I wanted to do a write up of the tips I found in Office 365 to reduce the number of unwanted messages in Office 365. I will skip the most basic ones like adding the SPF record as this is told by the domain configuration that you need that.

The more advanced once and usually not configured settings can bring you more.

Let us start with the anti-spam policy, this one is configured with the basic settings, but are very loose. By altering this policy you will remove some spam that is hitting your mailbox and dump it in the SPAM folder or even better the quarantine. The last one is not in your personal mailbox but stays on the server. So my recommendation is to go to the following URL https://protection.office.com/antispam and alter de default SPAM filter policy with the following settings

The last few weeks I had to create a few PowerShell scripts where I had to combine certain information from several sources.

The way I used to do it was to do a where-object on an ID in an array. This works well, but I noticed that on large datasets it takes a lot of time. A where-object on a dataset of 30.000 items it takes on average between 1 and 2 seconds. So if we do the math 2 seconds on 30.000 items costs in total 60.000 seconds (16 hours) just doing the where-object.

This weekend I had the privilege to speak at SharePoint Saturday in Madrid. The session was about Automation in Office 365. See the slides below

[slideshare id=151347967&doc=20190622-usingautomationinoffice365-190623120657]

Last week I attended the European Collaboration Summit for the third time. This year another location in Wiesbaden.

It was a fantastic conference with a lot of great speakers. This year I choose not to make a long post an everything I saw but made an Instagram story with the highlights.

Go and watch it here
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17889983905339614/

Next year the conference is coming back to Wiesbaden from June 8th till June 10th

Last month Microsoft announced that they enable auditing by default on every mailbox. Before this, you needed to run a script on every newly created mailbox to enable auditing for the items you wanted. Microsoft provided a script for this that can be found on GitHub.

The announcement can be found on techcommunity.

In this announcement, they say that every new mailbox gets the default set of auditing. This default set can be updated from Microsoft’s side, but when you have enabled auditing by yourself or the script, they provided it stays that way.

So, what is Access Review? It is an Azure solution that can assist in the reduction of access to guests in your tenant and access to applications for your users. This tool can assist you in doing automated reviews of access to certain Enterprise applications or on AD groups in your tenant. See this YouTube video for a detailed explanation

https://youtu.be/kDRjQQ22Wkk

The downside of this tool is that it is only available when you have Azure AD P2 or EMS E5 license. You can use this link to activate Azure AD P2 trail or EMS E5 trail

Let’s kick this post of what I mean with a break glass account.

What is a break glass account?

A break glass account is a non-personal in case of an emergency account that is never used and is stored in a vault where only a few people have access too. This account is a global admin on your tenant and in some sense is the top-level account of your environment.

Collaborating with Microsoft Teams is very easy, and I’m using it at several customers. At one customer the teams are getting multi-language where before every conversation was in Dutch, now with new team members that are not speaking Dutch they have trouble going back into the conversations and do not understand what is written. Luckily Microsoft Teams now offers the ability like Skype to have translations for this.

We found that this was not enabled by default in the tenants that I worked checked. There are two ways to enable this, with the GUI and with PowerShell.

What is Azure AD Terms of use?

Within Azure AD conditional Access there is an option called Terms of use. As Microsoft explains it:

“Azure AD Terms of use provides a simple method that organizations can use to present information to end users. This presentation ensures users see relevant disclaimers for legal or compliance requirements.”

So basically, you will give the end users a popup or screen when they login with a disclaimer for legal or compliance reasons. It is similar when you start working at your company and have to sign a document about using the network and internet of when you click next for reading the terms of use of installing that piece of software.

This week I had the privilege to speak at DIWUG about securing your Office 365 environment. This time I started from a governance point of view. So what policies do we have and do we need before we can set up the security in Office 365. Also what licenses are available and do we need additional licenses to satisfy our security needs.

In the demos I showed how Conditional Access can help securing the environment and how Terms of use can be used for certain user groups or applications.