SuperTekBoy

Practical Help for Exchange & Office 365

Revoke your guest access to an Office 365 tenant (and Teams)

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As a consultant, I am often invited to collaborate in other Office 365 tenants. This is often presented in the form of guest access into that tenant, which allows me to access applications such as Microsoft Teams or share files with SharePoint Online.

The benefit of guest access is that I can collaborate as if I were a member of that organization without consuming a license, or, requiring an identity in that tenant. For example, my guest access into that tenant could easily be attached to a personal email account hosted at outlook.com.

I often see guest access granted in mergers and acquisitions where the two companies need to collaborate at a business level well before any technology to integrate the two companies has been implemented.

But other scenarios that drive guest access include a company needing to collaborate with its vendors or partners, or, a consultant working with a customer on a project.

But what happens when that guest access is no longer needed?

For our example, Amy Pond successfully completed a project at Super Awesome LLC. Amy collaborated with Super Awesome employees using Microsoft Teams and would like to remove Super Awesome from her Microsoft Teams client. Amy needs to maintain access to Totally Brilliant LLC, which is her new project, and SuperTekBoy LLC, which is her employer. The screenshot below is how Amy’s Microsoft Teams client looks today.

Guest Access to other Microsoft Teams

In this article, Amy will leave Super Awesome’s Office 365 tenant by revoking her own guest access. After she revokes her access she will no longer have any access to any Super Awesome apps or data.

Let’s get started!

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Setting Windows 10 to Dark Mode

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If you are like me and like to work on a computer at night, or, just work with the lights off, then dark mode is for you. I find dark mode helps with eye strain. In addition, many sources also report that a dark color scheme helps conserve battery power on mobile devices.

With build 1809, you can now set Windows 10 to a dark color scheme. Previous builds offered this option as well, but 1809 was the first version that also adopted this color scheme in File Explorer.

The process to enable dark mode is super easy. It only takes 5 clicks and one scroll of the mouse wheel.

Let’s get started!

Enabling Dark Mode in Windows 10

To enable dark mode in Windows 10, click the Start button and then Settings.

Windows 10 1809 Dark Mode

This will launch the Windows Settings page. Click Personalization.

Windows 10 1809 Dark Mode Personalization

From the Personalization page, select the Colors tab on the left side.

From the Colors page scroll to the bottom of the page. Under Choose your default app mode select Dark.

Windows 10 1809 Dark Mode Personalization Colors Dark Mode
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Set your time zone to follow your location

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If you travel a lot with a laptop you may find yourself working in many different time zones. The challenge is that your laptop will display the incorrect time. This can make it particularly challenging when scheduling or attending meetings.

Rather than manually updating your time as you step foot into each new geography, one solution is to configure your time settings to update based on your location. This process is quite simple.

Let’s get started!

Note: This solution requires Windows 10

Configure Automatic Time Zone

Adjust Date Time in Windows 10

From your Windows 10 desktop, right click on the time in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen.

From the context menu select Adjust Date/Time.

From the Date & Time settings window flip the toggle under Set Time Zone Automatically to the On position.

Your time zone (and time) will update automatically based on your location in the world.

You will also notice that once you configured your PC to use an automatic time zone, all other manual zone settings, such as the drop-down box to set the time zone are now grayed out.

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Exchange February 2019 Updates

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Exchange 2019 CU1

Last week was a big week for Exchange. Microsoft released its first cumulative update for Exchange 2019 as well as cumulative updates for Exchange 2016 and 2013.

As always, test these updates in a lab first! I recommend checking out this 7-part guide on configuring Exchange in your lab. It doesn’t take much to get one going.

The updates are as follows:

Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 9

Exchange 2019 Cumulative Update 1 (VLSC)| KB4471391

Exchange 2016 Mini

Exchange 2016 Cumulative Update 12 | KB4471392 | UM Language Pack

Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 9

Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 22 | KB4345836 | UM Language Pack

Exchange 2010 Mini

Exchange 2010 SP3 Rollup 26 | KB4487052 (released February)

Exchange 2010 Mini

Exchange 2010 SP3 Rollup 25 | KB4468742 (released January)

Only 325 days left for Exchange 2010

Here is a quick reminder that extended support for Exchange 2010 is coming to an end. After January 14th, 2020, no further technical support or updates will be available. This includes security, bug and time zone updates.

Unfortunately, there is no direct path to Exchange 2019 from 2010. If you do plan to stay on-prem you will need to migrate to either 2013 or 2016 (I’d recommend 2016 as 2013 is now in extended support). From there you can migrate to 2019. Alternatively, you can migrate to Office 365.

For more information about the Exchange 2010 life-cycle check out the Exchange Team blog.

So, what’s new in these Cumulative Updates?

Push notifications are one type of notification a developer can leverage in their application to add value. An example of a push notification might be the notification of new mail on a mobile device.

In this series of cumulative updates, the Exchange Team has changed the way it initiates push notifications through Exchange Web Services. This is in direct response to a security flaw where an attacker could intercept push notifications to gain access to credentials streamed via NTLM. These cumulative updates mitigate this attack by removing these credentials from the stream. Microsoft documents this resolution in KB4490060.

After applying this cumulative update, Microsoft recommends forcing the computer account to change its password by using either the Reset-ComputerMachinePassword cmdlet or, NETDOM. In addition, Microsoft recommends every organization review its user password expiration policies.

In further response to the security flaw, Microsoft is reducing the number of rights Exchange has in Active Directory when operating in a shared permission model.

In a shared permission model, Exchange administrators have the ability to create security principals in Active Directory and mail-enable those security principals. This includes the ability to create a new user as you are creating a mailbox, or, the ability to remove a user when you remove a mailbox. This also extends to tasks such as being able to create a distribution group, or, modify distribution group members.

In a split permission model, the Exchange administrator is restricted from these tasks and can only mail-enable, or, mail-disable existing objects (e.g. users, groups or contacts) that were created by an administrator with Active Directory rights.

Going forward the shared permission model will have fewer Active Directory rights, but that does not mean reduced functionality for Exchange administrators.

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Presence missing in Outlook after Teams Only switch

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If you have recently made the switch from Skype to Teams Only mode in Office 365, you may have lost your presence data in Outlook.

Skype and Teams share their presence data with Outlook. When viewing or composing an email in Outlook you can also see the presence of anyone internal in your organization and any external users you have federated presence data with. That presence date will look like the screenshot below.

Presence data from Teams and Skype in Microsoft Outlook

In the example above, I have a green checkmark which identifies my presence as available. This could also be yellow to show away, red to show busy and, other presences such as do-not-disturb, out of office, or, unknown. This presence data can show up in other Office applications as well, such as Microsoft Word when co-authoring a document in real-time.

If you have recently switched to Teams-Only mode and there is no presence circle at all, then you may need to reconfigure your Teams client to share presence data. Below is an example of what that will look like.

Note: Presence data will also be missing if your Microsoft Teams client is not running.

Missing Presence Data in Microsoft Outlook
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Save Time with FindTime

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One of the great plugins for Outlook is FindTime. FindTime makes scheduling meetings easy by allowing organizers to poll attendees for their preferred date and time to meet. But FindTime is more than just a simple polling app, it integrates fully into your calendar. FindTime recommends meeting times, can place tentative placeholders on your calendar for each proposed time, and can automatically schedule the meeting if a consensus is met. Gone are the days of emails flying back and forth to find a time that works for everyone.

Note: There is one stipulation. The meeting organizer does require an active subscription to Office 365. The attendees do not. Attendees can be on any other email system.

Installing FindTime

To install FindTime, navigate to findtime.microsoft.com (alternatively, you can install FindTime from the Office 365 App Store – to do this, log into Office 365 and select Add-Ins). 

From the website click Install For Free (Requires Office 365).

Installing FindTime for Outlook

Select whether to receive FindTime announcements, updates, and information. Click I’m Ready.

Installing FindTime for Outlook
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The following servers in Windows Failover Cluster are not in Active Directory

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The Following Servers in the Windows Failover Cluster are not in Active Directory
The following servers in the Windows Failover Cluster are not in Active Directory: <server name>. This is usually the result of an incomplete membership change (add or remove) of the database availability group.

I ran into this error recently while trying to remove two Exchange 2010 members from a database availability group (DAG).

The error stated that a member of the DAG, a server named EXC3, did not exist in Active Directory. This was odd because queries to the Exchange 2010 management tools only returned two Exchange servers–EXC1 and EXC2.

We further confirmed that there was no computer account for EXC3 in Active Directory Users and Computers. We did however, see remanents of EXC3 in ADSI Edit.

Talking with our customer we discovered that there had been a third Exchange server, named EXC3, that had crashed and was never recovered.

Fix–The following servers in the Windows Failover Cluster are not in Active Directory

To verify the status of all nodes in your database availability group, open PowerShell and import the Windows Failover Clustering cmdlets with Import-Module.

 C:\> Import-Module FailoverClusters

Next, run the Get-ClusterNode cmdlet. This will retrieve the status of all our nodes.

 C:\> Get-ClusterNode

Name                                                  State
----                                                  -----
EXC1                                                     Up
EXC2                                                     Up
EXC3                                                   Down

In the example above, we can see EXC1 and EXC2 are operational, whereas EXC3 is offline.

Because EXC3 no longer exists (and the fact we plan to collapse the entire DAG anyway) we can forcibly evict the failed node. To do this issue the following command.

 C:\> Get-ClusterNode -Name "EXC3" | Remove-ClusterNode

Remove-ClusterNode
Are you sure you want to evict node EXC3
[Y] Yes [N] No [S] Suspend [?] Help (default is "Y"): Y

You will be prompted to confirm. Press enter to accept the default action of “Yes”.

If we repeat the first Get-ClusterNode command we will only have the two operation cluster nodes remaining.

 C:\> Get-ClusterNode

Name                                                  State
----                                                  -----
EXC1                                                     Up
EXC2                                                     Up

With no more failed nodes we can remove the two operational nodes using either the Exchange 2010 management console or PowerShell.

Twitter

Have you run into this error while add or removing members to a DAG? What did you do to fix it? Drop a comment below or join the conversation on Twitter

RunAs Radio #618 – Exchange 2019 with Gareth Gudger

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On November 30th I had the great pleasure of being a guest on the RunAs Radio podcast. I joined host Richard Campbell to discuss all the new features in Exchange 2019. We discuss the MetaCache Database (MCDB), the benefits of the new search architecture, and several client-side features.

Listen to the podcast

(Originally posted at http://runasradio.com/shows/show/618)

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