Brian Reid – Microsoft 365 Subject Matter Expert

Author: Brian Reid

  • Token2 Hardware OAuth Tokens and Azure AD Access

    This blog post walks through the process of logging into Azure AD resources (Office 365, other SaaS applications registered in Azure AD and on-premises applications that utilise Azure AD App Proxy). First step is to order your desired hardware. For this article we are looking at the devices manufactured by Token2 (www.token2.com). These include credit…

  • Read Only And Attachment Download Restrictions in Exchange Online

    Microsoft have released a tiny update to Exchange Online that has massive implications. I say tiny in that it take like 30 seconds to implement this (ok, may 60 seconds then). When this is enabled, and below I will describe a simple configuration for this, your users when using Outlook Web Access on a computer…

  • Public Folder Migrations and the Changing Cmdlets

    To complete a public folder migration from Exchange 2013/2016 to Exchange Online you need to run Set-OrganizationConfig -PublicFolderMailboxesLockedForNewConnections $true But if you look at lots of the documentation that is out there with their tips and tricks etc. you will see that lots of them say: Set-OrganizationConfig –PublicFoldersLockedForMigration $true So very near – but its…

  • Test Connectivity Website and TLS 1.2

    An excellent resource for Microsoft Exchange Server and Exchange Online administrators and consultants is the Remote Test Connectivity website at http://exrca.com or https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/. Here I am going to document an error that indicated that the Exchange Server (in this case) was not working, but we could see that the phone was connecting fine to the…

  • Public Folder Sync–Duplicate Name Error

    I came across this error with a client today and did not find it documented anywhere – so here it is! When running the Public Folder sync script Sync-ModernMailPublicFolders.ps1 which is part of the process of preparing your Exchange Online environment for a public folder migration, you see the following error message: UpdateMailEnabledPublicFolder : Active…

  • Configuring Multi Factor Authentication For Office 365

    Configuring Multi Factor Authentication For Office 365

    Given that Office 365 is a user service, the enabling of multi-factor authentication is very much as admin driven action – that is the administrators decide that the users should have it, or that it is is configured via Conditional Access when limiting the login for the user to certain applications and locations. For a…

  • SSL Inspection and Office 365

    Lots of cloud endpoint URL’s break service flow if you enable SSL Inspection on the network devices between your client and the service. My most recent example of this Enterprise State Routing in Windows 10. Microsoft have a list of URLs for the endpoints to their service, where they are categorised as Default, Allow or…

  • Improving Password Security In the Cloud and On-Premises

    Passwords are well known to be generally insecure the way users create them. They don’t like “complex” passwords such as p9Y8Li!uk%al and so if they are forced to create a “complex” password due to a policy in say Active Directory, or because their password has expired and they need to generate a new one, they…

  • Azure Information Protection and SSL Inspection

    I came across this issue the other day, so thought I would add it to my blog. We were trying to get Azure Information Protection operating in a client, and all we could see when checking the download of the templates in File > Info inside an Office application was the following: The sequence of…

  • CannotEnterFinalizationTransientException On Exchange Move Request

    Did not find a lot on the internet on this particular error, so I guess it does not happen very often, but in my case it delayed to move of the mailbox in question by a week or so until I could resolve it. When a mailbox is moving to a different Exchange organization (cross-forest…

  • Exchange Server Object ID Error With Windows Server 2016 Domain Controllers

    Saw this error the other day: When you open Exchange Control Panel and view the Mailbox Delegation tab of any user account you get the following: The object <name> has been corrupted, and it’s in an inconsistent state. The following validation errors happened: The access control entry defines the ObjectType ‘9b026da6-0d3c-465c-8bee-5199d7165cba’ that can’t be resolved..…

  • Copy Links and Backlinks Between Users and Shared Mailboxes (automapping)

    Automap for shared mailboxes does not work across forests when moving mailboxes. When the user is granted permission to a shared mailbox, the default behaviour of automapping means that the shared mailbox has msExchDelegateListLink set to the DN of the user, and the backlink (hidden in AD by default) on the user is populated with…

  • Anonymous Emails Between On-Premises and Exchange Online

    When you set up Exchange Hybrid, it should configure your Exchange organizations (both on-premises and cloud) to support the fact that an email from a person in one of the organizations should appear as internal to a recipient in the other organization. In Outlook that means you will see “Display Name” at the top of…

  • Azure AD Single Sign-On Basic Auth Popup

    When configuring Azure AD SSO as part of Pass-Through Authentication (PTA) or with Password Hash Authentication (PHA) you need now (since March 2018) to only configure a single URL in the Intranet Zone in Windows. That URL is https://autologon.microsoftazuread-sso.com and this can be rolled out as a registry preference via Group Policy. Before March 2018…

  • Send-On-Behalf Permissions in Exchange Online

    This document is up to date as of November 2018 and is therefore unlike many earlier documents on this issue as this feature set is in the process of changing. First, Send-On-Behalf is changing so that it is supported across a hybrid Exchange Server to Exchange Online connection. At the time of writing this is…

  • New Underlying Search Functionality in Exchange Online

    Mentioned during Microsoft Ignite 2017, there is a new search functionality in place within Exchange Online. Not all mailboxes are able to make use of the new functionality, such as hit highlighting and search results being shown in-line with the results highlighted in context with the results. The reason that the functionality is not available…

  • 420 4.2.0 RESOLVER.ADR.Ambiguous; ambiguous address

    This error can turn up in Exchange Server when Exchange Server is trying to resolve the object that it should deliver a message to. Exchange queries Active Directory and expect that if the object exists in the directory, that the object exists only once. If the object exists more than once, this is the error…

  • Exchange Online Migration Batches–How Long Do They Exist For

    When you create a migration batch in Exchange Online, the default setting for a migration is to start the batch immediately and complete manually. So how long can you leave this batch before you need to complete it? As you can see from the below screenshot, the migration batch here was created on Feb 19th,…

  • Office 365 Retention Policies and Hybrid Public Folders

    If you create an Office 365 Retention Policy (in the Security and Compliance Center) that applies to all Exchange Online content then you might find that after the retention policy has been deployed (a day or so later usually) that the policy is in error and there is a message at the top of the…

  • Journal Rule Testing In Exchange Online

    I came across two interesting oddities in journaling in Exchange Online in the last few weeks that I noticed where not really mentioned anyway (or anywhere I could find that is). The first involces routing of journal reports and the second the selection of the journal target. The journal report, that is the message that…