App secrets are used to authenticate registered apps with Entra ID. App secrets (or passwords) are convenient and easy to use, but they're relatively insecure. The default app management policy for the tenant can block app secrets while custom app management policies can allow selective apps to use app secrets for testing or other well-defined purposes. All explained here.
A previous article explained how Microsoft 365 usage report data can highlight inactive Copilot users. If we add audit data to the mix, the analysis becomes much richer because we can see exactly what use people make of different Copilot apps, like Word, Chat, Outlook, and so on. Better data means better decisions!
Previously, the Graph APIs limited Outlook attachments to a maximum of 3 MB. That limit doesn't exist anymore, but the old method of uploading very large attachments in chunks to make sure that the operation is possible across flaky networks is still useful, so we explain how to do it here using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.
After a year or so of using the AuditLog Query Graph API, we have enough experience to be able to explain how to take advantage of the API and when it could be used to run audit searches instead of the Search-UnifiedAuditLog cmdlet. There's lots of PowerShell code in this article to give anyone who wants to experiment with the API a good start to finding audit events.
On April 3, Microsoft announced a 10% increase in prices for on-premises products including Exchange Server SE, SharePoint Server, and Skype for Business SE. Prices for CAL suites also increase with the Enterprise CAL increasing by 20%. The transition to the cloud means that on-premises engineering costs must be met by fewer customers, so it's higher prices all round!
Some people say that the Teams usage report (available in the Microsoft 365 admin center) is a great way of finding inactive teams. I consider that viewpoint to be rubbish because the Teams usage report doesn't include all the kinds of activities that a team might host. This article explains how to use audit data to supplement the usage report and create a better view of inactive teams.
For years, Microsoft has told us that items held by retention policies or eDiscovery holds are immutable and cannot be removed. Well, that's not quite the case as proven by the launch of the Purview Priority Cleanup solution, which is able to find and remove held items (only in Exchange Online for now). There's lots of interesting technology to discuss, but I wonder if Priority Cleanup is too complex and a tad slow to succeed.
In this Practical Graph article, we describe how to create SharePoint files using an Azure Automation runbook. The code uses the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK whenever possible, but we had to resort to Graph API requests at times. We also look at how to update document metadata for the newly uploaded files.
This article describes how to create a report about group-based licensing assignments and any errors that might have occurred. The code uses the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to fetch information about the groups used for licensing assignments, interpret the assignments, find users with assignment errors, and send email to inform administrators about what's been found.
Convincing people to use MFA is one challenge. Convincing them to use a stronger authentication method than SMS is another. This article explains how to use PowerShell to find people still using SMS for MFA and send email to ask them to upgrade their authentication method.
The need to restore deleted user accounts sometimes arises. The process is well understood and options are available to do the job in the Entra and Microsoft 365 admin centers. But if you need to restore a deleted user account and change its user principal name, that operation can only be done with PowerShell. This article explores why updating a user principal name during a restore might be necessary and the code to restore accounts.
This article explains how to use the SharePoint Pages API to create new site pages with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK after reading information from an RSS feed. Parsing the RSS feed to find article details is just one of the challenges encountered and solved to accomplish the goal.
