Brian Reid – Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Certified Master

  • Adding App Tokens To Intune From Apple Business Manager  (VPP)

    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…

  • LAPS for Beginners

    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…

  • Domain Tenant Move and Device Join Issues

    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…

  • Post Tenant To Tenant Migration Calendaring Issues

    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…

  • Blocking More Obvious Phish – Attachment Filtering

    Blocking More Obvious Phish – Attachment Filtering

    One relatively easy way to block some categories of phishing email is to block the attachment type that is sent with some of these messages. For example, I have had a few of these recently: Hovering over the attachment I see the filename, and it ends .shtml. This attachment is for server-side HTML (SSI includes…

  • Exchange Hybrid Wizard – New Tenants and Missing Errors

    Exchange Hybrid Wizard – New Tenants and Missing Errors

    Rumoured to be fixed end of June 2023 A short blog post on this issue – you see in the Microsoft Exchange Server Hybrid Configuration Wizard logs the following error “Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message: Connecting to remote server outlook.office365.com failed with the following error message : For more information,…

  • Adobe Creative Cloud and Conditional Access Restrictions

    Adobe Creative Cloud and Conditional Access Restrictions

    In Azure Active Directory it is possible to create Conditional Access rules that restrict applications to only running on company owned or managed devices. Conditional Access approves or rejects the login based on that knowledge – so what happens if the app in question is running on a company (managed or compliant) machine, but the…

  • More Frequent Quarantine Notifications in Exchange Online Protection

    More Frequent Quarantine Notifications in Exchange Online Protection

    Available from the end of April 2023 there is now an option to increase the notification interval to end users about items in the quarantine. The Microsoft 365 Quarantine is at https://security.microsoft.com/quarantine and though this is a good link to add corporate intranets, its also a useful one for users to remember and bookmark. Up…

  • Join Button Not Working In Teams

    Join Button Not Working In Teams

    If you have any URL rewriting software in place outside of Microsoft 365 (i.e. not Defender for Office Safe Links) then you may find that functionality such as the Join button in the Teams Calendar view is broken and the only way to join is via the URL to the meeting: The only way you…

  • Restricting OneDrive To Multiple Tenants

    Restricting OneDrive To Multiple Tenants

    You can use GPO or Intune/MDM settings to restrict a number of settings with OneDrive. One of the documented settings is called “Allow syncing OneDrive accounts for only specific organizations”. Notice how it is a title in the plural – more than one organization. But if you look at all the documentation and examples others…

  • Zoom For Intune 5003 and Network Connection Errors

    Zoom For Intune 5003 and Network Connection Errors

    This was an interesting error to track down and fix. Its probably not going to affect a lot of my readers, but its was an interesting problem to get to the bottom of and it might apply for any Intune based app and not just Zoom. The specific scenario I have is a tenant to…

  • Migrating MFA Settings To Authentication Methods

    Migrating MFA Settings To Authentication Methods

    Released to Azure AD in December 2022 there is now a process for migrating from the legacy MFA methods and Self-Service Password Reset (SSPR) authentication methods to the unified Authentication Methods policies in Azure AD. This migration window is open until Jan 2024 when the legacy methods will be disabled. This change will allow you…

  • Troubleshooting AutoDetect

    Troubleshooting AutoDetect

    AutoDetect is like an “AutoDiscover of AutoDiscovers”. Exchange Online and Exchange Server administrators know the delights of AutoDiscover, which is a web service to tell the client where the mailbox is located (to return the endpoints and protocols that email is read from by the client). But AutoDiscover only works for Exchange based services (unless…

  • Managing Hybrid Exchange Online Without Installing an Exchange Server

    Managing Hybrid Exchange Online Without Installing an Exchange Server

    In April 2022 Microsoft finally released the ability to manage Active Directory synced attributes (Hybrid Identity) to Azure Active Directory for Exchange without a full Exchange Server installation. Instead, you install the Exchange Management Tools (EMT). You need to install Exchange Server 2019 CU12 or later to do this, and you either uninstall your existing…

  • Conditional Access in Defender for Cloud (MCAS)

    I was asked this question last week at Microsoft Ignite following a talk that I did, and as it was a question it was clearly not as clear cut as maybe I thought it was. The question was, “why is Conditional Access found in Azure AD and Defender for Cloud?” (Defender for Cloud was previously…

  • Conditional Access Authentication Strengths

    Newly released to Conditional Access in Azure AD is the “Authentication Strengths” settings. These allow you to control the strength of the authentication you need to be used for that conditional access rule. Before this feature was available you had the option of allowing access with no second factor, MFA as a second factor (any…

  • What Is “Multifactor Authentication Trusted IPs”

    In Azure AD for location based conditional access rules you can select “Multifactor Authentication Trusted IPs” as a location. This short blog post outlines what this is. As an example of the use of this location, it could be used as follows in Conditional Access: The location selected in the above is “Multifactor Authentication Trusted…

  • Getting Teams Meetings Added to Your Events When Using Apple iOS Calendar App

    A user can enable an “All Meetings Online” option in Outlook (all versions) to add a Teams meeting automatically when the meeting is created and an admin can enable this centrally for all users with the PowerShell Set-OrganizationConfig -OnlineMeetingsByDefaultEnabled $true But this does not add the meeting bridge to events created in Apple Calendar on…

  • Improving Exchange Online Email Deliverability Through Third Party Filtering Services – Trusted ARC Sealer

    When you receive emails into Exchange Online and you filter the external messages before arrival with a third party filter such as Mimecast, Proofpoint or others, then you can have DMARC failures that result in messages being junked or quarantined in Exchange Online. Trusted ARC Sealer is a feature of Exchange Online to allow you…

  • Fixing the Display of Voicemail In Outlook

    Fixing the Display of Voicemail In Outlook

    Once upon a time voicemail in Office 365 was done in Exchange Online Unified Messaging, but that was retired early 2020. Voicemail is now provided by a service known as Cloud Voicemail but Outlook did not keep up to date if you have a newly created tenant and now when voicemail arrives in Outlook it…

  • Gmail showing “via” in Microsoft 365 Email Headers

    I came across this issue the other day. In the headers of an email received from Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online into Gmail (and not other recipients) the message header reads “name@domain via otherdomain.onmicrosoft.com”, for example: In this case the via header for onmicrosoft.com was an old organization name and as tenant rename does not…