Microsoft

Access An Exchange Online Mailbox Without a License

Posted on by Adam Fowler

This is just a quick one. Most Office 365 admins will hopefully have a separate admin account to perform higher level tasks, compared to their normal user account.

Because of this, the admin accounts shouldn’t need any licensing, because they’re not being used like a normal user. One person shouldn’t need to have two sets of licenses – but there are some problems that can come up because of this.

For example, if you want to use your admin account to access someone’s mailbox, that can be difficult when you don’t have a mailbox yourself to log onto, to then open another user’s mailbox. Outlook can be used to work around this, where you set up a profile for the email address of the user you want to access, but enter your admin credentials when prompted:

Your Name is just a display name field, email address needs to be the user’s email. Don’t enter a password here and click ‘Next’
This login page will start by showing the user’s email address, use the option ‘Sign in with another account’ and use your admin account.

The above works OK, but is a little time consuming if you’re accessing a mailbox for a quick check.

If you try to go to Outlook Online, you’ll get a message saying your admin account doesn’t have a license or a mailbox. To get around this, you’ll need to use a URL like:

https://outlook.office.com/owa/[email protected]/?offline=disabled

or

https://outlook.office.com/mail/[email protected]/?offline=disabled
if you want the ‘new’ Outlook.

It will then jump straight to that user’s mailbox, assuming you have access rights to it, and have waited a few minutes for the rights to apply.

Using the URL method is really quick way of accessing another user’s mailbox without needing a license yourself.

Disable Windows Defender Summaries via Registry

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Windows Defender does some great stuff, but in my opinion one of the more ‘noisy’ things it does in Windows 10 is provide a frequent notification to say it’s working but hasn’t found anything.

Many users may find this notification unnecessary and breaking their work focus just to be told that their PC is fine. Especially in a business environment, they’d think that is someone else’s problem.

Windows Defender Security Center Settings

A user can turn these off themselves of course, in the Windows Defender Security Settings page under Virus & threat protection notifications. It’s possible to turn off all informational notifications, or untick certain types.

Although there is an inbuilt Group Policy to also turn off informational notifications, to me I’d still want users knowing a threat was found or something was blocked – those are useful to the user. However the recent activity and scan results is the one I’d suggest disabling, but there’s no Group Policy for that.

Luckily this is just a single registry key which I’ve found through using Procmon:


HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Defender Security Center\Virus and threat protection\

REG_DWORD: SummaryNotificationDisabled

Value: 1 (decimal)

This setting can be rolled out through Group Policy (even as a run once and don’t reapply) if you’d like users to have control over turning the setting on.

OneDrive for Business – Turn Off ‘Allow Editing’ By Default

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Update 21st March 2019

You can now find these settings in the OneDrive Admin Center (Preview) at https://admin.onedrive.com and that’s a clearer experience.

Update 16th April 2020

As the SharePoint Admin Center has been updated, here’s the area to find the view/edit choice:

Original Post

Every organisation has their own requirements and standards. For mine, I see a risk when the default action of sharing a document via OneDrive for Business is the ability to ‘Allow editing’ of any document sent out. It’s worse because that option is hidden behind the main popup when sharing a file, and you don’t actually see that you’re giving ‘modify’ access rather than ‘read only’:

OneDrive for Business default sharing popup
OneDrive for Business ‘Allow editing’ on by default

There is a way to change this default behavior though, and it’s not in the OneDrive admin center.

Instead, you’ll need to head to the SharePoint admin center (since the backend of OneDrive is SharePoint Online, this makes some sense). From here, go into ‘sharing’ and there’s an option around ‘Default link permissions’. You can change this to ‘View’ rather than ‘Edit’:

SharePoint admin center

The change was immediate from my testing, as soon as I went to share another file via OneDrive for Business, the ‘Allow editing’ option was unticked. This is only changing the default too, someone can still decide they want to allow editing and tick the box.

It’s worth considering what you should have as your default. The new versioning in OneDrive/SharePoint Online is really good, and will let a user easily roll back to a previous version of a document if something accidentally gets changed – but will your users be aware if something does change? It’s possible to set up an alert, but it’s a bit tedious: http://itgroove.net/brainlitter/2016/05/16/creating-alerts-documents-new-onedrive-business/

Hope this helps anyone considering rolling out OneDrive, or wants to start allowing external sharing.

Disable Internet Explorer Add-ons via Group Policy

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Problem:

I’ve discovered an issue with the Skype for Business add-ons to Internet Explorer which causes pages with large amounts of text to freeze briefly when scrolling.

As part of a Skype for Business install, two add-ins get loaded. They use the same Class ID and DLL File, and provide options such as click to call links on phone numbers on a page:

With these addons loaded though, some sites lag and freeze that have large amounts of text; here’s a good example. Scrolling through the page for several seconds either through mousewheel or sidebar should result in a brief freeze lasting a second or two. Other browsers are fine (such as Chrome or Edge), and Internet Explorer is fine without the above add-ons.

I had a few people confirm this experience, including @CliffordKennedy (Thank you!)

Solution:

This seems to be a problem that was around a while ago, and possibly only occurs in less common circumstances. If you can live without the IE addin, the solution is to disable it. However for me, I couldn’t do this as the option was greyed out – plus that solution doesn’t work at scale.

Other solutions like disabling via the registry didn’t seem to work for this add-in either, it came back. Even removing the OCHelper.DLL file didn’t stop it loading! Uninstalling Skype for Business altogether worked, but that’s a bit too drastic.

There is a Group Policy however, called ‘Add-on List’ located under Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Internet Explorer\Security Features\Add-on Management. Here, you can add the Class ID and set the value to 0 for disabled, 1 for enabled, and 2 for enabled but users can disable/enable. More instructions from Microsoft here.

For this one I’ve chosen to disable, but the ‘enable and let users disable’ option is quite nice – it’d be even better if there was a ‘disable but let users enable’!

This worked for me, and the add-in is now disabled, and the scrolling issue is gone. In the meantime, I have a case open with Microsoft and can hopefully have the root cause resolved too.

 

Update 21st September 2019

Microsoft Support have told me there is no fix planned for this issue. With that in mind, if you need to use IE I’d recommend disabling the addins:

Skype for Business add-ins for Internet Explorer 11 Disabled

How To Change The Microsoft Planner Date Format

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Updated 20th January 2022

I’m a big fan of Microsoft Planner, and it’s a great way to intro people into using some of the extra Office 365 features that gives a pretty quick benefit with very little training.

However, this is one problem I’ve come across; there is no option to change the date format in Microsoft Planner. The date format itself is actually dependent on what language you’re viewing the page as.

Here’s two tasks created on the same plan in the same tenant:

 12th of July, or 7th of December?

All I changed was the URL. The URL format will be https://tasks.office.com/adamfowlerit.com/en-us/Home/Planner/#/… and the ‘en-us’ component can be changed to ‘en-au’ or ‘en-gb’ (along with other languages most likely that I didn’t test).

Depending how I access Planner seems to generate different a different language.  There’s several ways this can be updated, but for an individual, you can change your regional format here https://myaccount.microsoft.com/settingsAndPrivacy/?languagesettings=true to display the format you want.

Microsoft Teams

If you’re using Planner inside Microsoft Teams, the date format shown is based on the App Language of Teams itself – which seems to default to English (United States) regardless of Planner, Office, or computer locale. To change:

In Microsoft Teams, go into settings (elipsis next to tenant name and profile)

Under the General area, scroll down to Language and the App Language dropdown. After selecting your region, make sure you click the ‘Save and restart’ button, or it won’t save your change at all.

After Microsoft Teams restarts, you should see the correct date format for Planner tabs.

To set it company wide or default as a user

Setting the language and region as per https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/troubleshoot/access-management/set-language-and-region does not seem to affect Teams (as I’ve had both set to en-au, logged onto a new computer and Teams has still been English (United States)

Patrick Lamber (MVP) found the following way to do it via PowerShell https://www.nubo.eu/Change-The-Display-Language-In-Your-Microsoft-Teams-Client/ as did Jesse Loudon https://purple.telstra.com/blog/automate-microsoft-teams-desktop-settings-with-powershell

There is a great writeup of the state of Language in Microsoft 365 here https://blog.thinformatics.com/2020/09/microsoft-365-language-confusion/ where the writer Jakob says: