Microsoft

Azure AD B2B PowerShell Invites

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I’ve written about Azure AD B2B before, as well as then giving those invited users access to SharePoint Online, but there’s been a lot of changes since I started using it. Have a read of my original article if you’re interested to see how I’m using B2B and why.

Azure AD B2B is still in preview, but in Feb 2017 a bunch of improvements were added. Part of these changes were around using the new Azure portal rather than the Classic Portal, and with that is the removal of inviting users via CSV file and uploading it to Azure AD. This was exactly the way I was using it, so I had to change to one of the newer methods.

Although CSV support is gone, it’s been replaced by PowerShell which can just call the same CSV file being used before, so it’s not a huge change. There’s a PowerShell example on this technet page which shows how to do it. There is a catch though, the ability to add the user to groups as part of the import is gone.

The other big change that impacted me was the invitation emails. This is the email that gets sent to the recipient when being invited – it was originally a plain text email from a generic Microsoft address, but it’s now changed to a much more professional looking email. The catch with this is, rather than coming from a generic Microsoft email account, it now comes from the user that sends the invites out. I found this out the hard way when invited parties started seeing my details and photo with the invite!

There’s four approaches I can come up with around this new invite method –

1. Leave it as showing the admin user who does the invites (not ideal)

2. Create and use a seperate service account for these invites, so it comes from a generic looking internal email address (quite good)

3. Get the users themselves to send the invites out – by default, all users have access to invite others to their tenant (worst option, users won’t do this themselves, need training and support, can’t automate)

4. Use APIs and send the invites out on behalf of the user (‘best’ option but requires the most work, most complex)

While I look at option 4, option 2 is a good middle ground and will probably do for most companies.

I’ve written and tested the below script, which works on a single user by user basis. This uses just the Azure AD Preview module for PowerShell, which is at version 2.0.0.85 at the time of writing. To use the method mentioned on that page to install, I had to first install Windows Management Framework 5.0.

$group = get-azureadgroup -SearchString "Put your exact search string here" | where {$_.dirsyncenabled -eq $null}
$newuser = New-AzureADMSInvitation -InvitedUserEmailAddress [email protected] -InvitedUserDisplayName "Full Name" -sendinvitationmessage $true -InviteRedirectUrl "http://myapps.microsoft.com"
Add-AzureADGroupMember -objectid $group.objectid -RefObjectId $newuser.InvitedUser.Id

This script requires you to first authenticate against Azure AD with the command connect-azuread : the same way you’d use connect-msol for Office 365. More on how to automate that part in an upcoming blog post.

I’ve written this on the basis that you already have a group to add the guest user into, which gives them the permissions required after being invited into your Azure AD tenant. It’s also more a proof of concept script, which shows how to automate these steps enough to then be able to do what you want with it – such as wrap it around a ‘for each’ and feed multiple users into it.

The first thing the script does is get the group name. As objects in Azure AD don’t have to have unique names like on-prem Active Directory, this script will fail if it finds multiple results the same. It’s also making sure the result that comes back is only a cloud based group, because you can only add B2B invited users into Azure AD groups (not ones synced from on-prem).

Next it will send out the invite to the user. This is the important part. If you don’t want an email to go out, you can change the -sendinvitationmessage value to $false.

Finally we’re adding the invited user into the group by ObjectIDs of each object – straight forward.

—-

The end result is a user who will be able to accept their invite, log in and have access to whatever they need to. Note that the way I do this is by having an app and advertising it to the group that also gives permissions to SharePoint Online, so they’ll see the single link on their myapps.microsoft.com page.

If you’re mucking about with Azure AD B2B this should give you somewhere to start. The Microsoft Technet pages for Azure AD are very comprehensive now as well as being easy to read, so check them out.

If you have any questions on Azure AD B2B feel free to ask!

Update 23rd August 2017

I’ve now gotten around to making a mass invite script. I used Eric Schrader’s script, and made some of my own modifications.

It will pick up a file in the same path as the script called azure_ad_b2b.csv which needs to be comma delimited with just “InvitedUserEmailAddress,Name”

It will also prompt for the group name which you want to add invitees to, and bomb out if you get more or less than 1 result (because display names aren’t unique fields in Office 365)

Another prompt is for the project URL, which is where you want invitees to be sent to (which for me, is usually a SharePoint Online site). It’s also set to send the invites out from a generic service account, so change “[email protected]” in the send-mailmessage line to whatever you’re sending as. Feel free to ask any questions!

#1.) Install Azure AD PS module – https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/AzureADPreview

#2.) provide O365 tenant admin cred

$cred = Get-Credential

Connect-AzureAD -Credential $cred

#2.second cred for O365 email account (merge var with above if for non-demo O365 tenant)

$adminemailcred = get-credential [email protected]

$groupname = Read-Host -Prompt 'Input the Group Name to add users to e.g. SharePoint Online XXX Portal External Full'

$project = Read-Host -Prompt 'Input the project name, 1 word e.g. TestSite'

#2.External User Security Group ID

$group = get-azureadgroup -SearchString $groupname | where {$_.dirsyncenabled -eq $null}

if ($group.count -ne 1) {echo "Not Exactly One Group Found"; break}

$projecturl = Read-host -Prompt 'Input the project URL XXX for https://yourdomain.sharepoint.com/XXX'

#3 import CSV, update url and csv location below.

$invitations = import-csv azure_ad_b2b.csv

foreach ($email in $invitations) {

$result= New-AzureADMSInvitation -InvitedUserEmailAddress $email.InvitedUserEmailAddress -InvitedUserDisplayName $email.Name -InviteRedirectUrl $projecturl -InvitedUserMessageInfo $messageInfo -SendInvitationMessage $false

$inviteurl = $result.InviteRedeemUrl

$userid = $result.InvitedUser.Id

#automatically add the new user to your Security Group

Add-AzureADGroupMember -objectid $group.objectid -RefObjectId $userid

#send the user a custom email from your Office 365 tenant. Supports HTML.

Send-MailMessage -To $result.InvitedUserEmailAddress -from [email protected] -Subject ‘Invitation to the $project ’ -Body “<h1>Congrats!</h1><br><strong>This is your invite</strong><br><br>Here:<br>$inviteurl <br>For <strong>help</strong>, contact [email protected]” -BodyAsHtml -smtpserver smtp.office365.com -usessl -Credential $adminemailcred -Port 587

}

Azure AD Group-Based License Management For Office 365

Posted on by Adam Fowler

It’s finally here! At least in public preview…

The ability to allocate Office 365 licenses via groups is now available for everyone to use. This has been a long-awaited feature, up until now licenses have either been applied manually via the portal, or via scripts/3rd party software with logic applied for automation.

Now, you can automatically apply and manage license allocation using whatever logic you like. You can create on-premise AD groups, apply a license set to the groups, and members will be allocated the relevant licensing. If that doesn’t work for you, there’s also cloud based Dynamic Groups which let you use whatever logic you can come up with to add members to the group. You could do it on something like a department name, or use an extension attribute and populate that based on what license you want to allocate.

The above link covers a lot of information about how to deploy this. At the time of writing, I couldn’t get to the Azure Licensing page by searching for the word ‘Licensing’, and instead had to use a direct link: https://portal.azure.com/#blade/Microsoft_AAD_IAM/LicensesMenuBlade/Products

I’ve already deployed it, it seems to work quickly and without issue.

 

Once you’re done, you’ll need to remove the Office 365 licenses applied manually. This TechNet article shows the commands to use for removal. I used this:

$Users = Get-MsolUser -All | where {$_.isLicensed -eq $true}; $Users | foreach {Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName $_.UserPrincipalName -RemoveLicenses "litwareinc:ENTERPRISEPACK"}

This removes licenses from all your users, to be more specific add extra criteria to the first ‘Get-MsolUser’ command. Also note you need to swap ‘litwareinc’ with your tenant ID, and ENTERPRISEPACK with whichever license you’re removing. I’d recommend testing on one account first!

To see what your tenant’s license options are just use:

Get-MsolAccountSku

And you’ll see a list of the license options along with existing allocations.

If you have any questions please comment below.

How To Grep in PowerShell

Posted on by Adam Fowler

How to Grep in PowerShell:

Here’s some example commands in PowerShell to replicate Grep:

  • Get-Process | Where-Object {$_ | Select-String “foo”}
  • get-process | where ProcessName -like “*foo*
  • get-process | findstr foo
  • ps *foo*

Applies To : PowerShell

For those who have lived in the Linux/Unix command line, the ‘grep‘ command is a commonly used way of finding something that you want in a chunk of data.

Øyvind Kallstad did a great writeup of comparing a bunch of ways to use PowerShell instead of grep which is worth reading.

The article covers a bunch of scenarios, and is centered around starting with the ‘grep’ command and working with it. However, there’s the other common use case of running a different command, then piping those results to grep to search for something.

This blogpost was triggered by Janet who asked me this fair question:

https://twitter.com/missjte/status/834132904045342720
https://twitter.com/missjte/status/834133021829664770

As with poor cute cats, there’s more than one way to skin PowerShell.

I had to do some research and asking around on this, because normally I’d filter out the property of the object I was looking at, and work with that. Using the get-process example:

get-process | where ProcessName -like "*foo*

That works, but it’s still a lot clunkier than what a grep user would expect. An easier way would be to use the ‘findstr‘ program (which also has a bunch of useful swtiches):

get-process | findstr foo

I say program because ‘findstr’ is not a PowerShell cmdlet, but it’s still native to Windows and works perfectly fine. It’s case sensitive though, so you need to use -i for case insensitive results.

That’s great for simple stuff, but we’re sort of breaking what PowerShell does. You’re no longer dealing with a standard PowerShell object, so further piping and processing won’t really work.

The ‘proper’ PowerShell way would be to use the ‘Where-Object’ command:

Get-Process | Where-Object {$_ | Select-String "foo"}

A bit longer, but you can shorten ‘Where-Object’ to ‘Where’. Although more involved, it’s good to get into the habit of doing it this way, so when you’re piping this to the next command, it still says as a standard object that can be read and manipulated.’

(Update 24th Feb 2017) As Steve_N points out in the comments section, there’s a much shorter way of doing this:

ps *foo*

That’s it. Many PowerShell commands have inbuilt aliases, including ‘get-process’. You can see what this is with the command ‘get-alias -definition get-process’

This shows that ‘gps’ and ‘ps’ are both aliases to the command  ‘get-process’. You can also create your own aliases with the ‘set-alias‘ command.

The ‘*foo*’ part works because the command assumes the -name switch has been used, which lets you define what criteria to search and show in the ProcessName field. This is the same way that many commands don’t need the -identity switch used, because it’s written to assume you’re going to tell it what identity/username/upn to work with.

This can also be piped to something else, so it’s a winner. It’s less ideal for scripts though, because it’s much harder to read, and you can’t assume that everyone will know the short alias of a full command.

Also note that this isn’t grep related at all, so part of the answer to the original question is that you may not even need grep or select-string as it adds unnecessary overhead of getting data and parsing it, whereas this updated example filters the data as it’s obtained.

(Update ends)

PowerShell isn’t a Linux/Unix command line, but Microsoft have incorporated many of the concepts from bash. If you still can’t bear to use PowerShell on Windows, there’s always the Linux Bash Shell on Windows.

Thanks again to Steve Mclnerey for the grep advice :)

Why Haven’t You Deployed LAPS Yet?

Posted on by Adam Fowler

LAPS – Local Administrator Password Solution is an official Microsoft solution for doing exactly what it’s called – managing local administrator passwords on the computers you manage (both desktops and servers).

The solution is fairly simple – have a tiny client rolled out on each PC, that gets told by Group Policy to generate a random password. The local admin account gets set to that password, and Active Directory also gets told what that password is. That changes on a 30 day cycle

The end result is that anyone who obtains local admin access through that account, can’t access anything beyond that single computer – and, that’s only for 30 days maximum before it gets changed. Even if the computer is taken off the domain, your Active Directory will have a record against the computer of what the last set password was.

There’s a great overview, demo, and install files available from TechNet with Jessica Payne going into great detail on how it all works and showing you exactly what to do which I highly recommend after watching it personally.

As she says, it only takes 10 minutes or so to set up, and it’s that much more secure than using Group Policy to set everyone’s local administrator account to the same password (which by the way, doesn’t securely save the password in the Group Policy anyway) and running into issues when someone needs the local administrator password for one reason or another.

Oh, there is a tiny AD schema update, but it’s a single command and nothing to worry about :)

Once you’ve got LAPS set up, you use the LAPS UI program to view passwords:

Chris Brown has also written up a nice ‘how-to’ guide on setting up LAPS from end to end which is worth following too.

LAPS is easy to deploy, easy to manage and provides several security benefits… and it’s free. If you’re not using LAPS yet, it’s time to do it! Grab it from Microsoft here.

PowerShell – ‘While’ Loop Statement

Posted on by Adam Fowler

There’s a lot of different ways to loop commands in PowerShell, and here’s one I just learnt (thanks Nathan Kewley for spending the time talking me through this!):

Scenario: You create a brand new user in Active Directory, but need to wait for things to sync before you make a change to the user. If you want to automate these steps, you want to check that the user exists before running more commands against it.

Answer: The ‘While‘ statement. This lets you loop a command ‘while’ something is a certain value. For example, you may want a script to loop for two minutes, or until a certain value is true or false.

With my script below, it will check if the value $running is nothing (null), which it is because we just made it up. Because it’s true, it’ll then continue on to do whatever is in the curly brackets. Here, I’m running a command the enable a user in Skype for Business, but also setting the result of that as the variable $running.

If the command works, $running now has a value of the created user, so as it loops again to see if $running is null, it won’t be, and the ‘while’ statement is done.

If the command fails however, and shows the dangerous red warning around the user not existing, nothing gets set to the $running variable. That means, when it loops again, $running will still be null so it’ll try again and again and again.

while($running -eq $null){
 $running = Enable-CsUser -Identity testuser -SipAddress [email protected]
}

That’s rather dangerous of course, what if it’s forever $null? It’ll run forever, so we’d better put in some failsafes.

while($running -eq $null){
 if($CheckUser -le '10'){
  $CheckUser++
  start-sleep -s 10
  $running = Enable-CsUser -Identity testuser -SipAddress [email protected]
}
}

OK, this time we’re doing a couple more things. We’ve got two curly bracketed things to run now, the first is an ‘If’. If $CheckUser is less or equal to 10, then do the next curly bracket thing. The first time this runs that value again doesn’t exist because we just made it up, and nothing is less or equal to 10. The If statement is true, so it moves onto the next segment.

The $CheckUser++ command just adds ‘1’ to the value of $CheckUser – starting off at null or 0, so will turn into 1. As the statement loops, that number will increment all the way up to 11. Once it’s 11, the If statement is no longer true, so bombs out.

We’ve also added the start-sleep command, which is just a 10 second wait before doing anything. If we didn’t have that there, the 11 loops before it fails would be over incredibly quickly.

The last thing we can add is an event to occur once the ‘If’ statement is no longer true:

while($running -eq $null){
 if($CheckUser -le '10'){
  $CheckUser++
  start-sleep -s 10
  $running = Enable-CsUser -Identity testuser -SipAddress [email protected]
}else{
Throw "Unable to create SfB User"
}
}

All we’ve done here is added the ‘Else’ section, which only runs when the ‘If’ isn’t true. Once the $CheckUser variable hits 11, the ‘Else’ command runs and throws up an error, with the aptly named ‘Throw’ command.

Hopefully this is enough to explain the basics of the ‘While’ command.

 

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