Brian Reid – Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Certified Master
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Implementing High Volume Email with Exchange Online
High Volume Email (HVE) is a new service from Microsoft to allow the sending of up to 100,000 internal emails per day (with a small number external) which is in excess of the current limits of 10,000 per day (depending upon your licence). Here are my initial observations on setting this service up. During preview…
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Multi-Tenant Organizations: What Configuration Changes
When you configure a Multi-Tenant Organization in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center a number of changes occur across a number of services. These allow for features like member or guest sync, cross-tenant people search and different behaviours for joining meetings (treating people in other tenants as internal for meeting join). You can put all these…
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Configuring and Migrating From Entra ID Custom Controls to External Authentication Methods
Custom Controls date back to the Azure AD days and the ability to link an external MFA provider into authentication but without the full step of federation. This feature was in preview for years and never left preview, and was limited to I think three companies. Over the years I have seen this a number…
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Deleting a Rogue Passkey Device
If you try and set up a passkey in Windows there is the possibility that if it goes wrong you will end up with an entry for a device but no passkey. I got this for a OnePlus device as the OnePlus Android OS (at the time of writing) does not support allowing Microsoft Authenticator…
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Export Conditional Access Named Locations Using PowerShell
The named locations can be used in Conditional Access rules as a way to block or allow countries by IP address to geo-lookup database. Whilst not always accurate, and can be bypassed by VPN or a virtual machine in an allowed location, they do have their uses as a basic block to where services can…
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Blocking onmicrosoft.com Emails in Exchange Online Protection
There is a considerable uptick in emails from the default domain in Microsoft 365 tenants. These emails come from senders @ tenant.onmicrosoft.com and are not your tenant. Microsoft recently announced recipient external sender limits to reduce this, as the default is 10,000 recipients per day, but will get an additional restriction of no more than…
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Integrating Microsoft 365 SafeLinks and Mimecast Targeted Threat Protection
If your email protection filter is provided by Mimecast, then you might also have enabled Mimecast Targeted Threat Protection (TTP). TTP, like Microsoft Defender for Office SafeLinks will rewrite the URLs in email messages, but unlike SafeLinks will not rewrite or redirect them in Office documents or Teams chat, channel and meetings. Therefore as both…
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What Is “mx.microsoft”?
mx.microsoft is the new MX delivery domain for Exchange Online. For years now it has been mail.protection.outlook.com, but this domain will not work with the new DNSSEC extensions that Exchange Online will start to support. When you added a new domain (called a vanity domain) to Microsoft 365, it would show you the MX record…
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Copilot 365 in Teams Meetings – To Transcribe or Not?
In my opinion, one of the clear best features of Microsoft Copilot 365 is the integration with Microsoft Teams Meetings. The ability to ask for meeting notes, unanswered questions, and more is fantastic. But it needs to be (minimally) configured, so this is what you need to check. Blog post updated April 2025 with updates…
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Outlook Reactions – Unsubscribe and Resubscribe
You can “answer” and email in Outlook with a emoji, called a reaction. If you get a reaction in response to a message you will see the reaction in the message, via a notification on the “bell” icon on the top of the Outlook desktop window and in other places, and importantly for this blog…
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Testing Entra ID Claims and Single Sign-On Enterprise Apps
Updated October 2024 Microsoft has removed Claims X-Ray from their website. If I get an answer to this tweet I might discover more. Meanwhile something similar to the below can be done using https://jwt.ms as the redirect URL. There is a class of Enterprise App in Entra ID (previously known as Azure Active Directory) that…
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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!