A [brief] intro to Azure Resource Visualiser (ARMVIZ.io)

21st of February, 2017 / / No Comments

Another week, another Azure tool that I’ve come by and thought I’d share with the masses. Though this one isn’t a major revelation or a something that I’ve added to my Chrome work profile bookmarks bar like I did with the Azure Resource Explorer (as yet, though, I may well add this in the very near future), I certainly have it bookmarked in my Azure folder in Chrome bookmarks.

When working with Azure Resource Manager templates, you’re dealing with long JSON files.… [Keep reading] “A [brief] intro to Azure Resource Visualiser (ARMVIZ.io)”

Why are you not using Azure Resource Explorer (Preview)?

17th of February, 2017 / / 1 Comment

For almost two years the Azure Resource Explorer has been in preview. For almost two years barely anyone has used it. This stops today!

I’ve been playing around with the Azure Portal (ARM) and clicking away stumbled upon the Azure Resource Explorer; available via https://resources.azure.com. Before you go any further, click on that or open the URI in a new tab in your favourite browser (I’m using Chrome 56.x for Mac if you were wondering) and finally BOOKMARK IT!… [Keep reading] “Why are you not using Azure Resource Explorer (Preview)?”

Azure AD Connect pass-through authentication. Yes, no more AD FS required.

8th of December, 2016 / / 18 Comments

Originally posted on Lucian.Blog. Follow Lucian on Twitter: @LucianFrango.

***

Yesterday I received a notification email from Alex Simons (Director of PM, Microsoft Identity Division) which started like this:

Todays news might well be our biggest news of the year. Azure AD Pass-Through Authentication and Seamless Single Sign-on are now both in public preview!

So I thought I’d put together a streamlined overview of what this means for authentication with regards to the Microsoft Cloud and my thoughts on if I’d use it.… [Keep reading] “Azure AD Connect pass-through authentication. Yes, no more AD FS required.”

Real world Azure AD Connect: the case for TWO Azure AD Connect servers

6th of December, 2016 / / 4 Comments

I was exchanging some emails with an account manager (Andy Walker) at Kloud and thought the exchange would be for some interesting reading. Here’s the outcome in an expanded and much more helpful (to you dear reader) format…

***

Background

When working with the Microsoft Cloud and in particular with identity, depending on some of the configuration options, it can be quite important to have Azure AD Connect highly available. Unfortunately for us, Microsoft has not developed AADConnect to be highly available.… [Keep reading] “Real world Azure AD Connect: the case for TWO Azure AD Connect servers”

Real world Azure AD Connect: multi forest user and resource + user forest implementation

2nd of December, 2016 / / 17 Comments

Disclaimer: During October I spent a few weeks working on this blog posts solution at a customer and had to do the responsible thing and pull the pin on further time as I had hit a glass ceiling. I reached what I thought was possible with Azure AD Connect. In comes Nigel Jones (Identity Consultant @ Kloud) who, through a bit of persuasion from Darren (@darrenjrobinson), took it upon himself to smash through that glass ceiling of Azure AD Connect and figured this solution out.

… [Keep reading] “Real world Azure AD Connect: multi forest user and resource + user forest implementation”

Completing an Exchange Online Hybrid individual MoveRequest for a mailbox in a migration batch

29th of November, 2016 / / 14 Comments

I can’t remember for certain, however, I would say since at least Exchange Server 2010 Hybrid, there was always the ability to complete a MoveRequest from on-premises to Exchange Online manually (via PowerShell) for a mailbox that was a within a migration batch. It’s really important for all customers to have this feature and something I have used on every enterprise migration to Exchange Online.

What are we trying to achive here?

With enterprise customers and the potential for thousands of mailboxes to move from on-premises to Exchange Online, business analyst’s get their “kind in a candy store” on and sift through data to come up with relationships between mailboxes so these mailboxes can be grouped together in migration batches for synchronised cutovers.… [Keep reading] “Completing an Exchange Online Hybrid individual MoveRequest for a mailbox in a migration batch”

How to export user error data from Azure AD Connect with CSExport

24th of October, 2016 / / 1 Comment

A short post is a good post?! – the other day I had some problems with users synchronising with Azure AD via Azure AD Connect. Ultimately Azure AD Connect was not able to meet the requirements of the particular solution, as Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) 2016 has the final 5% of the config required for, as I found out, a complicated user+resource and user forest design.
In saying that though, during my troubleshooting, I was looking at ways to export the error data from Azure AD Connect.… [Keep reading] “How to export user error data from Azure AD Connect with CSExport”

Azure AD Connect: An error occurred executing configure AAD Sync task: user realm discovery failed

12th of October, 2016 / / No Comments

Yesterday (Tuesday October 11th, 2016) I started a routine install of Azure AD Connect. This project is for an upgrade from FIM 2010 R2 for a long time client; if you were wondering.
Unfortunately at the end of the process, when essentially the final part of the install was running, during the “Configure” process, I ran into some trouble.

Strike 1

I received the following error:

An error occurred executing Configure AAD Sync task: user_realm_discovery_failed: User realm discovery failed

This happened with the current, as of this blog post, version of Azure AD Connect: 1.1.281.0 (release: Sep 7th 2016).… [Keep reading] “Azure AD Connect: An error occurred executing configure AAD Sync task: user realm discovery failed”

Azure networking VNET architecture best practice update (post #MSIgnite 2016)

11th of October, 2016 / / No Comments

During Microsoft Ignite 2016 I attended a few Azure networking architecture sessions. Towards the end of the week, though, they did overlap some content which was not ideal. A key message was there though. An interesting bit of reference architecture information.
Of note and relevant to this blog post:

  • Migrate and disaster recover Azure workloads using Operations Management Suite by Mahesh Unnifrishan, Microsoft Program Manager
  • Review ExpressRoute for Office 365 configuration (routing, proxy and network security) by Paul Andrew, Senior Product Marketing Manager
  • Run highly available solutions on Microsoft Azure by Igal Figlin, Principal PM- Availability, Scalability and Performance on Azure
  • Gain insight into real-world usage of the Microsoft cloud using Azure ExpressRoute by Bala Natarajan Microsoft Program Manager
  • Achieve high-performance data centre expansion with Azure Networking by Narayan Annamalai, Principal PM Manager, Microsoft

Background

For the last few years there has been one piece of design around Azure Virtual Networks (VNETs) that caused angst.… [Keep reading] “Azure networking VNET architecture best practice update (post #MSIgnite 2016)”

[Updated] Yammer group and user export via Yammer API to JSON, then converted to CSV

22nd of September, 2016 / / 3 Comments

 
Update: awesome pro-tip
Big shout out to Scott Hoag (@ciphertxt on Twitter) with this pro-tip which will save you having to read this blog post. Yes, you don’t know what you don’t know.
Part of a Yammer network merge (which I am writing a blog post about.. WIP), you would lose data, posts, files etc as that can’t come across. You can however do an export of all that data to, depending on how much there is to export, usually a large .zip file. This is where Scott showed me the light. In that export, there are also two .csv files that contain all the user info in the first, and in the second all the group info. Knowing this, run that export process and you probably don’t need to read the rest of this blog post. #FacePalm.
HOWEVER, and that is a big however for a reason. The network export process does not export what members there are in groups in that groups.csv file. So if you want to to export Yammer groups and all their members, the below blog post is one way of doing that process, just a longer way… 

Yammer network merges are not pretty. I’m not taking a stab at you (Yammer developers and Microsoft Office 365 developers), but, I’m taking a stab.
There should be an option to allow at least group and group member data to be brought across when there is a network merge. Fair enough not bringing any data across as that can certainly be a headache with the vast amount of posts, photos, files and various content that consumes a Yammer network.
However, it would be considerably much less painful for customers if at least the groups and all their members could be merged. It would also make my life a little easier not having to do it.
Let me set the stage her and paint you a word picture. I’m no developer. Putting that out there from the start. I am good at problem solving though and I’m a black belt at finding information online (surfing the interwebs). So, after some deliberation, I found the following that might help with gathering group and user data, to be used for Yammer network merges.
Read More