Automation - The Lazy Administrator

Set Corporate Lock Screen Wallpaper with Intune for Non Windows 10 Enterprise or Windows 10 Education Machines

August 8, 2019 Brad Wyatt Comments 37 comments

In my previous article I showed you how you can leverage PowerShell and Intune to set a computers wallpaper even if the OS was not Enterprise or Education. Currently, If you want to set the wallpaper or lock screen wallpaper via Intune Policies, you must be on either Enterprise or Education. In this article I will show you how you can leverage PowerShell and Intune, and set your own lock screen wallpaper no matter the version.

In my example I will use Intune to set the lock screen image of my end user machines to the following image:

First, we need to create a PowerShell script that will do the following:

Download the wallpaper
Store the wallpaper locally on the target machine
Set the lock screen wallpaper

In my example, I want to set my wallpaper as the following image: https://www.thelazyadministrator.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/nicewall.jpg, which will be named wallpaper_LazyAdmin.jpg and stored at … Continue...

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...

[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...