Author: Brian Reid

  • Microsoft 365 – How To Enable A Progressive Web Application

    A Progressive Web Application (PWA) is an application that runs in a website which you can separately have an icon for on your desktop (Windows, Chromebook, Raspberry PI, Linux, Android and other operating systems). This icon can be pinned to the Start Menu (or equivalent) and starting it opens the web application in a separate…

  • Outlook AutoDetect And Broken AutoDiscover

    Outlook AutoDetect And Broken AutoDiscover

    Those in the Exchange Server space for a number of years know all about AutoDiscover and the many ways it can be configured and misconfigured – if even configured at all. Often misconfiguration is to do with certificates or it is not configured at all because it involves certificates and I thought I was aware…

  • Proxies and Firewalls and Installing Microsoft Office Subscription Software

    Proxies and Firewalls and Installing Microsoft Office Subscription Software

    Microsoft Office 365 client software (Word, Excel etc.) has been available as a subscription model for over ten years and using the Click-2-Run technology for all or most of that time, but I still see a lot of people who are unsure how it actually works, assuming its a standard installer they have used for…

  • Centrally Managing Microsoft 365 Apps Updates

    Centrally Managing Microsoft 365 Apps Updates

    It used to be the domain of 3rd party enterprise apps or Microsoft’s Configuration Manager to control the updates (or servicing) of your Microsoft Office apps (now called Microsoft 365 Apps). With recent additions to the Office Configuration Portal at https://config.office.com you can have central admin of updates including groups to deploy and in which…

  • Intune MAM Exemptions – Discovering URL Protocols

    In Microsoft Intune you can create a secure container where the data in your apps cannot leak outside of. That is, you can restrict copy/paste outside of the supported apps and restrict opening the data in a different app. But sometimes you need to open the data in a different app and with the Intune…

  • 550 5.1.8 Access denied, bad outbound sender AS(42003)

    “Your message couldn’t be delivered because you weren’t recognized as a valid sender. The most common reason for this is that your email address is suspected of sending spam and it’s no longer allowed to send email. Contact your email admin for assistance.” This is an error you get when your anti-spam “outbound” policy restricts…

  • [New] External Email Notification in Exchange Online

    This is a new feature released in March 2021 that adds support in Outlook (Mac, OWA, Mobile) for the display of the external status of the sender – note at the time of writing it does not add this feature to Outlook for the PC. This should be used to replace the way this has…

  • Azure AD Consent For Zoom App Not Applying

    Azure AD Consent For Zoom App Not Applying

    This is a issue where you enabled Admin Approved Consent in Azure AD (as you should) and you require apps that have high data access rights to be approved. The Zoom add-in/desktop app falls into this category as it requires write access to your calendar and your contacts in Exchange Online. But if you set…

  • iOS and Outlook Mobile and Duplicate Contacts

    iOS and Outlook Mobile and Duplicate Contacts

    Of the back of a few conversations recently on having duplicate contacts in the iOS platform because of syncing via multiple different routes or devices I decided to try to reproduce the issues and see what I could work out. I looked on my test iPhone to see if I could see any duplicates and…

  • Removing a Default Sensitivity Label

    In Microsoft 365 Sensitivity Labels you can have a label policy that requires that all content is labelled. If you enable this and then later decide this is not for you, you can republish your label policy and disable the default label and the require label policies. That is, your settings start like this: And…

  • Unable To Update Defender Preferences

    I was trying to add Microsoft Defender exceptions via PowerShell to a clients server (Windows Server 2016 if that matters) the other day and it was always failing – the error was: This was returning “Failed to modify preferences” on the Add-MpPreference cmdlet and the error code 0x80070073 To fix I needed to uninstall Windows…

  • Why Do Comments In Microsoft 365 Planner Disappear?

    Why Do Comments In Microsoft 365 Planner Disappear?

    So first you need an Exchange Online mailbox for comments to work. Comments to the tasks of Plans are stored in the Microsoft 365 Group mailbox, and you need an Exchange Online mailbox to access the M365 Group mailbox. Behind the scenes, or actually not that behind the scenes, the process for comments is as…

  • Exchange Online Warning On Receipt Of New Email Sender

    Exchange Online Warning On Receipt Of New Email Sender

    Released recently to no fanfare at all, Microsoft now has a SafetyTip that appears if you receive email from a first time recipient. Most often phish emails will come from an address you have never received email from before, and sometimes this email will try to impersonate people you communicate with or are internal to…

  • Microsoft 365 From A Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer

    So my new computer arrived today, its a keyboard and a few cables, and as my first computer was a ZX Spectrum when I was 14, this brings back a few memories. But, is it usable today with services such as Microsoft 365? Lets see… First, the actual computer is in the keyboard, but its…

  • Enabling Better Mail Flow Security for Exchange Online

    At Microsoft Ignite 2020, Microsoft announced support for MTA-STS, or Mail Transfer Agent Strict Transport Security. This is covered in RFC 8461 and it includes making TLS for mail flow to your domains mandatory whereas it is currently down to the decision of the sender. You can publish your SMTP endpoint and offer the STARTTLS…

  • Reporting on MTA-STS Failures

    This article is a follow up to the Enabling Better Mail Flow Security for Exchange Online which discusses setting up MTA-STS and in this article we cover the reporting for MTA-STS. To get daily reports from each sending infrastructure to receive reports on MTA-STS you just create a DNS record in the following format: It…

  • Enable EOP Enhanced Filtering for Mimecast Users

    Enable EOP Enhanced Filtering for Mimecast Users

    Enhanced Filtering is a feature of Exchange Online Protection (EOP) that allows EOP to skip back through the hops the messages has been sent through to work out the original sender. Take for example a message from SenderA.com to RecipientB.com where RecipientB.com uses Mimecast (or another cloud security provider). The MX record for RecipientB.com is…

  • Mail Flow To The Correct Exchange Online Connector

    In a multi-forest Exchange Server/Exchange Online (single tenant) configuration, you are likely to have multiple inbound connectors to receive email from the different on-premises environments. There are scenarios where it is important to ensure that the correct connector is used for the inbound message rather than any of your connectors. Here is one such example.…

  • What Is The Value of enrollmentProfileName

    In Microsoft EndPoint Manager there are a few different device registration scenarios that make use of a property called device.enrollmentProfileName. To find and apply other settings (apps, config, etc) to these devices later on you need to have a Dynamic Device Group based on this property. The problem is the value of the property is…

  • Free Web Content Filtering With Microsoft Defender ATP

    Well free as in you need an MDATP licence first, but as this used to be an add on feature on top of MDATP with an additional cost, this is now effectively free once you are licensed for MDATP. The feature enables your organisation to track and regulate access to websites based on their content…

  • Force Mailbox Migration With Bad Items To Complete (2020)

    It used to be easy to complete an Exchange Server > Exchange Online move request that had bad items, but this has changed recently. In the last short while Move Requests (and Migration Batches) have begun to include a property called DataConsistencyScore If the result from the above is “Investigate” then you will not be…