Brian Reid – Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Certified Master
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Windows LAPS and Granting Roles to Administrative Units
This blog post discusses how to create both a custom admin role for reading the LAPS password and settings stored in Entra ID and then assigning that role so that only device administrators of an Entra ID Administrative Unit can see the local admin password for the subset of devices they are able to manage.…
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Entra ID Multi-Factor Authentication/Conditional Access and External Federation Implementation
I have a few clients (not many) who have external federation for Entra ID (previously Azure Active Directory) and over the last year or so have been looking into these and integrating them with Entra ID Conditional Access. This has become more of an issue recently with Microsoft’s recently creation of “Microsoft Managed” Conditional Access…
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Renewing Apple Tokens in Intune
To sync Apple OS devices to Intune you need a token created by Apple and uploaded to Intune. There are at least 3 seperate tokens that you might use and each of these expires one year after creation and needs renewing before they expire. The three (plus) tokens you need are: Apple MDM Push Certificate…
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Inviting Google (Gmail) Users To Collaborate In Your Teams Channels
This post is not about inviting Google users to your meetings, where you just send them the meeting invite and all is good. This is about adding the Gmail user as a member of a Team, so they can see the Teams channels, chat and collaborate with files and apps along with everyone else in…
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Teams v2 Machine Wide Installer
There was a “machine wide installer” for Teams v1 (version 1) that was an .msi file (as opposed to an .exe file) that would install Teams in the “Program Files” folder area (in contrast to the %appdata% folders) so that on machines that had many users (shared devices, hotdesks, multi-user VDI or remote desktops) you…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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!
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…