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”

Using Intune and AAD to protect against Spectre and Meltdown

1st of February, 2018 / / No Comments

Kieran Jacobsen is a Melbourne based IT professional specialising in Microsoft infrastructure, automation and security. Kieran is Head of Information Technology for Microsoft partner, Readify.
I’m a big fan of Intune’s device compliance policies and Azure Active Directory’s (AAD) conditional access rules. They’re one piece of the puzzle in moving to a Beyond Corp model, that I believe is the future of enterprise networks.
Compliance policies allow us to define what it takes for a device (typically a client) to be considered secure.… [Keep reading] “Using Intune and AAD to protect against Spectre and Meltdown”

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”

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”

A modern way to track FIM/MIM Attribute Value History utilizing Power BI

20th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

Microsoft Identity Manager is fantastic for keeping data consistent between connected systems. Often however you want to know what a previous value of an attribute was. FIM/MIM however can only tell you the current value and the Management Agent it was received on and when.
In the past where I’ve had to provide a solution to either make sure an attribute has a unique value forever (e.g email address or loginID (don’t reuse email addresses or loginID)) or just attribute value history I’ve used two different approaches;

  • Store previous values in an SQL Table and have an SQL MA that flows out the values
  • Store historical values in a Multi-Valued attribute on the user object in the Metaverse

Both are valid approaches but often fall down when you want to quickly get a report on that metadata.… [Keep reading] “A modern way to track FIM/MIM Attribute Value History utilizing Power BI”

MIM configuration version control with Git

8th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

The first question usually asked when something goes wrong: What changed?
Some areas of FIM/MIM make it easy to answer that question, some more difficult. If the Reporting Services components haven’t been installed (pretty common), history within the Portal/Service is only retained for 30 days by default, but also contains all data changes not just configuration changes. So, how do we track configuration change?
I was inspired by colleague Darren Robinson’s post “Automate the nightly backup of your Development FIM/MIM Sync and Portal Servers Configuration“, but wanted more detail, automatic differences, and handy visualisation.… [Keep reading] “MIM configuration version control with Git”

'Generic' LDAP Connector for Azure AD Connect

3rd of November, 2017 / / 7 Comments

I’m working for a large corporate who has a large user account store in Oracle Unified Directory (LDAP).   They want to use these existing accounts and synchronise them to Azure Active Directory for Azure application services (such as future Office 365 services).
Microsoft state here that Azure Active Directory Connect (AAD Connect) will, in a ‘Future Release’ version, provide native LDAP support (“Connect to single on-premises LDAP directory”), so timing wise I’m in a tricky position – do I guide my customer to attempt to use the current version? … [Keep reading] “'Generic' LDAP Connector for Azure AD Connect”