Author: Tony Redmond

Azure AD Intune Windows 10

Priority Cleanup for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business Is Generally Available

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

Priority cleanup is a Microsoft Purview solution that allows tenants to remove items even when the items are subject to retention hold. That sounds like Priority cleanup goes against the nature of data governance, but sometimes it's more important to remove items than to keep them for their full retention period. This article explains how Priority Cleanup works and some of the important concepts that you need to master before removing anything.

• Microsoft Purview

January 5, 2026

Practical PowerShell: Creating a Purview Role Group and Membership Report

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

This article describes how to use PowerShell to create a report for Microsoft Purview role groups and their memberships, including identifying unknown objects in group membership and expanding the amount of information reported for each role holder.

• Microsoft Purview

December 10, 2025

How to Use the Exchange Admin API

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

On November 17, Microsoft announced the Exchange Admin API, a REST-based method of interacting with Exchange Online administrative functions. Having a new API sounds exciting, but in reality the Exchange Admin API is a limited tool to help Exchange Web Services (EWS) developers migrate their apps before Microsoft retires EWS in October 2026. That being said, here's how the API works.

• Exchange Online

December 1, 2025

2 Comments

Practical Graph: Creating a Service Principal Analysis for a Microsoft 365 Tenant

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

Understanding the set of registered and enterprise apps active in a Microsoft 365 tenant is important. Attackers can sneak in and plant an app to exfiltrate or otherwise steal data. This article explains how to use PowerShell to create a service principal analysis report that highlights common problems and gives tenant administrators the data needed to manage apps.

• Entra ID

November 17, 2025

Practical Graph: How to Check Unexpected Sign-Ins Against Utility Accounts

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

Utility accounts exist in every Microsoft 365 tenant. These accounts are not intended for normal user activity and include accounts used for Exchange room and shared mailboxes and the break-glass or emergency accounts intended to allow administrators to sign-in if their usual accounts are blocked. This article shows how to use PowerShell and the Microsoft Graph to check sign-in events to ensure that the accounts aren't being accessed.

• Exchange Online

November 11, 2025

Finding Unused Proxy Addresses for Exchange Online Mail-Enabled Objects

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

A request came in about how to find unused proxy addresses for Exchange Online mail-enabled objects. There's no out-of-the-box report available for proxy address usage, but we can solve the problem by using a PowerShell script to download historical message trace data to check every proxy address for all mailboxes against. The question then is what to do with the unused proxy addresses?

• Exchange Online

November 5, 2025

Practical PowerShell: How to Analyze Junk Email and Intercept Traffic from Spammy Domains

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

Despite the best efforts of anti-spam solutions, some unwanted messages usually get through to user inboxes. This article explains how to analyze messages that end up in Junk Email and use the results to create a transport rule to block future traffic from the spammy domains.

• Exchange Online

October 27, 2025

One comment

Practical Graph: Creating a Multi-Workload User Activity Report

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

Microsoft 365 comes with many usage report API covering different workloads. This article explains how to use PowerShell to extract usage data for multiple workloads to combine together to create a holistic view of user account activity within a Microsoft 365 tenant.

• Microsoft 365

October 20, 2025

Creating a Comprehensive Inactive Guest Account Report

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

Many examples of how to report inactive guest accounts are available on the internet, but they're all flawed because they make decisions based on the last sign in. That's a shortsighted method because it doesn't take guest activity into account. This article explains how to combine audit data with sign-in data to create an enhanced view of guest account activity so that intelligent decisions can be made to keep or retain the accounts.

• Entra ID

October 13, 2025

Entra Agents are Promising but Could do More

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

Microsoft's Alex Simons came to the TEC 2025 conference to talk about the future of Entra ID, a lot of which hangs on the use of AI in components like the Entra agents that are now in preview. The idea of using agents to relieve hard-pressed human administrators is great, but only if those agents do more than a skilled human administrator can do, and that's not the case so far.

• Entra ID

October 7, 2025

Practical Graph: Preparing PowerShell Scripts to Run in Azure Automation

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

Many PowerShell scripts need to run on a scheduled basis or have to process large amounts of data. Azure Automation runbooks are a good way to handle both types of task. This article describes three important and practical steps to improve writing PowerShell code for Azure Automation.

• PowerShell

September 29, 2025

Practical Graph: Finding the Last App Accessed by a User

• Post author:By Tony Redmond

A reader question asked if it was possible to find the last app accessed by a user. Of course, anything is possible with PowerShell, but how? In this article, we explore using the Entra ID sign-in logs and Microsoft 365 audit log as sources for finding the desired information. Some performance issues emerge, so we end up running the code in Azure Automation.

• Entra ID

September 22, 2025