Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Automate OneDrive for Business Hold with Azure Automation

I was working on a project for a customer recently that wanted to automate the process of placing ODFB sites on hold the same way we can automate all Exchange Online mailboxes being placed on hold.

So I created a script and uploaded it to Technet Gallery , Available HERE

Readiness Toolkit to assess application compatibility for Office 365 ProPlus


Microsoft recently released a new Readiness Toolkit to assess application compatibility for Office. The toolkit can be downloaded HERE.

This blog post describes how I used this toolkit to gather analysis for approx 1500 machines.


  1. Install the toolkit on a Windows client.
  2. Create a network share and provide sufficient permissions for each client machine and user. Then copy all of the files from the local installation to the file share.
  3. Create a new folder in the file share called readiness.
  4. Add this executable as an exclusion to your endpoint protection service 'Readinessreporter.exe' 
  5. Create a .bat file : '\\fileshare\ReadinessReportCreator.exe -mru -addinscan -output \\fileshare\readiness\ -silent'
  6. Add the .bat file into a group policy start up script
  7. After a number of days when client machines have logged on, Their will be a sufficient number of .json files.
  8. Launch the readiness toolkit and choose the option
    'Previous readiness results saved together in a local folder or network share'
  9. This will then produce the report
This toolkit is very useful for providing a detailed report on add-ins and macros. The most common Office applications that use specific add-ins are Word and Excel. A use case where this type of report becomes critical is for legal organisations that use case management systems or document management systems.