Modern Authentication and MAPI-HTTP

27th of July, 2016 / / No Comments

If you haven’t heard, Modern Authentication (aka ADAL), has now officially gone GA (https://blogs.office.com/2015/11/19/updated-office-365-modern-authentication-public-preview/) – which means that if you are utilising Office 365 services, particularly Exchange Online, and Office 2013/2016 as your client, you should really be looking at enabling this functionality for your end users.

For those unfamiliar with Modern Auth, there are numerous benefits, but one of the most obvious for end users is it removes the need for the use of ‘save my credentials’ when signing into Exchange Online and provides a true SSO experience when combined with ADFS Federation.… [Keep reading] “Modern Authentication and MAPI-HTTP”

Office365 & Windows 10 Profile Pictures

20th of June, 2016 / / 2 Comments

At a customer recently, we were asked if we could provide a non-technical way of controlling profile pictures for both Office 365 and Windows 10. So straight away I thought, time for some PowerShell. I came up with the solution of having a number of shares on a server, which can be permission’d as required…

.\Source – for adding images
.\Replace – if a user wanted to change their picture
.\Remove – if a user opted out of the profile picture setup

As this was a new setup, I requested that they name the images UPN.jpg,… [Keep reading] “Office365 & Windows 10 Profile Pictures”

Configuring Intune Service to Service Connector for Exchange Online with a Service Account

4th of May, 2016 / / 2 Comments

If you are considering the use of Intune Conditional Access with Exchange Online it is generally recommended that you configure the Intune Service to Service Connector.  While it is not mandatory, it does provide your Intune Administrators the ability to report on the effectiveness of the Conditional Access Policies on your mobile ActiveSync clients within your Exchange Online environment.  In addition, if you wanted to enforce the use of the Outlook iOS/Android app using Exchange ActiveSync policies, as per my previous blog post here, setting up the connector would allow you to configure the ActiveSync access rules straight from the Intune Admin Portal.… [Keep reading] “Configuring Intune Service to Service Connector for Exchange Online with a Service Account”

WPAD and Proxy Auth Cause Exchange HCW to Fail

4th of May, 2016 / / No Comments

A recent conversation with a colleague reminded me of an issue I’ve faced a number of times (and forgotten to blog about) when running the Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) on Exchange 2010 or 2013 in an environment where Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol (WPAD) is used.

The Problem

The most common scenario where I’ve seen this come into play is along the lines of this:

  1. WPAD is used to distribute Proxy.PAC to client machines
  2. Customer permits direct connection from Exchange servers to Internet
  3. From an elevated command prompt, run “netsh winhttp reset proxy” to ensure a direct connection
  4. Change Internet Options settings from “Automatically detect settings” to “Disabled”
  5. Browse to a site restricted by the proxy to confirm proxy bypass is working
  6. Can connect to Exchange Online using Remote PowerShell
  7. Run the HCW but it fails with the following error in the logs:
    ERROR : System.Management.Automation.RemoteException:
… [Keep reading] “WPAD and Proxy Auth Cause Exchange HCW to Fail”

Enforcing Outlook App in Exchange Online and Intune Conditional Access

29th of April, 2016 / / 25 Comments

[UPDATE 23/11/16] Microsoft have announced a new method of doing what I describe in this blog post.  Matt Shadbolt from the Intune Engineering team has a nice blog post that describe how to use this new process, based on Intune MAM policies.  The below information is still useful though if you want to do more specific restrictions (e.g. iOS vs Android native clients).

What is Intune Conditional Access?

Intune Conditional Access is a pretty neat feature that allows administrators to enforce compliance policies to devices prior to allowing them access to sync their mail with Exchange Online.  … [Keep reading] “Enforcing Outlook App in Exchange Online and Intune Conditional Access”

Exchange Server hybrid “edition” myths and misunderstandings

28th of April, 2016 / / 35 Comments

There’s a common misunderstanding that Exchange Server hybrid (whichever version you may be running) is needed to be kept on-premises forever if you have Azure AD Connect. AADC syncs on-premises Active Directory with Azure AD. When AADC and federated identity is enabled, MOST of the cloud attributes in Azure AD are READ ONLY. From that statement it’s been understood that hybrid is needed to be maintained to do all that Exchange Online remote management goodness. Wrong!

I hate to burst the bubble here, but, I’m going to burst the bubble.

Exchange Server Hybrid

Being a consultant, I’m going to do that frustrating thing and say those famous words: “it depends on the situation”. I love being ambiguous sometimes as it affords room for different options and ideas which is great for brainstorming and architecting.

Looking at Exchange Server hybrid functionality independently of thinking about the common tech phrase “hybrid”, what does Exchange Server hybrid do? Put simply, which isn’t very clear on TechNet or other publications, hybrid creates send and receive connectors between on-premises and Office 365 EXO. It’s now just a wizard / setup application that completes a few commands that can be achieved manually through powershell. It’s not even an Exchange Server role anymore.

Read More

Programmatically read email from an Exchange Sever Mailbox

19th of April, 2016 / / 21 Comments

I can’t recall how many times I have come across a requirement to programmatically read emails from an Exchange Server mailbox and take some action based on the presence of new messages. The component reading the emails can read the mail content, parse its contents and transmit the data to other downstream systems. In this blog I’m going to take a look at one way we can do this.

Objective

In my scenario there was a requirement to develop a program to retrieve mails from an Exchange mailbox and, based on a specific criteria, send the email to multiple users based on an distribution list identifier.… [Keep reading] “Programmatically read email from an Exchange Sever Mailbox”

Consuming CSV files from an Exchange Mailbox via Exchange Web Services and FIM/MIM 2016 using the Granfeldt PowerShell MA

30th of March, 2016 / / No Comments

This solution on first look is quite random. A management agent that consumes a flat file (comma separated file) isn’t ground breaking, but when the twist is that the CSV file is in an email in an Exchange Inbox, it’s quite a different scenario.

Background

My customer uses a Cloud Service for their recruitment processes. The cloud service does have a SOAP API that I could potentially develop a FIM/MIM solution for using the Microsoft Web Services Management Agent, however my customer does not have API access to their tenant, the vendor isn’t overly responsive and I need a solution in days not weeks.… [Keep reading] “Consuming CSV files from an Exchange Mailbox via Exchange Web Services and FIM/MIM 2016 using the Granfeldt PowerShell MA”

Exchange Server 2016 Hybrid upgrade considerations

7th of March, 2016 / / 9 Comments

Exchange Server 2016, RTM as of October 2015, is still very much freshly baked having just come out of the oven from Redmond. Two recent projects that I’ve worked on have required me to consider deploying it as the “Hybrid” server (not an actual role- I’ll get to that later) for integration and coexistence with Office 365 Exchange Online.

With anything new there is a learning curve as to how the new product now works (not that dissimilar from previous versions of Exchange Server) and what will work with the existing environment to not compromise service.

There is an unwritten assumption that is made in our hybrid guidance that you have already properly deployed and completed the coexistence process with the current versions of Exchange in your on-premises environment.

– The Exchange Team

Read More

Use MailTips to help avoid those embarrassing email slips

22nd of February, 2016 / / 10 Comments

If you’re like me you probably have a lot of email addresses that auto-complete in Outlook because you spend a lot of your professional life in email.

As some point I bet you’ve also emailed Alan Smith at an external supplier rather than Alan Smyth in accounts because Outlook auto-complete did its thing and you didn’t notice. That is, until that split second after you clicked ‘Send’ or when Alan Smith replied with an email along the lines of “Errrr, don’t think this was meant for me”.… [Keep reading] “Use MailTips to help avoid those embarrassing email slips”