A “Ringless” Meet Now for Chat Participants Message Center notification MC762503 (30 March 2024) gives details about a new Meet Now experience for Teams group chats (chats with more than two participants). The Meet Now feature is not a new concept. It’s a feature that has been available for channel conversations and group chats since the earliest days of the Teams product. Basically, Meet Now is a shortcut to start an audio or video online meeting with the participants in a channel or chat conversation without needing to schedule a calendar event. The change is described in Microsoft 365 roadm ..read more

Remove Service Plans with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK In 2021, I wrote about how to remove a single service plan from multiple Entra ID user accounts with PowerShell. The original script used cmdlets from the Microsoft Online Services (MSOL) module. To cover all bases, I updated the post with versions of the script using cmdlets from the AzureAD and the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. Microsoft has deprecated the MSOL and AzureAD modules and the final retirement of these modules is due on March 30, 2025. The problem with updating a script to replace cmdlets is the tendency to keep the s ..read more

M365 Conference Next Week in Orlando Next week, I shall present two sessions at the M365 conference in Orlando (if you still want to attend the event, here’s a $100 off discount code). It’s the first time for me to present at this conference. A previous commitment to speak fell through due to a family event and then the pandemic and other reasons prevented the M365 conference from getting onto my agenda. I have two sessions: Mastering the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK (Tuesday, April 30, 11:30am). Don’t Let Copilot for Microsoft 365 Be a Vanity Project (Wednesday, May 1, 8am). Please come ..read more

License Management is All a Matter of Identifiers (GUIDs) A reader asked how to use the Graph SDK to remove the Exchange Online Plan 2 license from 2,000 users who have been upgraded to the Microsoft 365 E3 license. This can be a challenging task if you’re not accustomed to dealing with Microsoft 365 licenses using Graph SDK cmdlets and understand how to use the identifiers assigned to products and service plans. The task seems complete but it’s not complicated, especially since Microsoft supported license stacking for Exchange Online (the ability for an account to have multiple Exchange Onli ..read more

But Will a Password Expiration Report be Obsolete Soon? The advice not to force users to change passwords regularly comes from both Microsoft and independent security agencies. Forcing people to change passwords creates friction for people without delivering better security. The consensus is that better security is attained by moving away from passwords to protect accounts with stronger authentication methods like multifactor authentication or passkeys. Evidence of progress in this direction is Microsoft’s recent announcement of support in Entra ID for device-bound passkeys based on the Authen ..read more

SMTP AUTH Deprecated in 2025 Along with a New External Recipient Rate Limit The Exchange development team has clearly been busy lately. On April 15, 2024, they announced two major changes: The deprecation of basic authentication for client submission (SMTP AUTH) in September 2025. The imposition of a new external recipient rate limit (ERR limit) from January 1, 2025. Microsoft says that both announcements are part of the work to protect Exchange Online. SMTP AUTH and Basic Authentication The announcement about the demise of SMTP AUTH is not unexpected. For the past several years, Microsoft ..read more

A Community-Driven Security Configuration Analyzer for Entra ID Tenants The irrepressible Merill Fernando, a product manager in the Microsoft Entra ID organization, came together with Security MVPs Faben Bader and Thomas Naunheim to create the Maester tool. Announced on April 10, Maester is labeled as a “Microsoft Security test automation framework” and installation instructions are available here. It is a great example of a community-driven project. Maester is built using Pester and Microsoft Graph APIs. Basically, it runs a bunch of tests against an Entra ID tenant (usually a Microsoft 365 t ..read more

Standard Group Chat Pictures Instead of Avatars The announcement in message center notification MC717970 (last updated 4 April 2024) that Microsoft is introducing “custom avatars for group chats” is not what you think. No mesh avatars are involved. Microsoft 365 roadmap item 119305 clarifies the situation by saying that the avatars referred to in MC717970 are no more than the profile picture for group chats. What’s happening is that any member of a group chat (including guest accounts) can choose from a set of “pre-selected illustrations” (no doubt selected to communicate what happens in typic ..read more

Aspects of Monarch Client Security and Privacy Highlighted, Especially Data Held in Azure An April 4 posting on the respected security blog hosted by Bruce Schneier hyped the claim by Proton that the new Monarch client (aka the new Outlook for Windows) is “Microsoft’s new data collection service.” It’s repeats some of the overhyped shock and horror story that appeared in Germany in November 2023. In this instance, it seems like a great deal of uninformed commentary intended to convince people to ditch Monarch and use another email client. That’s absolutely a choice that people are entitled to ..read more

Azure Transitions Administrative Roles to Azure RBAC Roles On March 11, Microsoft sent a note to Azure administrators titled “Transition to role-based access control (RBAC) in Azure by 31 August 2024.” The note pointed to an article explaining that Microsoft will retire Azure’s classic deployment model on the same date in favor of Azure Resource Model. Microsoft 365 Consumes a Surprising Amount of Azure Like many Microsoft 365 administrators, I labor under the illusion that I don’t use Azure all that much. Then I realized that I use: Azure Automation accounts and managed identities to run Pow ..read more