So, for a while, there has been a gap in the Office 365 Government Community Cloud (GCC) SharePoint environment when it comes to the integration of Flow in GCC vs how it looks in our commercial environments. What is the difference we’re talking about?… [ Continue reading ]
Update to Create-LabUsers Script
My colleague Andreas asked today for some help troubleshooting an issue he’d run into with the Create-LabUsers script failing while using the InflateMailboxes parameter.
The problem ended up being three-fold:
- I had some pre-populated user names that had spaces in them
- I hadn’t trimmed the spaces out when constructing the SMTP address (although I had for the UPN)
- I didn’t test for a valid RFC sender address when constructing the mail
So, all of those things together conspired to generate errors whenever some of those user names were hit. … [ Continue reading ]
Basic PowerShell website scraper
Today, I just put together a quick little project for a friend of mine who needed a way to scrape downloadable documents and video files from a website for a project. Rather than clicking and downloading each one manually, he wondered if there was a way he could do it with a script.… [ Continue reading ]
Apply Security & Compliance Center Retention Labels to Outlook Folders
I couldn’t really come up with a cool-sounding title for this post, so I just went with the basics of what it does.
Last week, I worked with a customer that wanted to deploy custom retention labels to custom folders inside a user’s mailbox–the idea being that they would create a custom folder structure such as this under a user’s Inbox:
\Inbox
\Inbox\Retention Schedule
\Inbox\Retention Schedule\2 Year (apply a 2-year retention label to everything in this folder)
\Inbox\Retention Schedule\4 Year (apply a 4-year retention label to everything in this folder)
\Inbox\Retention Schedule\7 Year (apply a 7-year retention label to everything in this folder)
\Inbox\Retention Schedule\Forever (apply a ‘Never delete’ retention label to everything in this folder)
Seems easy enough, right? … [ Continue reading ]
Exchange Online Protection (EOP) Best Practices and Recommendations
Yes. I said it.
Someone needed to put a line in the sand and today, that person is me. I’m going to say these are some best practices.
Of course, your mileage may vary, depending on your type of organization–users at a local bank or city government will have different threats presented to them than an engineering firm with international customers, for example.… [ Continue reading ]
Disabling Teams AutoStart
Here’s a fun one … Disabling Teams auto-startup. Imagine this scenario:
- You haven’t trained your service desk on how to answer/troubleshoot/manage Teams help desk calls
- You’ve configured restrictions on who can create Teams
- You’ve deployed the new Office ProPlus update with Teams integrated.
Update to Get-UserHoldPolicies
This certainly seems to be a day for updates! Based on some additional feedback from my peers, I’ve updated the Get-UserHoldPolicies script to exclude legacy Exchange MRM policies by default. MRM policies, while they have RetentionPolicyTags, are technically either moving or deleting content, not preserving it.… [ Continue reading ]
Update to OneDrive for Business Admin tool
Based on some user feedback, I’ve made the following modifications to the OneDrive for Business Admin Tool:
- Fixed a reference to the original function name for FolderToDelete
- Added verbiage referencing the -Confirm parameter when using FolderToDelete parameter
- Tidied up code indentations to make it more readable
I’ve got some additional feedback that I will incorporate as well (once I figure out how to do it).… [ Continue reading ]
Update to PwnCheck!
As my kids are eager to tell me, I done messed up. 😉 One of my readers pointed out an oversight where a null variable may have been referenced–and it’s been corrected! H/T to @itpro_tipscom!
You can get the updated version at https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/PwnCheck-HaveIBeenPwned-d65cf5f1… [ Continue reading ]
Some of the many ways to Export Outlook Contacts
Just had this come up, so I thought I’d post it for whoever else needs to hear this. I can quickly think of three ways to do this: One using Outlook, one using PowerShell, and one using both.
Since you came to my blog, you’re probably most interested in figuring out how to get PowerShell to do the dirty work for you without interacting with the user. … [ Continue reading ]
Download all files from SharePoint Online
Update (2021-04-22): I have updated the script link to go to the PowerShell Gallery: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Download-AllSPOFiles/
Update (2020-01-28): I have updated this script to include the -Force parameter for Get-PnpFile, allowing you to willy-nilly overwrite destination files.
Yesterday, I came across a request for a script or method to download all files from SharePoint Online.… [ Continue reading ]
Removing Orphaned Mailbox Searches
An issue came up today for one of my customers–how to remove orphaned mailbox searches in Exchange Online. Apparently, they have about 300 mailboxes in this state. Oops.

So, in order to do this, you need to go through a handful of steps:
- Identify all of the Mailbox Searches.
SharePoint Online User Permissions Report
This week, I had a customer ask about generating a list of all sites a user had access to as part of their security and employee termination process. SharePoint PnP PowerShell seemed like a good place to start. But then, I decided, what if I wanted to find all the places a particular had a particular type of permission? … [ Continue reading ]
Cloud UPNs for AAD Connect users with Alt-ID don’t update after domain verified in tenant
A few weeks ago, I ran into an issue with a customer. Scenario:
- Customer had configured alternate-id sign in with AAD Connect (the gist is that it flows on-premises mail to cloud UPN)
- Synced identity to tenant
- Tenant did not have any verified domains
As expected, without a matching verified domain in the tenant, UPN suffixes in the tenant were actually set as @tenant.onmicrosoft.com. … [ Continue reading ]
Update to Create-LabUsers!
Sometimes, your mind just gets to thinking about stuff you could have done better. Last night was one of those times.
I’d started building new lab environments for work, and decided to start pumping users into AD and syncing them to my test tenants. … [ Continue reading ]
