Commanding your Philips Hue lights with PowerShell

19th of March, 2018 / / 8 Comments

A couple of years ago I bought a number of Philips Hue bulbs and put them in the living areas of my house. Typically we control them via the Hue App on our phones, or via the Google Assistant. This all works very well, but of course I’m a techie and have a bunch of other Internet of Things devices and it would be great to integrate the Hue lights with those.
This post is the first in doing that integration.… [Keep reading] “Commanding your Philips Hue lights with PowerShell”

Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager v2, k-Anonymity and Have I Been Pwned

22nd of February, 2018 / / No Comments

Background

In August 2017 Troy Hunted released a sizeable list of Pwned Passwords. 320 Million in fact.
I subsequently wrote this post on Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager which called the API and sets a boolean attribute in the MIM Service that could be used with business logic to force users with accounts that have compromised passwords to change their password on next logon.
Whilst that was a proof of concept/discussion point of sorts AND  I had a disclaimer about sending passwords across the internet to a third-party service there was a lot of momentum around the HIBP API and I developed a solution and wrote this update to check the passwords locally.… [Keep reading] “Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager v2, k-Anonymity and Have I Been Pwned”

Automating the submission of WordPress Blog Posts to your Microsoft MVP Community Activities Profile using PowerShell

13th of February, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

In November last year (2017) I was honored to be awarded Microsoft MVP Status for Enterprise Mobility – Identity and Access. MVP Status is awarded based on community activities and even once you’ve attained MVP Status you need to keep your community activity contributions updated on your profile.
Up until recently this was done by accessing the portal and updating your profile, however mid last year a MVP PowerShell Module (big thanks to Francois-Xavier Cat and Emin Atac) was released that allows for some automation.… [Keep reading] “Automating the submission of WordPress Blog Posts to your Microsoft MVP Community Activities Profile using PowerShell”

Automating the creation of Azure IoT Hubs and the registration of IoT Devices with PowerShell and VS Code

5th of February, 2018 / / No Comments

The creation of an Azure IoT Hub is quick and simple, either through the Azure Portal or using PowerShell. But what can get more time-consuming is the registration of IoT Devices with the IoT Hub and generation of SAS Tokens for them for authentication.
In my experiments with micro-controllers and their integration with Azure IoT Services I often find I keep having to manually do tasks that should have just been automated. So I did. In this post I’ll cover using PowerShell to;

  • create an Azure IoT Hub
  • register an Azure IoT Device
  • generate a SAS Token for the IoT Device to use for authentication to an Azure IoT Hub from a Mongoose OS enabled ESP8266 micro controller

IoT Integration

Prerequisites

In order to fully test this, ideally you will have a micro-controller.… [Keep reading] “Automating the creation of Azure IoT Hubs and the registration of IoT Devices with PowerShell and VS Code”

Automating the generation of Microsoft Identity Manager Configuration Documentation

10th of January, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

Last year Microsoft released the Microsoft Identity Manager Configuration Documenter which is available here. It is a fantastic little tool from Microsoft that supersedes its predecessor from the Microsoft Identity Manager 2003 Resource Toolkit (which only documented the Sync Server Configuration).
Running the tool (a PowerShell Module) against a base out-of-the-box reference configuration for FIM/MIM Servers reconciled against an exported configuration from the MIM Sync and Service Servers from an implementation, generates an HTML Report document that details the existing configuration of the MIM Service and MIM Sync.… [Keep reading] “Automating the generation of Microsoft Identity Manager Configuration Documentation”

Checking and patching your Microsoft Windows computer for Meltdown and Spectre

6th of January, 2018 / / 6 Comments

Overview

A Google team named Project Zero in mid 2017 identified vulnerabilities with many Intel, AMD and ARM CPU’s that allow speculative pre-processing of code to be abused. Speculative pre-processing aids performance which is why it exists. However when used maliciously it would allow an attacker to use JavaScript in a webpage to access memory that could contain information present in a users environment such as key strokes, passwords and personal sensitive information.
A very good overview on the how (and a little of the why) is summarised in a series of tweets by Graham Sutherland here.… [Keep reading] “Checking and patching your Microsoft Windows computer for Meltdown and Spectre”

Provisioning Hybrid Exchange/Exchange Online Mailboxes with Microsoft Identity Manager

19th of December, 2017 / / 3 Comments

Introduction

Working for Kloud all our projects involve Cloud services, and all our customers have varying and unique requirements. Recently one of our customers embarked on their migration from On-Premise Exchange to Exchange Online. Nothing really groundbreaking there though, however they had a number of unique requirements including management of Litigation Hold. And that needed to be integrated with their existing Microsoft Identity Manager implementation (that currently provisions new users to their Exchange 2013 environment). They also required that management of the Exchange environment still be possible via the Exchange Management Console against a local Exchange server.… [Keep reading] “Provisioning Hybrid Exchange/Exchange Online Mailboxes with Microsoft Identity Manager”

Geographically Visualizing your workforce using Microsoft Identity Manager, xMatters and Power BI

30th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

In the last couple of weeks I’ve posted about visualizing relationships of data from Microsoft Identity Manager using Power BI. Earlier this week I posted about building a Management Agent for Microsoft Identity Manger to integrate with xMatters.
In this post I combine data from the last two in order to allow us to visualise the geographic office locations for an organisation and then summary data about it (how many employees are located there, and what departments).… [Keep reading] “Geographically Visualizing your workforce using Microsoft Identity Manager, xMatters and Power BI”

Building a FIM/MIM Management Agent for xMatters

28th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago one of my customers had a requirement to provision and manage identities into xMatters. The xMatters API Documentation looked straight-forward and I figured it would be pretty quick to knock up an PowerShell Management Agent.
The identification of users (People) in xMatters was indeed pretty quick. I was quickly able to enumerate all users (that had initially been seeded independent of FIM/MIM) and join them to corresponding users in the MetaVerse.… [Keep reading] “Building a FIM/MIM Management Agent for xMatters”

Graphically Visualizing Identity Hierarchy and Relationships

24th of November, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Almost 15 years ago Microsoft released Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) 2003. Microsoft also released a couple of Resource Toolkits for MIIS to assist customers and IT Integrators’ implement the product as up to that time it’s predecessor (Microsoft Metadirectory Services) was only available as part of a Microsoft Consulting engagement.
At the same time Microsoft provided a Beta product – Microsoft PolyArchy Server. For someone who’s brain is wired in highly visually way, this was a wow moment.… [Keep reading] “Graphically Visualizing Identity Hierarchy and Relationships”