Microsoft has long been asked to support guest account expiration, just like the functionality available for on-premises Active Directory accounts. Engineering priorities have not allowed the developers to work on the feature, but it's possible to do the job with PowerShell as we explain here.
It's good to put a face on Azure AD Guest Accounts by updating the accounts with thumbnail photos. This article explains how to approach the process of gathering suitable photos and uploading them to Azure AD. We also discuss how to speed up the process by finding guest accounts that are missing photos so that the script can focus on those accounts.
A Graph API is available to extract details of the sensitivity labels assigned to SharePoint Online documents. This article explores how to extract the information from files in a document library and use it to create a report. The nice thing is that once you have the data, you can slice and dice it any way you wish in Excel, Power BI, or whatever tool you prefer.
Microsoft actively develops Azure AD external identities and doesn't do much with mail contacts. Maybe it's a good idea to migrate mail contacts to Azure AD guest accounts. This article explores what's involved in moving mail contacts over to Azure AD guest accounts using PowerShell.
Microsoft 365 auditing makes lots of data available to administrators to help them understand what happens in a tenant. When attackers try to compromise accounts, they can leave fingerprints behind in audit data. Being aware of what you might find in the data helps suppress BEC attacks.
Microsoft's announcement of Security Copilot is more interesting in some respects than Microsoft 365 Copilot because it promises to help organizations defend themselves better. Of course, we don't know much yet about how Security Copilot will work in the real world, but if Microsoft delivers what it says, Security Copilot could be quite a tool in the battle against the bad guys.
Copilot for Microsoft 365 generated a lot of media hype after its March 16 announcement. In this article, we contemplate some of the implementation issues that need to be teased out before Copilot for Microsoft 365 deployments start.
Microsoft released the preview version of the Loop app on March 22. The app works well for collaboration with people from the same Microsoft 365 tenant but fails utterly once external people are involved. Some other teething problems are evident, but there's enough in the Loop app for people to make their minds up if this will make collaboration smarter within their organization.
Microsoft announced that Exchange Online will block old Exchange Servers by throttling and then rejecting their inbound email into Exchange Online. The hope is that this tactic will convince those who operate unsupported versions of Exchange Server to upgrade and use supported software that isn't vulnerable to known attack vectors.
On March 16, Microsoft launched its latest AI-powered innovation in Microsoft 365 CoPilot, aimed at using AI to remove the drudgery of many Office tasks. We don't know when the new capabilities will be available or what they will cost. The demos looked wonderful, but how things work out when exposed to real users is an entirely different manner. Time will tell!
Among the latest set of patches released by Microsoft, a fix for CVE-2023-23397 is available to fix an NTLM vulnerability in Outlook for Windows clients. The update closes a hole where attackers can use specially formatted messages to force NTLM credentials to be sent outside the organization.
Microsoft 365 tenant administrators might want to know when user accounts receive a specific license. Unhappily, Azure AD license assignment dates can mislead, so some interpretation and personal knowledge might be needed to find out just when a user was licensed.
