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.
In an announcement that will surprise many, Microsoft announced the introduction of a tenant-wide external recipient rate limit for Exchange Online tenants to roll out starting on March 3, 2025. The new limit is designed to stop bad actors using Exchange Online as a spam platform. Microsoft says that its telemetry indicates that the new TERRL will not impact many tenants, but that fact is worth checking for any organization.
Most Microsoft 365 tenants have a collection of Entra ID apps to manage. One task might be to control access to Entra ID apps, so the question is how best to do this. Assignments for users and groups control the ability to use apps while custom app roles are there for developers to determine what a user can done when they run an app.
The Microsoft Graph API offers great access to SharePoint Online site content, but sometimes the need exists to resist app access to SharePoint Online sites. That's where the Sites.Selected Graph permission comes in by allowing administrators to dictate exactly which sites an app can access. Practice the Principle of Least Permission!
Everyone's very excited about the potential goodness of Copilot agents, but how Microsoft 365 tenants will manage potentially thousands of agents in the future is something that isn't clear. Some administrative capabilities are in the Microsoft 365 admin center, but are these sufficient? We don't think so, and this article explains why and what we'd do about the problem.
