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”

Quick start guide for PnP PowerShell

1st of February, 2018 / / 2 Comments

It is quite easy and quick to set up PnP PowerShell on a local system and start using it. Considering that PnP PowerShell has been gaining a lot of momentum among Devs and Admins, I thought it would be good to have a post for everyone’s reference.
So why PnP PowerShell? Because it is the recommended and most updated PowerShell module for IT Pros to work on SharePoint Online, SharePoint on-premise and Office 365 Groups. It allows us to remotely maintain a SharePoint Online and Office 365 tenancy as we will see below.… [Keep reading] “Quick start guide for PnP PowerShell”

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”

Exchange Online & Splunk – Automating the solution

13th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

NOTES FROM THE FIELD:

I have recently been consulting on, what I think is a pretty cool engagement to integrate some Office365 mailbox data into the Splunk reporting platform.
I initially thought about using a .csv export methodology however through trial & error (more error than trial if I’m being honest), and realising that this method still required some manual interaction, I decided to embark on finding a fully automated solution.
The final solution comprises the below components:

  • Splunk HTTP event collector
    • Splunk hostname
    • Token from HTTP event collector config page
  • Azure automation account
    • Azure Run As Account
    • Azure Runbook
    • Exchange Online credentials (registered to Azure automation account

I’m not going to run through the creation of the automation account, or required credentials as these had already been created, however there is a great guide to configuring the solution I have used for this customer at  https://www.splunk.com/blog/2017/10/05/splunking-microsoft-cloud-data-part-3.html… [Keep reading] “Exchange Online & Splunk – Automating the solution”

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”

Restoring deleted OneDrive sites in Office365

16th of October, 2017 / / 1 Comment

A customer has requested whether it was possible to restore a OneDrive site that had been deleted when the user’s account was marked for deletion in AD. After a bit of research, I was able to restore the site back and retrieved the files (luckily it was deleted less than 30 days ago).
Read More

Enabling and using Managed Service Identity to access an Azure Key Vault with Azure PowerShell Functions

19th of September, 2017 / / 4 Comments

Introduction

At the end of last week (14 Sept 2017) Microsoft announced a new Azure Active Directory feature – Managed Service Identity. Managed Service Identity helps solve the chicken and egg bootstrap problem of needing credentials to connect to the Azure Key Vault to retrieve credentials. When used in conjunction with Virtual Machines, Web Apps and Azure Functions that meant having to implement methods to obfuscate credentials that were stored within them. I touched on one method that I’ve used a lot in this post here whereby I encrypt the credential and store it in the Application Settings, but it still required a keyfile to allow reversing of the encryption as part of the automation process.… [Keep reading] “Enabling and using Managed Service Identity to access an Azure Key Vault with Azure PowerShell Functions”

Easier portability of the FIMAutomation powershell snap-in

15th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

I am a fan of Ryan Newington’s MIM PowerShell modules, I think they are like the missing tools that Microsoft should have provided in the box from day one. Sometimes though, for various reasons, we may not have approval or access to use 3rd party or open source code, or other tools may expect exports to be in a specific format.
Using the FIMAutomation PSSnapin is easy … on servers with the MIM Service installed. … [Keep reading] “Easier portability of the FIMAutomation powershell snap-in”

Quickly creating and using an Azure Key Vault with PowerShell

14th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

A couple of weeks back I was messing around with the Azure Key Vault looking to centralise a bunch of credentials for my ever-growing list of Azure Functions that are automating numerous tasks. What I found was getting an Azure Key Vault setup and getting credentials in and out was a little more cumbersome than what I thought it should be. At that same point via Twitter this tweet appeared in my timeline from a retweet.… [Keep reading] “Quickly creating and using an Azure Key Vault with PowerShell”