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Group Write Back Permission issue

Satheshwaran Manoharan

-

March 14, 2020

Just enabled Office 365 Group Write Back permission in my Azure AD Connect. It started generating permission issues. Even though it was running the latest version on a fresh green field tenant.

Group Write Back Permission issue was visible in my Azure AD Connect Server.

Verified its running the proper MSOL service account. Tried running re acls as mentioned in few articles.

No luck.

Right clicked on the Organizational Unit where the groups was supposed to write back in my local active directory. Gave “Create all Child Objects” groups started writing back instantly.

Make sure OU permissions have Create all Child Objects

Admin Take over in Office 365

Satheshwaran Manoharan

-

March 14, 2020

1

We recently added a domain to our office 365 tenant and it was throwing an error that it was used by someone else. We couldn’t find who is having access to the office 365 account. Even though we know we are the sole owner of this domain not sure who has access to it.

That’s where the trick on Admin Take over comes in. Go to https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/landing/signin/

Signup for a free account . use the domain you wish to take over.

Now login to the account and click on Admin Tab.

Click on “Yes I want to be the Admin”

Add the txt record show to prove ownership of the domain.

Now you are the admin of this domain.

Now got access to their existing Office 365 tenant went to admin portal. Removed the domain.

Waited for the domain to be completely removed from the tenant. Added the domain to our primary tenant.

Same time it shows the power of having access to the dns of a domain.

Upgrading Exchange Servers with Cumulative Updates

Satheshwaran Manoharan

-

February 29, 2020

0

Upgrading Exchange Servers with Cumulative Updates

Am upgrading my Exchange server from CU9 to CU15 with Security Patch a Critical Exchange Control Panel ECP Vulnerability. If you run Cumulative 15 on Exchange 2016 . Download the appropriate patch for your running version. Run as administrator is quite important .as it may cause issues if you don’t run the patch with elevated prompt.

CVE-2020-0688 is a static key vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Control Panel (ECP), a component of Microsoft Exchange Server. The use of static keys could allow an authenticated attacker with any privilege level to send a specially crafted request to a vulnerable ECP and gain SYSTEM level arbitrary code execution.
Microsoft rates this flaw as important, but notes that exploitation is more likely, according to its exploitability index.

https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security-guidance/advisory/CVE-2020-0688

CVE-2020-0692 | Microsoft Exchange Server Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
CVE-2020-0688 | Microsoft Exchange Memory Corruption Vulnerability

Performing Maintenance on an Exchange Servers , Usually i kill Client Access Connections to the Node from Load Balancer for 443 (Client Connectivity) and Port 25 (SMTP Connections)

To Drain the Existing Mail Queue

Set-ServerComponentState EXCH1 -Component HubTransport -State Draining -Requester Maintenance

Restart-Service MSExchangeTransport

if you have UM – To Drain Calls

Set-ServerComponentState EXCH1 -Component UMCallRouter -State Draining -Requester Maintenance


.\StartDagServerMaintenance.ps1
.\StopDagServerMaintenance.ps1
.\RedistributeActiveDatabases.ps1

.\StartDagServerMaintenance.ps1 will set the Exchange server into maintenance mode, which will prevent that other servers in the DAG, attempt a database failover onto the maschine where you are currently performing maintenance work. Also all active databases will be moved to the other nodes. And after the maintenance work is done, you will be able to automatically redistribute database with the RedistributeActiveDatabases.ps1 script based on the configured activation preference.

Those scripts are located in the Exchange scripts folder. In Exchange PowerShell the path to this folder is preloaded in the variable $exscripts.


cd $exscripts
.\StartDagServerMaintenance.ps1 -ServerName EXCH1 –OverrideMinimumTwoCopies

To redirect messages pending delivery in the local queues to the Exchange server specified by the Target

Redirect-Message -Server EXCH1 -Target EXCH2

To place the server into maintenance mode

Set-ServerComponentState EXCH1 -Component ServerWideOffline -State Inactive -Requester Maintenance

Verify the server has been placed into maintenance mode

Get-ServerComponentState EXCH1 | Format-Table Component,State -Autosize

verify the server is not hosting any active database copies

Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus -Server EXCH1

Verify DatabaseActivationPolicy is Blocked

Get-MailboxServer EXCH1 | Format-List DatabaseCopyAutoActivationPolicy

verify that the cluster node is paused

Get-ClusterNode EXCH1 | Format-List

Verify Queue is 0

Get-Queue

Now run the Upgrade Steps

Error:
A reboot from a previous installation is pending. Please restart the system and then rerun Setup.
For more information, visit: http://technet.microsoft.com/library(EXCHG.150)/ms.exch.setupreadiness.RebootPending.aspx

Error:
This computer requires .NET Framework 4.8 (https://support.microsoft.com/kb/4503548).
For more information, visit: https://docs.microsoft.com/Exchange/plan-and-deploy/system-requirements?view=exchserver-2016

Downloaded .NET 4.8 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4503548/microsoft-net-framework-4-8-offline-installer-for-windows

Error:
Setup can’t continue with the upgrade because the mscorsvw (14848) has open files. Close the process, and then restart Setup.
For more information, visit: http://technet.microsoft.com/library(EXCHG.150)/ms.exch.setupreadiness.ProcessNeedsToBeClosedOnUpgrade.aspx

Close and Reopen Setup

Open cmd Prompt

Run as Administrator

Browse for the .msp file and Click Enter.

To Exit the server from maintenance mode

Set-ServerComponentState EXCH1 -Component ServerWideOffline -State Active -Requester Maintenance

if you use UM – Set Server Component to Active

Set-ServerComponentState EXCH1 -Component UMCallRouter -State Active -Requester Maintenance

To Set HUB Component to Active

Set-ServerComponentState EXCH1 -Component HubTransport -State Active -Requester Maintenance

To Resume Transport Activty

Restart-Service MSExchangeTransport

Remove the restriction using below script

Resumes the node in the cluster.
Sets the value of the DatabaseCopyAutoActivationPolicy to Unrestricted.
Runs the Resume-MailboxDatabaseCopy cmdlet for each database copy on the node.

.\StopDagServerMaintenance.ps1 -ServerName EXCH1

We have to do the same process for all DAG members once is done,all database copies are active on EXCH1 for example and we need to redestribute them back to servers . For that purpose you can execute the following script. Otherwise Exchange 2016 Servers redistribute automatically in 60 minutes with native configuration.

.\RedistributeActiveDatabases.ps1 -DagName DAGNAME -BalanceDbsByActivationPreference

-OverrideMinimumTwoCopies – By default Script makes sure that there are at least 2 available copies of data available, before it attempts to move a database. if you have only one copy you have to use this switch

.\RedistributeActiveDatabases.ps1 script you will be asked to confirm every database move. If you are working in a large production evironment were you can have 50+ databases per server, this can be a bit annoying. There is however a posibility to change that within the script:

[switch] $Confirm = $true

Prompts on every move

[switch] $Confirm = $false

Moves without prompts (Don’t do this unless you are confident on the environment)

Verify all ok

Verify the server has been exited maintenance mode

Get-ServerComponentState EXCH1 | Format-Table Component,State -Autosize

Verify DatabaseActivationPolicy is Unrestricted

Get-MailboxServer EXCH1 | Format-List DatabaseCopyAutoActivationPolicy

verify that the cluster node is Resumed

Get-ClusterNode EXCH1 | Format-List

Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus -Server Exch1

Get-MailboxDatabaseCopyStatus -Server Exch2

Test-ReplicationHealth

Reference _ Manual Steps Without Scripts _ Without HUB Maintenance _ Test Environments

If Servers on DAG – Move all your Active Databases

Move-ActiveMailboxDatabase Database0 -ActivateOnServer EXCH2

Set your Database Activation to Blocked

Set-MailboxServer -Identity EXCH1 -DatabaseCopyAutoActivationPolicy Blocked

Run the upgrade steps. Remove the restriction

Set-MailboxServer -Identity EXCH1 -DatabaseCopyAutoActivationPolicy Unrestricted

Microsoft Teams PowerShell

Satheshwaran Manoharan

-

February 26, 2020

9

Poweshell is simply amazing , it saved more than 3000 hours in my life. It made the impossible possible to work with Microsoft Products seamlessly. when it comes to managing large data sets or user base. It makes life simply easy. Microsoft Teams dynamic membership can happen only on the team level with Azure P1 license . But if you wish to have channels with large user base. PowerShell is your savior. Otherwise your fingers are going to pain clicking it. i have made as simple as possible using the existing cmdlets . if you wish to add any additional cmdlets please feel free to leave on comments.

Installing Teams Module

Find-Module MicrosoftTeams

Find-Module MicrosoftTeams | Install-Module

Using pre-Release Modules _ For Example Some Commands Available are only at pre-release

Before using pre-release modules make sure PowerShellGet Runs the latest version

Install-Module PowerShellGet -RequiredVersion 2.2.4.1

To use pre-release version – (Get-TeamChannelUser is available only on pre release version for now)

Install-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams -RequiredVersion 1.1.3-preview -AllowPrerelease

To use Production version –

Install-Module MicrosoftTeams –RequiredVersion 1.1.4

Production Versions – https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/MicrosoftTeams

Connect-MicrosoftTeams

To List all Teams

Get-Team

To Get Channels within Team

Get-Team -DisplayName "Information Technology" | Get-TeamChannel

1. Copy Channel Members to another Channel

You can collect the GroupID of the team from the previous command

Get-TeamChannelUser -GroupId "50e33be9-GROUPIDOFTHETEAM4706544ab1a4" -DisplayName "ChannelName"

Now Save it to a Variable from Channel1

$SaveAllMembers = Get-TeamChannelUser -GroupId "50e33be9-GROUPIDOFTHETEAM4706544ab1a4" -DisplayName "ChannelName"

Now Add Same Set of Members to Channel2

$saveallmembers | ForEach-Object{Add-TeamChannelUser -GroupId "50e33be9GROUPIDOFTHETEAM706544ab1a4" -DisplayName "CHANNEL NAME" -User $_.user}

Removing Specific Channel user

Remove-TeamChannelUser -GroupId "50e33be9GROUPIDOFTHETEAM-4706544ab1a4" -DisplayName "Channel name" –User "zulqar@localhost"

Export Channel Members to CSV –

Get-TeamChannelUser -GroupId "50e33be9GROUPIDOFTHETEAM-4706544ab1a4" -DisplayName "Channel Name" | Select-Object User | Export-Csv TeamsChannelMembers.csv

Removing Members from Channels using CSV

Import-Csv .\TeamsChannelMembers.csv

Import-Csv .\TeamsChannelMembers.csv | ForEach-Object{Remove-TeamChannelUser -GroupId "50e33be9-GROUPIDOFTHETEAM-4706544ab1a4" -DisplayName "SD - NET" -User $_.User}

Adding Channel Members using CSV

Import-Csv .\TeamsChannelMembers.csv | ForEach-Object{Add-TeamChannelUser -GroupId "50e33be9GROUPIDOFTHETEAM-4706544ab1a4" -DisplayName "Channel Name" -User $_.User}

Adding Team Members using CSV

Import-Csv .\TeamsMembers.csv | ForEach-Object{Add-TeamUser -GroupId "000faf41-7fa8-0000-ac2d-2c180000af77" -User $_.User}}

To Display All Teams and Channels

Get-Team | ForEach-Object{Get-TeamChannel -GroupID $_.GroupID | FT DisplayName,Description,MembershipType}

Good to have – To Use Different Repositories –

Register-PSRepository –Name '_TempTestRepo' –SourceLocation 'https://www.poshtestgallery.com'

To List Registered Repositories –

Get-PSRepository | Fl

Microsoft Remove - Pre-Release Versions from below Location - https://www.poshtestgallery.com/packages/MicrosoftTeams

If you hit below error - Update PowershellGet and Restart Powershell

PS C:\Scripts&amp;amp;gt; Install-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams -RequiredVersion 1.1.3-preview -AllowPrerelease
Install-Module : Cannot process argument transformation on parameter 'RequiredVersion'. Cannot convert value
"1.1.3-preview" to type "System.Version". Error: "Input string was not in a correct format."
At line:1 char:54
+ ... ll-Module -Name MicrosoftTeams -RequiredVersion 1.1.3-preview -AllowP ...
+ CategoryInfo&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp; : InvalidData: (:) [Install-Module], ParameterBindingArgumentTransformationException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : ParameterArgumentTransformationError,Install-Module

Exchange Server couldn’t find Enterprise Organization Container

Satheshwaran Manoharan

-

February 22, 2020

4

Exchange Server couldn’t find Enterprise Organization Container

Customers who did cutover or migrated their mailboxes to the cloud removed all the exchange servers environment then they think about bringing a new exchange server later point of time may end up with this error and there are some left over objects in the Active Directory environment. They quickest solution we found is to check which exchange server version was there in the environment lastly. Run PrepareAD with that setup once and re run the exchange server 2016 setup. Then the setup worked seamlessly. In my case the last exchange server was 2010. so ran preparead with exchange 2010

First Ran Exchange Server 2016 _ Error _

Couldn’t find the Enterprise Organization container.

Error:
A reboot from a previous installation is pending. Please restart the system and then rerun Setup.
For more information, visit: http://technet.microsoft.com/library(EXCHG.150)/ms.exch.setupreadiness.RebootPending.aspx

Error:
Setup encountered a problem while validating the state of Active Directory: Couldn’t find the Enterprise Organization container. See the Exchange setup log for more information on this error.
For more information, visit: http://technet.microsoft.com/library(EXCHG.150)/ms.exch.setupreadiness.AdInitErrorRule.aspx

Warning:
Setup will prepare the organization for Exchange Server 2016 by using ‘Setup /PrepareAD’. No Exchange Server 2013 roles have been detected in this topology. After this operation, you will not be able to install any Exchange Server 2013 roles.
For more information, visit: https://docs.microsoft.com/Exchange/plan-and-deploy/deployment-ref/readiness-checks?view=exchserver-2016

Warning:
Setup will prepare the organization for Exchange Server 2016 by using ‘Setup /PrepareAD’. No Exchange Server 2010 roles have been detected in this topology. After this operation, you will not be able to install any Exchange Server 2010 roles.
For more information, visit: https://docs.microsoft.com/Exchange/plan-and-deploy/deployment-ref/readiness-checks?view=exchserver-2016

A reboot from a previous installation is pending. Please restart the system and rerun setup or clear the below attribute and continue

Took backup of the key and Cleared attribute _ PendingFileRenameOperations instead of rebooting the server.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\PendingFileRenameOperations

With Exchange 2010 SP3 Setup

.\setup.com /PrepareAD /OrganizationName:”First Organization”

Ran Exchange 2016 Setup it worked seamlessly.

Designing Dynamic Teams with Private Channels

Satheshwaran Manoharan

-

February 9, 2020

15

Designing Dynamic Teams with Private Channels

A group of people in a large team wants a focused space to collaborate without having to create a separate team. It reduces the number of teams created and slice them into channels. Also private channels is not visible to anyone unless you are a member of it or you own it.

Firstly we wanted to limit the users who can create teams. So we created a security group and only members of the specified group can create Teams. Before getting into Private channels lets see how to create dynamic membership to Teams. See how you can create Office 365 Groups with Dynamic membership now Create a similar Office 365 Group with Dynamic Membership (Requires Azure Premium P1). Microsoft 365 Business Premium customers have Azure Premium P1 in the package now as well.

https://aad.portal.azure.com/

If you don’t have Azure Premium P1 license or any equivalent license , you can see membership type is greyed out like below.

Once the Group is Created . if you have P1 license you can create Dynamic Membership rules based on department in my case.

Now you use teams client to create from Office 365 Group.

Choose Create from

Choose Office 365 Group

Choose Information Technology (The Office 365 group we created earlier) and click on create

Now the membership of the teams is dynamic using Department Attribute and new members are added automatically and members who are changing departments will be removed from the Team instantly as the department attribute changes. “This Team has membership settings that prevent you from adding or removing members” which shows membership is managed on the azure active directory which gives greater control when you manager large teams.

The Advantages of this is One or Many Owners of the Department can create as many channels they want but they have to reach out if they wish to create a team across departments as we have limited teams creators based on my previous post.
Owners of the Teams and Teams Creators (Based on a Group) can be managed by Azure Active Directory Admin Center. https://aad.portal.azure.com/

Owners of the Teams can be managed from Teams Admin Center as well https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/ As you can see below you can add a owner or promote a member to be a owner anytime where he gets access to create channels within teams. (As we have limited members to create unlimited channels)

Channel owner cannot add members out of his team (In my case user cannot add out of information technology team) because membership is limited to based on department.

Now in the Channel updates like below , Team can receive updates instantly when users change departments in my case or any new joiners. (When department attribute changes in On-premises – Azure AD Connect Synchronizes to the cloud – Office 365 Groups takes care of the seamless dynamic membership. ) As this moment teams cannot hide these notifications.

As per the requirement from teams admin center.

Turned off – Adding New Channels and editing existing ones

Turned off – Adding,Editing and removing tabs

Turned off – Adding,Editing and removing Connectors

Turned off – Adding,editing and removing apps

Now

Disabled – Allow members to create and update channels.

Disabled – Allow members to delete and restore channels.

Now Added Channels as per the Structure

Good Part of Private channels is it shows only when you are member or owner of the channel.So instead of creating multiple teams we can use channels which is a perfect replacements of whats app groups

when infrastructure team member logs in it shows like below

For Application Team member

I couldn’t think of using teams without private channels. its serves a lot of use cases . We are limiting few things so that we don’t end up 100’s of office 365 groups in the backend. Freedom of creating teams and channels in a controlled manner it will help us govern on what’s happening. Group expiration and naming policy is the next level of optimization. For small business I don’t think of limiting anything if you are 200 user base. if you are 2000 userbase or above. Controlling these things definitely helps you on the audit day. As office 365 groups used provide permissions for documents and so on.

Few organizations have went on full fledge without group naming policy or group expiration . now they ended up with 100’s of groups with no clue where they are mapped to. if you are green field environment take some time to plan it. Every environment is different. So plan accordingly.

Group Write Back Permission issue

Admin Take over in Office 365

Upgrading Exchange Servers with Cumulative Updates

Microsoft Teams PowerShell

Exchange Server couldn’t find Enterprise Organization Container

Designing Dynamic Teams with Private Channels

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