What I've Learned This Week #7. DevOps, Microsoft Loop, PoSH

Background

Welcome back to our technical blog post series! It’s hard to believe we’re already on post number 7. I hope you’ve been enjoying our tips and tricks so far.

In this week’s post, we’ve got some fantastic insights to share that will help you work smarter, not harder. We’ll cover sprints and iterations in Azure DevOps, a handy trick for copying and pasting text without formatting, enabling Microsoft Loop, and answer the question of how often Intune devices sync.

So, let’s dive in!

Azure Portal Deny Assignments can’t be created manually

I was working on a solution in Azure, and a key component was separating permissions into different groups.

I intended to use a general Read group for the azure subscription and then modify the permissions on different resources, depending on use and scope.

One part is blocking read permissions to a storage account, except for some users.

However, it is impossible to add Deny permissions right now, and this is due to a design choice by Microsoft.

This is from the documentation.

To summarize, the only option when you have a similar scenario is to start from the top of the hierarchy and create a design that keeps this behavior in mind from the start.

Understand Azure deny assignments – Azure RBAC | Microsoft Learn

How to add Iterations/Sprint to your teams backlog in ADO

I was setting up a new Project and design for a company that will use Azure DevOps in the future.

At first, I couldn’t find the right place to do this. I look in Sprints, Backlogs, etc, to no avail.

I finally learned that you can configure the cadence and schedule in Project Settings and Project configuration.

Here, you create new Iterations and specify the Start and End dates you want. The cool thing is that it remembers the duration you used for the previous one and will automatically suggest the same duration for the following iteration!

The default value is set to one month.

You can also use the New child button to create a sub-iteration to the selected one!

Define iteration paths and configure team iterations – Azure Boards | Microsoft Learn

How to find OEM product key

Sometimes, you have a device that you will reinstall, but you don’t know the product key.

Usually, all OEM devices has a build-in product key that is stored in the BIOS of the device.

Using this one-liner, you can get that key with Powershell!

(Get-CimInstance -query 'select * from SoftwareLicensingService').OA3xOriginalProductKey

How to paste text without formatting

This one is amazing!

I’ve always had a problem with pasting content from one place to another.

It never matches the formatting and looks very bad.

As it turns out, there is an easy solution to this behavior that I wished I had known earlier.

Instead of using Ctrl-V, try Ctrl+Shift+V.

This will paste the content from your clipboard but without the formatting!

Talk about an easy fix!

How to Enable Microsoft Loop in your organization

Microsoft released the preview of Loop this week!

I just wan to say, Finally! Since I found the Loop components in Teams and Outlook, I’ve wanted to do more.

As an avid OneNote user, it is really time for an alternative!

It is very easy to get started!

Create an Azure AD group with users that will test the preview of Microsoft Loop
Create a policy at https://config.office.com
- Use the group from Step 1 as Scope
- Search for Loop in the Policies list and enable the following options