Azure & Active Directory Center

Previously, MVP Nicolas Blank wrote an interesting article "Having an Identity Crisis" and it talked about all kinds of attacks on your environment. One such attack is on user email.  Users tend to choose a password that is easy for them to remember and this makes the password weak and easy to guess by others.  Even with some social engineering, user passwords are easy to retrieve, as can be seen on this YouTube clip What is your password?

Powershell functions can be created as advanced functions. These functions behave very similarly to built-in Powershell cmdlets. Because I can't do without the ability to add a -Verbose or -Debug parameter to my functions now nowadays, these are the only kind of functions I build. Advanced functions, just like "dumb" functions, have parameters. The parameters are the values that are passed into the function from your script.

Now that you've got an understanding of Powershell's advanced functions and the ValidateSet() parameter validation method in the first part of this blog, “Validating Powershell Advanced Function Parameters” you can begin Part #2 of this small post series. Part 2 of this series goes deeper by demonstrating how to dynamically create your sets for ValidateSet() so they aren't hardcoded in. This is essential when dealing with values that may constantly change or even if you just want to practice writing good scripting and have no static references.

As more and more organizations move to Office 365 the challenge shifts from “How do we get into Office 365?” to “How do we manage our data within Office 365?” Keeping your organization’s data secure inside the service is a major concern for many organizations, as well as for Microsoft itself.

Without any big announcements, a preview version of the Azure AD PowerShell module was released last week. In this article, we will go over the release in a bit more detail and cover some of the changes in comparison with the MSOnline module.

Modern authentication has been around for a while now, and it’s great. It brought support for the latest and greatest in authentication and authorization protocols and made new scenarios available. It gave us simple, unified experience across devices and platforms and improvements to the Alternate Login ID feature. On top of all that, it enabled proper support for two-factor authentication for all clients and put an end to the Office 2013 RTM fiasco (bye-bye rich clients, rest in peace app passwords!).

In Exchange 2010 users can create distribution lists that are visible to the whole organization through Outlook Web App in the user Options.  By default these are created in the Users OU in Active Directory.

In the previous two parts of this series I took you through building a Windows 2012 server on Hyper-V Server and then in the second part took you through the process of installing Active Directory Domain Services.

In this part of the series I would like to take you through the process of installing and configuring Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services on your domain controller.

In the previous part of this series (Part 1), I took you through to the point where you now have a basic Hyper-V guest which can be used as the domain controller for your Exchange 2013 Test Lab. In this part I would like to take you through how you can install Active Directory on that guest machine.