- Fighting CEO Fraud
Attempted CEO Fraud has taken a rise, lately. I'll show how you can fight these and minimize impact in Office 365.
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- 2019 - Year in Review
Spoiler - 2019 was a good year! This is the recap.
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- Checking MFA Enrollment status
When rolling out MFA in your organization, you might want to periodically check which user haven't enrolled yet. You can use PowerShell to perform this check.
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- 10 Etiquette tips for Microsoft Teams
To make Microsoft Teams work in your organization, you might want to set up some rules on how to use it. Use these 10 etiqette guidelines to get you started!
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- Experts Live 2019 Presentation
Today, I had the pleasure of presenting a session at Experts Live 2019, on PowerShell, Intune and the Graph API
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- Limit MFA Enrollment to you corporate network
For security, you might want to limit the possibility to change your security information for self-service password reset or multifactor authentication to users inside your corporate network. You can do so using conditional access!
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- Block webmail access using conditional access
Using conditional access you can accomplish (almost) everything you want, security wise. In this blogpost we check out the steps required to block access to webmail through conditional access.
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- Using hardware MFA Tokens without Azure AD Premium
Hardware OATH tokens for Azure MFA are great, but require Azure AD Premium licenses. Using programmable tokens, u can still get MFA with a hardware token.
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- New blog engine
I changed the blog engine for my site. Some posts / images may not display, working on it!
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- Using OATH Tokens with Azure MFA
I took the Token2 OATH MFA Token for a spin in Azure AD.
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- Encrypting disks on an Azure VM
Due to all the new privay and data-protection rules like GDPR, a lot of companies are looking at using disk encryption on their servers. How do you manage this for your Azure VM's?
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- Presentation and code for Experts Live 2018
Donwload the presentation and demo code for my session at Experts Live 2018 on Skype Cloud PBX
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- Getting Intune device config Powershell scripts via the Graph API
I poke around the GraphAPI using PowerShell to see if I can manage my Intune device and compliance policies this way. Spoiler: you can!
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- Microsoft Authenticator to support account backup & recovery
Good news for everyone who, like me, uses the Microsoft Authenticator app for all his (or hers) multifactor authentication needs: a much requested feature will soon be available!
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- Saving MS Forms responses to SharePoint
Last Friday I had the privilege to speek at a Dutch Meetup on Office 365 adoption. This really was a nice experience, as it was a small group of people sharing the love for Office 365 and just talking about what makes the platform so fun to work with but also what the pain points are.
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- New in OneDrive - File Restore
A few days ago, Microsoft announced a new feature for the Office 365 Suite, specifically within OneDrive: the ability to restore files as a user.
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- Deleting rogue mailbox folder permissions using PowerShell
In this post we look at how to remove roque mailbox folder permissions, using the Exchange Managment Shell. Those permission can prevent a succesfull migration to Exchange Online!
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- Analyzing hybrid migration logs using PowerShell
While I’m currently working on migrating a customer from an on-prem Exchange environment to Exchange Online, in ran in to some problems with a few mailboxes.
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- Teams guest access - user experience
a quick look at the user experience when visiting a Microsoft Team as a guest.
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- Update to the 365Tools PowerShell Module
Earlier this week, I decided to add a new function to the 365Tools PowerShell module.
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- Whoomp, there it is - guest access for MS Teams!
It’s been a long awaited feature for the app that should be Microsoft’s answer to Slack: collaborating with users from outside your organization in Teams. While the feature has been announced earlier, it has been postponed moments before it’s initial launch date. But it’s finaly here: in this blogpost the general manager for Teams announces guest access for Teams.
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- Dupsug Basics - Part Deux
Op 19 september 2017 organiseert de Dutch Powershell User Group weer een ‘DuPSUG Basics’ event. Op 22 maart vorig jaar was de eerste keer dat er zo’n dag georganiseerd werd. Deze zeer goed bezochte editie smaakte waarschijnlijk naar meer, want er wordt nog regelmatig gevraagd wanneer de tweede editie gehouden wordt. Op Prinsjesdag, dus!
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- Getting VPN logging from Azure
Today, I was working with a customer who had some issues with a VPN connection from Azure to his on-premises environment. After checking the configuration, everything seemed to be okay. I decided to run some logging on the VPN connection from the Azure side, to see if I could pin-point the issue. For that, I usually use the following script, of course after logging in to Azure in Powershell using
Read Moreadd-azureaccount
:
- OneDrive Files on Demand - the new OneDrive experience
One of the things I'm looking forward to in the new Windows 10 Creators Fall update is the new OneDrive sync-client, which enables the files on demand functionality. In fact, I'm looking forward to it that much, I decided to enroll my device in the Windows 10 Insiders Fast Ring, so I could take the new client for a test drive right now.
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- Exchange Cached mode in RDS/VDI
Some notes / thoughts on working with Exchange Cached mode in VDI / RDS environments
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- Azure AD Group Based Licensing
When working with larger Office 365 and / or EM+S deployments, one of the pains for me has always been the automation of license assignment. You can provision users in Azure AD (and thus in Office 365) automatically using Azure AD Connect, and you could even add some magic with some PowerShell scripts to assign a license to these users based on OU or group-membership in your on-prem AD. The removal of these licenses takes even more scripting, where you would need to compare you on-prem group membership with the active licenses and remove licenses when needed.
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- 365Tools is in the Powershell gallery
After my previous post about my
Read Moreopen-msolconnection
function, I decided that it would be nice if I grouped all my commonly used PowerShell scripts for managing Office 365 in a single module, so I could publish it to the PowerShell gallery. So here it is!
- Connect to O365 Powershell with one command
For a few years, I’ve been using a simple script to connect to Office 365 using Powershell. In stead of typing all the commands needed to connect to both Azure AD and Exchange Online, I use a small piece of code placed in my Powershell profile to do all this for me. I simply type open-msolconnection from my Powershell prompt, specify my username and password and that’s it.
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- Checking out Staffhub in Office 365
Mid January, Microsoft announced the general availability of a new member of the Office 365 family: Microsoft Staffhub.
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- Home lab automation at DuPSUG
This just in: on March 9th I will be speaking at the 10th DuPSUG meeting. The meeting will be held in Utrecht and I will be speaking with Sven on the work we both did on the PowerShell module you can use to automate the (re)deployment of your home lab environment.
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- Completing individual moverequests from a migrationbatch
While working on a hybrid migration from Exchange 2010 to Office 365, I found myself in a place where I had a migration batch of approximately 350 mailboxes that was ready to complete, but I only wanted to complete around five of them so my costumer could do some further testing. This was something that was decided later on in the migration traject, so the migration batch was already set up and had synced.
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- The OneDrive admin-portal is in preview
Recently, Microsoft announced the OneDrive admin portal to be available in preview.
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- Pass-through authentication and SSO
In an earlier blogpost I wrote about the new ‘pass-through authentication’ feature that is in public preview in the new Azure AD Sync client.
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- AAD Pass-through authentication checked out
Exactly one week ago, Alex Simons announced what he called ‘the biggest news of the year’: the public preview of Azure AD Pass-through authentication and seamless single sign-on.
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- Further developing the homelab script
My previous post was about the script I used for my presentation at Experts Live: (re)building your homelab using PowerShell. As it turns out, someone got inspired 😉 Sven already did an update to the script by creating a variable for specifying the gateway address for your new VM.
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- Slides and code for Experts Live 2016
Last week i had the privilige to speak at Experts Live 2016. This has always been a great event to brush up on skills, gain some new knowledge and catch up with old and new friends from ’the industry’.
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- Building a home lab, the PowerShell way
I haven’t posted here in a while, but for a good reason: I started a new job! As of May 1th, I started working as a Senior IT Consultant at Hands On.
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- Exchange 2010 EMC issue resolved; so it seems
I blogged earlier about an issue when setting up a connection to Office 365 in the Exchange Management Console in Exchange 2010 (in this case, Service Pack 3, Rollup Update 12).
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- Free E-Book: Microsoft Intune Step-by-step
Just a quick blogpost this time, because colleague Ronny informed me that there’s a free E-Book to download on the Microsoft website: Microsoft Intune Step by Step.
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- Exchange 2010 hybrid connection in EMC fails with ExchangeBuild error
I ran in to an issue using Exchange 2010 in a Hybrid setup.
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- Finally SharePoint Online storage increase
The future is here! It was announced several times, but Microsoft finally upgraded the default available SharePoint Online storage for an Office 365 tenant to 1TB.
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- Remove calendar processing from a non-resource mailbox
Today I was working on converting an Office 365 room-mailbox to a ‘regular’ shared mailbox. The customer had some legitimate reasons to convert this mailbox, and who am I to question. 😉
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- What happens when my Office 365 subscription ends?
Your Office 365 subscription will end one day. Either because it expires, because payment wasn’t processed in time, or because you decided to cancel it. This doesn’t mean your data will be gone directly. There are several states before the subscription is fully deprovisioned.
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- Office 365 E5 will bring PSTN calling to The Netherlands before this summer!
Some breaking news at the Office 365 Drumbeat event today! The Office 365 E5 plan has been available for a while, but in The Netherlands, there was no PSTN-calling. You can currently use the PSTN conferencing dial-in, but you can not use your Skype for Business as a cloud based PBX. This will change! Before this summer, PSTN-calling will be available in The Netherlands. This was disclosed at the O365 Drumbeat conference in Amsterdam today.
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- Getting started with Powershell for Office 365
So, you manage a nice, shiny Office 365 tenant. You use the portal to take care of your admin needs like creating users, assigning licenses and setting permissions.
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- Use Outlook or Outlook for the Web?
Just a quick blog post today, on deciding whether you should use Outlook for the Web for you tasks, or you should use the full Outlook desktop client.
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- Change the Office 365 language for synced users
Office 365 is all about letting users set up their own environment and preferences. One of those preferences can be the language in the Office 365 interface. I work for a company in The Netherlands, where everyone speaks Dutch, but I still prefer my computer and software to be in English. In Office 365, I can set this up. Unless I’m a ‘synced user’, a user who originates in an on-prem AD and that is being synced to the cloud.
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- Tagging someone in your email
One of the previously announced features just showed up in our Office 365 tenant: tagging someone in an email.
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- Use Powershell to remove aliases from O365 users
First blog of the new year! Let me start off by wishing everyone a great 2016!
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- Skype Meeting Broadcast is GA!
The preview period has ended, and Skype Meeting Broadcast is now general available!
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- Fixing a messed up ESXi Passtrough configuration
Okay, not exactly O365-related but an issue I came across recently that needed to be fixed. You can see this post as some sort of documentation for myself 😉
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- Fingerprint readers and corporate email
Fingerprint readers are hot. Many phones now sport this nifty future helping you to unlock your phone even faster. Despite the fact that this Is pretty cool, it does bring some challenges to the admin. Ever since Exchange 2003, and all the way up to Office 365, Exchange has had the option to define a policy to secure the devices connecting through ActiveSync. You can disable camera’s or Bluetooth to protect data leakage from your organization, or define a policy that requires the user to set up a PIN on his device when connecting to his (or her) corporate email account.
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- Naar Experts Live 2015?
As Experts Live is a Dutch event, this post is in Dutch. 🙂
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- stopped-extension-dll-exception when running DirSync
Today I ran into a problem at a costumer. They are running an Exchange 2013 server in a hybrid configuration with O365. Part of the users are on the local Exchange server, but the main part of the users use O365 for their mailbox needs.
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- Managing O365 groups with PowerShell
One of the much appreciated features in Office 365 are the new Office 365 Groups.
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- Message trace retention in O365
There seems to be some misunderstanding about the retention of message trace data in Office 365. To be clear: this data is stored for 90 days. You can find this info on TechNet.
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- 365 Dude at Experts Live 2015
On November 19th I’ll be at Experts Live 2015 in Ede. This year I will not only be there listening to the cool sessions on all new Microsoft technology and absorbing all the knowledge, but I’ll also present a session myself.
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- Redesigning your meeting room? Think Vytru.
One of the highest scoring devices when it comes to coolness, at least in my humble opinion, are Lync Room Systems.
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- Backup your Windows 10 machine to Azure
Cloud first, mobile first, right? But what will I do with the data that lives on my machine, but I don’t want to (or cannot) sync with OneDrive? I need to backup that data!
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- Enable single sign on when joining Azure AD
One of the perks of Windows 10 in combination with Office 365 and Azure AD is the new ‘join Azure AD’ function.
This enables a few things. One of them is the automatic enrollment in MDM or Intune, which I’ll cover in an upcoming blog post. Another cool thing I’ll demonstrate here: it enables single sign-on to Azure-bases services such as the various Office 365 services.
We’ll start with a sparkling new Windows 10 system. It’s the Pro-version on x64, but you’ll experience will be the same on other versions.
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- Time to check your PoSH-connection to Exchange Online
I’ve been using the same action to connect my Powershell-session to Office 365 and Exchange Online for quite some time now. A while ago, I created a function that lives in my ‘all users, all hosts’ Powershell-profile to setup the remoting session to Exchange Online:
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- Use Powershell to check on external sharing in SP Online
Sharepoint online enables you to share (sub)sites, lists, libraries or files with external user, when the tenant administrator allows this feature.
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- Surface hub now available for purchase
For a while, Microsoft pushed the Lync Room System as the go-to product when designing your meeting room to use with Lync / Skype for Business. Those systems created an integrated experience to bring Lync or Skype for Business to the meeting room. Those room systems are not an actual Microsoft product, but were 3rd-party solutions based on the guidelines provided by Microsoft.
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- Skype Meeting Broadcast checked out
As mentioned in an earlier blogpost, you can now start with testdriving the new Skype Meeting Broadcast functionality. So I did 🙂
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- IFTT now supports O365 Channels!
For those of you that don’t know IFTT yet: get to know it now! IFTT (that’s short for If this, then that) is a cool cloud based service to connect different platforms.
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- Using cmdlet extensions to automate Exchange
There are some days I actualy feel sorry for my colleagues. Not because we hate our jobs (far from!) or because we have to drink bad coffee while in the office, but because my standard resposne to every request for help seems to be:
Have you tried using Powershell? 😉
- Use a PoSH-function to connect to MS Online
I like to make my life as easy as possible. One of the ways is doing this, is bij using Powershell whenever I can. To quicly connect to O365 and Azure AD through PoSH, I use a simple function in my Powershell-profile.
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- Testdrive the new Skype for Business features
In case you missed it: it is possible to sign up for the preview of the new Skype for Business features that were recently announced.
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- Get to know the real Windows-geeks in your environment
I always like to check out who is using my environment, be it an on-prem Exchange setup or an Office 365 tenant.
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One of the things I find interesting, is checking in on the devices being used to connect to Exchange. Mostly because it can warn me of issues that my occur; it wouldn’t be the first time some iOS update causes trouble. The second reason I like to do this, is because I like to know what user are the first to upgrade their device, be it Apple, Android or anything else. Those ‘early adopters’ might be the perfect users to help in testing out new features in Office 365. They’re usualy tech-savy and willing to cope with issues that come with working with bleading edge technology.
When iOS7 was released, I used this simple Powershell one-liner to check on all devices running this operating sytem:
- Managing Office-installation for your users in O365
One of the perks of having an Office 365 E3 (or higher) subscription are the licenses for using the full office suite.
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- Setting Google as search provider in Edge
In the last few Windows 10 Preview builds, I fell in love with Edge. Seriously, it’s one of the best browsers i’ve ever seen. It’s fast, responsive and some extra features like the ‘ask cortana’ context menu and the reading list feature sometimes come in very handy.
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- Office for Mac 2016 released
A few days ago, Microsoft released the Office 2016 suite for Mac.
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