Celebrating 10 Years as a Microsoft MVP!

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Back from my vacation, I am thrilled to share that I have been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for the 10th consecutive year. In addition to being recognized as an expert within Teams, I am have also been recognized as an expert with Microsoft Copilot. This means a lot to me.  Being an MVP has been an incredibly rewarding journey, both personally and professionally. It has provided me with countless opportunities to grow, learn, and connect with like-minded professionals who share a passion for technology and innovation.  The award is not just a title; it's a testament to the hard work, dedication, and contributions to the tech community. It's a privilege to be part of such an esteemed group of individuals who share the same love for technology, and sharing their knowledge about it.  As I reflect on the past decade, I am thankful for the experiences and knowledge I've gained. This recognition motivates me to continue sharing my expertise, mentor

Autumn summary of news related to Exchange

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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"