By now, lots of folks in the technology industry, and especially those folks working on the Microsoft stack, are aware of Office 365. It’s a platform for collaboration and productivity and is expanding like crazy. For most for-profit companies, it’s also very affordable. However, what about all of the organizations that are not-for-profit? Many of […]
What good is an application if folks can’t actually use it? So far, we’ve just been running and testing the application in Visual Studio. That’s all fine and well, but asking our Help Desk operators to fire up Visual Studio each time they need to go to work just doesn’t really seem feasible. We could […]
To this point, we’ve been creating the building blocks that will enable our Help Desk dashboard. Let’s take all of that effort and put it to good use! There are some changes to the various _Layout.cshtml files and such, but the site is driven completely by Home/Index.cshtml, so let’s start there. The home screen contains […]
The Help Desk dashboard needs to be able to display any current Announcements from the Operations team. The idea is that the Operations team has a SharePoint team site and has added a standard Announcements app. When useful bits of information need to be made available, they add a new announcement to the app. It […]
For the Help Desk dashboard to keep track of the current Support Tickets, we need to store and retrieve that information from a database. In our case, we’ll utilize SQL Azure because cloud stuff is awesome! Really, our database is incredibly simple. I won’t cover creating a SQL Azure database in depth since there are […]
Admittedly, this is the section of the application that I’m most excited about, since it’s brand spanking new technology. Sure, it’s been around for a while as the Unified API, but now it’s officially official and it’s called the Microsoft Graph. The Microsoft Graph is a REST based service that provides a single endpoint to […]
Now that we have our application configured in Azure, we need to update the Startup.Auth.cs class (in the App_Start folder) so that the application can utilize Azure Active Directory authentication for the users. The Startup.Auth.cs class looks like this. using System;using System.IdentityModel.Claims;using System.Threading.Tasks;using System.Web;using Microsoft.Owin.Security;using Microsoft.Owin.Security.Cookies;using Microsoft.Owin.Security.OpenIdConnect;using Microsoft.IdentityModel.Clients.ActiveDirectory;using Owin;using BusinessApps.HelpDesk.Models;using BusinessApps.HelpDesk.Helpers; namespace BusinessApps.HelpDesk{ public partial class Startup { […]
Authentication to the various Office 365 APIs and access points requires some effort. First, we need to create our application. Then we need to assign access to the individual applications. Finally, we need to generate and install a certificate for authentication. Creating the application To create the application, we first need to make our way […]
The first step creating a new website, naturally, is to create a new Visual Studio project. In this case, it’ll be a new ASP.NET MVC project built in Visual Studio 2015. I won’t go through the individual steps for creating a new web project, since that information is available in many, many places around the […]
Anyone that has spent any time working with O365 and/or Azure APIs knows that there are thousands and thousands of how-to articles available to read. Those folks also know that most of those articles cover fairly small, easy to consume topics that cover a specific subject matter. However, after some conversations with Vesa Juvonen, it […]