Author Archives: Richard Burrs

MyIgnite – Reflections on Microsoft Ignite 2018

I attended this year’s Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, FL and decided i would provide my reflections on the event.  The annual conference provides a plethora of sessions on Microsoft technology offerings and solutions related to Microsoft 365, IoT, containers, DevOps, Team collaboration, Azure services and more.  Also, there’s an Expo of various IT vendors; panel discussions on Diversity in IT; and hands on labs to provide IT skill development.  It’s a huge event with attendees in all walks of IT from around the world.

The conference kicked off with a Keynote address from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.  In his opening speech, he outlined Microsoft’s vision of the next generation in IT.  This involves solutions which revolve around an Intelligent cloud and edge that transform products (business apps, gaming, infrastructure, etc.) and how IT organizations design their operations.  Traditionally, IT has been slow to adopt new technologies due to security concerns and policies.  Also, some IT shops are still afraid of the cloud and the perceived risks that it presents to business information.  However, this posture is no longer viable as users and business partners must be given the flexibility to be productive from any device and any location.

What’s new at Microsoft?  Two new features introduced at Ignite are Ideas and a refined Microsoft Search.  Ideas is cool feature that uses AI to predict what a user will do and can offer a set of design suggestions when creating a PowerPoint presentation.  For instance, if you are designing a PowerPoint slide, Ideas will suggest a particular graphic image based on the written text in the slide.  It can also find content inconsistencies such as a particular word spelled differently and offer to remediate the differences.  You must have OfficePro Plus to use this feature since it leverages the AI capabilities in the cloud.  It was announced that Microsoft Search has now been expanded to search across all Office products and device types.  By using Microsoft Graph and Bing, It intelligently provides customized results based on previous activities and work.

Also, Microsoft 365 now has a new Admin center.  As an improvement to the Office 365 Admin Center, it offers a more focused and centralized workplace for managing and securing resources in Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem.  If you are a Security Administrator for your organization, the Microsoft 365 Admin Center has an HTTP endpoint called security.microsoft.com that is a custom portal for security related responsibilities such as DLP, document classification and permissions.  Also, there’s an endpoint called admin.microsoft.com for managing users, groups and resources.  This approach falls in line with the concept of Just Enough Administration (JEA).

Microsoft is clearly implementing a full court press towards a wider adoption of Azure and Office365.  A majority of the sessions are related to Azure cloud platform and its myriad of offerings.  On-Premise enterprise applications such as Exchange server may not be dead, but they are definitely on the endangered list. At past conferences, there would have been a variety of sessions around On-Premise Exchange and related features, particular in a year which has a new release of Exchange server.  Not so this year.  There were a couple session devoted towards Exchange 2019, which is currently in Preview.  Although, the handwriting has been on the wall for several years that the focal point of messaging is the cloud.

In addition to technical skill development of staff, a very important part of IT is creating a work environment that is free of sexual harassment and racial biases.  The IT field is very male dominated and an unspoken reality is that it’s often a toxic world for women.  It was good to see in the session lineup several discussions highlighting the challenges that women face in IT; how to overcome biases; or creating a more inclusive workplace.

Microsoft has announced that Ignite will be held in Orlando again in 2019.  However, it will be the first week of November as opposed to the last week of September.  This will mark the third year in a row that Ignite will be in Orlando.  Although it’s nice to be able to visit different cities, Orlando is great location for the conference, which has nearly 30,000 attendees.  The weather is great, it’s close to Disney theme parks (the closing celebration was at Universal Studios) and it’s not congested like other major cities.

Those are my thoughts and takeaways.  What stood out to you about this year’s Ignite?

 

 

 

 

 

Advertisements
Standard

Azure AD Attribute Hide and Seek

Azure Ad Connect provides organizations with the ability to synchronize their On-premise users and groups to Azure Active Directory.  When synchronizing objects to Azure, administrators have the ability to control which users or groups are synchronized to the cloud.    Furthermore, it’s also possible to select which user or group attributes are synchronized.  Some organizations may have Security policies that prohibit certain information, such as phone numbers and addresses, from appearing in the cloud.  Luckily, attributes can be easily filtered by unchecking the attribute on the AD connector object in Synchronization Service Manager.  However, what if there’s an attribute that is being synced, but does not appear on the Azure AD connector as a filterable option?  Here’s an example that shows you how to deal with that.

Lets take a look at a user called TesterB in Powershell.  Using the Azure Powershell module (or Azure Cloud shell), we can get the user object and its properties with the following command.  Notice that the City attribute for our user is set to New York.

We don’t want location information available in Azure AD.  Lets logon to the Azure AD connect sever and open Synchronization Service Manager to filter this attribute.  Once there, click on the Connectors button.  You will see two connectors:  one for Azure AD and the other for On-premise AD.  Select the On-premise AD connector.

On the Properties window for the AD connector, click on “Select Attributes” to see the list of attributes that are available and being synchronized to Azure.

As shown below in the AD connector attributes window, there isn’t a “City” attribute.  Also, the attributes with a check mark are being synced to Azure AD.  This view shows the ldap name for each attribute, which is not always the same as its Display name, which is what the user property showed above in Powershell. To get to the bottom of this, we will need to look at the Attributes Editor for the user object in On-premise AD.

Open the TesterB user in ADUC and go to the Attribute Editor tab.  There you will see a list of the attributes that are available.  This view shows the ldap name for the attribute and its value, if one is set.  The ldap name for City is “l”, since the value is New York.

Now if you go back to the AD connector for verification, you will notice the attribute “l” is checked.  This will need to be unchecked.

Once you uncheck it and save the change, run the following command in Powershell to remove the City information from users in Azure AD and prevent it from being synced in the future.

A quick look at the City property for TesterB shows the location is no longer displayed.

That’s it!  If you ever have a situation where you can’t find an attribute to filter on the Azure AD connector, remember it probably has a ldap name that is different from the display name.

 

 

 

Standard

A Guide to Passing Azure Exam 70-533

Back in April of this year, I passed Azure exam 70-533:  Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions.  To be honest, this was actually my second attempt at the exam.  I failed on my first try about three weeks earlier.  But who’s counting?   All that matters is that I persisted and eventually passed.  I’m not mentioning this to be discouraging to anyone intending to take the exam.  However, my intention is to provide encouragement if you don’t pass the first time around.  No one likes seeing the word “Fail” on the exam printout, but it’s not the end of the world.  With that being said, I thought I would write an article outlining the methods I employed to prepare for the test.

Practical Experience

First and foremost, you will need hands-on experience to pass this test.  Azure exam 70-533 is not easy and cannot be passed solely on reading books or articles.  If you do not have access to Azure through your employer or a Visual Studio subscription, Microsoft offers a 30-day free trial, which comes with a $200 credit.  The free trial allows you to create resources in Azure such as VM’s, vrtual networks, storage accounts, web apps, containers, etc.

Once you setup your account, it’s important to have a strategy to learning the skills that are needed to pass the exam.  Microsoft has a list of objectives and related skills that are covered by the exam.  As of this writing, the objectives were last updated on March 29, 2018.  Under each category of objectives are a number of relevant tasks or exercises.  Go to the exam site and do exercises around all the listed skill areas.  Microsoft has excellent documentation that will help you develop the skills measured by exam 70-533.  Also, it’s very important to learn how to accomplish tasks using Powershell and ARM templates, instead of only in the Portal.  For instance, learn how to deploy VM’s and related resources from a script or template.  Perform all of the tasks until you feel you have mastered them.

Training Courses

Pluralsight courses were an asset that proved to be a critical component of my training.  This site offers a number courses that cover topics such as Azure infrastructure solutions, storage, networking, application services, ARM templates, Identity management and more.  Also, there is a learning path for exam 70-533 that consists of about 7 or 8 course.  The training material is excellent, and consists of demos and exercise files that provide some practical training.  Pluralsight courses will give you a solid foundation.  Additionally, a monthly Pluralsight subscription will cost you $29.  The site is more than worth the price.  Another site that was helpful is Cloud Ranger.  The courses are free but many of them are now outdated since they are designed around the old Classic Model.

Practice Exam

I would advise you to get the official Measureup practice exams from Mindhub.  Some of the questions are on the Classic model, however the exam was still very helpful.  The real exam is all ARM, nothing on the Classic model.  The Measureup practice exam provides the option of taking the test in Practice mode, which is a customizable format.  For instance, you can select questions from a particular objective, or only questions that you missed during the last practice exam.  A huge benefit with the practice test is that it offers explanations for why an answer is correct and the others are wrong.  Also, each answer has links to documents that are relevant to each question.  DO NOT memorize the answer; know why an answer is correct.  I retook the full Practice exam (nearly 200 questions) until I consistently passed with at least a 95%.  At this point, I moved on to taking the practice test in Exam mode.  Mindhub currently has a special that offers an exam voucher, the practice test and 2 retakes for $266.00.

Helpful Links

The Exam 70-533 reference book has not been updated for awhile, but this site has tips that were extracted from the book’s content.  These bullet points are important facts that you will need to remember for the exam.  Also, make sure you know the features and pricing with app service plans and SQL database service tiers.

I hope the information I provided was beneficial and will contribute towards you passing exam 70-533.  Good luck!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Standard

Powershell Function to Get Messages

If you are an Exchange server administrator, you more than likely spend a fair amount of time searching the Message Tracking logs.  The data provided by these logs can be helpful in finding all messages with a particular subject or sent by a certain user during a specific time frame.  Of course, there are two ways to search the Message logs:  the Exchange Admin Center (EAC) or Exchange Management Shell.  Using the GUI is perfectly fine, if that is your preference.  However, if you are having to perform searches on a regular basis, the EMS is the more efficient option.

To help make your job and mine alot easier, I wrote this Powershell function that can be used to find messages based on various criteria.  Check it out on Github, and let me know what you think.

https://github.com/rburrs/Powershell-Toolbox/tree/master/Exchange%20Server

 

Standard

No Reminders

We have very busy work and personal lives, which can easily involve several meetings in the span of one week.  Outlook reminders serve an important role in helping to manage scheduled appointments and meetings.  Although, it’s not sufficient to have a slot on the calendar for that demo scheduled next week with a software vendor.    This is where Reminders come to the rescue of human memory shortcomings.  A reminder will popup and say  “your demo session with Vendor X starts in 15 minutes”.  That’s not what it actually says, but you get the point.

Recently, I received a request from someone to have reminders disabled for all calendar items.  Personally, I couldn’t survive without having reminders for upcoming events, but to each her own.  This is a very simple request to fulfill, right?  Just go into Outlook and click File > Options > Calendar Options to uncheck Default Reminders.  After performing these steps, calendar reminders should be disabled…at least I thought.  After making this change, reminders were still enabled by default.

To determine why reminders were still enabled on meeting invites, we have to turn our attention to the mailbox settings in Exchange.  Specifically, we must examine the properties of the mailbox in the Exchange Management shell (EMS) to get the answer.  Since the EMS is technically Powershell just customized with a different look and loaded with Exchange cmdlets, we can use it to get the properties and methods of any object.  Naturally, one would think that a mailbox object would contain a property which contains settings for calendar reminders.  Let’s see.  In the EMS, I will run the following command to see the properties of my mailbox:

Get-Mailbox -Identity Burrs | Get-Member

The output of this command consists of a long list of properties, however the only calendar related items are:

Hmmm…not exactly what we are looking for.

If the Reminder settings are not configured by a property on the Get-Mailbox cmdlet, we must determine where that setting exists.  Let’s check in the EMS by searching for any cmdlets that are related to Calendar configuration. The following search query will reveal any cmdlets that contain the noun calendar:

Get-Command *calendar*

The output of this query shows something interesting.  It includes a command called “Get-MailboxCalendarConfiguration”.  Let’s take a look at the properties of this command to see what we are able to configure.  To do this, we must include the identity parameter in the command syntax to pipe to “Get-Member”.  I will use my mailbox name as the Identifier.

Get-MailboxCalendarConfiguration -Identity Burrs | Get-Member

Bingo!  One of the properties available for the “”Get-MailboxCalendarConfiguration” command is called “RemindersEnabled”.  Also, you can see included in the properties definition  is “{get;set;}”.  This means we can apply a value to the RemindersEnabled property using the verb “Set”.

Now we have something to work with.  If we take a look at the calendar configuration settings of my mailbox, here’s what we see:

Get-MailboxCalendarConfiguration -Identity Burrs | Format-List

It appears that reminders are enabled on my mailbox with the DefaultReminderTime being set to 15 minutes.  Here’s how he we disable reminders:

Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration -Identity Burrs -RemindersEnabled:$false -DefaultReminderTime 00:00:00

After executing the above command, reminders are now disabled for my mailbox.

 

 

Standard

A Case for Exchange Personal Archives

With the expanded role of email in business communication, there is a need for organizations to preserve emails for compliance and security reasons.  Email has become the lifeblood of companies, the primary means by which employees communicate with clients, coworkers and vendors.  Since electronic messages contain business related data or content, emails often maintain importance that extends months or years into the future.  Additionally, many times an Email administrator will be faced with the task of gathering and producing messages for legal cases.  For these reasons, message Archiving is a vital process.

Lets examine some of the evidence for considering Exchange Archives over other solutions.

Exhibit A:  The Archive is a secondary mailbox in Outlook

The Archive mailbox is a secondary mailbox that appears in Outlook beneath a user’s Primary mailbox.  Archive Retention policies on the Exchange server are configured to move messages from the Primary mailbox into the Archive once the messages reach a certain age.  For the end-user, this is a seamless process.  Additionally, the archived messages are stored in the same folder hierarchy in which they resided in the Primary mailbox.  For users, it’s a benefit to have a consistent view between the two mailboxes.  However, there isn’t a process in place to synchronize the Primary and Archive mailbox folder structures.  If a folder is deleted or moved in the Primary mailbox, the same actions are not applied to the corresponding folder in the Archive mailbox.  This can lead to some divergence between the two folder structures.

Exhibit B:  No third-party utility needed for management

This article will not explain the steps involved in creating Retention polices and Archive mailboxes.  But will only highlight the advantages they provide towards managing them.  For Exchange administrators, Archive mailboxes are managed using the Exchange Management shell or console.  The Archive mailbox can be created via the shell or console.  As with Primary mailboxes, limits can be placed on Archive mailboxes or the databases that contain them.  If limits are placed on both, the mailbox settings will override limits that are configured at the database level.  Also, the Retention policies that determine when and what items are Archived are setup in the console.

Exhibit C:  Can leverage native Exchange HA solutions

The databases that hold Archive mailboxes are not different from the databases that contain Primary mailboxes.  As a matter of fact, both types of mailboxes can reside on the same database.  For this reason, Archive mailboxes are able to be included in a DAG and replicated.  Some organizations may require Archives to be available in database *over scenarios.

Exhibit D:  No Stubbed messages

Due to the fact that messages are not transferred to a separate database with Exchange Archives, there are no linked messages that point to the actual email.  This is particularly important for compliance reasons.  Most organizations have compliance standards that mandate emails are retained and produced for legal cases.  When messages get archived with 3rd Party solutions, important meta data gets removed.  This can render the message incomplete and not reflective of its original state when collected for discovery procedures.

Conclusion

Upon looking at the evidence, it can be stated that Exchange Personal archives in most cases is a better choice:  seamless integration, access to native high availability, no linked messages, Of course, all situations aren’t equal and in some cases a 3rd party solution could be more viable.  Each organization will have to evaluate its particular needs and challenges, and make a decision accordingly in regards to an archiving solution.

 

 

 

 

 

Standard