Export selection improvements - Alignment with Whitepaper and new mode

[andikrueger]

The currently available options to export a tenant are:

• None
• Lite
• Default
• Full

It would be great to add a new option that would exclude all 'content related' modules. By 'content related' I think about resources that do not export plain settings for a tenant. This would be resources that hold objects like users, teams, groups, sites,...

In alignment to the whitepaper it would be great to have an option to create several export commands so that for each workload a new configuration is created.

[andikrueger]

@sebastienlevert Do you think this is doable?

[sebastienlevert]

If we have a way to categorize the Resources, yes!

[andikrueger]

Would be a manual process to add this information, but it would be doable.

@NikCharlebois Do you see any value in this feature?

[NikCharlebois]

My take on this is:

Lite: is all Configuration Plane items with the exception of those that take a very long time to export (e.g., AADGroup, EXOMailboxSettings, etc.)

Default: is all Configuration Plane items.

Full: is all Configuration & Data plane items.

This is not currently 100% true, but the mechanism to do so is already available and @sebastienlevert was driving the export.microsoft365dsc.com UI from it. We could definitively create new categories if it makes sense. We just need to make sure that every new resource we create clearly identifies what categories they belong to.

for example, if we were to add a new "TenantSettingsOnly" category, the SPOTenantSettings would be part of it, but also part of the Full, Default and Lite mode.

[andikrueger]

Would it be ok to extend the settings.json with this kind of information? I e the added value of making the website more dynamic to new resources and how the should be made available within the export categories.

[NikCharlebois]

I believe this one would be better addressed with guidance to the users instead of introducing a new mode. What I normally tell customers is that they should look at only monitoring and exporting components that either:

1 - Have the word Policy or Settings in their names or 2 - That implement the IsSingleInstance property. Other resources tend to delve in what we call the Data Plane, which can be modified by the end users and aren't good candidates for Export or Monitoring

[andikrueger]

I understand your perspective and absolutely agree on to improve our documentation on this matter. I believe that implementing a new export mode would greatly enhance user experience and help user to adopt the two points you mentioned.