Author: Tony Redmond

Latest Articles

Use PowerShell to Create a Report About the Teams Policies Assigned to User Accounts 10 Comments

Use PowerShell to Create a Report About the Teams Policies Assigned to User Accounts

Like all the other Microsoft 365 administrative consoles, the Teams admin center doesn't have any print options. If you want to print off any kind of information about Teams settings, you need to write your own code. PowerShell makes it easy to create a report about the Microsoft Teams policy assignments for user accounts. In this article, we explain how to extract policy information and generate a HTML report.

November 29, 2021
Improve MFA Effectiveness in Your Microsoft 365 Tenant in 30 Minutes 15 Comments

Improve MFA Effectiveness in Your Microsoft 365 Tenant in 30 Minutes

Microsoft has released two new features to help Multi-factor authentication for Azure AD accounts work smarter and better. It's possible to implement number matching and additional context for MFA challenges in 30 minutes, and the two increase the security of MFA. It's something that every Microsoft 365 tenant administrator should consider, as we explain here.

November 22, 2021
Using Adaptive Scopes with Retention Policies for SharePoint Online Sites 4 Comments

Using Adaptive Scopes with Retention Policies for SharePoint Online Sites

Adaptive scopes are a new way to target locations for Microsoft 365 retention policies. Previously, we covered how to use scopes to find users and groups. Now, we move to describe how to use adaptive scopes to find SharePoint Online sites and OneDrive for Business accounts. The process is not quite as easy as it is to create scopes for users and groups, but once you understand how to add custom properties to sites, you're home free and easy. That is, if you have the necessary Office 365 E5 licenses to use adaptive scopes...

November 15, 2021
Using Adaptive Scopes with Microsoft 365 Retention Policies for Users and Groups 24 Comments

Using Adaptive Scopes with Microsoft 365 Retention Policies for Users and Groups

Adaptive scopes are a new way to dynamically target sets of locations (sites, users, and groups) for Microsoft 365 retention policies. In this article, we discuss the basics of adaptive scopes and how to build the filters used in the scopes, and then how to use adaptive scopes in retention policies. Adaptive scopes are well suited to the kind of processing needed by large enterprises, which is good because they required Office 365 E5 licenses.

November 11, 2021
Using Certificate-based Authentication with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK 16 Comments

Using Certificate-based Authentication with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK

Although it's easy to write scripts using cmdlets in the Microsoft Graph PowerShell, SDK you probably don't want to execute the scripts interactively. In this article, we explain how to use certificate-based (app-only) authentication to run scripts. This is very much an explanation about how to accomplish the task in a testing environment. If you want to run scripts in production, some extra work is needed.

November 9, 2021
Loop, Mesh, Connect IQ, and Lots of Teams Dominate Office at Microsoft Ignite 2021 5 Comments

Loop, Mesh, Connect IQ, and Lots of Teams Dominate Office at Microsoft Ignite 2021

The Office news at Microsoft's Fall Ignite event was dominated by Teams and technology associated with Teams. A new Microsoft 365 app called Loop will be available in 2022 and we'll have the chance to use Connect IQ to make our messages even more intelligent than they are now. And if you really get funky, you can join a Teams mesh meetings in a virtual environment. But the bad news is that Teams Shared Channels are delayed until preview in early 2022.

November 2, 2021
Teams End-to-End Encryption Finally Rolls Out to Desktop Clients 3 Comments

Teams End-to-End Encryption Finally Rolls Out to Desktop Clients

Microsoft has made end-to-end encryption available in preview for Teams 1:1 calls on Windows and Mac desktop clients. The full roll-out to tenants is due in November. End to end encryption means that the workstations involved in both sides of a conversation do extra work to secure the communications. Although E2EE results in extra protection, it means that some call features cannot be used.

November 1, 2021
Ignite 2021 is Next Week. Here’s What I Anticipate for Microsoft 365 4 Comments

Ignite 2021 is Next Week. Here’s What I Anticipate for Microsoft 365

Microsoft Ignite 2021 happens (virtually) on Nov 2-4. There are tons of sessions scheduled and in this post we consider some important Microsoft 365 topics that we hope Microsoft will cover to help technologists plan tenant development over the coming year. Above all, we're looking forward to being able to attend conferences like Ignite in person so that we can learn from experts from inside and outside Microsoft.

October 26, 2021
Using the Microsoft SDK for PowerShell to Report Azure AD Account Sign-ins 9 Comments

Using the Microsoft SDK for PowerShell to Report Azure AD Account Sign-ins

The Microsoft Graph SDK for PowerShell can be used for many purposes, among which is access to Azure AD account sign-in data. In this article, we explain how to use the SDK cmdlets to retrieve sign-in data for both tenant and guest accounts and report what we find. You can use the report to identify potentially unused accounts which might not need some expensive licenses, or guest accounts that are no longer used.

October 26, 2021
Send Exchange Online Email Using the Microsoft Graph SDK for PowerShell 16 Comments

Send Exchange Online Email Using the Microsoft Graph SDK for PowerShell

Many people use the PowerShell Send-MailMessage cmdlet to send email from Exchange Online. In this article, we explain how to use cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph SDK for PowerShell to do the same job. The reason why this is important is that Microsoft will eventually deprecate the Send-MailMessage cmdlet as part of its campaign to eliminate basic authentication from Exchange Online. A replacement will be needed for all those PowerShell scripts which uses Send-MailMessage. This is one solution.

October 18, 2021
How to Create a Microsoft 365 Licensing Report Using the Microsoft Graph SDK for PowerShell 123 Comments

How to Create a Microsoft 365 Licensing Report Using the Microsoft Graph SDK for PowerShell

After figuring out how to convert a script from using Azure AD licensing cmdlets (due to stop working in June 2022), we move on to create a licensing report for a tenant using cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph SDK for PowerShell. The code is pretty straightforward, but you need to do some up-front work to extract and prepare some input files containing product and service plan codes. Given that Microsoft is increasing its license fees, it's a good time to report this information...

October 14, 2021