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 ]

August 13, 2019June 8, 2023

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 ]

July 11, 2019

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.

… [ Continue reading ]

February 8, 2019

Update to Forwarding Address Export Import Tool

Every now and then, I get a ahead of myself. I’ve updated a typo in the script on the gallery, a vestige of when I updated the script to use server-side filtering. The bug revealed itself when you did not use the -Domain parameter.… [ Continue reading ]

January 31, 2019February 1, 2019

Getting Around the Basics of Azure Automation for Office 365

One of the the things that we’ve learned about the cloud over the past few years is that you still need an environment (a utility server, an app server, a something) to run batch jobs and custom scripts against your environments. … [ Continue reading ]

January 23, 2019May 11, 2021

Update to the Wipe-ExchangeOnlineMailbox tool

Who knew you’d need an update to a tool meant to delete things?

After working with a partner today and an out-of-control email application spamming user mailboxes, we decided an update was necessary. Outlook became unusable with several hundred thousand messages in Deleted Items. … [ Continue reading ]

January 10, 2019July 27, 2021

Migrating from Exchange Online eDiscovery and In-Place Hold to the Security & Compliance Center

One of the issues that some of my larger customers have been dealing with is the lack of tooling and planning around moving legacy Exchange Online In-Place eDiscovery & Holds to the new(ish) Security & Compliance Center. Our direction has been to either let them age out or manually recreate them the Security & Compliance Center.… [ Continue reading ]

December 10, 2018June 8, 2023

Find Allowed Users, Domains, and IPs in Office 365

If you’ve ever asked anyone how to do virtually anything, the answer is usually “It depends.” Just as there is no wrong way to eat a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and more than one way to skin a cat, so it frequently is with technological tasks. … [ Continue reading ]

December 4, 2018December 4, 2018

Delegating Reporting Access for Exchange Online

Earlier this week, I had a request for assistance with delegating reporting features in Exchange Online to non-administrative users. This is a frequent topic of discussion when it comes to compliance and security officers validating that systems are not being misused by unauthorized persons.… [ Continue reading ]

December 3, 2018December 3, 2018

Migrate-EOPSettings now does ATP!

ATP! ATP!

At long last, I’ve made a first pass at updating the Migrate-EOPSettings script to now include settings for Advanced Threat Protection. I’ve had several customers moving their instances from commercial EOP to Office 365 GCC, and while my Migrate EOP script would capture just about everything, it came to my attention that we still had configuration to do for ATP. … [ Continue reading ]

October 5, 2018October 5, 2018

Update to the Export-CalendarProcessing tool

As luck would have it, I have one more update to deliver today.

One of my peers (shout out to Mike Manning) noticed that when using the ExportImport-CalendarProcessing tool, mailbox objects that have some special characters in them don’t get processed correctly on the import function. … [ Continue reading ]

September 14, 2018January 4, 2024

Fixing Office 365 Anonymous Group Write-back and External Delivery

Yes, Hell has frozen over. The cows have come home. The lady of size has sung.

I have come up with a “best case” (ok, maybe “better case”) solution for the ~~Office~~ Microsoft 365 hybrid group write-back problem.

Background
Solution overview and limitations
Pre-pend description field with EXTERNAL
Create an outbound to Active Directory rule to modify the attribute value
Preview the objects
Make it so

Background

For the long(er) background, you’ll probably want to go see this post.… [ Continue reading ]

September 13, 2018January 2, 2019

Forwarding Address Import and Export

Four score and many moons ago, I was working on one of my first projects in Microsoft Consulting Services. This particular customer (a university) shared their Active Directory infrastructure with a hospital. During the course of their business, employees would frequently move between organizations. … [ Continue reading ]

June 15, 2018May 11, 2021

Mail-enabling Guest Users or “How I made everyone show up in the Address Book”

So, today, I received an email from one of my esteemed colleagues asking how we could get B2B Azure AD tenant guests to show up in the Office 365 GAL. I thought, “Yeah, that should be something that’s possible. I mean, they have email addresses.”… [ Continue reading ]

April 23, 2018October 15, 2021

Using “Restore-RecoverableItems”, or “how I saved my own bacon”

Since the dawn of time (or at least, since the dawn of the Epoch), people have been inadvertently deleting stuff. As is attributed to Uncle Ben, “with great power comes great responsibility,” and so it is true with the system administrator. … [ Continue reading ]