Author: Brian Reid

  • SSL Inspection and Microsoft 365

    SSL Inspection and Microsoft 365

    There are a number of features in Microsoft 365 that do not work if SSL Inspection (also known as TLS Interception) is enabled on your device or network provider. You need to disable the listed URLs that Microsoft provides in its documentation. The problem is there is a lot of disconnected documentation! This blog post…

  • Is That Domain In Entra ID

    Is That Domain In Entra ID

    Occasionally it is useful to know if a domain name is registered with a tenant in Entra ID (previously known as Azure AD). There is a URL to lookup this information as to my knowledge there is not easy portal to query. The URL requires you to add an email address, though the actual user…

  • Enabling BitLocker In Silent Mode Using the Settings Catalog (2023)

    Enabling BitLocker In Silent Mode Using the Settings Catalog (2023)

    There are many blog posts and articles online about the old way to configure silent BitLocker. These used a template that Microsoft added to Intune. Since March 2023 BitLocker has moved (along with lots of other configurations) to using the Settings Catalog. Often the settings are similar and you can take a old blog post…

  • Duplicate rule found: ‘Standard Preset Security Policy’.

    Duplicate rule found: ‘Standard Preset Security Policy’.

    If you are editing the Preset Security Policies in Microsoft 365 you might come across the error Duplicate rule found: ‘Standard Preset Security Policy’. There is an easy fix for this – go through the wizard and remove all the users, groups or domains that the rule applies to. This will delete the rule. You…

  • Introduction to Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK

    Introduction to Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK

    This short blog post is the 10 minute demo I presented at Microsoft Ignite 2023 in Seattle. It was not recorded, but this was the slide deck that went with it. Graph SDK Additional Content.pptx The full speaking text of the presentation might be added here once the jetlag goes away!

  • Upgrade Teams Room Basic Licences To Teams Room Pro

    Upgrade Teams Room Basic Licences To Teams Room Pro

    Teams Room Pro licences come at a licence cost, but provide considerably more features than Teams Room Basic licences (which are free, and limited to 25 rooms per tenant). One of the features available in Teams Room Pro is dual display, and another is the Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro Management portal, but for me the…

  • Bulk Token Retrieval Failed

    Bulk Token Retrieval Failed

    The Windows Configuration Designer (WCD) application (installed from the Microsoft Store) allows you to bulk convert standalone Windows 10+ clients to Azure AD Joined clients, and if you have Intune auto-enroll enabled then the client will enrol with Intune as well. But there are a number of issues with this application that result in errors…

  • Entra ID and Parental Consent

    Entra ID and Parental Consent

    For organizations that store the data of young adults and children, and in some legal regions, adults who cannot consent to their own legal affairs, you need to record the Age Group for the user, along with any Consent Provided in the case of Minors. There are three categories of Age Group in Entra ID…

  • Migrating from AADConnect Sync to Entra Connect Cloud Sync Correctly

    Migrating from AADConnect Sync to Entra Connect Cloud Sync Correctly

    At the time of writing this blog post, the Microsoft guide for doing an AADConnect to Entra ID Cloud Sync migration is lacking quite a lot of detail. It contains the sum of two self referencing documents, one of which is a guide to doing the migration in a lab environment and the other is…

  • SharePoint Org Assets Library Missing Read Permissions for “Everyone Except External Users”

    SharePoint Org Assets Library Missing Read Permissions for “Everyone Except External Users”

    A SharePoint Organization Assets Library allows you to have a central location for Office templates, fonts and images. Various Microsoft 365 apps show this location when in use, for example when creating a new document in Word, the organization templates library can be listed as a source of templates. To create an Organization Assets Library…

  • Upgrading to Information Barriers v2

    Upgrading to Information Barriers v2

    Information Barriers are a compliance feature of Microsoft 365, and until March 2023 a version, now known as v1 or legacy mode Information Barriers was the only option in place. Legacy (v1) Information Barriers allowed a user to be a member of a single Information Barrier segment and so communications where limited between all users…

  • Seamless Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) Never Works

    Seamless Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) Never Works

    Microsoft 365 Purview Message Encryption, previously known as OME (Office Message Encryption) and before that Microsoft Rights Management, allows you to share protected email with anyone on any device. Users can exchange protected messages with other Microsoft 365 organizations, as well as third-parties using Outlook.com, Gmail, and other email services. The feature is part of…

  • Adding App Tokens To Intune From Apple Business Manager  (VPP)

    Adding App Tokens To Intune From Apple Business Manager (VPP)

    Documentation on this process is hard to come by. Either Microsoft says “download the Apple Business Manager location token (Apple VPP token) for your account” but does not say how, or other documentation covers other bits of the process, but not this step. So, how do you download and create a Apps Content Token so…

  • LAPS for Beginners

    LAPS for Beginners

    This is a simple blog post to outline how to turn on Windows LAPS via Intune to ensure that all your managed devices have a local admin account that has a unique password per device. A unique, and frequently changed, local admin password stops lateral movement by malicious actors from a compromised machine across some…

  • Domain Tenant Move and Device Join Issues

    Domain Tenant Move and Device Join Issues

    I discovered recently an issue following a tenant to tenant Microsoft 365/Azure AD migration. The issue was that devices would not enroll with Intune in the old tenant because the settings the device was getting was mixed up between the old and new tenants. In the case I had, the new tenant was not yet…

  • Post Tenant To Tenant Migration Calendaring Issues

    Post Tenant To Tenant Migration Calendaring Issues

    When you perform a Microsoft 365 tenant to tenant (T2T) migration and run a migration that is either staged over some time or sometime after the migration has completed you cutover the domains from the old tenant to the new tenant (that is, you were doing a rebrand and the new tenant had a new…

  • Blocking More Obvious Phish – Attachment Filtering

    Blocking More Obvious Phish – Attachment Filtering

    One relatively easy way to block some categories of phishing email is to block the attachment type that is sent with some of these messages. For example, I have had a few of these recently: Hovering over the attachment I see the filename, and it ends .shtml. This attachment is for server-side HTML (SSI includes…

  • Exchange Hybrid Wizard – New Tenants and Missing Errors

    Exchange Hybrid Wizard – New Tenants and Missing Errors

    Rumoured to be fixed end of June 2023 A short blog post on this issue – you see in the Microsoft Exchange Server Hybrid Configuration Wizard logs the following error “Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message: Connecting to remote server outlook.office365.com failed with the following error message : For more information,…

  • Adobe Creative Cloud and Conditional Access Restrictions

    Adobe Creative Cloud and Conditional Access Restrictions

    In Azure Active Directory it is possible to create Conditional Access rules that restrict applications to only running on company owned or managed devices. Conditional Access approves or rejects the login based on that knowledge – so what happens if the app in question is running on a company (managed or compliant) machine, but the…

  • More Frequent Quarantine Notifications in Exchange Online Protection

    More Frequent Quarantine Notifications in Exchange Online Protection

    Available from the end of April 2023 there is now an option to increase the notification interval to end users about items in the quarantine. The Microsoft 365 Quarantine is at https://security.microsoft.com/quarantine and though this is a good link to add corporate intranets, its also a useful one for users to remember and bookmark. Up…

  • Join Button Not Working In Teams

    Join Button Not Working In Teams

    If you have any URL rewriting software in place outside of Microsoft 365 (i.e. not Defender for Office Safe Links) then you may find that functionality such as the Join button in the Teams Calendar view is broken and the only way to join is via the URL to the meeting: The only way you…