How to setup your Datazen server to leverage Office365 for e-mail notifications

Happy Saturday everyone!

As promised, here is a quick follow-up to my post last week on how to setup a Datazen Test/Dev server in Azure.  As you’ll remember, I had you skip over the part where you setup you e-mail provider during the install wizard.  However, it’s pretty painless to now setup that information on your Datazen Server.  Couple quick caveats –

1. I’m admittedly showing you a method that is a little “hacktastic”, so I’d recommend you setup a dummy e-mail account to use for this purpose as opposed to simply leveraging your everyday Office365 account.

2. This is probably only necessary if you’re using the default Datazen authentication for your Datazen instance and don’t have an SMTP server in your organization you can leverage instead.

With that out of the way, let’s get started –

First, you’ll need your Office365 settings for SMTP e-mail.  You can find that by logging into your Outlook account on Office365 and going to this link.  You can also go up to the upper right-hand corner of the window and click on the gear icon, and then select Options

You can then look under Accounts –> POP and IMAP on the lefthand menu to find the SMTP settings

Once you have that information, open a Remote Desktop connection to the Datazen server you setup in Azure.  Once opened, navigate to the following path –

C:\Program Files\Datazen Enterprise Server\controlpanel\

You should see a web.config file.  MAKE A BACKUP copy of the file first just in case and save it somewhere safe.

Open the file in notepad and scroll all the way to the bottom until you find the mail settings.  It should look like this assuming you followed the steps I laid out previously.

To change the settings to leverage your Office365 account to send e-mails, you just need to change them to the following in between the tags –

Then save the file.  To test it, login to the control panel and add a new user to the server (this was all covered in the previous blogpost if you need a reference).  Once you’ve added him/her, you’ll see them listed with a “Set Password Link” next to their name –

You can now click on the “Send Reminder” link to send the e-mail to your user directly.  Assuming it was successfully setup in the web.config file, you should see a green success message just below the button.

And the user should get an e-mail in their inbox with an invitation to join the dashboard hub which looks like so.

They can then setup their account by entering their password after they click the link they receive.

That’s it!  You’ve now successfully setup your Office365 account to act as the mail server for your Datazen instance. 

I’ll be doing another blogpost in the next few days on how to setup a custom data provider and connect to a SAP HANA instance from your Datazen server.  Until then!