External Sharing in SharePoint and OneDrive is changing: What You Need to Know

on
In an ongoing effort to create a more secure environment by default, Microsoft is introducing an important security update that will affect how external users access content shared through SharePoint and OneDrive. Starting July 1, 2025, any links shared with external users before your organization enabled Microsoft Entra B2B integration will no longer work. This change applies to all organizations that have already enabled or will enable SharePoint and OneDrive integration with Microsoft Entra B2B (Most organizations I have looked into so far). External users trying to use old links will see an error message saying the organization has updated its guest access settings. To regain access, the content must be reshared. Highlights of how the change affects organizations who have enabled B2B: All external sharing will require guest registration. External users must be added as guests in your Microsoft Entra directory. Access will be managed through Microsoft Entra B2B Invitation Manager. T...

More additions to the Backup-SfB script

on
The Backup-SfB script was just released, and keen eyes might have noticed the version 4.00 has been updated to 4.00 C by the time of the release.
I had several beta testers run the 4.00 release, and most of them ran it without too many comments. But I received two important requests:

  1. Please try to minimize error output from the script
  2. I don't know how to capture certain devices.
So here are the three minor, yet important changes to the script

Backup Common Area and Analog Devices
This request was simple enough: Neither the user nor the db backups hold any information on Common area phones or Analog devices. That's why the "backup-basics" function now will run get-cscommonarephone and get-csanalogphones and pipe it to a couple of csv files in the bakcup directory. 
From these files, it should be easy enough to import the information required back into SfB upon restore through a script.

CS Announcements
Although this information is present in the CMS configuration, I was asked if not this could be added as a standalone extra in the same way as the polices and voice settings are.
As it only took two lines of code, I decided it was a good idea to do so.
Included in the bakup are now two new files. A list of unassigned number ranges, and a list of cs announcements (The voice prompts should already be a part of the file backup)

Error handling
Error handling isn't my strongest powershell skill. After all, I'm only a UC techie trying to learn this stuff. But I have been requested on several occasions to quiet down the blood red text in the output of the script. In order to do so, I have now set the default error and warning handling to -silentlycontinue, unless you use the -DebugSQL switch.

I have tried to capture any missing backup files we would expect, so please read the transcript for errors. And then run the script again, with the -debugsql switch to capture the real error.