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Speaking at RDW Techday on April 1st 2020

On Wednesday April 1st, I have the opportunity to present at the RDW Techday. RDW Techday is a community event organized by the RDW, the goal is to stimulate knowledge sharing within the company and between companies in the same region. I had the pleasure to present at earlier events already and received some really positive feedback.

RDW is the Netherlands Vehicle Authority in the mobility chain. RDW has developed extensive expertise through its years of experience in executing its statutory and assigned tasks. Tasks in the area of the licensing of vehicles and vehicle parts, supervision and enforcement, registration, information provision and issuing documents.

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Modern Workplace, Presentations, ,

License requirements for administering Microsoft 365 services

Microsoft licensing is tough and vague but something we must deal with while implementing our solutions. I’m also aware that some of the features I describe on my blog are only available in the most expensive licensing options Microsoft provides, making some of the features I describe not usable for some of my readers.

Update June 23rd 2020: Microsoft has removed the Intune license requirement for administrators, see this blogpost by Peter van der Woude for more information: Quick tip: Allow access to unlicensed admins

If you administer Microsoft 365 services like Azure Active Directory (AzureAD), Exchange Online (EXO), SharePoint Online (SPO), Intune and many other products the license requirements for your administrative accounts are extra vague. I’ve asked Microsoft in December last year to clarify this, but until now no response was given.

There is some fragmented information available in the Microsoft documentation, that in combination with some other information to be found on the internet, like on twitter concludes that the license requirements are indeed very vague and could really use some official documentation from Microsoft to clear things up.

One thing in known, is that when asked about licensing requirements for the online services provided by Microsoft the statement returned is: “When the user benefits from the service, a license is required”

So let’s see what I found available online and see if it makes sense in some way…

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AzureAD, Cloud App Security, Intune, Licensing, Modern Workplace, Security, , , , , ,

Microsoft is going to disable basic/legacy authentication for Exchange Online. What does that actually mean and does that impact me?

Update: On April 3rd 2020, the Exchange Team announced that due to the COVID019 crisis, they will postpone disabling legacy authentication until the second half of 2021.

Update: On April 30 2020, the Exchange Team announced that OAuth 2.0 authentication for IMAP and SMTP AUTH protocols is now available. In order to leverage this functionality mail clients need to start using it (so they need an update). Michel de Rooij did a nice article on how to configure Thunderbird for oAuth2 which you can read here: Configuring Exchange Online with IMAP & OAuth2

Update: On May 28 2020, the Exchange Team announced that OAuth support for POP is now also available for Exchange Online.

Update: On June 30th 2020, the Microsoft Exchange Team announced support for Modern Authentication in scripts using the new Exchange PowerShell module, see: Modern Auth and Unattended Scripts in Exchange Online PowerShell V2

Update: On July 28th, the Microsoft Exchange Team announced some new changes to Modern Authentication controls in the Microsoft 365 Admin center, see: Basic Authentication and Exchange Online – July Update

Make sure that you also

On March 7, 2018 the Microsoft Exchange Team announced that on October 13, 2020 it would stop the support for Basic Authentication (also called Legacy authentication) for Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online (EXO), the version of Exchange offered as a service part of Office 365. EWS is a web service which can be used by client applications to access the EXO environment. The team also announced that EWS would not receive any feature updates anymore, and suggests customers to transition towards using Microsoft Graph to access EXO.

One and a half year later, on November 20, 2019 the Exchange Team also announced to stop supporting Basic Authentication for Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), Post Office Protocol (POP), Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) and Remote PowerShell on October 13 2020 as well. Authenticated Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) will stay supported when used with Basic Authentication.

Instead of supporting Basic/Legacy authentication Microsoft will move towards only supporting Modern Authentication for most of the methods used to connect to Exchange Online.

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AzureAD, Exchange Online, Modern Workplace, Security, , , ,

A guide to implementing Applocker on your Modern Workplace

At our last Windows Management User Group Netherlands meeting, we had the honor to have Sami Laiho, one of the world’s leading professionals in the Windows OS and Security flying over to the Netherlands and present for our user group. In his presentation titled: “Securing Windows in 2020 and forward”, Sami made us aware that by implementing some simple Applocker policies on our Modern Workplace and by making sure that the user working on the device has no admin rights, we can seriously improve our security. In his presentation Sami referred to a quote from Mikko Hyppönen (Chief Research Officer at F-Secure): “Make your security better than your neighbours”.

In this blogpost I will share my experience with implementing Applocker policy within my own tenant, and how I started to use these principles myself which eventually led by removing my account from the local administrator group.

Disclaimer: This blogpost provides a very simplistic way of enabling Applocker policies, in the real world there are some caveats which must be addressed when implementing Applocker. I will address  those caveats later in this post as well.

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Intune, Modern Workplace, Security, Windows 10, , ,

Ask yourself if you still really need ADFS

In Q1 2017 Microsoft released the Pass Through Authentication (PTA) functionality as part of Azure AD connect. With the release of Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Pass-through Authentication allowed for your users to sign in to both on-premises and cloud-based applications using the same passwords without the need to implement a Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) environment.

With this options we now have the following authentication options available when setting up a hyrid identiy:

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AzureAD, Modern Workplace, Office 365, Security