MyCloudSpace Release 2020 Q4

by Ben Young

Another release out the door for MyCloudSpace this quarter and we have been working on a number of exciting things.

1) Support for Backup for Office365 Version 5 which brings teams support and also modern authentication deployment - this simplifies the setup of the tenancy a lot (not more manual Azure steps!)

2) We have been working with a number of partners who are using the MyCloudSpace API to automate their operations, authentication is about to get a heap more simple!

3) We have revamped our Xero accounting integration to support the new oauth 2.0 specification and supporting Xero SDK/API allowing resellers now to automatically onboard themselves for client billing (where we create the client invoices each month automatically) - not to mention their support for oauth 1.0a is deprecated as of October.

A bit of a dive into a couple of the items;

Backup for Office365 version 5

Teams Support
This release now has support for Microsoft Teams. This means that a Team or content within a Team can now be restored back the way it was.

Veeam have built a dedicated Teams explorer for this task and like the other explorers you can browse for missing/specific content and put back what is missing.

I actually blogged about this when it was announced, jump to this post to see this working in depth.

Modern Authentication
This was actually part of a later release in v4 but we have now modified MyCloudSpace to use this as the setup mechanism by default. This upside for customers is

  • No more app passwords (more secure)
  • No more manual Azure app registration setup (less complicated)

You can also use the modern authentication when you login to the browser.

For customers not yet fully enabled for Modern authentication don't worry we also allow you to deploy using the legacy authentication mechanism.

Here is a view of the new setup page, basically enter your onmicosoft.com address then click go, enter the code into Microsoft's device login page with the account you want to use - MyCloudSpace will take care of the rest.

API Key Authentication for Machine to Machine

We are pleased to announce that as of this moment we can enable your account(s) for API Key authentication.

When it comes to machines talking to machines dealing with the 2factor by default security we impose on all MyCloudSpace accounts was a bit of a pain. So we have added the ability on a per user account level to be enabled for this function. We have also restricted what endpoints can use this functionality and based on feedback from our clients we will expand this over time.

Right now you could do anything from monitoring backup jobs to cost optimisation tasks such as powering down/up test environments when not in use.

If this is something you are interested in get in touch and we can get you setup.