Microsoft Purview Sensitivity Labels: Sensitivity label grouping modernization coming this fall (?)

There is a change coming to Microsoft Purview Information Protection that simplifies sensitivity label architecture. The goal is to make label management easier, more scalable, and less rigid for organizations. The new model will only include standalone labels and sublabels. Parent labels will be replaced by label groups, which act as organizational containers. These groups cannot be applied to content and have no actions or scope, but they retain color and priority for visual organization. Hopefully, this change will make it much easier to move labels around and make other changes in production: for example, converting a standalone label into a sublabel or moving sublabels between groups without breaking dependencies.  From my experience, this update solves one of the biggest challenges in large environments: rigid label hierarchies. The new dynamic model gives admins the agility they need to adapt quickly as compliance and business needs evolve. For admins, migration will be quic...

Autumn summary of news related to Exchange

Starting this post with two Exchange Online updates. 

Let me begin with a quick user tip: Finding the perfect time for a meeting with participants outside of the company can sometimes be a challenge. I have been using "Find Time" for a long time. But now that add-in is now being replaced by a native scheduling poll feature. Collaboration just got easier!

As many of you probably already know, Microsoft is starting their selective shut down of Basic Authentication on October the 1st (today) 2022. Working with customers I find that many of them have enabled MFA for their users, and these users will not be affected by the change. However, there are a lot of 3.rd party integrations out there, using EWS and other affected services. And these integrations will stop working once basic authentication is shut down.

I wanted to share two easy ways for an organization to figure out if they have such services running or not. 

The easy one requires licenses for conditional access, and use of  log analytics. Simply create a conditional access rule blocking all legacy authentication, and set it to report only. Within a day or two, you can go to the analytics part of conditional access and see how may "fails" there are. The report will identify any user-id being hit by the report only block.

The other method can be performed by filtering the sign-in logs in Azure AD. Head over to the Entra portal (entra.microsoft.com), open "monitoring and health" and select "sign-in logs". Add a filter called "client app", and use the filter to select on  all or any of the legacy protocols, "pro tip: I also add a filter for successful logins, failure attempts can also be password spraying"