DOWST.DEV

runbook, it must have the permission to act as an administrator. In this article, we cover how to assign the necessary role to a service principal.

organizations. As team owners can add or remove members from MS Teams, it is important for admins to track membership changes to ensure authorized individuals have access

However, even after a project ends, the corresponding team often remains in the execution phase, leading to a growing number of inactive teams in Microsoft Teams.

infrastructure has been the development of Teams. Teams is amazing tool on it's own but there is a risk regarding governance and training, but also explosive growth of teams and the way these are implemented. Especially because Teams makes self-services super easy.

Business Online via PowerShell via two methods.

it was possible to create a team from the membership of a dynamic distribution list. The answer is that the steps are straightforward to create a static Microsoft 365 group. Things get more complicated if you contemplate using a dynamic Microsoft 365 group.

API's clone URL. The cloning isn't as robust as it could be, both avenues miss key components that an administrator may want to clone, like but not limited to private channels. This script not only copies the group's public channels, but its private channels, and private channel members including their correct roles. It's also been my experience while the Teams client will copy guest Teams members, using clone from the Graph API doesn't. This script, however, will.

closing tasks over a period for Microsoft 365 users.

Using a concept called Adaptive Cards, Teams allows you to create and customize various cards in Teams via JSON. You could create them by typing up some JSON but it's much more fun to create them with incoming Teams webhooks and a little PowerShell!

was configured?

Skype for Business Online PowerShell. To connect to this service, you need to download and install the latest SkypeOnlineConnector module and create a remote PowerShell session to the service.

analyzing an individual's meeting activity within Teams. Look no further! In this blog, we'll explore the methods to obtain user-specific Teams meeting reports. Here, we'll also introduce a crafted PowerShell script that simplifies the process...

conversations, files, and tasks around specific topics or projects. However, they also come with challenges-especially when external members are involved.

2016 (not all the time). Some recent Graph hiccups meant that I had to apply some fixes and workarounds. At the same time, some users hit the infamous 'not recognized as a valid datetime' problem, so another update was needed. All good, clean fun.

for meetings and calls using PowerShell, including message templates, localization, and known limitations.

policy change or simply troubleshoot an issue. The challenge here is that the cache for Microsoft Teams is in multiple directories. This can be done manually but would result in a slow and tedious process. Again, we turn to PowerShell to automate this process and this time it's a one-liner that addresses this opportunity.

meeting transcripts with and without speaker attribution using PowerShell.

conversations using PowerShell.

From chats to meetings, it's become the collaboration hub for team projects. However, as projects come to an end, many of the teams gradually fade into inactivity.

content from wiki to OneNote. That's great, but you need to know what channels include the wiki tab before you can decide what material should be migrated. This article explains how to use PowerShell to create a report of Teams channel tabs for wikis.

are not. If you want to hide all the groups used by Teams, here's how to do the job with PowerShell

are using the communications tool to stay connected with its employees and customers alike. The increase of use has also resulted in an increase of demand of system administrator's time to manage Microsoft Teams. Everything from adding users and groups to managing policies of said users and groups can be managed via PowerShell. This post will highlight the foundations to get started and provide links to continue your automation through script writing journey.

applications to have both Microsoft Graph permissions and enabled Transcript API Access. This adds an extra layer of security for sensitive meeting data.

Dashboard module created by Adam Driscoll (PowerShell MVP), in order to monitor Microsoft Teams Cloud call queues.

performing a particular action for some integration scripts.

usual reason is because someone posted some bad or objectionable content to Teams. This article covers how to use Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK cmdlets to find chat threads, to check thread messages for targeted content, and to remove matching chat threads. The code can be run interactively by an administrator to clean up Teams.

Fixing apps to meet the new requirement is easily done with PowerShell. First, find the apps that use Teams PowerShell (we show two ways), and then assign the two required permissions to the apps. All done with a few lines of Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK code.

channels in a Microsoft 365 tenant. It provides a script that generates a report file containing details of channels and their last message, along with information on team owners.

recordings. Then things changed in terms of how the audit records were generated and how the Search-UnifiedAuditLog cmdlet returns audit search results. All of which meant that considerable work was needed to revamp (rewrite) the script. Maybe you need to check any script that uses the Search-UnifiedAuditLog cmdlet too?

Microsoft Teams think I'm away while I'm not / My PC isn't locked yet... I read a few solutions, setting your status duration to a date in the future, etc... Didn't work 🙁 What does work is running my simple PowerShell scripts, which I will show you in this blog post 🙂

automated to cater to the requirements of the business, as well as IT. In this article, Sean McAvinue goes over keep your Teams tidy through some useful tips and PowerShell code.

PowerShell Gallery. Welcome as any update is, the publication was unaccompanied by any announcement or notification, and Microsoft didn't up date the release notes for the module until late on May 3. Even with the release notes, we don't know exactly what V2.3.0 contains, so it's time for inspired interpre...

Teams Phone Number database, how to remove phone numbers, and the benefits of doing so.

authentication, new governance controls, AI management, synthetic media detection, and voice phishing protection settings.

supported now. All earlier versions are fully retired since June 15, 2022 & will stop working (Message center post for reference - MC350371).

generating reports on Microsoft Teams on daily basis. Most admins and executives want to prepare reports on the number of meetings between users, meeting participants, call times, and more. But Microsoft is yet to provide the cmdlets or API to extract those data from Office 365.

end-users to get started with when they are onboarded to Microsoft Teams?

federation configuration again to improve how a script works. Instead of taking all the domains guest accounts came from and adding them to the configuration, I created a function to check if the tenant uses Microsoft 365. If it does, we add the tenant to the allow list in the tenant federation configuration. If not, we ignore the domain.

PowerShell with the unified audit log to deliver a solution. The idea is that you can check audit log entries to see when specific user accounts join the membership of Teams. Once you've found that data, it's a simple matter of creating email to share the results. All done with a few lines of PowerShell...

'C:Users\AppDataRoamingMicrosoftTeams', Clear this registry entry 'HKCU:SoftwareMicrosoftOfficeTeamsPreventInstallationFromMsi', download Teams installer to c:temp as teams.exe, execute teams.exe --silent

security, but it causes assembly clash issues and will be deprecated in future releases.

Global - AllowEngagementReport "Enabled"

Starting on August 15, they're retiring connectors for Teams. The problem is finding out which teams and channels have configured connectors. That's when PowerShell comes in handy, as we prove with a script to report which teams have connectors.

properties in the?Export-MailboxDiagnosticLogs?cmdlet. The properties record different kinds of mailbox activity and I included a script to generate a report based on the properties. The output is a CSV file that can be opened in Excel or imported in Power BI. All is well.

always will be ad free. It's just a cheat sheet that I thought was worth sharing.

events. The information is available through the Events Graph API, and some PowerShell code written using the Graph PowerShell SDK quickly extracts events to analyze and determine the set of external domains meeting participants come from.

improve automated Teams provisioning using templates and preset structures.

channels. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to create a report with PowerShell and just a little Graph magic.

Teams reactions to chat and channel messages. This is not an exercise that leads to any great business value, but it's a good way to show the sometimes surprising data that can be extracted from audit records.

Azure Automation runbooks. We also consider when you'd want to consider using Teams PowerShell cmdlets instead of Graph API requests or cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. The bottom line is that it's possible, but maybe not a frequently-used option.

compose and send Teams urgent messages to a set of recipients using Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK cmdlets. The conversation with each recipient is a one-to-one chat that Teams either creates from scratch or reuses (if a suitable one-on-one chat exists).

extensive use of classes introduced in PowerShell 5.0. PowerShell modules are loaded into PoshBot and instantly become available as bot commands.

released. Yes I know there is a overview in Teams Admin Center, but I thought it would be nice to do this and some kind more via PowerShell Module. So I picked up the script and build it again with the organic PowerShell Module for Teams.

What we are learning today is how to send messages, photos, urls, and information from APIs to Teams' chat using PowerShell.

Teams. But there's one problem, when you migrate a Teams meeting event from Exchange to a new tenant, the URLs and other information still points to the old tenant. If you then disable all the users in the old tenant, those meetings would be useless even if guests are auto accepted to join, as they would not exist anymore. There would be various other problems also trying to join a meeting in the old tenant.

about it! So this will be an entire series on Teams PowerShell - including interlocking aspects like Skype, Azure AD and Exchange PowerShell.

authentication, introducing new controls over federated chat. The changes include stricter external access and mutual federation policies in federated group chats, which can be managed with the Set-CsTenantFederationConfiguration cmdlet.

private channels). Support for PowerShell access to private channels is not yet available in the publicly available version of the Teams PowerShell module. Instead, if you want to work with private channels through PowerShell, you must install the latest version of the Teams module from the PowerShell test gallery. You need to run version 1.0.18 or better to manage private channels.

Exchange Online PowerShell modules. Now its code uses only cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. It's an example of the kind of update that many organizations are going through due to the upcoming deprecation of the Azure AD and MSOL modules.

transfer meeting ownership between user mailboxes. The cmdlet allows administrators to switch organizers for meetings and updates the calendars of internal attendees with the new organizer information.

Microsoft seems set on retiring the Office connectors. The Teams post to channel workflow when a webhook request is received seems like is a possible replacement, but it's not just a matter of switching mechanisms. Some PowerShell magic is needed to create a suitable adaptive card to post to the channel, which is exactly what we explain how to do here.

name implies, the cmdlet returns details of all channels in a team (regular, private, and shared). To see what it does, we wrote a script to report all the channels in teams in a tenant.

messaging to create new one-to-one and group chats and post messages to chats and channel conversations.

experience managing it with PowerShell in this blog post.

by a scope, writing them back to onpremises Active Directory, including group memberships.

can show Who has what on which object.

Securing Active Directory is a massive part of the overall organization security, configuration, and permission and Access Control List (ACL).

maintaining a secure environment and heading off bad actors early. Thankfully, AD offers the information necessary to track these changes, despite being difficult to parse and understand at times. LAPS is a great example of this.

how well does it scale? Not very well.

Ensuring its health is pivotal for the seamless operation of various services. Today, I decided to look at Microsoft Entra Connect Health (Azure AD Connect Health) service, which allows monitoring Azure AD Connect, ADFS, and Active Directory. This means that under a single umbrella, you can have an overview of three services health. But is it worth it?

about computers in our Active Directory domain. Then, we will update our dashboard and take advantage of the charting capabilities of Universal Dashboard to show the information in an easy to digest manner.

overview of their environment I always check a lot of things before writing a report and a recommendation about which steps we need to take. In this blog post, I will show you a script that gathers information about the Active Directory Domain which saves a lot of command-line checking and starting up Management Consoles 😉

community, for part one of a multi-episode series covering his projects. This episode focuses on the Active Directory Management Framework, or ADMF, a configuration-driven system Fred originally built while working as a field engineer at Microsoft for a large enterprise customer managing hundreds of Active Directory forests.

of directory information across all domain controllers in a domain. Monitoring this process is important as it helps identify any issues that may arise and resolve them quickly. One way to monitor Active Directory replication is by using the Repadmin command-line tool. Repadmin provides a wealth of information about the replication status and health of a domain. However, manually checking the Repadmin output can be time-consuming and tedious, and running it manually every 30 minutes just to check if everything is great doesn't seem like a great idea. While PowerShell has its own commands around replication I've not found something as fast and reliable as repadmin /replsummary.

Active Directory scripts using VBScript and PowerShell for over a decade. Here's a big sample of Active Directory PowerShell scripts to do all kinds of stuff!

units don't refer to the site where the users work.

against a Windows Active-Directory domain.

managing them natively can be time-consuming and difficult to scale. To simplify the process, we developed a PowerShell script that supports 12 Active Directory contact management actions. With support for both individual and bulk operations, it helps admins efficiently manage the entire contact lifecycle from creation to deletion.

Active Directory. The code used PowerShell and CIM events to notify you, for example, when a new user account is created. This can be helpful when you need alerting. But perhaps you only need reporting. What has changed in Active Directory since a given date and time, such as in the last 24 hours? And wouldn't it be nice to have a pretty report? Let me help. Here's how I approached the prob lem using PowerShell and the ActiveDirectory module.

criteria. However, these filters do not assess the content of the log entry messages. To evaluate the log messages, you can extend filters using an XPath query. The examples below demonstrate how to audit Group Policy changes with XML queries, which you can further process with PowerShell.

user?

vulnerabilities in on-premises Active Directory environments. When multiple privileged accounts share the same password, a single compromise can cascade across your entire infrastructure. In this post, I'll demonstrate how to audit your Active Directory environment for shared passwords using PowerShell and the DSInternals module.

different. By downloading a freely available PowerShell module, an IT admin can manage every facet of AD and build powerful scripts to save time on all kinds of tasks. The best part is that knowledge of LDAP, ADSI and other typically developer-focused terms is not necessary. The PowerShell cmdlets take care of that stuff for you.

to build a solid reporting tool around Active Directory. I had a library of scripts and functions I have written over the years, including a few that I've written about here recently. Thus was born ADReportingTools.

with the Backup-GPO cmdlet of the Group Policy module. With my function, it will be much easier to identify the correct Group Policy Object (GPO) in case you have to restore Group Policy settings.

users can't login, they probably can't browse the web, machines can't communicate and finance won't be able to generate their latest report. Be sure you keep AD in tip top shape with an Active Directory health check script!

in bulk using PowerShell.

objects. Also it logs in EventLog and as a file on disk in csv format.

so you may need also cleanup disabled users from groups. Sometimes you don't want to delete users but only removing them from AD groups is required (often for licensing issues etc.)

including a script that identifies and automates cleanup actions such as disabling, moving, or deleting accounts.

criteria. It can also disable, move or delete objects. It can utilize Azure AD, Intune and Jamf to get additional information about objects before deleting them.

policies to users and computers. A policy is some computer setting you wish to enforce, such as which screen saver to use, what desktop background to use, or what the default execution policy should be.

code if the OSD process didn't join the domain properly. Basically, I'm using PowerShell to do a couple of lookups and writing the information to variables, which I then use to trigger an exit command.

when you by accident fat finger it, and you have to redo it? Or even, you have multiple people in ...

virtual machines, which are ideal as I can simply dispose of them after. But you also need to cleanup the device records that were created in Azure Active Directory, Intune, the Autopilot registration service, Microsoft Endpoint Manager (if you're using it) and Active Directory in the case of Hybrid-joined devices.

Administration Tools. That sucks! We want it as simple as executing a script.

off-hand remark about parsing out organizational unit names from a distinguished name. On one hand, this is a pretty simple task, assuming a proper distinguished name from the Active Directory cmdlets. All you really need to do is split the string.

important to document them. In this blog post I am going to show you two PowerShell commands [...]

either completely public cloud using AAD or they have hosted servers in our private cloud. For these clients I've made the following script to document their Active Directory server settings. I always I want to be in complete control of my clients environment. That means having up to date documentation at the ready.

including password resets, SID history injection, group membership changes, and enabling/disabling accounts.

include FIDO2 and NGC key auditing, offline ntds.dit file manipulation, password auditing, DC recovery from IFM backups, and password hash calculation.

basic user attributes in Active Directory. Like anyone else, I presented the idea of using RSAT to let them modify users in ADUC or ADAC. This was not an ideal solution because ADUC can become overwhelming to someone that isn't technical. They wanted something that was extremely basic, easy to follow and work in without any guidance or instructions, and did not show the user anything else that they could not modify or needed to see.

group writeback v2 to on-premises using MS Graph PowerShell

implementing proper tier isolation, highlighting the importance of a culture of least privilege in securing AD environments.

This was written on Friday, July 19, 2024, due to the CrowdStrike Outage. If you choose to test this PowerShell, ensure that you update the argument for the SearchBase parameter to reflect your Active Directory domain.

maintain a proper lifecycle around Active Directory groups. Many organizations love creating groups however, some (most?), don't really like to do cleanup

Group Policy. With rsop.msc, a graphical tool is available for this purpose. However, it is generally more efficient to generate a report using gpresult.exe and evaluate it with PowerShell.

may no longer be in use. Let's go.

main problem admins tend to face is identifying the source computer or service that is causing the account to lock out in the first place.

that tracks and prevent duplicate SPN's

includes the cmdlet Get-ADGroupMember for finding group members, but it cannot be used to query groups with over 5000 members. The cmdlet also suffers from performance bottlenecks. I'd like to share with you a tool I built that solves both those problems.

disable insecure LDAP Bindings, which is going to break a lot of your systems (hopefully not). But this was already communicated, and you know all about it, right? If not, you should read those two articles that can help you with understanding what is happening and when.

and other directory services. Knowing these ports is crucial for configuring firewalls, ensuring secure communication, and troubleshooting network issues related to Active Directory services. This post will teach you how to get the Active Directory ports with PowerShell.

Directory. A good use case is if a director or VP wants to send an email to all of their direct reports, and the direct reports of those direct reports. Another use case would be if you were doing an audit comparing your HR system to what is in Active Directory. What ever the reason might be, you can use this script to get direct reports in active directory using Powershell. Pretty neat!!

details are stored on individual domain controllers and not fully replicated. This makes it hard to get a single accurate value, especially in environments with multiple DCs. To simplify this, we developed a PowerShell script that retrieves accurate last logon details for all users in a domain.

come to the right place! In this article, you will learn how to create custom reports of user accounts in your AD environment using the Get-ADObject cmdlet.

development by creating an account on GitHub.

migrations, backup & restore.

Enter, will I be prompted for MyAdmin password? I saw a few examples but they don't seem to be quite what I'm looking for. I would be performing this on an individual station, therefore I don't think I would need to specify a computer name.

Directory. Well wonder no longer with this tutorial from Windows OS Hub showing you every step of the process, from enabling logging, to how to search the logs with PowerShell.

environment.

PowerShell is the optimal choice when you need to make large-scale changes. But there are caveats to consider before you can reap the automation benefits.

If so, you may have run across a frustrating problem - an on-prem AD user has expired but that user can still access resources protected with Azure AD.

production servers and not feel guilty! There are many possibilities for using PowerShell on non-Windows platforms now and today my mind was pondering how to use it to join Linux servers to Active Directory. So, I created a small little function that automates some of this called Join-LinuxToAD. Keep in mind I tested this only on CentOS 7.

Directory to avoid serious problems. PowerShell can make quick edits to keep order.

how it fits in with Identity Management. This is a new podcast presented by Semperis and hosted by 15 time MVP Sean Deuby. The podcast is off to a fantastic start with wide range of experts in the field of Identity Management. It's a great listen because of the topics but also because the episodes are only 15-20 minutes in length.

operations. To simplify this, we developed a PowerShell script that helps you perform 15 Active Directory group management tasks for single or multiple groups in bulk. This blog walks through the script and shows how to use it to manage AD groups.

allows users and groups in a new domain to retain access to resources that still rely on permissions from the old domain. However, once migrations are completed, these historical SIDs can become clutter, posing both security and administrative challenges.

that haven't been turned on since World Cup 2016?" Yeah, we've all been there. Keeping AD clean and up-to-date is like trying to organize your garage-it's easy to put off until it becomes a total mess.

continues to evolve.

on your Active Directory, whether to view key indicators or to perform advanced searches in a simple way.

so you don't have to. It is not a replacement for tools already in place such as DCDiag. Instead, this toolkit comprises tools that my co-writers and I have found nowhere else. The goal of this module is to enable you to know when the core pieces of Active Directory aren't working as expected so you can take action.

are logged in the Event Viewer. In this article I will cover how to monitor all logon events with PowerShell. Let's dive in.

Access Management tool that will be living in your Azure environment, mostly designed for MSPs. If you want to see how AzPam looks or contribute, check out the Github page about it here. I should be pretty close to releasing an alpha version soon!

supported, due to COVID we had some extra time to prepare our clients for this change as its been postponed to July of 2021. We've helped all of our clients move to modern authentication last year but I understood there is still a bit of a struggle for other MSPs to achieve this.

and generates nicely viewable reports in HTML format by highlighting the spots that require attention. The script manipulates user data using facts collected with benchmark values.

person. Most who have tried granting permissions outside of adding users to groups in Active Directory would probably agree that, access delegation can be a daunting task.

to get started building your own PowerShell toolkit.

changes in a safe manner, Advanced Group Policy Management or AGPM, is an amazing tool.

appeared first on PKI Solutions.

supported. You can totally run the ActiveDirectory module, natively, without using the WindowsCompatibility module! This is one of the most under-reported facts of PowerShell 7, even going as far back as 6.1

security concerns. Delegation & Revocation of privileges. Configuring monitoring of active directory object changes. Analysis of security relevant AD configuration settings/state.

the functions are designed to work with eachother. Functions that gather information on users or computers can be piped into functions that take an action. For instance, you can pipe a function that returns computers that have not logged onto the network for 30 days into a function that disables computer accounts. In a single line of code, you can disable all the inactive computers in active directory. There are a wide variety of functions that perform other tasks like sending magic packets for wake on lan, measuring directory and sub-directory sizes, gathering large files, and other tasks. Every function is fully documented and works with the Get-Help function.

ADMF and see this PowerShell-backed tool in action!

you can, doesn't mean you should.) If you do, be sure to follow Jorge's advice and use PowerShell to do it!

permissions. One of the replies I got about that was: How about the Container permissions, those are important too 🙂 And that's correct, they are! In this blog post, I will show you how to create a report on those (Script is based on the OU report)

Role Based Access and delegating permissions on Organizational Units (OU's). But one of the first questions was. What are the current permissions and what should we remove and where? In this blogpost I will show you a way to report on the current permissions so that you can remove them where they shouldn't be granted

companion tool to the Group Policy backup tool he shared earlier this year.

working hours. These logon times can be configured using the calendar widget in Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC). However, PowerShell provides a more efficient and flexible alternative, particularly because it offers reporting capabilities that the graphical interface does not.

connector management.

objects in AD.

helpdesk requests due to expired passwords, especially for VPN users, and may actually undermine security. However, timely notifications can help mitigate issues when password changes are necessary. Learn how to notify users with Group Policy or a PowerShell script.

combines that data into a prettified report. If you have ever used DSInternals, you know that while very powerful, it comes with raw data that is hard to process and requires some skills to get it into a state that can be shown to management or security.

redundant and scalable file shares. And yet anyone who has used it, knows that monitoring it can be difficult at the best of times.

it's best to deliver on the promise. What you're about to witness here is something I've worked on for a while now, and it meets my basic needs. If you don't have SIEM product or products that monitor who does what in Active Directory this command makes it very easy, even for people who don't have much experience in reading Event Logs. If you'd like to learn about working with Windows Event Logs here's a great article I wrote recently - PowerShell - Everything you wanted to know about Event Logs and then some.

Directory? Check out Anthony Howell’s walkthrough of a PowerShell function to easily do just that.

you need to extract specific information from events.

copied from Support Tool for WS2003) console tools to monitor and control Active Directory replication. In Windows Server 2012, Microsoft added a number of PowerShell cmdlets to manage and check replication status in the Active Directory forest. In this article we'll look at the main useful PoSh cmdlets that an AD administrator can use to control replication between domain controllers.

of an AD object - the time and date when the password for that object was last changed. This attribute is used to enforce password policies and track when a password was last changed. This quick post helps you understand these...

Directory. This applies, for example, to the expiration date of passwords or to Kerberos delegation. An AD audit should check this attribute regularly. This can be done using PowerShell, and there is a cmdlet for changing flags.

Create a local user or administrator account in Windows using PowerShell. It's a bit overcomplicated, but the goal was it should work for Windows 7 and up, and that means supporting PowerShell 2.0. As part of that exercise, I've been using Win32_UserAccount WMI based query to find local users and manage them to an extent. While Get-LocalUser exists, it's not suitable for the PowerShell 2.0 scenario. I also use the same query in GPO for WMI filtering. You can say it's been a good friend of mine - until today! Let's take a look at this basic WMI query:

group membership. Those are Get-ADGroup and Get-ADGroupMember. The first command contains property Members, which gives you DistinguishedName of all members, and Get-ADGroupMember can provide you either direct members or with Recursive switch all members recursively (skipping groups). Till a few weeks ago, I was a happy user of those commands until I noticed two things. Member property for Get-ADGroup sometimes misses elements for whatever reason.

check out the following command.

ldap signing. See LINK. This affects every supported version of Windows Server (from 2008R2 till 2019). There is another LINK ADV190023 with detailed explanation.

of Windows in your domain. It will also break down the versions of Windows 10.

make it easier to modify (Or more succinctly a Settings Page). This was a bit of work to think through. I am hoping someone might know of a more robust way to do what I am doing. This way I felt I could do with a bit of work. So I came up with two ways of implementing the same settings script.

web site. The challenges are designed for individuals to do on their own to build up their PowerShell scripting skills. A few weeks ago, a challenge was posted to create a network monitoring tool using PowerShell and the Write-Progress cmdlet. I thought I'd share my notes on the challenge and some of the code I came up with.

Azure Policy as Code, enabling organizations to enforce controls across their enterprise cloud environments.

can make your life better as an IT professional. I have a friend - let's call her Gladys Kravitz. Gladys and I were chatting and she mentioned how tricky it is to pull information out of Windows event logs. If I recall, she was looking at 4625 events in the Security log which represents failed logon attempts.

third-party, but Microsoft signed are safe(r). In this blog post, I will show you how you can scan your system for non-Microsoft signed Windows Services and create a report on those.

mentioned in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) to include DHCP scope information, and IIS-based website information.

Elasticsearch.

only on a 'custom' script. Considering how many variables are involved: requirements, environments, the overall experience of the team that will manage that piece of software, and all efforts to develop, test, and support the solution over time.

how to create a multiple fragment body and why it's needed for more complex reports.

Module to display performance metrics.

and/or your team know PowerShell and, perhaps, already have some PowerShell scripts to manage web services, using PowerShell to monitor uptime may be a good option.

in a lot of the communities I frequent but a worry popped up by someone recently; how am I sure that the Azure Application Proxy is always completely functional at my clients? You can monitor the service of course, but that does not mean that the entire connection to Azure is functional.

production. A friend of mine is using my PSexec monitoring script. He just has a couple of issue with that; he's running an application that actively uses psexec to create some elevation. That's quite...

how to literally monitor anything! All you need to get started is our PowerShell MP, plus some APIs and custom discoveries - happy monitoring!

for a while. He told me that he loved having the ability to measure the users experience but he had some clients with in-house applications that would write errors to the system log constantly, or he had other clients with crashing services that could not be prevented.

actually released it on the blog so I figured it's a good way to get back into blogging.

clients don't notice downtime when a failover or load balancing action occurs. It makes everything smooth and fluent for clients and users of our systems. The only problem with this is that sometimes a failover occurs and you don't notice. Great for users, not so great for administrators; if a server crashes in the woods, did it really crash at all? To make sure we always get notified about these situations we use the following script via our RMM system.

and ports being in use. The use case is that users have a Autocad type application installed that launches a server on a specific port; the users also run a remote control application that at times steals the port.

little more difficult . Microsoft allows per-user MFA, Security Defaults, and Conditional Access all to be used concurrently. I've created this monitoring script that returns which users seem to fall out of any Multi-factor authentication scope, and also reports what type of authentication is currently active on the tenant. Using the normal PowerShell methods you can only find if a user has per-user MFA enabled, if a user uses Conditional Access or Security Defaults it shows the per-user MFA state as disabled, which is a little annoying.

or the backup software does not work, they still have an image based backup for those huge emergencies.

needed an easy way to manage virtual desktops over many regions. This deployment actually got me thinking about how monitoring the WVD environment should be done.

small analysis on stuff like disk space can make a huge difference in how you respond to incidents but I rarely see this integrated into RMM systems - Often there are some reports on which you could extrapolate this data manually but that means you'll only do it on demand and it will require your time.

demonstrated during the conference. The presenters showed a method of checking if your O365 domain was being Typosquated. The tool can be found here. The presenters made a Python tool, and I figured to create an alternative in PowerShell.

iPerf with the help of PowerShell.

from provided input inside Excel CSV using PowerShell script.

live CPU and network usage. It also demonstrates how to use themes to custom the backcolor, text color and font family.

generally down for everyone else, too. PowerShell can ask a web service to check web site availability for you. Here is a simple wrapper function.

issues. With its wide range of built-in cmdlets and flexibility, PowerShell enables you to investigate issues, monitor performance, and manage services and processes. In this article, we will explore how to use PowerShell for troubleshooting, covering event logs, performance counters, services, and processes

is... I read the NPS logs, and they were DTS Compliant formatted, a bit of a pain to read and search ?? So, I used PowerShell to create a nice log for me in either a GridView or ... Continue reading Use PowerShell to create report of a DTS Compliant NPS log

the use of Windows Console and custom scripting.

resolution, potentially enabling you to quickly establish an area to concentrate on for the issue. However, if you try to run Pester in a .NET Notebook you will receive an error. Now let Rob show you how to fix it.

needed only when the function is not public to tell us where to find it.

with your needs. Perfect for large test suites.

automatically send the results to the service codecov.io, which in turn will present the results so that we can see change over time.

modules keep on running correctly. Some substantial changes in Pester add new features, changing some things, but that also means all the tests that you have defined most likely will need a small push to get it up and running again on Pester V5. Starting this blog post, I wanted to mention that I am by no means an expert on Pester, but I do use it for some time now for most of my projects. I am using basic functionality, but even that basic functionality stops working once you upgrade from PesterV4 to PesterV5, so I thought I would save you some time and give you a small overview of how you can quickly fix it. It works for me, but you may have to find your way to fix things.

validating locations, in which the user must have street, city, state, postal code, country, business phone, and company name the same as the valid location in the json.

lead maintainer of Pester and a software engineer at Microsoft. The talk circled around the history, growth, and importance of Pester, Jakub's role in the organization and delivery of PSConfEU this year, as well as Profiler, a beneficial PowerShell project for unraveling performance hurdles. The episode concluded on a personal note, discussing Jakub's journey within the PowerShell community and his ascension to his current position at Microsoft.

comfortable with Pester 5 and as my tests grow in complexity I am embracing the use of tags. You can add tags to different Pester test elements.

scoping, module loading, TestDrive access, and stream capture challenges with timeout protection.

everyone. As well as a website for deeper understanding where needed.

the PluralSight course, Infrastructure Testing with Pester, where Adam covers how to use Pester and PowerShell to create in-depth infrastructure tests.

administering Linux and macOS systems using Microsoft PowerShell. Adapted by PowerShell team members Travis Plunk and Tyler Leonhardt from the bestselling Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches by community legends Don Jones and Jeffrey Hicks, it features Linux-based examples covering core language features and admin tasks. Designed for busy IT professionals, this innovative guide will take you from the basics to PowerShell proficiency through 25 tutorials you can do in your lunch break.

can config the validation.json file in the Validating folder with your company standards to make only those values pass. Here are the fields so far, and will be adding more!

where you're looking at a large number of results. PesterExplorer creates a Text User Interface to explore Pester results.

to write tests that ensure your code works as intended.

reliability in my PowerShell code. After writing the Pester Book and mentioning some of the methodologies I used with Pester v4 I'll present in this blog post, I've since learned Pester v5 makes my work so much easier.

validating that your infrastructure is operating how you expect.

a parameter may have a value of null why does the attribute need to be written [AllowNull()] with an empty () ?

maybe about some scripts and sometime more. PowerShell is more than that. It's not only a sequential programming language it's also a functional language. You can create functions and modules, but not only you can use it as configuration management with DSC and other tools, you can use it in serverless platforms like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions, you can build cloud solutions either on Azure or AWS. You can build complete solutions with PowerShell.

introduction to Pester.

unit testing concepts to Microsoft 365 security configuration.

used to test AI-generated code. He also talks about the importance of community involvement, overcoming imposter syndrome, and learning in public.

always felt like magic. I could cast a charm simply by typing a few characters on a keyboard. Naturally, my magic skills went from batch files to VBScript to PowerShell. Throughout it all, I've also had an internal decision tree regarding automation. Over the years, I've seen IT pros new to scripting and automation needlessly struggle. Often it is due to a deficiency in their decision tree. Today, I thought I'd help you nurture yours.

configure authentication to Azure resources. With these tools available, your next step is to expand your runbook's reach outside of Azure to on-premises resources. Azure Automation makes this possible with Hybrid Worker Groups. In this guide, you will learn how

front end, and PowerShell, the Graph API, and Azure Runbooks as the back-end.

flexible is an Azure Automation account.

Automation runbooks, including Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK runbooks. In this article, we create a new environment for PowerShell V7.4, load in some SDK modules, switch a runbook from a system-generated environment, and run some code.

the post you're looking for; maybe another time.

teaches us about DSC and shares details of the DSCWorkshop project, which is a great way to go about learning more about DSC in a hands-on manner. We also learned about Cattle vs. Pets and how that applies to your servers. You can hear all of this, plus more in this companion episode to our first AutomatedLab episode.

Azure Automation Disclaimer: This post can be seen as satire. There are probably better ways, but because we were so limited with the customer at the time, we opted for a hobby approach: 'Maintenance mode the creative way'. What if... ... Continue reading How to create a maintenance mode in Azure Automation

Clixml is, or what it means, nor am I going to explain exactly why this issue is happening (mainly because I don't have a clear answer for you). I'll give you the solution and a possible way to make this easier for you.

Non solution aware flows can now be restored via PowerShell but in this video I demonstrate how you can turn a PowerShell script into an Azure RunBook, which in turn can be called from Power Automate and Power Apps.

RunAs account because it doesn't require certificate/secret renewal. Therefore it is maintenance-free.

run scripts for various jobs.

even easier with the new portal integration. This video picks up where the previous video left off and goes over the steps to install applications and modify the base OS using PowerShell. We start with the requirements of using silent installation for the software deployment, and then go over how to use inline PowerShell commands and PowerShell scripts to customize the image. The result is a custom Windows 10 multi-user image ready for deployment.

three learnings that might be of interest to others. Debugging, cost, and tracking the use of Azure Automation PowerShell might not interest everyone, but they've certainly helped me to understand how the platform works.

with managed identities. I don't have any issue with the proposal because managed identities are more secure and a better overall solution. It would have been nice if Microsoft had communicated the change more broadly. I guess if you were in the know, you found out about this development, but maybe the average Microsoft 365 tenant administrator might have struggled to discover what's happening.

including Classic Run As accounts, will be retired so you will need to migrate your runbooks to managed identities for authentication.

community book, "Modern IT Automation with PowerShell." We start off by talking about Constrained Language Mode, which Michael knows a lot about. We then move on to the four pillars of PowerShell Security, followed by a brief break from the technical talk to chat about food, as we like to do. We then move on to talking about how Michael became a Microsoft MVP. We also learned about the origins of this book, the journey to get it published, and how this is a textbook by the community for the community. All this, and more, on this episode of the PowerShell Podcast!

assigning usernames? g.surname? surname? gsurname? What are the naming conventions?

again in the future.

local or domain account configured. They needed this report because they are switching to more strict Group Policies and they needed to know what user accounts should have the "Log on as a batch job"

onboard Azure management services such as Azure Monitor, Defender for Cloud, and many others. One of the integrations is with Azure Automation Hybrid Worker. This allows you to run Azure Automation PowerShell or Phyton runbooks on-premises directly on .

PowerShell Gallery. Release 1.1.4 of the SailPoint IdentityNow PowerShell Module is the result of considerable effort by myself and Sean McGovern. Release 1.1.4's numerous updates comprise changes to cmdlets to account for changes to IdentityNow API authentication, four new cmdlets, cmdlet updates for API changes, bug-fixes and documentation updates..

in creating scheduled tasks with PowerShell. I find it handy when developing thing in my lab to keep the script in GitHub, and call it remotely. You can also easily modify the script to copy the script local ... Read more

effortlessly tracking their outputs while dynamically updating the same line with the latest information stream from each script block.

to embed PowerShell scripts directly into workflows. This feature unlocks new possibilities for complex integrations, and I'm excited to demonstrate its potential with a bank reconciliation workflow demo.

some of the modernized cmdlets available in the Teams PowerShell module. Not everything worked as smoothly as we'd like, but like most PowerShell scenarios, there's usually a workaround available to get the job done. It just needs to be found.

web site. The challenges are designed for individuals to do on their own to build up their PowerShell scripting skills. A few weeks ago, a challenge was posted to create a network monitoring tool using PowerShell and the Write-Progress cmdlet. I thought I'd share my notes on the challenge and some of the code I came up with.

critical for configuring supporting infrastructure services, such as Routing and Remote Access (RRAS) and Network Policy Server (NPS), as well as provisioning and managing Always On VPN client configuration settings on endpoints.

troubleshooting mail flow. The SpfAnalyzer module from Jiri Formacek can help with that. In this blog post, I will show you how it works.

using PowerShell and the PSTcpIp module.

Globalping PowerShell Module is here to save the day! With its easy-to-use cmdlets, you can automate measurements from probes distributed across the globe.

Managed DNS services. This has caused us to look for a different solution. Of course, I immediately thought of Azure, with an Azure DNS hosted zone.

inside networks managed by a Windows DHCP server. The process is pr etty straight forward - Add a vendor class, add the option, and set it to the correct IP address. Unfortunately, that of course means a lot of clicking in the DHCP console on each Windows Server he manages....

templates (WIP). It has capabilities to insert appropriate Azure Icons depending upon the type of the Azure Resource you have in your Resource Group, like Virtual Machine, Virtual Network, Subnet etc.

and what we'll cover. It can do POST requests, handle pagination, handle multipart/form-data, and it can pass in multiple headers if required. Don't forget about authentication and credentials; it can handle those, as well.

on a remote computer. You can use this cmdlet to check the response and...

IP-Adresses to hosts. In this article I will show you how to configure a DHCP Server with a [...]

"Remote Desktop"

(VM) toContinue Reading

uses password authenticationContinue Reading

give you a good insight into traffic from the systems to the local network or internet. You can do this with DNS auditing on your Windows server or in your local Pihole server, but that's not always available

tested. In this case, the new servers were not deployed in that specific network yet. But... We did want to test the connections before deploying the servers 🙂 In this blog post, I will show you a way how to create listening ports on a machine in order to test the connection from another network using netcat on Linux or portqry on Windows.

been around mostly in the Linux world for many years but more recently in Windows 10. But the scripting language PowerShell can accomplish similar tasks that curl can. Is PowerShell a good alternative to curl? What are the differences? Let's find out!

Wireless (WiFi) and/or VPN. This was a decent sized environment, about 50K clients, with hardware models from both HP, Dell, and Lenovo. The existing code I had did not work across all the hardware, so I reached out to the ConfigMgr community, and got some great tips...

monitor the utilization of DHCP scopes. While Microsoft provides System Center Operations Manager and necessary management packs to monitor all aspects of DHCP servers including monitoring of DHCP scopes, the System Center suite is very expensive and it requires a considerable amount of time to implement all of its components just to enable monitoring of a few servers. In this article, we learn how we can use simple PowerShell commands and a PowerShell script to check the utilization of DHCP scopes on multiple DHCP servers.

endpoints. You'll learn how to record those results into a SQLite database with a just few commands, and no need to create any underlying infrastructure. Finally, you'll see how you can view the data in PowerShell to help identify where and when you are experiencing network latency issues.

access tools that are installed on a computer, and list the possible access URLs; that way he could easily document which access methods are open and audit them once in a while to see if he...

specified target (website or IP address) and providing real-time updates on successful responses and timeouts.

include in $PROFILE

PowerShell. This report will give you one location to see all of your DHCP scope statistics across all of your Windows DHCP servers. It will dynamically pull the DHCP servers and associated DHCP scopes within your Active Directory domain. This report will help you keep an eye on the usage of all of your DHCP scopes so you can prevent scopes from filling up. With this PowerShell script there is no need to import a list of DHCP servers or hard code them in a variable. I recommend setting this up as a recurring scheduled task so that the report runs without the need for manual intervention.

what destination for Microsoft services like Exchange Online, Teams, Endpoint Manager, and so on. Microsoft publishes this on their website but in the blog post, I would like to show you a nice way of outputting

most basic tasks you're expected to do as an administrator. This guide will teach you how to use PowerShell to get and set the IP address.

method that doesn't mean I have to open up a web browser and visit a website, I wrote a small Powershell module to allow me to get the information.

closely simulate a .Net client application. It also provides easy access to the Windows Certificate store for client certificate authentication.

you have a new server on which you want to deploy DHCP, just run the PowerShell command:

this script should be an example of how you can build a function for each REST API. Nowadays there are more and more Rest APIs that we can use instead of Cmdlets (which use the Rest API in ... Continue reading How to manage most Rest APIs with just a few PowerShell functions

to organizational networks. Singular purpose devices made available through the Internet of Things (IoT) offering has increased network complexity even further with the ease of adding said devices to the network and sometimes without the knowledge of a system administrator. Hence the following received question: "How do I ensure all the appropriate ports are closed with all these devices being added to my network?"

this is the case also for all wireless networks with (SSID and Passphrase) that our OS stores and use to connect automatically.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to work with files remotely via SFTP and dig into some of the different PowerShell SFTP modules you can use.

that you need to manually create, edit, or remove various types of DNS records. Or to even add various DNS tasks to automation scripts. It is at times like this that using PowerShell for DNS records is the way to go.

non-standard xml. So that part is messy to say the least.

Variable-Length Subnet Masking (VLSM) consists of segregating subnets into smaller segments, allowing network engineers to divide an IP address space into a hierarchy of subnets of different sizes, making it possible to create very different host subnets without account. waste a large number of addresses. This in turn can be a pretty annoying task, especially when it needs to be done several times, so I decided to do a powershell module to just tell you how many hosts I need in a given segment and it will tell me what the addressing is.

for SSH authentication.

interact with Email.

started popping up. Errors that didn't really point to a security problem.

Effective lease and reservation management is crucial for maintaining a smooth-running network, preventing IP address conflicts, and ensuring that critical devices always receive the same IP address.

Firewall with Advanced Security from the PowerShell command line. We'll look at how to...

course. I would like to share it here.

would like to share this script here on my website.

and/or your team know PowerShell and, perhaps, already have some PowerShell scripts to manage web services, using PowerShell to monitor uptime may be a good option.

times for my network.

all the moving parts of our systems and applications and create a big picture of the health of the whole environment. Before going down the rabbit hole of complicated monitoring tools and techniques let's start with define a that monitoring can be subjective and on a case-by-case can be very basic or detailed and can let you choose a specific tool or strategy. There is no one-size-fits-all. This week I needed to implement a custom check to monitor the network load/usage on any Windows OS and instead of looking for a third-party tool and deploying maybe another agent on servers I wrote a Powershell script to perform this activity.

clients don't notice downtime when a failover or load balancing action occurs. It makes everything smooth and fluent for clients and users of our systems. The only problem with this is that sometimes a failover occurs and you don't notice. Great for users, not so great for administrators; if a server crashes in the woods, did it really crash at all? To make sure we always get notified about these situations we use the following script via our RMM system.

?? This time we're tackling three issues in one; We're going to monitor traffic usage to see if a connection isn't saturated. We're also going to check if the NIC speed is correct and we're going to check if the connection is metered and if it is alert on it.

demonstrated during the conference. The presenters showed a method of checking if your O365 domain was being Typosquated. The tool can be found here. The presenters made a Python tool, and I figured to create an alternative in PowerShell.

macOS, Linux, and Windows.

an eye on your network and send you an email when a new host is discovered. NetNeighbor Watch is done completely in PowerShell. The results are very similar to those of arpwatch. NetNeighbor Watch is for anyone that wants more visibility into the wireless or wired devices on their network. We will also setup a weekly email report with all of the known hosts on your network. In this post, I will walk you through the entire process of setting this up from scratch on a Raspberry Pi, lets get started!

with circular file management, non-blocking background operation, and enterprise-grade persistence capabilities.

iPerf with the help of PowerShell.

different places that this damn protocol needs to be killed depending on the OS. It's still a work in progress (needs testing and error handling) but in case it's useful feel free to use it

seconds.

effortlessly. A comprehensive guide for efficient network management.

can create such a QR code with PowerShell without any 3rd party tools? No? [.]

on Windows machines. The script overcomes the issue of localization that arises when parsing the output of the 'netsh.exe' command.

show you a few examples of how you can ping multiple computers.

Ping, Hostsentries, NICs.. Every test returns a PSCustomObject instead of a Strings.

to them in real time. That means you can decide what request data to explore and what response data to send on the fly!

new Datalist element and a lot more - including some additional breaking changes.

understand exactly what you have configured. Therefore, Sean McAvinue has created a PowerShell Script to control and report External Domains.

multiple platforms, including Windows. However, there is an alternative, the PowerShell Resolve-DnsName cmdlet, which can also check proprietary Microsoft protocols for name resolution, such as NetBIOS or LLMNR.

public-submitted issue for PoShDynDnsApi.

Microsoft (Or other) management addresses. In this blog post, I will show how you can live-track blocked DNS queries and get some insights while troubleshooting 🙂

because of that I use mxtoolbox.com a lot for querying of MX, SPF, DMARC and DKIM records. Wouldn't it be convenient to get a simple overview of those records in a PowerShell function? This blogpost will show you how

simple web server on Windows. To avoid a full-featured IIS installation,...

Assuming file not modified since download, here's PowerShell to do it

TeamViewer client.

IP-Addresses. Nice to know those in secure environments where not everything is allowed to go onto the internet, but how can you test if they are accessible? This blog post will show how to test most of these services using PowerShell.

security purposes. Of course, you can do that using PowerShell with the Test-TlsProtocols Module from TechnologyAnimal 🙂 In this blog post, I will show you how.

generally down for everyone else, too. PowerShell can ask a web service to check web site availability for you. Here is a simple wrapper function.

PortQRY.exe

running: Set-TlsConfiguration -EnableSecure -DisableInsecure Fortunately it IS that simple with the new PowerShell module TlsConfig

entries, and network connectivity in a repeatable workflow.

security, and token handling. Learn how to build a secure auth flow from scratch and why the SDK might still be the best choice for automation.

come from and if they are internal or external, PowerShell developers can use online web-based geolocation services. It's important not to overuse the services because you could be throttled.

address belongs to which Vendor and the corresponding IP details, as well as the open ports. In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to use Get-NetNeighbor and NMAP for this purpose.

slots managed by the Ubiquiti UISP software running on my VPS in Docker. In this blog post, I will show you a few examples of how to query it using PowerShell.

PowerShell... You can use the DnsClient-PS module. In this brief blog post, I will demonstrate how it works.

always need just one more to troubleshoot the problem. 😉 In this blog post, I will show you how the built-in Get-NetView module can help you collect all the necessary logs and information.

eventually memorized subnet calculations. That, and using IP Calculators 😉 In this blog post, I will show you how you can use Chris Dent's PowerShell module for that.

server without installing IIS or other similar web servers.

content associated with the wave of everything AI that we are currently in.

ecosystem. It?s designed to be followed in order, with each exercise introducing the basic concepts. If you complete all of the exercises you should be well on your way to understanding how you can use Bolt and Bolt Tasks to help manage your infrastructure.

Olin.

into Chocolatey. Stephen is a support engineer for Chocolatey and active PowerShell community member.

ConfigMgr Blog, you should, as I go into how Dell Command Update (DCU) gets it's feed of information under the hood. That is the basis for a lot of things I'll be doing. In this post, ... Read more

treat. In this article, you're going to learn all about the ubiquitous package management tool called Chocolatey. Whether you're building a DevOps pipeline, attempting to automate software deployments or an individual user wanted to speed up software installations, this article is for you.

handy when using Jobs and Threads) Enjoy!

existing discussions and threads will be migrated to the Devolutions forum - the new home for all PowerShell Universal conversations

you?re going to learn how to start from scratch; downloading, installing and understanding how PowerCLI can help you get more done.

disposal and have helped me a lot! You can install it using the Microsoft Store method, it will be updated like that too, but for your management server, it's nice to have an installer that works without the Microsoft Store 🙂 In this blog post, I will show you a way to install or update your SysInternals Suite.

install-free option, Jupyter Notebooks, Kata hands-on training, VisualStudio 2019 and VSCode integration – even my favorite PowerShell!

pretty sure it was due to permissions. But that didn't stop me from writing something to monitor them! The script loops through all scheduled tasks and if it finds Tasks that haven't run in a day and aren't disabled, it will log it to a array, and then send off a email HTML Chart with relevant information.

the latest updates to the modules for Horizon, vSAN, and HCX.

install it on the server/machine you wish you execute the PowerShell command. COMMAND Below is the PowerShell command to power on/off the server.

(Disclaimer: As with all code besure to review everything in it before running it in your local environment. I am just adding this because this is my first time linking to vcloud-lab and this project contains more than just PowerShell. However, I have reviewed the code and did not see anything unexpected, but don't just take my word for it. I'm certainly not a JavaScript expert.)

PowerShell Core v6 so there is no longer a need to use the JSON.Net libraries.

with PowerShell and the selected text.

support and more.

The goal is to utilize the toolkit in a more consistent and easier to uddate manner

here.

built-in PowerShell ISE is usually there for you on Windows, but there's a nice PowerShell module that you can use called PSEdit. In this blog post, I will show you how to use that as an alternative to VSCode.

bookauthority.org.

GitHub. Some tasks would include:

correctly. Our goal is to make it easier to install software on Windows. We also recently released tab completion in PowerShell, and a feature toggle.

your scripting to the next level and begin to think of your scripts as tools.

quality of life improvements and bug fixes. We are also updating Windows Terminal stable to version 1.23, which will include all of the features from this previous blog post. Some notable features to call out are: 🌟 A completely new [...]

latest preview, both bringing major improvements to the popular command-line tool. These versions introduce a completely new windowing architecture, expanded settings in the user interface, and other powerful enhancements for productivity and customization. In this article, we'll explore what's new in these updates and to how to install the latest stable and preview builds through Microsoft Store, winget, choco, and scoop.

a bunch of buttons, and finally receive the information you were trying to retrieve on an AWS service? Perhaps the metadata on an EC2 instance? Now you can do it all automatically!

powershell-gui-aws-lambda-start-functions.ps1

update, deletions of such resources or on a schedule. They are used to audit resources for compliance with some defined policy. They don't prevent you from deploying in-compliant resources as this is the realm of service control policies.

supporting some EC2 in the cloud testing some new AWS features and services and I found my self locked out and released this machine was not domain joined but I couldn't login. With the windows PowerShell cmdlets swirlingContinue reading "AWS EC2 powerShell tips"

called from just about anywhere in AWS (or outside for that matter). Even better lambdas don't require a server to run, this means that you only pay for the compute that you actually use. Don't worry the first 1M hits per month are free. Let's dive in and see how we can start using our existing PowerShell skills to start building lambdas.

shop but, like most enterprises these days, they have some apps and business units which use AWS. As I documented what I already knew and researched what I didn't, I was (once again) blown away by the capabilities of this massive cloud-scale network file system....

PowerShell scripting environment. This repository is meant to be used as a way to collect feedback from users of the AWS Tools for PowerShell modules. You are invited to create GitHub issues to report bugs or make feature requests.

PowerShell scripting environment.

from existing AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. This is particularly useful for creating point-in-time backups or disaster recovery. I mostly use the script to quickly clone an EC2 instance for testing or troubleshooting.

walks through setting up permissions, requesting a certificate, and verifying its creation.

REST API endpoints? Although functional, interacting with AWS services through the REST API endpoints can be complex. What is the way out? AWS PowerShell Tools is the solution!

creation of a CloudShell environment within a dedicated VPC, establishing secure connections to other resources in the same subnet. The CloudShell inherits the VPC network configuration without any additional modification. In this article, I will introduce CloudShell, explain the new VPC support, and outline how to install AWS CloudShell in a VPC.

written in PowerShell to process events. Using this runtime, you can run native PowerShell code in Lambda without having to compile code, which simplifies deployment and testing. You can also now view PowerShell code in the AWS Management Console, and have more control over function output and logging.

version if an outdated version is detected.

Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from an EC2 instance. In this post, I will be explaining how you can promptly launch an EC2 instance using the AMI.

PowerShell modules. Checkout out the blog post for more information.

to get anything working.

major language except for PowerShell. If you're interested in publishing AWS Lambda functions, by using a PowerShell container image, add your voice to this GitHub issue report. One of the AWS developers has responded and expressed interest in prioritizing, but we need to show interest / demand for this feature.

lots of help writing .Net end user functions for Lambda. By end user, I mean things that are part of an application system, like kicking off Glue jobs, working with Redshift and so on.

Office 365 audit reports will be helpful to identify security events, monitor user activities, track file sharing, investigate forensic events, etc. Most admins prefer PowerShell over [.]

thoughts? I was going to do every 2 weeks, but not sure if that is too quick. Big update as I'm s...

365AutomatedLab, but I'll be honest after Microsoft made the announcement of no more new Dev tenants it hurt a bit as I know how useful they are on learning and testing features and PowerShell without hurting your production environment.

manager when creating a new user. Also added a feature so that when you use the parameter -UseDevelope...

"deleted" SharePoint sites the recycle bin. The reason for it is you can't mass delete SharePoint sites from the GUI and sometimes you create SharePoint sites that aren't in your Excel workbook and this just makes it easier.

announcement that you can no longer create new Free 365 Dev Tenants. I'm really hoping they revert that decision, or make the Dev Tenant even better. I honestly don't think it's a money grab, but more for security. If it is toot easy to create a temp tenant it is a great tool for bad actors. I'll leave it at that for now, and will probably do a bigger blog post on it in the future.

for user accounts. V1.3 expands the amount of detail reported for each method, such as the phone number used for SMS challenges, or the email address used for SSPR. It's a small but important detail that's useful to administrators. However, it also comes with a potential privacy issue, so the script must handle that too.

Microsoft 365 and Entra ID. Anyone can contribute to Office365ITPros by forking the code to a copy of the repository and making changes to scripts there. If you want, you can push the changes back to us so that we can consider their inclusion in Office365ITPros. It's a great example of community in action.

Microsoft 365 and Entra ID. Anyone can contribute to Office365ITPros by forking the code to a copy of the repository and making changes to scripts there. If you want, you can push the changes back to us so that we can consider their inclusion in Office365ITPros. It's a great example of community in action.

customers start using these new cmdlets right away.

- managing multiple admins is no small feat. Microsoft 365 administrators hold significant responsibilities like getting users on board, handling passwords, overseeing various

subscribers to download. The eBook now includes over 350 content-rich pages packed full of practical examples of how to use PowerShell to automate Microsoft 365 operations. It's an essential tool for anyone who needs to use PowerShell in a Microsoft 365 environment.

and beautiful) and forget to add an alert to indicate when a license SKU is running low? I have not seen any feature within Office 365 that sends one a notification when a tenant license SKU is low.

Subscribers can download the new PDF and EPUB files from their Gumroad account. As always, the update features a mixture of new and updated information, some corrections, and removal of obsolete information. Look no further for guidance about using PowerShell with the Graph APIs to interact with Microsoft 365 data!

the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBook. Subscribers can download the latest PDF and EPUB files from Gumroad.com. In other news, a new eBook about Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE) is available. It's always nice to see new sources of knowledge open up!

365 with PowerShell (2nd edition). This completely revised 350-page book delivers the most comprehensive coverage of how to use Microsoft Graph APIs and the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK with Microsoft 365 workloads. Existing subscribers can download the second edition now free of charge.

download the updated PDF and EPUB files from Gumroad.com. A paperback version is also available, but we can't update the print characters. In any case, a new SharePoint create Site API is in beta, and a new version of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK is available. Both have their moments, as we discuss here.

PC's using PowerShell and Microsoft Graph. This mini series should help you get started with automating

PC's using PowerShell and Microsoft Graph. This mini series should help you get started with automatingContinue reading

course just one part of the new beta Secure Score module. The next one is actually the more fun part; applying the correct security settings to a tenant.

Extended Security License (ESU)Continue Reading

SDK. We didn't have one to hand, so we wrote a new script to illustrate the principles of how to process license assignments for a set of user accounts (which don't necessarily have to come from a CSV file). We even included some error handling!

in Office365. He found that when he went to the new Settings Pane for Modern Authentication he could change settings specifically to block older clients.

realize that knowing where users are active as guest accounts is not as easy as it might seem. Part of the problem is that data about user activity is mostly controlled by host rather than home tenants. However, it's possible to extract some information from audit sign-in logs to figure out where tenant users go as guests.

Microsoft 365, helping administrators clean up outdated data and improve performance.

pick and choose from any of 25+ available Conditional Access templates included, and the tool will auto-deploy them in your tenant (report-only mode), automatically create all dependencies like groups, named locations, and terms of use agreements, and finally document your new policy design

managed identity. The module has several parameters:

they advise us to migrate all the scripts to the MS Graph PowerShell. But finding the equivalent cmdlets and updating the scripts can be tough. Don't worry! Microsoft heard our struggle!

Code, just as you wish. Please start with the following steps to begin the deployment (the Hashtags are comments):

bulk are the challenges. In Entra ID, there is the option to create bulk invitations, but I still find it limited.

administrators; it is a critical task to do! While our primary concern is safeguarding our data with these policies, it's equally important

Microsoft 365 PowerShell and use ISV products instead. It's a silly position to argue. PowerShell is an important automation tool for administrators that can't be replaced by any ISV product. ISV products have their place and fill many gaps, but arguing to dump PowerShell and use ISV products instead just can't be justified.

created by applications in the directories of Office 365 tenants. The accounts are created through Azure B2B collaboration (by applications that generate invitations to join Office 365 Groups, like Teams and Planner) or SharePoint sharing invitations for documents or folders. It's one thing to invite people outside your tenant to collaborate; it's a horse of a different color to manage the resulting guest accounts.

document which mobile devices exist in a O365 tenant and put them into IT-Glue as configurations. I figured I'd help him real quick and blog about it.

lot more questions about documenting Secure Score with the Secure Application model.

can cause (image) damage to an organization. The PowerShell script DomainHealthChecker.ps1 checks the SPF, DKIM and DMARC record of one or more email domains and gives advice if necessary.

Skype for Business Online PowerShell. To connect to this service, you need to download and install the latest SkypeOnlineConnector module and create a remote PowerShell session to the service.

in today's world of highly sought after cloud management skills. With expert guidance, IT pros will learn how to leverage the muscle of PowerShell to automate many advanced administrative tasks not otherwise accessible in the Office 365 Admin Center. You will discover how to unlock configuration options and automate tasks in order to free up valuable time and resources.

The new edition of the book is available HERE and is a Nov 2022 Edition! Go get your copy now, or if you are a subscriber (THANK YOU!) you can download an update to your subscription. The next update should...

organization. Let's spend some time to learn some default use cases lot of exchange admins have to do. In this article I'm showing a various combination of different PowerShell cmdlets, with special focus in the new Exchange Online cmdlets. You can do a much more crazy stuff, but I want to show some basics.

in Exchange Online management using EXO V2 Module. Today, we are delighted to announce general availability of this feature along with the support for macOS.

administrators. Whether you're conducting audits, offboarding M365 users, or handling routine mailbox maintenance, having quick access to a complete and accurate list of mailboxes is vital.

key component of the zero-trust model. However, setting them up incorrectly can have serious consequences, like unintentionally compromising your entire Microsoft 365 security.

your business needs. But with that flexibility comes complexity. Managing Microsoft 365 licenses and the cost spent on all those licenses can lead to confusion and can be a challenge.

reducing help desk reliance in the organization. However, before users can utilize SSPR, admins must enable self-service password reset, and users must register their authentication methods.