Blog

Latest Articles

Scheduler for Microsoft 365 Debuts 2 Comments
Using Cortana and Scheduler for Microsoft 365 AI voice command

Scheduler for Microsoft 365 Debuts

Scheduler for Microsoft 365 is a new meeting scheduling service launched with a $10/month price tag (per user). Scheduler and Cortana work together to find the most suitable meeting times for participants to get together. Scheduler works for any kind of attendees (as long as they can receive email) and the big pay-out is that you can ask Cortana to set things up and leave the meeting for artificial intelligence to sort out. Sometimes things don't work out and humans need to get involved, and that's when privacy concerns come into play. If you can cope with the issues and have a lot of meetings to organize, Scheduler for Microsoft 365 might do a job for you.

June 17, 2021
Creating Personal Contacts in User Mailboxes with PowerShell and the Graph 43 Comments

Creating Personal Contacts in User Mailboxes with PowerShell and the Graph

An earlier article explained how to create organizational contacts in user mailboxes with Graph API calls. This article builds on that idea with three improvements. First, we select target mailboxes for update by looking for those added in the last month. Second, we allow any mail-enabled recipient to be added as an organizational contact. Third, we incorporate some code to check if a contact already exists in a mailbox. Like anything with PowerShell, this code can be improved..

June 15, 2021
Taking Control of Your Unmanaged PCs with Intune One comment
Azure AD Intune Windows 10

Taking Control of Your Unmanaged PCs with Intune

In a frantic rush to enable remote workers at the onset of the pandemic, many organizations were forced to ship devices directly to the user from the supplier without any prior configuration by IT. Administrators must take back control to properly secure and manage these devices. This article will show you how to regain control and prepare for scalable deployments consistent with corporate policy; reviews best practices for long-term management; and gets you thinking about how to protect your organization from this type of unmanaged situation in the future.

June 14, 2021
Microsoft Delays June 2021 Cumulative Update for Exchange Server One comment

Microsoft Delays June 2021 Cumulative Update for Exchange Server

Microsoft has delayed the release of the June 2021 cumulative updates for Exchange Server for two weeks to integrate the Windows Antimalware Scan interface (AMSI). The change will allow Exchange 2016 and Exchange 2019 servers running on Windows Server 2016 or later to integrate antimalware engines to check HTTP requests for potential problems. If ever there was good reason to delay an update, this is it.

June 12, 2021
Managing Office 365 Quarantine Confusion 22 Comments

Managing Office 365 Quarantine Confusion

The email quarantine process is as old as email itself, and still an essential part of any email service. As far as Office 365 is concerned, Exchange Online is a world-class product and the quarantine mechanism works well, however, the current iteration of the Quarantine portal falls short in user experience and performance.

June 10, 2021
How Outlook’s Room Finder Uses Metadata from the Places Service 66 Comments
Microsoft Teams Rooms

How Outlook’s Room Finder Uses Metadata from the Places Service

The Outlook Places service uses metadata stored for conference rooms and room lists to help users find suitable meeting places. The metadata surfaces in Outlook's Room Finder component (shared between OWA and Outlook desktop). Obviously, the better populated the room metadata is, the more useful it will be, once we all start meeting in conference rooms again!

June 9, 2021
Moving on from Send-MailMessage: Sending Email from PowerShell using the Graph API 36 Comments
PowerShell Microsoft Graph

Moving on from Send-MailMessage: Sending Email from PowerShell using the Graph API

Many PowerShell scripts use the Send-MailMessage cmdlet to send mail. That's fine, but if you want to remove basic authentication to improve tenant security, you need to stop using Send-MailMessage. One solution is to move to use the Graph API SendMail call. This works fine, but it creates some new security issues that need to be thought through. In this article, we explain how to use the Graph to send email and some of those security considerations to ponder.

June 8, 2021
Getting Exchange Online Distribution List Membership Counts with PowerShell 15 Comments
Exchange Online Powershell

Getting Exchange Online Distribution List Membership Counts with PowerShell

It's important to know if a tenant has any very large distribution lists as these might be the source of reply-all mail storms. An old article explains how to report the membership counts for distribution lists on an on-premises Exchange server. Life is different in the cloud, and we need to take a different approach. This article explains how to use different calls in a PowerShell script to create a nice report about distribution list memberships.

June 7, 2021
Taming Teams Notifications
Microsoft Teams notifications

Taming Teams Notifications

There are several areas where Microsoft could improve the way Teams handles out-of-office and away-from-work scenarios. Are the default "quiet hours" reasonable? Should there be a global setting for quiet hours or do-not-disturb? While there may be good reasons to leave some of these as a tenant-level settings, you don't want to forget about the extra steps you must take to truly escape from Teams for a bit.

June 4, 2021