Microsoft plans to enable Azure AD Security Defaults for Office 365 tenants created prior to October 2019. The move will protect an additional 60 million Azure AD accounts against common attacks by enforcing MFA more broadly. It's a big deal in terms of improving the overall security posture of Office 365. If you don't want to use Security Defaults, tenant administrators can switch them off.
Build 2022 is not an event that many IT Pros would naturally attend. The conference is focused on meeting the needs of developers rather than managing IT environments. However, buried in the slew of Microsoft announcements, there's a few topics that catch the eye. Here's what we found.
Any discussion about securing Microsoft Teams can rapidly descend into a detailed debate about different policy settings. But when you focus on what really needs to be done, it's all about making sure that user access is secure, external access is controlled, and individual teams are managed. Easy!
The Microsoft 365 Groups Ownership Governance policy is now generally available. Also known as the ownerless group policy, this capability allows organizations to make sure that all groups have owners by detecting ownerless groups and extending invitations to active group members to become owners. It's a useful capability, especially in large tenants with many groups.
Microsoft has released security updates for Exchange 2013, 2016, and 2019. The updates address some known elevation of permission vulnerabilities. Microsoft says that there's no evidence that attackers have exploited the vulnerabilities "in the wild," but that's no reason to avoid installing the security updates as soon as possible.
Organizations have lots of choice in terms of the licenses they buy to use Office 365 and Microsoft 365 functionality. If you're interested in compliance and data governance, maybe the Office 365 E5 plan delivers the best combination of functionality and price. Let's see what the numbers say.
Microsoft released Exchange Server 2019 CU12 and Exchange Server 2016 CU23 on April 20. They also made some important announcements, including a new half-yearly servicing cadence for Exchange 2019, availability of free Exchange 2019 keys for hybrid servers, support for Windows Server 2022, and the beginning of the ability to remove the last on-premises Exchange server.
When Microsoft released cross-tenant access settings into preview, the natural focus was on how this capability enabled external access to Teams shared channels. However, the story is deeper because cross-tenant access settings are also available for Azure AD B2B Collaboration (aka guest user access). A different blocking mechanism is used and it delivers better results, once you're used to the new method.
MSOL and AzureAD license management cmdlets stop working at the end of March 2024. By then, Microsoft 365 will have switched to a new license management platform. The Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK includes cmdlets which can replace the older code, once you know how. The good news is that this article is packed full of practical examples of how to add, remove, and update licenses assigned to Entra ID user accounts.
The Microsoft Graph operates on a least permission model, which means that developers are forced to ask for permissions for the actions they wish to perform. This is a very different approach to the way traditional PowerShell modules work, so it's an area to focus on when converting scripts which use cmdlets from the Azure AD and MSOL modules to the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. In this article, we look at four ways to find out what permissions are needed to perform different actions and explain how the Graph use the permissions.
Azure AD cross-tenant access settings or policies define how your tenant collaborates with other Microsoft 365 tenants. By default, collaboration using Azure B2B Direct Connect is disabled, so some work is needed to prepare for Teams shared channels. In this article, we look at how to set up cross-tenant policies to enable collaboration to begin using Teams shared channels.
Exchange Online boasts a set of mailbox permissions that allow delegate access to some (or all) content. In this article, we describe how to notify mailbox owners when administrators assign new permissions over their mailbox. Naturally, the notification is via email, but there are some twists along the way.
