Office 365 - The Lazy Administrator

Get a Teams Notification the Moment an Active Directory User gets Locked Out with PowerShell Using Webhooks

December 13, 2018 Brad Wyatt Comments 26 comments

I have been recently using Teams as a central location for my organizations technical notifications instead of email as it provides a way for an entire Help Desk team to openly collaborate on the message and its contents. I recently got a request to get a Teams notification when a user gets locked out of their Active Directory account. By setting up a Webhook connector we can make it happen. The script will be triggered from Task Scheduler on Event ID 4740 which is created when a user gets locked out. By using “Search-ADAccount -LockedOut” we can return an array of locked out accounts, but by ordering it by lockout time we can ensure that we grab the most recent locked out user that corresponds to the security event.

I set the script and scheduled task up on my PDC because as far as I know, the actual lockout event … Continue...

Post Inactive Users as a Microsoft Teams Message with PowerShell

December 11, 2018 Brad Wyatt Comments 14 comments

In my previous post I went through setting up a Team’s webhook to send a daily message / notification of all your Active Directory users that have their password expiring in a week or less. This is valuable for an IT team as they can review users and work together on the within the same work space (team). In this post I will be setting up another scheduled task to send a daily message on Active Directory accounts that have not logged on in 90 days or more. I am also returning attributes like LockedOut, LastLogon, Enabled and more.

The array of users is sorted, showing the users that have not logged on in the longest to the shortest. You can change the sort order to fit the needs of your environment. By using the cmdlet, “New-Timespan” I can get the amount of days since the user last logged on.… Continue...

Post Users with Expiring Passwords as Microsoft Teams Message with PowerShell

December 7, 2018 Brad Wyatt Comments 9 comments

Microsoft Teams has many connectors available including Incoming Webhook. “This provides an easy solution to post notifications / messages from any scripting language through JSON formatted web service call.”¹

In this post I will show you how you can gather all of your users who have passwords expiring within a specified time range, and send a notification including all relevant information to a Teams Channel. In my example I will get all users who have passwords expiring in 7 days and less and have it notify my “Help Desk” Teams Channel.

The current script will parse only enabled users because we don’t need to report on users, ‘passwordlastset’ attribute if the account isn’t even allowed to log in. It will also sort all of our data, so the users with passwords expiring the earliest will always be at the top of the message. The top description under, “Users … Continue...

Sync Office 365 / AzureAD down to ADDS

November 21, 2018 Brad Wyatt Comments 9 comments

I recently found myself needing to build out an on premise Active Directory environment and populate it from objects found in Office 365 (AzureAD). The local Active Directory would then be configured as the identity source and would sync up to AzureAD using Azure AD Connect. Unfortunately, Azure AD Connect is currently a one way sync from your on premise Active Directory Domain Services environment to AzureAD and wont sync objects down. AADConnect does have the ability to match our AzureAD objects to their corresponding Active Directory objects but, if an attribute like City, Phone Number, Department, Title, etc. is present in your existing AzureAD and not in ADDS, the attribute may remain in AzureAD but not replicate down to ADDS. So we will want to copy over as many attributes from AzureAD to our local Active Directory as possible in preparation for the Azure AD Connect sync. We will … Continue...

Customize your Office 365 Encrypted Messages with your Organizations Brand in Office 365

October 13, 2018 Brad Wyatt Comments 12 comments

As an Office 365 administrator, you can apply your company branding to customize the look of your organization’s Office 365 Message Encryption email messages as well as the contents of the encryption portal. You can customize the following aspects of the viewing experience for recipients of encrypted email messages:

Introductory text of the email that contains the encrypted message
Disclaimer text of the email that contains the encrypted message
Text that appears in the OME portal
Logo that appears in the email message and OME portal
Background color in the email message and OME portal

You can also revert back to the default look and feel at any time.

Below is the default message your recipient will see when they receive an encrypted email message.

Customize the Message

To customize the OME message you will first need to connect to Exchange Online using Remote PowerShell. You then want to get … Continue...

[Tool] Create and Configure Active Directory and Office 365 Users at Once.

July 11, 2018 Brad Wyatt Comments 58 comments

One of the things IT Administrators look to automate first is the new user creation process. I recently was going through the process of creating a new hires Active Directory login, Office 365 mailbox, and their Office 365 user account, and I wondered how I could make the process easier and quicker.

My focus was geared towards Managed Service Providers (MSP’s), Human Resource (HR) departments and general Help Desk Technicians. For MSP’s I wanted to create a tool that they could easily use across all of their clients because they may not spend the time to automate new user creations because they have hundreds, if not thousands of clients to tend to, and each client is unique so you can’t just copy the same automation script from one client to another. This would also be a huge asset for Help Desk technicians because they are more often than not the … Continue...

Create an Interactive HTML Report for Office 365 with PowerShell

June 22, 2018 Brad Wyatt Comments 39 comments

From time to time you may get clients or even managers requesting reports about their Office 365 environment. Another popular reason to compile a report on an Office 365 tenant would be when you take over a new client and you are auditing their environment trying to figure out what exactly is going on.

Click here to view the report as we go through it.

Using the PowerShell module “ReportHTML“, we can create beautiful and interactive HTML reports. Below I will walk you through a report I spent some time creating that includes tabs, charts, data tables and more. Below you can see the first page of my report. You can navigate to different content by clicking the tab. If you wanted to view the Users report you would just click on that tab.

Report Overview

Dashboard

The Dashboard contains some basic information about the Office 365 tenant … Continue...

Office 365 Report Using Excel COM Interface with PowerShell

April 12, 2018 Brad Wyatt Comments 2 comments

I set out to explore a way to generate a nice, multi-sheet, Office 365 report that I could give to end-user’s or Office Manager’s using PowerShell. Unfortunately, I read about the Excel COM interface before reading about the Excel PowerShell module created by Doug Finke. If you are starting from scratch, I would recommend reading up on the PowerShell Module instead of going the COM route as it’s a easier to use that the Excel COM Interface. Regardless, I finished my PowerShell script and wanted to share it for others to use.

Pre-requisites

Not a lot of pre-reqs for this script and I designed it that way. At first it was reliant on an Excel Workbook that was pre-formatted how I liked, and it would populate the data specifically for that workbook only. However, I decided to have PowerShell format the Excel Workbook from scratch as it ran. So for … Continue...

Create a Real Time Interactive Dashboard for Office 365 Using PowerShell Universal Dashboard

April 9, 2018 Brad Wyatt Comments 6 comments

If you have never heard of PowerShell Universal Dashboard you need to head on over to PoshUD right now and check out this awesome PowerShell Module. Using PowerShell Core, Material Design, ReactJS and ASP.NET Core, Universal Dashboard takes advantage of cutting-edge technology to provide cross-platform, cross-device dashboards that looks sleek and modern.¹

While reading over some other posts about what other people have done with PowerShell Universal Dashboard, I wondered if there was a way to create a interactive dashboard that would hook into Office 365 and gather data from it. At first, I attempted to create a dashboard that would create a PSSession to Office 365 but it presented some problems and overall was quite slow. I then decided to use the Microsoft Graph REST API to connect to Office 365. This allows it to refresh the data within in the dashboard quickly and takes seconds to connect.… Continue...

Auto License Office 365 Migration Users Prior to Completing the Migration

April 6, 2018 Brad Wyatt Comments 1 comment

When doing a migration to Office 365, one of the final steps prior to “flipping” the user in the migration batches, is to make sure to properly license them so once they flip they get an Exchange Online mailbox. One of the issues you will come across is you will have more users in Office 365 than you are migrating. This is very common because some users may not need Exchange services but may need other Office 365 offerings such as OneDrive, SharePoint, etc. This also happens when you use ADConnect to sync on-premise Active Directory users to Office 365 and again, not everyone will be needing an Exchange mailbox. However, prior to completing your migration batch jobs is all the users in the batches must have a proper license for Exchange.

Instead of going through user objects one by one, I created a script that will do the following:… Continue...