Zoom – C7 Solutions

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 up admin consent requests in Azure AD you may find this breaks – the user requests consent calendar and contact access via the Zoom profile page (https://zoom.us/profile), chooses Office 365 and gets the following prompt.

End user consent form for Zoom application

The admin gets a request for approval email (as consent requested permissions are high [write calendar and write contacts]) and then once approved the user gets an email telling them so.

So the user goes back to the Zoom profile and tries again – and they get the same option as above. Though the admin has approved the app, it appears the user keeps asking for the admin to approve it.

The fix for this is in the Zoom admin Account Settings pages at https://zoom.us/account/setting and then scrolling down a long way to the “Calendar and Contacts” section (just search the page for 365 to find this bit).

Here you need to disable the option where users are asked to request consent. As in Azure AD you have set “admin grants consent”, you need to match this setting in the Zoom admin pages. This setting is as follows:

Zoom options on who requests consent and the O365 OAuth 2.0 option

Ensure the option highlighted matches your Azure AD consent settings – that means, as admin approval is recommended in Azure AD this setting in Zoom should be turned off (user does not request consent).

Other useful options you can set when you are here are to force the user to only consent for Office 365 (remove Google and Exchange Server options). Obviously if you have users mailboxes on either of these platforms and O365 you would not set the lock to the right as shown below:

Select your mail platform and lock consent options to that platform only

This hides this option from the user when they go to choose consent:

Which service to access in Zoom – this option can be locked to the only service you need

Once the platform is locked, the users experience removes the above page and shows the following in their Zoom profile:

Zoom profile and calendar access limited to a single platform

Then finally, you can enable the “Enforce OAuth 2.0 option” for Office 365, which is the last option in this section. This stops the user consenting via a legacy method that uses EWS and requires more than necessary permissions. By disabling this option you reduce the end user choices during calendar consent – that is you chose to consent and it is done rather than their being more steps than might be useful!

Here are my recommended settings for Zoom consent as described above:

Choose your service provider. If using Exchange Server and one of the other two cloud platforms, set Exchange Server as the default so that the EWS URL is provided to the user. Set the others as default and the EWS URL is blank in Zoom profile and the user needs to enter it.
Lock this if using only one provider
Turn this off and ensure you require Admin Consent (Microsoft default to this since the end of 2020)
Set O365 consent to OAuth 2.0 to turn off the EWS option for Exchange Online. This setting does not affect your Exchange Server EWS URL mentioned above.

Photo by Julia M Cameron from Pexels

Why is the Text in my Teams Background Back To Front

With Teams (and Zoom, and probably other video conferencing apps) as well as apps that add to the live camera image such Chromacam and Snap Camera in popular use, you might have noticed that all the example backgrounds have no text on them.

So what happens when you or your company roll out a set background to use that does contain text – for example, this mockup image:

Teams background mockup with text — Teams Background With Added Text

Now my graphics editing skills are not great, but this is just one of the included background images that come with Microsoft Teams and a logo added as if it were a picture on the wall.

So what happens when I use this as my custom background in Teams (or Zoom etc.) – the following is what I see:

Teams (Presenter View) on Desktop with Text In Background Meeting

You can see that in the view of the background I can see the text is back to front. This is correct, as the view from my camera that is presented back to me is usually mirrored for my convenience. This is because they way I see myself is in a mirror, and so to show me “unmirrored” so to speak would look odd to me. Also if I raise one hand or move to one side, the mirrored image of me from my camera shows this happening on the side of the screen I would naturally expect it to be on.

The downside of this is that any text we add to background images will appear back to front for us – but it will appear correct to all attendees, as the Teams will not show the attendees the mirrored image. Just as we expect to see a mirror image when looking at ourselves, others who look at us do not expect to see that, and the video conferencing apps will not show that to them – so they see your logo, or text or whatever, correctly as you intended.