MSPortals.io – A List of Microsoft Portals

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I thought I should write up a little bit of information on a site I created; msportals.io and how it’s doing:

Being a Microsoft 365 Administrator at the time, I was looking for a list of all the Microsoft portals, particularly from an administrator point of view. A lot of lists were floating around, but nothing that was being maintained or comprehensive enough. I’d asked around a lot around it, others had the idea that they were going to create something – but nothing happened. It was a pretty simple idea and I was hardly the first to have it…

I also had the idea of creating this list on GitHub. I’d already been looking at GitHub Pages to move my blog to, but not being a programmer or developer, I was finding it too difficult to try and work out how to migrate and have feature parity with what I was using on WordPress. However, the GitHub Pages free tier, allowing 500mb of data in a public Github Repository sounded like a perfect fit for me, providing a platform for a list of URLs.

I started to collect and write up a list of portals. Just the name of the portal, and a link to it. I wasn’t using any GitHub client or command line things, purely using the web based interface for GitHub to start putting data in and seeing how it looked on the resulting msportals.github.io site. It seemed fine, so I started asking around for people to tell me of any links I might be missing. People jumped on board pretty quickly to help (read my thanks section here) to provide portals, but also to actually contribute to the project and provide features that would have taken me a very long time to work out myself.

I also bought a domain – msportals.xyz as it only cost a few dollars a year, and GitHub Pages supports bringing in your own domain. I had the site up, started using it.. and though I should throw it out there to see how much criticism it brought. I posted a tweet:

I didn’t expect to get much of a response – it was more of a test so I could properly launch later. Instead, as I expect what often happens on projects like this, it blew up. It turned out to be my most popular tweet of all time, with almost 100k views. My only annoyance of this was that I had no statistics to collect on how much the site was being used! Quickly I had help to add in Google Analytics to the site, so about a week later I had stats.

Since mid November 2020, the site has had 55,000 users hit it. As expected, the engagement time is tiny – you go to the site and click a link.

That peak is when The Register wrote an article on the site. The site changed from msportals.xyz to msportals.io after @SwiftOnSecurity bought it and handed it over, after some discussion around certain firewalls blocking xyz domains under some standard settings:

Updates and suggestions to the the portal of Microsoft portals came think and fast for a while – nice features like a filter so you can just type ‘teams’ and see the link to the Teams portal were implemented by others (mdjx), due to the way open source platforms like GitHub work.

I don’t see as many portal suggestions and updates these days, but they still trickle in. I still use the site frequently, and see people pop up time to time saying how much they like it which is awesome to hear; I really wanted something functional for myself, and if others also liked it, that was a bonus.

I actually had an idea for another site – a list of PowerShell modules with the commands to both install and connect to different things like Exchange Online and Microsoft Teams. Someone had beaten me to it (which is good!), and had done it a similar way; check out https://msshells.net/ by Andrés Gorzelany to have a look at what he’s done.

If you’ve got your own idea for something like this, go for it! You can do it entirely for free if you don’t care about your own top level domain, and it’s an interesting project to try.

Fifth and Sixth Generations of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga

Posted on by Adam Fowler

For the first four generations of the X1 Yoga click here

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga is still my favourite all-rounder laptop. In 2021 we’re up to the 6th Generation of the X1 Yoga and I’d previously written up the first 4, so figured it was time to cover these two.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5

Coming out in 2020, we saw the jump from the 8th Generation Intel CPU to the 10th Generation (we skipped 9th Gen Intel for some reason). It was also the first with WiFi 6 which is now seeing wide adoption across markets.

Beyond that, there was very little difference between the 4th and 5th generations of the X1 Yoga. All the ports are the same, the layout the same, and the keys the same beyond a few different special functions above some of the function keys. There is a privacy shutter over the webcam though, which is a handy addition.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5

Beyond that, there was very little difference between the 4th and 5th generations of the X1 Yoga. All the ports are the same, the layout the same, and the keys the same beyond a few different special functions above some of the function keys. There is a privacy shutter over the webcam though, which is a handy addition.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6

This one is a bigger jump again. The screen bezel is smaller, and at a 16:10 ratio rather than 16:9, the base resolution has changed from the very standard 1920 x 1080 and is now 1920 x 1200, providing a little more screen real estate without making the unit bigger – it’s actually slightly smaller as you’ll see below. Also coming with an 11th Gen Intel CPU, Lenovo changed the entire laptop from one shade of grey to another (OK, it’s officially changed from Iron Gray to Storm Gray which sounds like a superhero name).

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6

The trackpad itself is a lot bigger, and the power button has moved to being above the keyboard, instead of on the side as per all previous generations. This button doubles as the fingerprint reader, no more dedicated fingerprint square to press. There’s also speaker grills on each side of the keyboard instead of above, and no dedicated special NIC dongle port.

Here’s some photos of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6 on top of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5:

Left side – X1 Yogas
Back – X1 Yogas
Right side – Left side – X1 Yogas
Front – Left side – X1 Yogas
X1 Yoga Gen 5 top
X1 Yoga Gen 6 top

From the above, there’s little differences to the ports beyond what I’ve already mentioned – the grill for expelling air went from the right on the 5th Gen, to the back on the 6th Gen (which is better to blow hot air away from you), and the audio jack is on opposite sides which shouldn’t bother anyone either way.

I don’t have any complaints around either model of laptop – there is something that feels more modern about the 6th Gen X1 Yoga in it’s colour and stylings, so the better CPU and screen differences are the biggest deciding factors. As always, I’m keen to see how the X1 Yoga line progresses, and this is a solid entry in the lineup.

Migrating Phone System from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I thought I’d document a few lessons learned in this migration. The migration was from Skype for Business Server 2015 and Skype for Business 2016 clients with Enterprise Voice, moving users across to Microsoft Teams.

The steps to migrate a user for me were:

  1. Add user to AD Group “Azure AD Licensing Telstra Calling for Office 365” as this allocates a Telstra Calling for Office 365 license. These licenses are bought from https://marketplace.telstra.com/ and feed into Microsoft 365. I believe this is unique to Australia.
  2. From Skype for Business Server Management Shell:
    $cred=Get-Credential
    $url="https://adminau1.online.lync.com/HostedMigration/hostedmigrationService.svc" (different links here for different countries)
    Move-CsUser -Identity [email protected] –Target sipfed.online.lync.com -MoveToTeams -Credential $cred -HostedMigrationOverrideUrl $url
    set-csuser -identity [email protected] -LineURI $null
  3. Form a machine with the Teams PowerShell Module installed:
    $Session = New-CSOnlineSession -OverrideAdminDomain yourdomain.onmicrosoft.com
    Import-PSSession $session –AllowClobber
    Set-CsOnlineVoiceUser -Identity [email protected] -TelephoneNumber 61812341234
    Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy -PolicyName UpgradeToTeams -Identity [email protected]
  4. Configure call forwarding in Gateway (Pilot Users only that were being given a new number out of our normal number range)

EHR Error on Teams Portal

We can’t get details of EHR usage. Please try again. If you continue to have problems, contact Microsoft customer support.

Seeing this error everywhere on the Teams Admin portal, unsure what the cause/fix is yet. It ended up disappearing by itself after a few weeks *shrug* – you’ll see this theme is common around portal errors.

Dial Plans error


We can’t get the effective dial plan so the dial plan can’t be tested.

Going into any Dial Plan brings up this admin portal error, as well as trying to run a Test Dial plan test:

Something went wrong while testing this phone number. If you continue to have problems, contact Microsoft customer support.

This problem was another portal issue – logged a case which Microsoft confirmed was at their end, and a few weeks later they’d resolved it.

Create Resource Account error

We can’t save changes to ___

When creating a Resource Account used for Auto Attendant or Call queues, I was getting a very unhelpful error. I believe this is because I’m running in hybrid mode, so Teams can’t create an account on my primary domain – changing the domain to @contoso.onmicrosoft.com then let me create the Resource Account.

This problem also disappeared later and now I can create accounts on my primary domain – put it down to another portal issue.

Desk Phones requiring PIN

Phones would be registered in Intune, because they’re running Android – and that means any ‘all user’ Android policy would apply.

I’ve since created Dynamic Device Groups and filtered by DeviceModel and DeviceOSType – only testing the Poly CCX500 at this stage, but will add more models as we get them. Also filtering by OStype which is not really necessary, but does make sure it’s only Android devices affected.

(device.deviceModel -eq "CCX500") and (device.deviceOSType -eq "Android")

If you use a test account 20 times, that account will hit its device limit in azure and get locked out.

Skype for Business users unable to call Teams users

Early in migration, we tested interoperability between the two platforms, as it wasn’t going to be an overnight company wide migration. A Skype for Business user trying to call a migrated to Teams user would instead get diverted elsewhere. This was because we had Unassigned Number range rules in place, that were designed to send calls somewhere if it wasn’t allocated to anyone. Removing these rules immediately fixed this issue.

Home Screen on Desk Phones Laggy

The default experience if the phone supports it, is to show a home screen. More details on what the Home Screen is here. This is in CsTeamsIPPhonePolicy with the default value ‘AllowHomeScreen’ set to ‘EnabledUserOverride’. Changing this to Disabled via the PowerShell command:

set-CsTeamsIPPhonePolicy -allowhomescreen Disabled

removed this. I like the idea of the Home Screen, but not at the cost of a fast functioning phone vs a slow one.

I later found out this is due to the 1GB RAM on some devices, and Teams now (at the time of writing) uses > 1GB RAM, and then the Home Screen uses even more RAM. Trying a phone model with 2GB RAM this all worked perfectly.

I believe this is also fixed now, but it took Microsoft about 5 months to resolve.

New Desk Phones not signing in

Testing the Poly CCX500 model, some wouldn’t sign in to Teams out of the box. As soon as I tried to sign in, they’d say:

‘Error Could not sign in. You will need to sign in again. If you see this message again, please contact your company support. OK’

I spent so long on this, unsuccessfully trying to update the firmware via USB etc. In the end, turning off the ‘DHCP Time’ setting under ‘Device Settings’ made it work – I assume it had some problems contacting a NTP server (settings appeared correct in the DHCP scope of the phone). Someone else found the same issue here, but this was due to the phone running a very old v1 firmware. This shouldn’t affect most people, but worth noting.

Microsoft News and interests Taskbar Icon in Windows 10

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Microsoft is now rolling out their News and interests taskbar icon, which was announced back in April on TechCommunity.

I’ve seen this turn up in the last day on both my home PC and work PC – the work PC being configured to get updates immediately from Windows Updates for Business.

If you don’t want this at all, you can disable via Group Policy or Intune.

Group Policy

If you want to disable this with a Group Policy setting, you’ll need to get the latest ADMX files updated 7th May 2021 from Microsoft. These will contain a new ‘feeds.admx’ policy definition file, but it’s just a single enable/disable setting:

You can do either of the registry settings recommended by Ben below – the first being a user config setting and the second being a machine policy that users couldn’t change in any way. The second registry setting is the same as what Group Policy is setting above.

For more granular control on disabling or enabling options in it, the registry entries live in:

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Feeds

From here, if you wanted to disabled ‘Open on Hover’ you’d use this value:

ShellFeedsTaskbarOpenOnHover : 0 (off) or 1 (on)

Intune

Intune is covered on the TechCommunity article and is just setting ‘Enable News and interests’ to ‘Allowed’ or ‘Not Allowed’

Microsoft also has an end user support article on News and Interests, which covers end user configuration, how they can turn it off, personalisation options and other user advice.

Update UPN from AD to Azure AD

Posted on by Adam Fowler

When there was a name change in Active Directory (AD), we used to update the Universal Principal Name (UPN) in AD, then separately run the Set-MsolUserPrincipalName command to update Azure AD to the same UPN. Except, it no longer worked – I was now getting an ‘Access Denied’ message.

When trying to update the UPN via the Microsoft 365 admin center, it would correctly advise that the object was homed in AD, so changes needed to be made there. Except, they were, and Azure AD Connect was even reporting that it had seen the update and sent it off to Azure AD, no errors.

After some investigation, I found that there is now an option to allow ‘Synchronize userPrincipalName updates‘ which is off in older tenants. To check and update this:

In PowerShell, first install and connect to MSOLService. Then to check the status if UPN updates will sync and update:

Get-MsolDirSyncFeatures -Feature SynchronizeUpnForManagedUsers

If it’s $true, you’re already set. If it’s $false, update the value to $true with this command:

Set-MsolDirSyncFeature -Feature SynchronizeUpnForManagedUsers -Enable $true

In my testing, running another Azure AD Sync (both delta and full) did not resolve any already updated UPNs. I had to change the UPNs to a temporary value, sync, then change them back to the original value I wanted, and sync again. The update was instant in Azure AD once the sync had run each time.