Baseline Policy Replacements: Conditional Access MFA for Administrators

Posted on Brian ReidLeave a commentPosted in Authentication, Azure Active Directory, Azure AD, AzureAD, conditional access

From Feb 29th 2020 Microsoft will remove the “baseline policies” from Azure AD. These were very useful in the past to enable blanket settings like MFA for all admin accounts (well, selected admin roles) and to disable legacy auth for the same admin roles. With the removal of the baseline policies you need to ensure that before Feb 29th 2020 you have a replacement policy/policies in place. If you are reading this blog post after […]

Disable all phone and text options for MFA

Impact of Removing SMS As an MFA Method In Azure AD

Posted on Brian Reid5 CommentsPosted in 2FA, Azure Active Directory, Azure AD, MFA, security, self-service password reset, smartphone, sms, text message

There are a number of general recommendations that SMS (text messages) as an MFA method is not a good idea (mainly to do with the ease of porting or moving devices the number is associated with). You should always be looking at MFA with an app (Microsoft Authenticator or other) or hardware device. But the default in Azure AD is to include SMS as an option – so if we turn off text messaging as […]

MFA and End User Impacts

Posted on Brian Reid6 CommentsPosted in app password, ATP, Authentication, Azure, Azure Active Directory, Azure AD, Azure Information Protection, AzureAD, conditional access, EM+S, email, enterprise mobility + security, management, mcm, mcsm, MFA, microsoft, modern authentication, multi-factor auth, Multi-Factor Authentication, sspr

This article will look at the various different MFA settings found in Azure AD (which controls MFA for Office 365 and other SaaS services) and how those decisions impact users. There is lots on the internet on enabling MFA, and lots on what that looks like for the user – but nothing I could see that directly laid out all the options and the impact of each option. The options that the admin can set […]

Making Your Office 365 Meeting Rooms Accessible

Posted on Brian Reid2 CommentsPosted in booking, calendar, exchange online, Outlook, places, room

Or How to Use Set-Place to Configure Your Meeting Rooms or How Wheelchair Users Can Find The Best Meeting Rooms In Your Organization etc. – there are many different titles I can think of for this blog post. They are all to do with setting useful properties against your meeting rooms so that your users can find the best rooms. As of the time of writing, “Outlook Places” service exposes a client-side UX only in […]

Getting Rid of Passwords in Azure AD / Office 365

Posted on Brian Reid3 CommentsPosted in Authentication, Azure Active Directory, Azure AD, AzureAD, FIDO, modern authentication, Multi-Factor Authentication, password, yubikey

This article is based on the public preview of the use of hardware tokens/Microsoft Authenticator to do sign-in without passwords released in July 2019 Using Microsoft Authenticator for Passwordless Sign-in You used to be able to do this by running the following in PowerShell for the last few years New-AzureADPolicy -Type AuthenticatorAppSignInPolicy -Definition ‘{“AuthenticatorAppSignInPolicy”:{“Enabled”:true}}’ -isOrganizationDefault $true -DisplayName AuthenticatorAppSignIn Interestingly, if you have done this in the past, the new Azure AD portal settings for doing […]

Exchange Transport Rules Corrupt On Installing New Exchange Server Version

Posted on Brian ReidLeave a commentPosted in 2013, 2016, Exchange Server, ndr, rules, transport

When you install Exchange Server into an existing Exchange organization, your existing configuration typically remains intact and associated with the previous servers and some configuration, that is global in nature, also works across both versions. I can across a scenario where this does not work the other day. The scenario was the installation of Exchange Server 2016 CU12 as a brand new Exchange installation into an existing Exchange Server 2013 deployment. This AD forest has […]

Register For Azure AD MFA From On-Premises Or Known Networks Only

Posted on Brian Reid8 CommentsPosted in Azure Active Directory, Azure AD, conditional access, enterprise mobility + security, Office 365, security, self-service password reset, sspr

A long request within Azure AD/Office 365 has been the request to be able to register your security info from a known location or only on certain other conditions. Well it looks like this has appeared in Azure AD in the last few days!! Its visible under Azure AD > Conditional Access > New/Existing Policy > Cloud Apps or Actions: So, what does this look like in practice? Lets put this preview to the test. […]

Review and Audit Offensive Language in Office 365 Communications

Posted on Brian ReidLeave a commentPosted in cyber bullying, exchange, exchange online, Exchange Server, offensive, Office 365, supervision

A new feature as of May 2018 in Office 365 is to filter communications based upon the offensive language machine learning filter. This is part of the Supervision settings that have been available for a number of years. The Offensive Language model uses a combination of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and keywords to identify inappropriate email messages as part of anti-harassment and cyber bullying monitoring requirements. Here we will walk through the process of setting […]

Teams Calendar Fails To On-Premises Mailbox

Posted on Brian Reid2 CommentsPosted in 2016, 2019, autodiscover, autodiscover v2, calendar, exchange, exchange online, Exchange Server, Microsoft Teams, Teams

In Microsoft Teams, you have a calendar  (previously called meetings) icon in the main display that shows your diary and meetings etc. – except it does not work if your mailbox is not either in Exchange Online or, if if your mailbox is on-premises, you are not using Exchange Server 2016 CU3 or later. The reason for this is that the Teams calendar uses AutoDiscover v2, which is only supported by Exchange Server 2016 CU3 […]

Save Time! Have All Your Meetings End Early

Posted on Brian Reid4 CommentsPosted in calendar, exchange online, Exchange Server, monthly channel, Office 365, Office 365 ProPlus, Outlook, semi-annual channel

I am sure you have been in a meeting, where the meeting end time rolls around and there is a knock at the door from the people who want the meeting room now, as their meeting time has started and yours has finished. What if you could recover five, eight, ten or more minutes per meeting so that the next meeting party can get into the room on time, and you have time to get […]

Too Many Folders To Successfully Migrate To Exchange Online

Posted on Brian Reid1 CommentPosted in activesync, android, email, exchange, exchange online, Exchange Server, iPad, iPhone

Exchange Online has a limit of 10,000 folders within a mailbox. If you try and migrate a mailbox with more than this number of folders then it will fail – and that would be expected. But what happens if you have a mailbox with less than this number of folders and it still fails for this same reason? This is the problem, with resolution, I outline below. I was moving some mailboxes to Exchange Online […]

Exchange Move Requests | Large Items | And Setting TCP KeepAliveTime To A Large Value

Posted on Brian ReidLeave a commentPosted in exchange online, Exchange Server, mailbox, move, networking

I have seen this situation a number of times. A large mailbox (or mailbox and archive) wont move to the target because the process of checking what the changes are in the mailbox take too long, the network or Exchange Server times out the users move and then reports the mailbox is locked. The fix for this is counter though to everything else you read online about this. Often you will see to reduce the […]

bin/ExSMIME.dll Copy Error During Exchange Patching

Posted on Brian ReidLeave a commentPosted in 2013, 2016, exchange, Exchange Server, update, upgrade

I have seen a lot of this, and there are some documents online but none that described what I was seeing. I was getting the following on an upgrade of Exchange 2013 CU10 to CU22 (yes, a big difference in versions):      The following error was generated when “$error.Clear();           $dllFile = join-path $RoleInstallPath “bin\ExSMIME.dll”;           $regsvr = join-path (join-path $env:SystemRoot system32) regsvr32.exe;          start-SetupProcess -Name:”$regsvr” -Args:”/s `”$dllFile`”” -Timeout:120000;         ” was run: “Microsoft.Exchange.Configuration.Tasks.TaskException: Process execution failed with exit […]

Decommission ADFS When Moving To Azure AD Based Authentication

Posted on Brian ReidLeave a commentPosted in ADFS, ADFS 3.0, Azure, Azure Active Directory, Azure AD, AzureAD

I am doing a number of ADFS to Azure AD based authentication projects, where authentication is moved to Password Hash Sync + SSO or Pass Through Auth + SSO. Once that part of the project is complete it is time to decommission the ADFS and WAP servers. This guide is for Windows 2012 R2 installations of ADFS. There are guides for the other versions online. This guide assumes you were using ADFS for one relying […]

Hardware Tokens for Office 365 and Azure AD Services Without Azure AD P1 Licences

Posted on Brian Reid4 CommentsPosted in Azure Active Directory, Azure AD, AzureAD, MFA, multi-factor auth, Multi-Factor Authentication, token2

A recent update to Azure AD Premium 1 (P1) licence has been the use of hardware tokens for multi-factor authentication (MFA). This is excellent news if your MFA deployment is stuck because users cannot use phones on the shop floor or work environment or they do not want to use personal devices for work activities. But it requires a P1 licence for each user. Now a P1 licence gives lots of stuff in addition to […]