Intune GPO Enrollment With MFA Quick Tip

When enrolling a device that is already Hybrid Joined you may run into an issue when the account that is first logging into the machine has MFA enabled on it. 

Depending on how you rolled out MFA, if you did the entire identity option in the classic portal or if you are using CA and you choose all cloud apps as your MFA target you may run into an issue that will require users to complete an MFA challenge to enroll the device into Intune. That prompt usually takes the form of a notification that reads something like 'your account needs attention', 'there is an issue with your account', or 'login to fix your account', etc...

Once you select this prompt a traditional modern auth window should pop up and ask for an MFA prompt. Once you complete this the device should then enroll after some time has elapsed. 

To remediate this either complete the prompt, move your MFA to Conditional Access, or exclude Intune Enrollment options from your MFA policy (which sometimes does not work as 'All Cloud Apps' protects some backend services that you can not exclude when included in a CA policy)

Hope this helps some of you out.

Intune GPO Enrollment General Info

Just a quick note on how to enroll an existing domain joined device.

If you have not yet, a prerequisite for the GPO enrollment is Azure AD Hybrid Join. You can find directions on how to accomplish this here

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/devices/hybrid-azuread-join-managed-domains

You can also find some more background information on it here

https://www.amobileattempt.com/2018/07/hybrid-join-azure-ad-and.html

Once you have that completed and are running the correct version of windows, I recommend at least 1803, and have your GPO store updated as such you can create the new GPO and deploy it to your Hybrid Joined Devices. Information on that process can be found here.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/mdm/enroll-a-windows-10-device-automatically-using-group-policy

What this article from Microsoft doesn't tell you is where you can find the event logs for this process or what the error codes you might find are. The location in the event viewer is 

Applications and Services Logs/Microsoft/Windows/DeviceManagement-Enterprise-Diagnostics-Provider/Admin

MS does offer additional tshooting help in some tucked away corners of their platform that I want to gather here. Use the below links as a starting point. Good luck!

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4494359/troubleshoot-intune-windows-10-group-policy-based-auto-enrollment

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4469913/troubleshooting-windows-device-enrollment-problems-in-microsoft-intune

Intune App Protection Policies and iOS Exemptions

Disclaimer: While the below information should be true, it can still be hit or miss getting this to work!

Hello Everyone!

No amount of searching has been very helpful for me personally when trying to find iOS application identifier URLs. 

A URL identifier is a unique name that each iOS application must have. Using this name an existing application on an iOS device can call upon that app to perform actions, such as open a file. 

To my knowledge there is no list out there for such identifiers. What I would like to do is start that list here in this post A Mobile Attempt: List Of Possible iOS Identifiers

Edit: 5/2021 If something is not on that list you can try the simple method below of follow the more in depth method here https://c7solutions.com/2021/04/intune-mam-exemptions-discovering-url-protocols

My only methods to finding out this URL identifier are to either ask the developer or to take a guess and test it inside of safari. If you open safari and type the following into the address bar

guessedappname:// 

You should get a result of either app not found, or something that asks if you would like to allow an app to open the webpage. For an example using Salesforce (salesforce1://) see screen shots below.

BAD GUESS

CORRECT GUESS

Without further ado here is the very short list of ones I have used in the past. If you know any additional ones leave a comment below and lets get them added to the list.

• Salesforce - salesforce1
• Go To Meeting - gotomeeting
• AutoCAD DWG Viewer and Editor - autocad
• Webex - wbx
• Zoom Cloud Meetings - zoomus
• Slack - slack
• Apple Maps - maps
• Google Maps - googlemaps
• Docusign - Docusignit

The items on this list were generated by myself and the community. I have not verified the accuracy of most of them. I am asking for the communities help in either adding to the list or for a more foolproof way of finding out the applications URL identifier.

Thanks everyone!

The Intune Exchange Connector Workflow and Gotchas

Hello readers!

In this post I want to talk about some of the Intune on-premise Exchange Connector gotchas and how the communication flow works. 

What is the Exchange Connector?

The Intune Exchange Connector is a piece of software that you download from the Intune portal and install on your Exchange server. Specifically the CAS role if you still have seperated roles. Installation instructions can be found here.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/intune/exchange-service-connector-configure

Please note that the section on the 'Service to Service' connector should be ignored. That feature is being deprecated and was honestly never needed in the first place.

I dont want to go over installation, the Microsoft document does a decent job of that and its fairly self explanatory. I do want to touch on the communication flow. It looks something like this,

For iOS, and Knox devices there are 2 routes. Either you install the company portal first, or you try to add an EAS account first. We will go over the adding an EAS account scenario.

1. End user adds thier EAS account to their mobile device
2. After some time the Intune connector will sync the EAS record up to Intune
3. If the EAS record gets synced up and there is no corresponding MDM record the Intune Connector will set the device from allowed to blocked
4. The end user will recieve an email asking them to enroll into Intune
5. The end user enrolls the device into Intune and creates an MDM record
6. The EAS record and MDM record merge to become a EAS/MDM record in the Intune console
7. The connector will do another sync and check that the record is merged. If so it will remove the device from blocked back to allow

Where this process gets tricky though is for non-Samsung Androids. For some reason, and this may change with Android Enterprise, when a regular Android device enrolls into Intune it does not report its Active-Sync ID. They way we get around this is by using the link in the email notification we receive on the device that says we've been blocked. This link contains our EAS ID and will communicate that to the Intune Service. Without this link our EAS record will never merge with the MDM record when enrolled.

This also makes it tricky to use any type of non native email client as these clients create their own EAS record but can never create an MDM record to match to. The MDM record is always owned by the device not by the email clients on it, if that makes sense. Long story short you have to use the native mail clients when doing this or you have to create an exception for certain platforms.

I will say it again, non-Samsung Android devices have to enroll via the email notification!!! Just going to the app store and getting the company portal app will not work. Enrolling using the app before you receive the email notification will not work.

Here is where the gotchas come in to play. There are two main ones that I want to cover. 

When setting up the connector it asks you to enter a notification account. You need to enable that and MAKE SURE THAT ACCOUNT HAS A MAILBOX!

Without a mailbox the end user will never receive the email asking them to enroll with the link that contains their EAS ID. 

Second gotcha is that this service relies heavily on the Autodiscover service. Very heavily. If your Autodiscover is not healthy then this process will fail. One specific example of this when working through this in my lab was that I did not have an internal DNS record for Autodiscover.rollerlabs.com. This is because internal Outlook clients do not use the DNS record to find AutoD, they use the internal URI that is set within Exchange. I never had a need for an actual internal DNS record before. 

The connector was reliant upon that to find the Exchange server, even though you specify in the connector what your server name is, it will still look at AutoD.

Once I added the internal AutoD record I was able to receive the enroll now email.

This is just an image pulled out of a search but it lets you see the format of the expected email. Please note that the activate/enroll email with link that contains your EAS ID is not the same as the email generated by the exchange server that tells you your device has been blocked. The activate link will come from the Notification account.

Hope this is helpful to someone out there. Is anyone still using Exchange on premise anymore? Hello? Bueller?

SSPR Note From The Field

Hello Everyone!

Today I want to talk about a little issue I found when deploying SSPR at a customer. We enabled write back in AAD Connect, used a test group to start with in Azure AD, set all of our options up, created a new test user on prem and synced it up into the group. 

Everything appeared to be working. 

When we rolled it out to the general population (without forcing enrollment so most of production never even knew something was wrong when it broke) we started seeing some weird behavior on our existing users. When they would go to reset thier password we would get this error in the portal

Except everything did meet the policy. We then traced it back using a few various logs. One place where nothing showed up was in the Synchronization Service app on the AAD Connect server. Where we did see something was in the Azure AD Audit Logs

And the Event Viewer on the AAD Connect server as well

Come to find out most existing accounts had the restriction of 'User cannot change password' set in their account options in Active Directory from some past project that the current admin was not aware of. 

If your running into a similar situation maybe take a look there. This can be fixed either manually, with PowerShell, or as luck would have it this is one of the options you can set when you select multiple user objects in ADUC.

Good luck!

Securing Traditional Domain Joins

Hello Everyone!

My bread and butter are EMS deployments and some general O365 security talks. 

A lot of my customers really like the option to limit logins to certain cloud services to only Hybrid Joined machines using Conditional Access. 

For those unaware, at a high level, the Hybrid Join process will automatically join a domain joined Windows 10 machine into Azure AD. 

When I help people with setting this up I always check to see if they have modified who is allowed to join a computer to the domain. At the time of this writing (Server 2016) the default is that any authenticaed user can join up to 10 devices to the domain.

Thats right folks, by default you do not have to be a domain admin to join a machine to your domain. Above the obvious issues like clutter in AD, duplicate objects, SID issues, etc there is also the issue that the person who joins the object to the domain becomes the owner of that object in AD and can see some sensetive attributes.

Anyways, in our case this almost invalidates the reason most companies want to do Hybrid Join, which is to prevent personal machines from accessing corporate cloud resources. If the user brings thier laptop in though and decides to join it to the local domain then were back at square one. 

The easiest way to fix this is with a GPO on your domain controllers.

The GPO is located at Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > User Rights Assignments > Add Workstation to Domain

Once you find the GPO you can add whatever group you would like to keep it locked down.

Just a little tidbit that some people dont realize! I think were all so used to only having an admin join a machine this can slip through the cracks.

Until next time, have a good one.

Azure AD Hybrid Join and the UserCertificate Attribute

Hello Everyone, 

Today I want to talk about an issue I ran into recently with trying to setup Hybrid Azure AD Join. 

First lets do a little background on the process. Microsoft has a decent guide on how to do it which can be found here.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/device-management-hybrid-azuread-joined-devices-setup

The exact situation I ran into, or at least that I thought I ran into, was the fact that the device object was not syncing into Azure AD. 

In order for a Hybrid Join to occur you have to sync the device object with AAD Connect. Inside of AAD Connect there are certain sync rules and settings. One of those rules states if the userCertificate attribute on a machine is $null then do not sync it.

Now you technically can brute force a fix by either manually putting in literally anything for that attribute (I tried, it accepts a junk value) or changing the rule in AAD Connect to sync the object anyways. Either way I would not recommend as something else is most likely the actual root issue and wont fix the problem.

For awhile I chased down the idea that this attribute was generated upon domain join (due to a tip from an MS rep), spoiler alert, this is not when the attribute is generated on the Active Directory Object. This attribute is generated AFTER the Win10 device probes the SCP you setup in your AD and actually finds something. 

So, at a basic level, this meant that my issue was one of communication. For whatever reason my device was not communicating with Azure AD. This issue was solved two different ways for me when I ran into it across a few customers. 

1.) ADFS. If you have ADFS in place you need to place the claims rules in ADFS correctly. In my specific case the users UPN and the domain that they had federated with O365 was user@domainA.com but the real domain name on prem and the name that all the devices used was computer.domainB.com. The fix in this scenario was to federate domainB.com with ADFS as well and include domainB in our claims rules. 

2.) Scheduled Task. At two of my clients we ran into this without ADFS being in the mix. We were using AAD Connect with SSSO. The fix in this situation came in the form of enabling the scheduled task built into Win10 devices that attempts to do the Hybrid Join. This task can be found at Microsoft>Windows>WorkPlace Join. For some reason this was disabled, it should be enabled by default. I suspect something to do with SCCM but can not verify.

Once this was actually enabled the device was able to probe the Azure AD Join service, generate its specific userCertificate attribute and then complete its join after a login or two. If this does not happen for you this task can also be controlled by a GPO that can block the device enrollment. As a test I would move a device into an OU with no policies on it and work off it from there.

So, to recap, usually not having a value in the userCertificate attribute is not the actual issue. Something is stopping the communication between your machine and Azure AD. 

Event Viewer is also pretty helpful in tracking down some of these issues as well. You can view the logs at Microsoft>Windows>User Device Registration. If the above does not help you I would check here for further info. 

Hope this can help some of you, see ya around.