Office 365
Tuesday, July 14, 2020
I’m going to continue my recent look at securing your Office 365/Azure AD directory with a quick dive into using Conditional Access rules to protect your directory’s most prized asset - accounts with admin roles.
These are roles that can be used to accomplish admin tasks within your organisation’s Office 365/Azure AD and Azure estate and they are important because they are essentially the keys to the kingdom. While you should be looking to secure all your accounts because all your users probably have access to sensitive information, systems or services; admin accounts are the accounts that give their user access to your entire estate in one or two leaps.
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Sunday, July 5, 2020
As the pace of attacks continues against companies who use online services, major IAM providers such as Microsoft and Okta are looking for ways to improve theirs and your security game.
I was fortunate enough to attend the 2019 Okta forum in London and one of the drums Okta beat throughout the entire presentation was Passwordless Authentication. Microsoft are also recommending this as a major improvement to Office 365/Azure security even on top of MFA.
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Friday, July 3, 2020
I suspect most of you reading this article will already know this, but part of Microsoft’s Azure AD (AAD) / Office 365 Cloud directory service that you get when you pay for premium AAD is Conditional Access (CA), which can be used to allow quite sophisticated access controls for accessing Office 365 resources.
Of course, you get basic Office 365 MFA with the basic Office 365 enterprise product, and you should absolutely look into enrolling your users and turning this on straight away if that is what you have.
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Tuesday, June 9, 2020
Has this ever happened to you? You're using Teams like normal and one day it doesn't start. No reason, just the usual Teams error that tells you nothing. You try the usual workarounds (Mark Vale's write-up on cleaning the Teams Cache is invaluable) but nothing helps. So back to that error that doesn't tell you anything.
Teams being helpful Or maybe it does tell you something. The error code in the bottom left corner: CAA70007.
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Saturday, May 11, 2019
Introduction When talking about how Intune works with a colleague, I likened assembling a working Intune configuration to protect corporate devices and data to working with small pieces of Lego to build a house. The reason for this comparison is that a managed Intune environment is built up of lots of different components that can all be slotted together - or left out - to build the environment you want.
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Saturday, March 30, 2019
Introduction to Microsoft Mobile Device Management I'm currently settling in to a new job where I'm spending a fair amount of time working with Microsoft's Mobile security management tools, mostly Microsoft Intune. This is largely what I was doing towards the end of my old job too, and while there's some great people writing great material out there, I think there's a lack of articles that try to start at the beginning with current (as of April 2019) tools and pull all the strands together, so that's what we're going to talk about here.
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Thursday, August 23, 2018
IntroductionOne of the new features in Windows 10 1803 is the ability for "local Active Directory" Domain joined workstations to allow users to reset their password from the login screen. This was introduced for Azure Active Directory joined systems in Windows 10 1709. In this post I’m quickly going to run through what you need to do in order to configure this for your domain. I’m making the following assumptions:
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Saturday, September 9, 2017
One of the things that I’ve always been interested in is automation, and being able to reproduce a ‘known state’ reliably and consistently. This applies at work when building servers or workstations thanks to tools like SCCM and Fog, and should be in your grasp at home or in even the smallest office, thanks to Chocolatey.
Not to make a fine point of it, between my last post and this one I’ve rebuilt my PC, installing windows from scratch and all my applications, prepared breakfast for my partner and myself, started some laundry, and dealt with the cat pulling the net curtains down in my study.
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Tuesday, August 8, 2017
One of the things I’m working on at the moment is moving the remainder of our Exchange organisation over to Office 365 / Exchange Online.
We moved the bulk of our accounts some time ago; students here have been on Office 365 Exchange email for a few years, but staff and ‘role’ email accounts have been held on local Exchange servers until this month.
The things I’ve seen people worry about on these migrations have actually been the least of my worries.
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Sunday, October 2, 2016
{There was a section here on converting Windows 2016 server eval to full version for enterprise customers, but as Windows 2016 is properly out there now it seems pointless. I've pasted what was here into the comments below in case anyone needs it} Upgrading ADFS The first question after deciding to roll out a new version of Windows server into your organisation is what to deploy first, and the answer for me, at least, turned out to be ADFS 4.
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Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Just lately Microsoft seem to be determined to mix up brand names to confuse customers.
For a while now we’ve had OneDrive for Business, the product that is built on the back of totally has nothing to do with OneDrive. OneDrive is your typical cloud file sync platform… and actually one I like enough to make my primary cloud storage of choice. OneDrive for Business is the name Microsoft have decided to give to uploading documents to a personal document library in SharePoint, in particular SharePoint Online/Office365.
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Sunday, August 4, 2013
I’m currently heading an Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013 migration at work and I’m going to share the thoughts and notes that I’ve made on the process so far.
The actual install process was fairly painless to be fair, with one CAS and two Mailbox servers currently configured, but I have encountered one problem with certificates that I thought I would share:
We required a new Unified Comms certificate as part of the rollout, so I used the Exchange Admin Centre (EAC/ECP) to generate a Certificate Signing Request on the CAS server.
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