To show off, the demo concludes with an interesting twist. I used ChatGPT to write the same code.

All the code I used in the demo is available on my GitHub repo. You can find it at PoshPnP and PnP PowerShell.

I hope you find this demo useful in your PowerShell journey. Remember, when you're writing PowerShell, try to be the tool maker, not the tool user. Happy coding!

Watch the full video here.

tk

ShortURL: https://www.toddklindt.com/PoshValidation

June 12
Formatting ShareGate Log Files in Excel with PowerShell

Hi All,

Today, I want to share a handy PowerShell function I developed recently to enhance readability of ShareGate log files.

If you are using ShareGate for SharePoint migrations or management tasks, you might be familiar with the extensive Excel logs produced by ShareGate. While these logs are rich in details, they can sometimes be too rich in details. They often require some formatting for better readability or to highlight the necessary details. When doing a lot of migrations I found myself doing the same steps over and over again to these logs. Being lazy, I thought, “Someone should automate this!”. I sat down with my buddy PowerShell and this is what we came up with.

This function, Format-ShareGateLogFile, tackles this by opening a ShareGate log file in Excel format and applying a few changes. It does this by using Doug Finke’s excellent ImportExcel PowerShell Module. It adds a table to the first worksheet, formats the first column as "Date-Time", calculates the duration of the log file, and formats the duration as "[h]:mm:ss" in the last row. Finally, it saves the changes and closes the Excel file.

To use this function, you’ll have to download Logfiles.psm1 from my Github Repo. Then use Import-Module to import it into your PowerShell session.

After that’s done you can run Format-ShareGateLogFile. You will need to provide the path to the Excel file to format as an argument to the Path parameter, which is mandatory. For instance,

PS C:\> Format-ShareGateLogFile -Path "C:\path\to\ShareGateLogFile.xlsx"

This will format the Excel file located at "C:\path\to\ShareGateLogFile.xlsx" for readability.

The function also accepts two optional switches: Open and HideColumns. If you use the Open switch, the function will open the formatted Excel file automatically after it has finished formatting. The HideColumns switch will hide specified columns (E-U, W-AR, AT-BA) in the Excel file. For instance,


PS C:\> Format-ShareGateLogFile -Path "C:\path\to\ShareGateLogFile.xlsx" -HideColumns -Open

This will format the Excel file, hide the specified columns, and open the Excel file automatically after it has been formatted.

One neat feature of the function is that it can accept pipeline input for the `Path` parameter. This means you can pipe in a series of file paths to the function and it will format each file in turn. For instance,


PS C:\> Get-ChildItem -Path "C:\path\to\folder" -Filter "*.xlsx" | Format-ShareGateLogFile -HideColumns -Open

This will get all the Excel (.xlsx) files in the specified folder, and for each one, it will be formatted for readability, with specified columns hidden, and the Excel file opened automatically after it has been formatted.

This function has saved me heaps of time while working with ShareGate log files, and I hope it does the same for you. Happy scripting!

tk

ShortURL: https://www.toddklindt.com/PoshFormatSharegateLogs

May 23
PowerShell Function to Extract ChatGPT Conversations

Hey there, PowerShell enthusiasts and fellow M365 admins! I’ve been tinkering around with a little something I think you'll find helpful, especially if you've been playing around with OpenAI's ChatGPT. I have been and let me tell you, this has been a wild ride.

Meet Format-ChatGPTConversation, it’s a function I wrote that takes your ChatGPT conversation history and formats it into a more digestible output. If you've been in the trenches with ChatGPT, you know that it can be tough to share your conversations with other people. You have to take a bunch of screenshots or just copy out individual parts. Neither of those are any fun. That's where this function comes into play.

Now, you might be thinking, "That's great, but where do I find these ChatGPT conversations?" Good news! You can get the conversations.json file right from the OpenAI chat interface. Just head over to https://chat.openai.com/, click on the three dots by your name in the lower left corner, and navigate to "Settings". Once you're in there, click the "Data controls" tab, and voila! There's an "Export" button waiting for you. Clicking that will give you a zip file, and nestled inside it is your conversations.json file.

So what does Format-ChatGPTConversation actually do? Well, it processes this JSON file, extracting relevant conversation details like the title, ID, create time, author, and content. Any system messages or messages without an author are left out. We don't need them muddying up our beautiful output, do we?

Let's talk about how to use this bad boy. You can pipe it to the console, save the formatted output to a text file, pass multiple JSON files through the pipeline, or even group the output by conversation title. Here are a few examples:


Format-ChatGPTConversation -filename "conversations.json"

Format-ChatGPTConversation -filename "conversations.json" | Out-File -Filepath "formatted_conversations.txt"

Get-ChildItem -Path "conversations.json" | Format-ChatGPTConversation

Format-ChatGPTConversation -filename conversations.json | Group-Object -Property Title | Select-Object name, count

And if you're feeling particularly adventurous, you can even select specific conversations and format them in a list:


Format-ChatGPTConversation -filename conversations.json | Where-Object { $_.title -eq "PowerShell Function Advice" } | select author, content | Format-List | more.com

image 

All of those examples are included in the Examples in the function. You can get to them with help Format-ChatGPTConversation -Examples after you’ve downloaded and imported it.

Ain't that a sight for sore eyes? It's like finding a pearl in an oyster. The world of PowerShell and ChatGPT is your oyster, my friends. Go forth and explore.

How do you get this marvel of modern technology? Go to my PowerShell repo on Github and download it. Then use Import-Module to import it into your PowerShell session.

As always, I'd love to hear how you're using this function. Are you finding it helpful? Have you made any tweaks or improvements? Let's have a conversation about our ChatGPT conversations. It's like Inception, but with less Leonardo DiCaprio and more PowerShell.

Until next time,

tk

ShortURL: https://www.toddklindt.com/PoshChatGPTConversations

August 01
PnP Script Sample: Force a User Profile Property Index

Have you ever updated some properties for a user in SharePoint Online, waited what seemed like a reasonable length of time, then did a search for that user? Have you ever done that and found your old values still there? Gah! Me too! Did you then use Mikael Svenson’s brilliant script to fix that? Yeah, me too. A few times.

I’m also a tinkerer, and I love me some PowerShell. So I cracked open VS Code, put on some aggressive music, loaded up Mikael’s code, and looked around a bit. I found a couple of things that I’d do differently. Not that there’s anything wrong with his code, it’s good stuff. But I wanted to so some stuff like turn his code into a function, so I could add it to an existing module I have. I wanted to move the JSON file from the root of the web to the Shared Documents library, innocent little changes like that. And his code had been written several years ago. PowerShell has matured since then, as coders we’ve matured, so I cleaned a few other little things up while I was in there. It was fun, and it kept me off the streets for a while.

After I got done I reached out to Mikael to see if he was okay with me sharing it with all of you. Mikael, being the stand up guy that he is, was totally good with it. Then I reached out to Paul Bullock about getting it published to the PnP Script Samples. I’ve been meaning to start submitting some stuff to that, but I didn’t have anything I thought was worthy. Paul graciously accepted my script, so now you can all enjoy it too.

While you’re there, check out all the other great script samples. There’s some gold in those hills.

tk

ShortURL: https://www.toddklindt.com/PoshReindexUPS

April 15
Calling Microsoft Graph with PnP PowerShell

As an M365 Admin it’s not tough to see that the future is hidden somewhere in the Microsoft Graph. And this particular M365 Admin would like to get there using his favorite tool, PowerShell. Microsoft released the Graph SDK, but it didn’t really scratch the itch for me. I found it confusing and really tough to use. But, as much as I ignored it, the Graph didn’t go away. With increased frequency there would be some little tidbit of information I’d want and the answer would be, “It’s in the Graph.” Grrrrr.

I was poking the M365 PnP Samples and stumbled across this little gem, Authenticate with and call the Microsoft Graph. That looked promising, I can work with that. I fired up PowerShell, loaded the PnP.PowerShell, fired up the Graph Explorer and started working.

It went well enough that I wrote a little wrapper function around it and published it to GitHub. It’s called Get-TKPnPGraphURI and it looks like this:

image

Get-TKPnPGraphURI -uri https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/

Get-TKPnPGraphURI -uri https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users | select displayName,userPrincipalName,id

It uses PnP.PowerShell, so you’ll need that module installed, and you’ll need to connect with Connect-PnPOnline. From there you can pass it any Graph endpoint, v1.0 or beta. You can find out what the endpoints are at the Graph Explorer.  Right now this only supports Gets. You’ll also have to manually put in any parameters or filters. I’ve added help and examples. I hope to expand them both in the future.

The output is a stand PSCustomObject, so you can send its output down the pipeline however you’d like. Select-Object, Where-Object, Sort-Object, the world is your oyster.

Let me know if this is useful and what you’re doing with it.

tk

ShortURL: https://www.toddklindt.com/PoshMSGraph

November 05
Introducing SharePoint Server… Subscription Edition

There were a lot of fun things announced at Ignite this week. If you haven’t already done so, check out the Ignite Book of News. It’s one handy place for all of the announcements that came out. My favorite announcement, of course, was the General Availability of the next version of on-prem SharePoint, SharePoint Server Subscription Edition!!!

You can read Microsoft’s announcement on Tech Community blog for the official word and links. Reading is boring though, so here’s the Download Link. Smile 

I haven’t kicked the tires much yet, so I don’t have any impressions to share. Don’t fret though, I have already created the official SharePoint Server Subscription Edition Builds List.

As I play with it more I’ll let you all know how it goes.

tk

ShortURL: https://www.toddklindt.com/SharePointSubscriptionEdition

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