11th MVP Award Rewarded

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I am actually on vacation, but as I sit here under the summer sun, toes in the pool and a cold drink within reach, I have been waiting for that email confirming that I’ve been awarded my 11th Microsoft MVP Award! As last year, I am being awarded in both the Teams and Copilot category. To say I’m humbled would be an understatement. Being part of the global Microsoft MVP community for over a decade now has been an incredible journey, filled with learning, sharing, speaking, and connecting with passionate technologists from every corner of the world. What is the Microsoft MVP Award? The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award is given to technology experts who share their knowledge and real-world expertise with communities. With fewer than 4,000 MVPs worldwide, it’s an honor to be part of such a vibrant and dedicated group. MVPs contribute through speaking engagements, writing, open-source contributions, and helping others online and offline. You can learn more about the progra...

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"