Group-based licensing is a simple way to automate the distribution of licenses to members of security groups. In this article, we review how the mechanism works and show how to automate operations with PowerShell. Finally, we update the tenant licensing report to include group-based licensing and to highlight duplicate license assignments.
On October 5, 2023, Microsoft announced the general availability of the new Teams 2.1 client. Based on a new architecture and promising better performance and lower system resource usage, Teams 2.1 is available for Windows and macOS desktops and browsers. The signs are good as the client has been in public preview since March, but we'll only really know how successful the client is after several months of use.
Years ago, we worried about ex-employees taking PSTs full of email away when they left an organization. OneDrive for Business is a more current concern because of its ability to synchronize large quantities of information to local workstations.
A previous article explains how to delete Teams chats using an interactive Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK session. This article builds on that information and explains how to use an Azure Automation runbook to find and remove specified chat threads by scanning all user accounts. The results of the scan and any removed chat threads are emailed to a nominated address at the end of processing.
At the TEC 2023 conference in Atlanta, Greg Taylor (Microsoft) analyzed the four-year project he led to remove basic authentication from Exchange Online. Microsoft will reuse the methods and tools developed for this project when it removes other features from Microsoft 365.
A beta version of a Graph API to delete Teams chat threads allows administrators to remove unwanted chats. This article reviews how the API requests work to delete, list, and undo deleted chat threads using cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. The first step is to find chats to remove, so we wrote a script to report all the chat threads for the signed-in user.
Many questions arose from the announcement of the Microsoft 365 multi-tenant organization (MTO) feature, In this article, I examine some practical aspects of multi-tenant organizations and examine why MTO does not replace the need for tenant-to-tenant migrations.
Microsoft has changed the way that the Search-UnifiedAuditLog cmdlet works without saying anything to Microsoft 365 customers. The results is that some scripts don't work and others won't return the expected results. This article explains what's happened and offers a workaround. Microsoft's actions are unexplainable, but it's the norm in this area where audit log changes happen without communication all the time.
A reader asked how to use a CSV file for bulk license assignment with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. We didn't have one to hand, so we wrote a new script to illustrate the principles of how to process license assignments for a set of user accounts (which don't necessarily have to come from a CSV file). We even included some error handling!
The multi-tenant organization (MTO) is a Microsoft 365 solution built on top of Entra ID cross-tenant synchronization. An MTO can span up to five tenants each with up to 100,000 synchronized users. It's an interesting solution that should be of interest to many large enterprises.
The Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK uses a default enterprise app to hold its permissions. Over time, the SDK can accrue many permissions, so it's important to control interactive access to it. In this article, we review how to lock down the SDK app and how to create new registered apps for use with the Graph SDK.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is only available for 4 Microsoft 365 SKUs. There's no technical reason why this is so. Instead, Microsoft is using Copilot as a selling point to convince customers to upgrade to Microsoft 365 E5 (preferably). All's fair in love and business, and this is just an example of product management for maximized profit.
