Category:Microsoft 365 Admin

How to allow auto-forwarding to Teams channels

Posted on Updated on by Nikki Chapple

Email forwarding can be useful, but poses a security risk due to the potential disclosure of information. Therefore the Anti-spam outbound policy blocks the auto-forwarding at the tenant level by default. Although this minimises the security risks, it hampers productivity since there are valid reasons to allow auto-forwarding to an external domain.

There are valid use cases for external email forwarding such as:

  • To support the adoption of Microsoft Teams and the concept of working in Teams rather than sending email. However, users cannot auto-forward emails to a Teams channel, because the Teams channel email addresses are external email addresses, for example (uniqueid@emea.teams.ms or uniqueid@uk.teams.ms).
  • Auto-forwarding emails to a third-party system, such as CRM or ticketing system for processing.

Read on to learn how to allow auto-forwarding to Teams channels and other authorised external domains to increase productivity and reduce security risks.

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How to manage Microsoft 365 evergreen change with Power Automate

Posted on Updated on by Nikki Chapple

Are you effectively managing your Microsoft 365 evergreen change?

The pace of change in Microsoft 365 is rapid as Microsoft constantly delivers new features, updates to enhance customer value and ways to secure the environment better. We all know it is essential to keep on top of this constant flow of changes, but keeping track of the evergreen changes across the multiple different Microsoft 365 services can be challenging.

Microsoft post all change messages in the Microsoft 365 Message Center. However, the Message Center is not a workflow tool, so triaging and tracking the changes is difficult. In addition, people spend too much time manually copying content from Message Center to other applications and notifying stakeholders rather than assessing the change itself!

So how do you remove this manual overhead and automate your Microsoft 365 evergreen change process?

Read on for top tips and guidance on how to sync your Microsoft 365 messages to a Planner board, and then use Power Automate to automate and customise your process. My Power Automate Flow removes those repetitive tasks, giving you more time to focus on the triaging.

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How to apply just-in-time access to Security & Compliance roles

Posted on Updated on by Nikki Chapple

I am often asked by clients how they can provide additional levels of controls to their Security and Compliance privileged roles to mitigate the risks of excessive, unnecessary, or misused access permissions to important resources.

Microsoft recommends the following best practice for managing privileged accounts:

  • Use least privileged access
  • Turn on multi-factor authentication for all your administrator accounts
  • Use Privileged Identity Management to grant just-in-time access with optional approvals
  • Configure recurring access reviews to revoke unneeded permissions over time

If you have Azure AD Premium 2 licensing you can use Azure AD Privilege Identity Management (PIM) to provide just-in-time access to privileged admin accounts. PIM only provides just-in-time access to Azure AD and Azure privileged roles. The issue with Security and Compliance roles is that they are managed in Security and Compliance admin Centers and not in Azure AD.

So how can we protect Security and Compliance roles with just-in-time access to mitigate the risks of excessive, unnecessary, or misused access permissions to important resources?

Read on to discover how to use Privileged Access Groups in PIM to indirectly provide just-in-time access to your Security & Compliance roles. In addition, this process will work with other non-Azure AD roles such as roles from Exchange or SharePoint.

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How to track Microsoft Docs page updates in Microsoft To-do

Posted on Updated on by Nikki Chapple

How do you keep track of Microsoft Docs page updates?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could be notified when your favourite Microsoft Docs pages are updated rather than having to go to Microsoft Docs pages daily or relying on social media?

Read on and I will explain how you can create an RSS feed from Microsoft Search results to create a task in Microsoft To Do every time one of your favourite Microsoft Docs pages is updated.

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Use Power Automate to bulk export members from Microsoft Teams

Posted on Updated on by Nikki Chapple

How can I quickly export a list of all members in a specific Team? As a Microsoft Team’s owner you have probably come to the conclusion that managing your Team membership is not easy.

This blog is a two part blog. Read part one to see how you can use Power Automate to bulk add new members into a Microsoft Team.

Part two of the blog now explains how you can use Power Automate to automatically export a list of members from a Team into an Excel spreadsheet. With the added bonus of including several user attributes such as job title, mobile or office along side their name and email.

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Use Power Automate to bulk add members into Microsoft Teams

Posted on Updated on by Nikki Chapple

How can I add many members into my Microsoft Teams quickly and easily? As a Microsoft Team’s owner then you have probably come to the conclusion that managing your Team membership is not easy.

This blog explains how you can use Power Automate to automatically bulk add members into any Microsoft Team that you own.

I will walk through four scenarios

  1. Automatically add members to a Team using email addresses.
  2. Automatically add members to a Team using their display names.
  3. Automatically add a list of managers to a Team as owners and their direct reports as members.
  4. Create a data entry field in the Power Automate flow to allow the owner to choose which Team to import the users into.

Read part two of the blog to see how you can use Power Automate to export members of a Team into an Excel spreadsheet.

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