Azure AD and Exchange Online store information about user principal names and email addresses, but they don't store the domain name of an account. In this article, we explain how to use a custom attribute to store the domain name and then use that with an adaptive scope in a Microsoft 365 retention policy.
Outlook groups and shared mailboxes both help small teams work with shared email. The decision as to which to use depends on the exact needs the team has. Microsoft has given Outlook groups some useful enhancements recently, but shared mailboxes are still the most email-friendly choice.
Now that they've disabled basic authentication for email connection protocols, Microsoft is doing the same for the Autodiscover service. This makes sense. There's no point in allowing basic authentication for Autodiscover when clients can't use basic authentication to connect. Microsoft will therefore turn off basic authentication for Autodiscover as it removes basic authentication for protocols like POP3, EAS, IMAP4, EWS, and MAPI.
Microsoft plans to launch a Pay As You Go backup and restore service for Exchange Online and SharePoint Online as part of its Syntex content management suite. This is new ground for Microsoft as they've never offered a backup service for Microsoft 365 before. How will Syntex compare to ISV backup services? Time will tell!
18 Comments
Microsoft 365 tenants can assign colors to the sensitivity labels used to mark files and messages. However, the set of colors chosen by Microsoft is frankly a bit weird. You can use PowerShell to assign different colors to labels and in this article, we show you how to use a traffic light color scheme.
For those wanting to eliminate the SMTP AUTH protocol, Microsoft has three ways to send email using Graph APIs. This article looks at how to use the Send-MgUserMail cmdlet and compares it to the Send-MgUserMessage cmdlet (covered in depth in a previous article). Our conclusion is that you'll probably end up using Send0-MgUserMail because it's easier to use.
A Wired article calls Exchange Server a security liability and it's hard to argue the case that the assertion is incorrect. Too many vulnerabilities, too many attacks, and an architecture that's creaking at the seams means that Exchange on-premises is at the end of its days.
Every month, Microsoft generates a new version of the Graph PowerShell SDK. And if you use the SDK with Azure Automation, you must update automation accounts with the new modules. That's a pain to do manually, but easy to automate with PowerShell as we explain here.
The Office 365 audit log is a rich source of forensic information. This article explains how to use Azure Automation to search the log for high-priority events. We use the new support for managed identities in V3.0 of the Exchange Online management PowerShell module to search the audit log and end up sending a nice HTML-format message to administrators.
Microsoft will launch a new Teams Premium product in early 2023 to make a set of security and compliance features (mostly) for Teams meetings available. Customers will be able to use the new functionality in preview for several months to understand if they need the new capabilities.
Everyone likes reports. Well, here's a PowerShell script to create a report of Exchange Online mailbox content. The script uses the Graph API to list every item more than a year old (you can remove the filter if you like) and creates an Excel workbook containing the data. What you do with the information afterwards is up to you!
The bad news is that Exchange Server has two more day-zero vulnerabilities to cope with. The good is that Microsoft has figured out some mitigations. The ongoing problem remains that attackers like to go after Exchange Server because so many servers are in a poor state of maintenance.
