Category Archives: Office 365

Configure your Teams Room Systems to join WebEx and Zoom Meetings

Meeting Rooms, Microsoft Teams, Office 365 June 21, 2021 Leave a comment

In the current scenario most of the Organizations are running Teams Room systems as their meeting room solution from their Offices. Few of their customers, vendors and partners host their meetings from Zoom ,WebEx or other meeting solutions. In these unique circumstances, we will be hitting in a scenario where there are people attending the meetings from Teams Room from our organization and the meeting sent by vendor or a customer might be Web-Ex or Zoom.

Knowing this requirement Microsoft released a supported Teams App version in the mid of last year for the Room Systems to join Cisco WebEx Meetings from a Teams enabled room system with the direct guest join. Later this option was extended to attend a Zoom Meetings as well from the Teams App version 4.6.20.0. We’ll walk through the procedures to enable Teams Room Devices to join the 3rd party meetings Cisco WebEx and Zoom Meetings.

There are few prerequisites to be met in order to join WebEx and Zoom Meetings from a Teams Room System

  1. Make sure the WebEx and the Zoom Meeting URLs are fully whitelisted in your proxy and in your network to fully support this scenario.
  2. Configure Office 365 Threat Protection and Link Rewrite exclusion list for WebEx and Zoom Meeting URLs.
  3. Configure your Room Mailbox to automatically accept and process the invitation from Zoom and WebEx.
  4. Configure this settings in your Room Systems devices , so that they are ready for this functionality.

To make this work for the Room Mailbox Connect to your Office 365 Exchange Online Tenant and check for the current setup for accepting the meeting room from a 3rd party meeting invites by running the below command.

Get-CalendarProcesing -Identity UserPrincipalNameOfRoomMailbox | Fl Identity,ProcessExternalMeetingMessages

In our case the value is set to false which is by default. The ProcessExternalMeetingMessages parameter specifies whether to process meeting requests that originate outside the Exchange organization.

Run this command on the Room Mailbox of the Room System to accept meeting requests from Zoom and WebEx

Set-CalendarProcessing roomnl@ezcloudinfo.com -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages $True -DeleteComments $False -DeleteSubject $False

Now we could see that the value ProcessExternalMeetingMessages is set to True

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Microsoft Teams – Apply Sensitivity Labels to secure content in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Information Protection, Office 365 April 5, 2021 Leave a comment

Classification of data is always an important factor for any organization to protect their data and to make sure only the right people have the access to the right documents. Couple of years back we went through the Azure Information Protection on this blog through which we can classify the sensitivity of any organization documents and leverage them on the Microsoft 365 Applications. Previously in Microsoft 365 only had the built in retention labels through which only the classification of the documents was possible. During this time in order to apply more protection like auto classification and enforce the policy the Azure information Classic Client and Azure Information Protection was utilized.

Its very important to note at this point that the Azure Information Protection Classic client and the Label Management from the Azure Portal are deprecated from March 31 2021.

It has been a quite long time that Microsoft supports sensitivity labels in addition to retention labels, so all action can be completed from the same location from Microsoft Information protection in the Compliance Center. Microsoft recommends to utilize to new Unified labeling and upgrade the clients to new unified labeling client.

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Move users to Teams only mode from on premise Skype for business environment

Microsoft Teams, Office 365 December 18, 2020 Comments: 8

This article outlines the technical steps that is required to move an on premise skype for business account to Teams only mode. There are lot of other factors that needs to be considered before making this change and this step can only be a final stage almost in any environment.

If there is any PSTN integration with Skype for Business on-premise environment then these factors needs to be planned and executed in stages before phasing out Skype for Business On-premise and moving users to Teams Only Mode. These features and functionalities needs to be transferred completely to Microsoft Teams.

If you are moving from a Skype for Business 2015 environment, ensure that the supported CU version admin tools is Skype for Business Server 2015 with CU8.

In this example I have built a lab on my environment which has my local Directory identities below test accounts synched to the Azure AD.

And I have a standard Skype for Business 2015 environment running in the local active directory environment.

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Schedule Microsoft Teams Live Events from an external app OBS Studio

Microsoft Teams, Office 365 October 23, 2020 Leave a comment

With Microsoft Teams Live Events ,we have an alternative to stream them from outside encoding sources. There are few advantages of playing out this activity from an external application. We can customize the presentation deck by including various sources and there is an option to include multiple cameras and cumulate them on the same deck.

So here I caught some eye over this subject to investigate this alternative from an open source free tool OBS Studio . The installer can be downloaded and installed on the PC from where we are going to stream the live event from this app OBS Studio. And they are present in the list of Supported Encoders provided by Microsoft.

Well before we setup the OBS studio the mandatory part is we need to schedule a live event to generate the URL to build up the connection between them.

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PowerBI – Microsoft Intune Data WareHouse Beta connector

Intune, Office 365, PowerBI October 5, 2020 Leave a comment

Now we can use PowerBI and use the Microsoft intune data warehouse to build reports for the entire organization to foresee the intune analytics and the status. PowerBI being a very potential platform for data gathering and analysis this intune data warehouse can help in terms of analyzing the Microsoft intune statistics and provide us the overall metrics.

When we look into the get data from the PowerBI desktop version, we do see the option Intune Data WareHouse Beta Preview connector. Once authenticated with the account we can select this connector

At this point of writing this blog , we could see that this connector is integrated with a 3rd party service as of now and it in the progress of full mature version and can expect more improvements in the future.

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Synology DiskStation Active Backup for Office365

Backup, Office 365 August 30, 2020 Comments: 4

Recently i was requested to review the synology diskstation ActiveBackup for Office 365 . Though Microsoft 365 provides unlimited retention period and litigation hold for office 365 applications i always had one topic in my hit list to read on why there might be a reason to have a local backup instance for Office 365 applications.This made me to do some little bit research on this topic and could see there might be few business cases ,compliance/legal requirements which demands to maintain backup copies of electronic data.

Moreover the litigation hold and retention period is not applicable for all office 365 plans. I have seen organizations consuming wide variety of Office 365 plans based on their business models.

On the other hand i see most of the office 365 backup solutions provides faster efficiency of users able to restore the content on their own mostly from the user management portal. In an ideal scenario office 365 user data recovery can be executed from a native tool set where we use the native content search or an e-discovery case from the admin portal. In a real case scenario if we don’t have an SLA for restore of data that comes in everyday for a resigned employee or an existing employee there might be some delay where only few admins are responsible in handling the operations tasks. With these third party packages we can optimize the processes for data restore.

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Microsoft Azure – Leverage Manage Engine AD Manager and delegate MFA reset action to the Helpdesk Team

Azure, Office 365, RBAC May 12, 2020 Leave a comment

Currently there is no option as per this uservoice to delegate the MFA reset action to help desk team via an admin role. As of now only the global admin have the required privileges to perform this action from the azure portal. In this article we had a look into how to reset this option by creating an automation account and integrating with Microsoft Flow. Though this is a good option there is another way where this action can be delegated via ManageEngine AD manager plus. 

Most of the organizations have AD Manager plus and its features integrated on their on premise tenant. This can be used to execute office 365 and Azure AD operations in a hybrid environment. In this article we will have a look at the steps to integrate AD manager plus with Azure AD to  delegate this action to the help desk team.

Below are the prerequisites :

  1. AD manager plus server must be present in the hybrid domain. Not necessarily a hybrid domain it works well for cloud only accounts as well.
  2. The connectivity to the Azure IPs and URLs are required to connect azure module connect-msolservice
  3. Azure AD modules must be downloaded  on the AD manager plus server.
  4. AD delegation must be already assigned to the help desk team with AD management role.
  5. Global admin account is required to specify them as encrypted credentials with key on the AD manager plus server. This global admin account will only be used by the manage engine AD manager server in the backend and not exposed to the helpdesk team.
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Microsoft Intune – Configure customized role based access control in a redistributed IT environment.

Azure, Intune, Office 365 March 5, 2020 Leave a comment

In a huge enterprise scale deployments there will be various teams who handles the services with multiple administrator accounts.These executives must be furnished with administrator accounts which are appropriate to their boundaries.Microsoft intune being a device,apps and office 365 administration management there are high prospects that this element may be used over various departments,applications,devices and from various areas. Microsoft Intune having lots of features and capabilities now most of the organizations are moving as managed tenant with Microsoft intune.

For instance there can be multiple app protection policies, device compliance policies, app configuration policies ,etc., are created for multiple services one for meeting room management, another for BYOD devices and for corporate windows devices. In these situations we need to create customized role based access control for each users.

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Analyze the office 365 adoption with Microsoft 365 usage analytics

Office 365 October 20, 2019 Leave a comment

Office 365 adoption preview helps to have insights of the Office 365 utilization trends for the whole organization.This helps organization on identifying the departments who needs training and places where there is real success on office 365 aquisition.

With Microsoft 365 usage analytics integrated with Power BI , we get much visibility on how Office365 is been utilized.It is a pre built content pack and do not need to create any customization on getting the reports.

This content pack is free of charge and works well with powerBI free service and can customize the dashboards with reports.We do not need to have a powerbi pro or premium license to utilize this service.Once we connect this content pack it can be shared with anybody. However if the user attempts to share, export the report then powerbi pro license is required. For viewing only the data powerbi free license is much sufficient.

The moment when we connect the data pack it provides the data for last 12 months. Later it refreshes in a weeks time. We do have an option to customize the refresh schedule.

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Script to generate office 365 groups created on last 30 days

Office 365, Scripts October 16, 2019 Leave a comment

By default it is enabled for users to create the office365 groups. There are few organizations where they do not need to restrict this group creation because these groups are heavily influenced on utilizing the office365 services Sharepoint,Yammer, Microsoft Teams, PowerBI , Outlook, Planner and Road Map which in turn might decline the office 365 user adoption rate.

The below script can be used to run in task scheduler on a monthly basis for reviewing the Office 365 groups which have been created in last 30 days and will email us the report.

Below is the sample output of the script which will provide us the below details.

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