2. SharePoint improvements  

• Simpler authoring - introducing Copilot in SharePoint, a new SharePoint home page, and coauthoring experiences.  You’ll be able to use natural language and AI to author SharePoint pages faster and easier and collaborate with others in real time.
• Compelling content - SharePoint is getting a major aesthetic update.  You’ll be able to create visually stunning sites and pages that embrace images and videos in new ways to express your brand.
• Deeper engagement – with new integrations for SharePoint into email, Teams, and Microsoft Viva, you’ll be able to rely on SharePoint to meet your readers where they work and measure the impact of your content.
• Flexible platform – with continued investment in templates, the SharePoint Framework, and Microsoft Graph, your existing solutions will continue to work even as we update the user experience, so you’ll be able to continue to tailor your SharePoint sites to specific workflows and integrate them with custom applications.

Day 1

The first day of the conference was dedicated to full day tutorials. Our team decided to go to the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) session by Paolo Pialorsi. SPFx is a library that allows developers to develop customisable web parts which can be deployed into SharePoint, Teams, Viva Connections and even Outlook. We also discussed the PnP community and some of the cool SPFx solutions which have been developed there that are already publicly available. Our newfound knowledge paired with the experience of Chad Carlse – an experienced SPFx developer who has just joined the A-Team should lead to some new and interesting apps in the next couple of months.

Day 2

The day started with a Key Note speech from the Microsoft product managers. They talked about some of the new technologies that have been developed recently including:

·  Teams scheduled messaging – which is going to very useful for teams with members in different time zones as well as organisations with flexible working hours.

·  Microsoft Loop – a widget that can be inserted into Teams chats or Outlook that allows users to create lists collaboratively in real time. It will be ideal for putting together lists  on the fly during meetings.

·  Syntex – Microsofts new document e-signing tool. Though less flexible than some of the existing 3^rd party solutions (such as Adobe or Docusign), the fact that this is a Microsoft product has perks – licencing is managed in one place and integration between other products on the Microsoft Suite is easier to setup. Our team will be paying close attention for new features for this product.

We also enjoyed a session about list formatting. Marijn Somers went through everything from user friendly options that we could introduce to our clients to develop themselves to more complicated examples that use JSON objects to configure the styling of the lists and columns. We even went through some github repositories that showed off the high level of flexibility and extensibility of this feature.

Day 2 also marked the start of the Vendor Expo for all sponsors of the event. Craig and Annie were managing our booth and met tonnes of participants from the conference. It was great to get to interact with the community and meet some potential clients and partners.

Day 3

The highlight of day 3 was a session with Vlad Catrinescu. He explained how the Power Virtual Agent can be used to develop Teams chat bots. The technology is easy to pick up for anyone familiar with Power Automate and can allow developers to quickly build chat bots as a solution to quickly disseminate information or complete simple tasks (through Power Automate).

In the evening we went to the party in Copenhagen city. The party was a circus themed dinner with singing, dancing and circus performers who put together a great show! We enjoyed the show, the food and the conversations with the people at our table.

Day 4

On the final day of the conference, we went to 2 talks about search both hosted by Mikael Svenson. The first was the Search API and how it can be extended using graph to search throughout an entire tenant as well as the potential risks with creating such a solution. The second session focused on the PnP search web part which is currently the best way to all of the functionality of search on Modern SharePoint. Though the A-Team is using the solution for most intranets that we build we learnt a few tricks that we can’t wait to implement.

You can find us as stand 38, very close to the community area, where we will most certainly have one the best prizes this year.  As we are GT, we thought it would be fitting to have a GT race set as a prize to the tournament winner.  How do you win, well its pretty straight forward, head round to the stand, say hi to the team and enter the competition.  Each day make sure to come back to challenge the winners from the previous day for the top spot.  The winner on the final day goes home with the prize.

We look forward to seeing our clients, partners and all the attendees at the event.  Please come past the stand and see how we can assist you with our A Team managed services.  And if you want to book time with Craig Tarr our CEO who will be very keen on sharing a meal of local brew and Smørrebrød in the beautiful city of Copenhagen you can do that by booking his time below.

The Power Pages site was down right now, probably due to the entire internet checking it out. 

Draw an idea on a napkin, take a pic of it, and transform that into a Power App in minutes.  That’s right, you can do it with Express Design. 

3.  Project Volterra

4.  Live Share in Microsoft Teams

5.  Mesh for Teams

This issue is largely a Remote Code Execution one, Allowing an attacker with access to the Configuration or Control interface to perform dangerous activities without credentials, or authentication of any form, all with elevated privileges.

In short this allows a 3^rd party to take complete control of the device and easily establish a foothold in your corporate network in a matter of minutes. There’s a reason this vulnerability scores a 9.8 on the CVSSv3 scoring.

This is all possible due to a fault in the iControl REST api authentication component effecting the majority of BIG-IP’s software versions from 11.6.1 all the way up to 16.1.2. Thankfully F5 has already released a series of security updates covering various versions of their software which could save you a great deal of troubles. We highly recommend these get patched IMMEDIATELY.

However, It is important to keep in mind that 11.x and 12.x versions of the software will not be patched so workarounds will need to be employed or the software will need to be upgraded to at least 13.x.

Thanks to F5, mitigation of this issue can be as easy as updating to one of the below versions of the software:

17.0.0

16.1.2.2

15.1.5.1

14.1.4.6

13.1.5

3 Temporary Workaround’s exist for when update is not immediately possible. We have provided these below as directly taken from F5’s support article K23605346

“Until it is possible to install a fixed version, you can use the following sections as temporary mitigations. These mitigations restrict access to iControl REST to only trusted networks or devices, thereby limiting the attack surface.

·  Block iControl REST access through the self IP address

·  Block iControl REST access through the management interface

·  Modify the BIG-IP httpd configuration

Block iControl REST access through the self IP address

You can block all access to the iControl REST interface of your BIG-IP system through self IP addresses. To do so, you can change the Port Lockdown setting to Allow None for each self IP address in the system. If you must open any ports, you should use the Allow Custom option, taking care to disallow access to iControl REST. By default, iControl REST listens on TCP port 443 or TCP port 8443 on single NIC BIG-IP VE instances. If you modified the default port, ensure that you disallow access to the alternate port you configured.

Note: Performing this action prevents all access to the Configuration utility and iControl REST using the self IP address. These changes may also impact other services, including breaking high availability (HA) configurations.

Before you make changes to the configuration of your self IP addresses, F5 strongly recommends that you refer to the following articles:

·  K17333: Overview of port lockdown behavior (12.x - 16.x)

·  K13092: Overview of securing access to the BIG-IP system

·  K31003634: The Configuration utility of the Single-NIC BIG-IP Virtual Edition now defaults to TCP port 8443

·  K51358480: The single-NIC BIG-IP VE may erroneously revert to the default management httpd port after a configuration reload

If you must expose port 443 on your self IP addresses and want to restrict access to specific IP ranges, you may consider using the packet filtering functionality built into the BIG-IP system. For more information, refer to the following article:

K13383: Configuring CIDR Network Addresses for the BIG-IP packet filter

Block iControl REST access through the management interface

To mitigate this vulnerability for affected F5 products, you should restrict management access only to trusted users and devices over a secure network. For more information about securing access to BIG-IP systems, refer to the following articles:

·  K13092: Overview of securing access to the BIG-IP system

·  K46122561: Restricting access to the management interface using network firewall rules

·  K69354049: Restricting access to the BIG-IP management interface for Configuration Utility and iControl REST services using iptables

Note: Restricting access to the management interface by IP address in httpd is not a viable mitigation for this issue.

Modify the BIG-IP httpd configuration

In addition to blocking access through the self IP addresses and management interface, or as an alternative to blocking access if those options are not possible in your environment, you can modify the BIG-IP httpd configuration to mitigate this issue.

·  BIG-IP 14.1.0 and later

·  BIG-IP 14.0.0 and earlier

BIG-IP 14.1.0 and later

Impact of procedure: Performing the following procedure should not have a negative impact on your system.

Log in to the TMOS Shell (tmsh) of the BIG-IP system by entering the following command:

tmsh

Open the httpd configuration for editing by entering the following command:

edit /sys httpd all-properties

Locate the line that starts with include none and replace none with the following text:

Note: If the current include statement already contains a configuration other than none, add the following configuration to the end of the current configuration, within the existing double-quotation mark characters (").

"<If \"%{HTTP:connection} =~ /close/i \">

RequestHeader set connection close

</If>

<ElseIf \"%{HTTP:connection} =~ /keep-alive/i \">

RequestHeader set connection keep-alive

</ElseIf>

<Else>

  RequestHeader set connection close

</Else>"

After updating the include statement, use the ESC key to exit the editor interactive mode, then save changes by entering the following command:

:wq

At the Save changes (y/n/e) prompt, select y to save the changes.

Save the BIG-IP configuration by entering the following command:

save /sys config

BIG-IP 14.0.0 and earlier

Impact of procedure: Performing the following procedure should not have a negative impact on your system.

Log in to tmsh of the BIG-IP system by entering the following command:

tmsh

Open the httpd configuration for editing by entering the following command:

edit /sys httpd all-properties

Locate the line that starts with include none and replace none with the following text:

Note: If the current include statement already contains a configuration other than none, add the following configuration to the end of the current configuration, within the existing double-quotation mark characters (").

"RequestHeader set connection close"

After updating the include statement, use the ESC key to exit the editor interactive mode, then save changes by entering the following command:

:wq

At the Save changes (y/n/e) prompt, select y to save the changes.

Save the BIG-IP configuration by entering the following command:

save /sys config”