Tony Redmond

Creating an Exchange Online Inbound Email Traffic Report for the Last 90 Days

Tony Redmond — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Exchange Online keeps message trace data online for 10 days. If you want an email traffic report covering longer periods, you need to retrieve historical message data (for up to 90 days) and report that data. That's the easy description. This article explains some of the complexities involved in generating a 90-day email traffic report for a Microsoft 365 tenant.

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How to Configure Automated Processing for a Room Mailbox

Tony Redmond — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Room mailboxes are a well-known part of Exchange Online. With a little planning, it's easy to add automated bookings for room mailboxes. In this example, we create a room mailbox and configure it to allow salespeople to book customer meetings during a conference.

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Microsoft Ignite 2023 Emphasizes Copilot

Tony Redmond — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 17:52:21 +0000

As is the norm for any Microsoft conference, the Microsoft Ignite 2023 announcements came thick and fast. Most of the announcements featured a heavy emphasis on some form of Copilot. Quite how useful all this AI-powered assistance will be in real life remains to be seen. Here's the Practical365 take on the important Microsoft 365 announcements at Ignite.

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Working with Entra ID Directory Extensions Through the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK

Tony Redmond — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Directory extensions allow organizations to customize the data stored for Entra ID objects such as users, groups, and devices, You need to create and manage directory extensions with PowerShell. This article explains how to do the job with cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.

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Building a Teams External Access Allow List from External Chats

Tony Redmond — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

A Teams external access whitelist controls the domains that users can connect to for federated chats. Organizations often limit federation using a whitelist to reduce the possibility of attacks through chat communications. This article explains how administrators can discover the set of domains users chat with by analyzing chat information using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.

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Microsoft’s Glacial Progress to Improve Purview Audit

Tony Redmond — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Despite making a commitment to generate MailItemsAccessed events for customers with Microsoft Purview Audit (Standard) licenses in July 2023, Microsoft won't ship the necessary updates until June 2024.

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How to Check Licenses Before Assignment to Entra ID Accounts

Tony Redmond — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

License assignment to Entra ID accounts with PowerShell is easy if licenses are available and the account doesn't already have the license. In this article, we explore how to check license availability and make sure that we don't try to assign a license that's already present.

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Reusing User Principal Names and Primary SMTP Addresses

Tony Redmond — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Microsoft 365 user accounts have user principal names (for sign in) and primary SMTP addresses (to receive email). Is it a good idea to reuse user principal names or SMTP addresses that become available when an employee leaves the organization. It might seem like a good idea, but it's really not and should be avoided. We explain why here.

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How to Report Microsoft 365 Licenses Assigned Through Group-Based Licensing

Tony Redmond — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

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.

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Teams 2.1 Client Hits General Availability

Tony Redmond — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 16:02:44 +0000

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.

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