Brian Reid – Microsoft 365 Subject Matter Expert

Brian Reid – Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Certified Master

  • Outbound Email Via Exchange Online Protection When Using Hybrid Exchange Online

    In a long term hybrid scenario, where you have Exchange Online and Exchange Server configured and mailboxes on both, internet bound email from your on-premises servers can route in two general ways. The first is outbound via whatever you had in place before you moved to Office 365. You might have configured Exchange Online to…

  • Duplicate Exchange Online and Exchange Server Mailboxes

    With a hybrid Exchange Online deployment, where you have Exchange Server on-premises and Exchange Online configured in the cloud, and utilising AADConnect to synchronize the directories, you should never find that a synced user object is configured as both a mailbox in Exchange Online and a mailbox on-premises. When Active Directory is synced to Azure…

  • Enable Report Message Add-In For Office 365

    There is a new add-in available for Outlook and OWA in Office 365 that can simplify spam and phishing reporting to Microsoft for content in your mailbox. I recommend rolling this add-in out to everyone in your Office 365 tenant and for Office 365 consultants to add this as part of the default steps in…

  • SSPT RRAS VPN with Wildcard Certificate–Client Issues

    If you set up an SSTP VPN on Windows RRAS server and are using a wildcard certificate, there are client settings to fix before the client can connect. If you run the Windows 10 client through the default setup for a VPN you get the following error. This reads “The remove access connection completed, but…

  • Office 365 Advance Threat Protection Attachment Preview

    It is now possible to preview attachments that Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is currently in the process of checking. This was enabled on my tenant recently and so will come to all tenants soon. It was mentioned at Microsoft Ignite 2017. It looks like this. You get the email with the standard ATP attachment saying…

  • Configuring Hybrid Device Join On Active Directory with SSO

    The instructions from Microsoft at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/device-management-hybrid-azuread-joined-devices-setup are missing some of the steps on setting up hybrid device join to Azure AD. This is a complete list of steps when Pass-Thru auth with SSO is enabled on the domain. Enable SSO – this is covered elsewhere. You can also do hybrid device join on a federated…

  • Conversation Red Number in Skype For Business That Won’t Go Away

    Conversation Red Number in Skype For Business That Won’t Go Away

    I have had this issue for ages, but could not find any answer for it on the internet that did not involve resetting Skype for Business or other complex stuff when in fact the answer is so easy it hurts! Finding it was one of those Duh! moments. You have this: Skype for Business shows…

  • Office 365 and ACDC

    The best connectivity to Office 365 is achieved with local internet breakout and local DNS egress. This means things like each branch office should connect directly to the internet and not via the Head Office and then to the internet and that DNS lookups are done local as well. The reason for DNS lookups is…

  • Outlook Authentication Broken–Username and Password Missing

    I came across an issue recently where the Outlook security dialog box popup was broken. Rather than looking as below, the username and password fields where missing: The dialog box appeared as: Notice that the username and password fields are missing! Also missing, and the key to this issue, is the picture is missing too.…

  • Unexpected Security and Compliance Center Changes

    In the last few days the layout of the Security and Compliance Center with regard to the Threat Management section appears to have changed. In the middle of the week just gone, and for a long while previously, you could access Mail Filtering, Anti-malware, and DKIM from Security and Compliance > Threat Management and see…

  • Azure AD SSO and Disabled Computer Accounts

    When you set up Azure AD SSO, the Azure AD Connect application creates a computer account called AZUREADSSOACC. Do not disable this account, or SSO stops working. I’ve had a few clients in the past week disable this when generally disabling all the computer accounts that have not logged in for X days. Therefore if…

  • DMARC Quarantine Issues

    I saw the following error with a client the other day when sending emails from the client to any of the Virgin Media owned consumer ISP email addresses (virginmedia.com, ntlworld.com, blueyonder.com etc.) mx3.mnd.ukmail.iss.as9143.net gave this error:vLkg1v00o2hp5bc01Lkg9w DMARC validation failed with result 3.00:quarantine In the above, the server name (…as9143.net) might change as will the value…

  • How To Run an Advanced Threat Protection Proof of Concept

    I put the following post together as I was asked this question from Microsoft themselves! This post covers what you need to put in place, and how you can test some of it (as testing the blocking of malware involves sending malware first!) First, lets take a look at the Advanced Threat Protection steps for…

  • On-Premises Public Folders, Exchange Online, And Multiple Forests

    Update: October 2018. Microsoft have added support to hide public folders in Exchange Online. Now rather than the below post from me, you can set a users mailbox to see public folders or not as required and then enable the global setting to turn on controlled access to public folders. For more see https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/announcing-support-for-controlled-connections-to-public-folders/ba-p/608591  …

  • Forcing Transport Level Secure Email With Exchange Online

    In Exchange Online there are a few different options for forcing email to require an encrypted connection. These depend upon the level of licence you have, and some of them are user based (Office 365 Message Encryption for example), but there are two ways to force TLS (transport layer security) for the email between when…

  • XOORG, Edge and Exchange 2010 Hybrid

    So you have found yourself in the position of moving to Exchange Online from a legacy version of Exchange Server, namely Exchange 2010. You are planning to move everyone, or mostly everyone to Exchange Online and directory synchronization plays a major part (can it play a minor part?) in your plans. So you have made…

  • Cloud Admins, AADConnect and Privilege Increase Issues

    Microsoft recommends that you stay on top of version updates to AADConnect. In version 1.1.553.0, which became available in June 2017, there is a reference to a gain in admin privileges that could be possible with password writeback (part of Azure AD Premium and EMS licences) that hints at a security issue. The following is…

  • Malware Filter Policy Updates in Office 365

    Updated August 2022 In March 2017 I wrote a blog post that showed how to take the attachment filter list from Edge Server and add those attachment block types to EOP, as EOP had a very small list of attachments. In June 2017 in one of my client tenants I noticed this precanned list of…

  • OWA and Conditional Access: Inconsistent Error Reports

    Here is a good error message. Its good, because I could not find any references to it on Google and the fault was nothing to do with the error message: The error says “something went wrong” and “Ref A: a long string of Hex Ref B: AMSEDGE0319 Ref C: Date Time”. The server name in…

  • Administrators, AADConnect and AdminSDHolder Issues (or why are some accounts having permission-issue)

    [Scripts updated 5th October 2017 to support updates for Exchange Hybrid Writeback. If you ran earlier versions of these scripts you will need to run them again] AdminSDHolder is something I come across a lot, but find a lot of admins are unaware of it. In brief it is any user that is a member…

  • Bypassing Focused Inbox and Clutter Folders

    For the last few years Exchange Online mailboxes have been processed by a service call Clutter, which moved the less important emails, or indeed the clutter, to a dedicated folder. This is now in the processes of being replaced by the Focused Inbox, which is client version dependant and is all based on views on…