Intune, Outlook App, and the Legacy Conditional Access Changes

Howdy howdy howdy

Sorry, been watching a lot of Toy Story.

In today's post I want to spell out some of the changes that have been made to Conditional Access and the depreciation of the legacy policies, specifically around enforcing the Outlook App through Intune.

Before you were able to use a simple drop down box to enable this option

Apparently this method of blocking access to non approved apps is considered "legacy" now and the functionality has changed

On the back end this blocked Exchange Active-Sync as well as other client apps with just a flip of the switch. That appears to no longer be the case, at least in my own personal tenant and in a couple customer tenants I've had recently. Moving forward you should use the new condition of "Require approved client app"

Not to much of a change so far. The main thing I want to stress here is that you now need to create two policies with this conditional grant, one for EAS and one for all other protocols. This is done by creating one policy with the targeting condition of "Browser" and "Mobile apps and desktop clients" under the "Client Apps" setting

Then another with the "Client App" setting of Exchange Active-Sync. We also want to make sure the box for applying the policy only to supported platforms is NOT checked. We want this to apply to all platforms ideally, that way no sneaky Blackberrys can find their way in. I also ran into an issue where if this box was checked this rule would not filter down to Android For Work, not sure why on that one but no biggie in the grand scheme of things (I love comparing things to the "Grand Scheme" being everything, no matter how important just seems small! Its like a get outta consulting free card!)

Once this is set users will receive a message in their mailbox explaining that they now need to use the Outlook App moving forward.

Hope this helps someone out there.

I feel like I should have a sign off phrase, but I don't. Maybe that is it though

"I feel like I should have a sign off phrase, but I don't".

Exchange Online Certificate Based Authentication

Hey guys!


Today I want to build upon the last post surrounding Intune and certificate services. Once we get the certificates onto the devices the next step is to configure our services to accept certs as a form of authentication. 

I want to talk about configuring Exchange Online in this post and some caveats when setting that up. 

Per usual I dont want to spell out a guide for everyone. Those can be found in a multitude of places. There is a good one here.

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/messagingblogs/2017/02/16/certificate-based-authentication-o365/

What I do want to talk about are some of the gaps that this guide didnt cover. 

First thing is the intermediary. In a best practice PKI deployment you should have a Root and an Int certificate. I would publish both certificates and CRLs to Azure AD using the guide above. When you deploy the Int cert be sure you change the powershell from this

Get-AzureADTrustedCertificateAuthority

$Cert=Get-Content -Encoding byte "Location of Root CA CER file"

$New_CA=New-Object -TypeName Microsoft.Open.AzureAD.Model.CertificateAuthorityInformation

$New_CA.AuthorityType=0

$New_CA.TrustedCertificate=$Cert

$New_CA.crlDistributionPoint="CRL Distribution URL"

New-AzureADTrustedCertificateAuthority -CertificateAuthorityInformation $New_CA


To this "$New_CA.AuthorityType=1" this will specify the cert we upload as the Int.

I reccomend putting the Int cert on the devices we deploy as well as accepting it for authentication in AzureAD

The next little gotcha they don't mention is that ADFS certificate based auth goes over a different port. It goes over port 49443 so make sure you aren't blocking that port coming into the WAPS.

And last but not least make sure that you configure ADFS to accept cert based auth. In ADFS 2016 its a little checkbox under authentication types.

Using a Public Certificate For Intune Certificates

Hello Everyone, long time no talk!

Today I want to go over an experience I had with a client setting up Certificate Based Authentication (CBA) to Exchange Online. 

To give a brief rundown of how this is accomplished I will put a couple bullett points below

1. Have an Internal PKI

2. Add and NDES Server to your PKI

3. Configure templates

4. Configure cert profiles in Intune

A great guide on how to accomplish this can be found here

https://www.scconfigmgr.com/2016/04/12/prepare-your-environment-for-scep-certificate-enrollment-with-microsoft-intune/

The issue I ran into comes from the use of a trusted public certificate to secure the IIS server and Intune Certificate Connector instead of one from your internal PKI as in the steps Nickolaj provided in his blog. 

By default the NDES Server places its own DNS name in certain registry values that it expects the certificate to have. When using a public cert we need to change those values in the registry. 

The keys that need to be changed can be found at

The values that hold the server name should be changed to the namespace on the public cert. See example below. Client information has been removed but you get the idea.

After this change was made our SCEP certificates were getting to the devices. 

Hope this helps someone out there that may be hung up on this issue.

Until next time.

Exchange upgrades and forgotten servers

Hello Everyone! 

Got a guest post from a colleague of mine today. Erick Purkins is a Microsoft consultant out of the Houston Texas area and he did a write up of a recent issue he saw. Enjoy.

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I just wanted to share an experience and issue with everyone this morning.

I am currently working with a customer to upgrade their Exchange 2010 infrastructure to Exchange 2016. During our discussions, we talked about correct service pack levels and OS’s required, etc. One thing I didn’t think to talk about was “FAILED EXCHANGE SERVERS”. Just curious if anyone brings this up?

This is important because during the installation of their first 2016 server I received a rather odd error.

It was the “Update-RmsSharedIdentity -ServerName $RoIeNetBIOSName was run: "Microsoft.ExchangeData.DataVaIidationException: Database is mandatory on UserMaiIbox.” That led me to the issue.

Apparently at one time or another they had an Exchange server go belly up. Instead of fixing the issue they turned it off and forgot about it, eventually having someone go in and remove the server through ADSI.

Now normally this wouldn’t have been much cause for alarm, but after reviewing the error message and a little google-fu I realized they had no arbitration mailboxes and this was what the error referred to.

• So How did I fix this issue?

First, I reviewed how to recreate Arbitration mailboxes. Something I have done before but not in a while.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/5317.recreate-and-enable-missing-arbitration-user-accounts-and-mailboxes-in-exchange-server-2010.aspx

• OK seems easy, right? Wrong.

Since I had previously run the Exchange 2016 setup it had ran /prepareAD and updated the schema. So I could not run the Exchange 2010 SP3 with /PrepareAD to recreate the mailboxes.

• Where to next? I guess I’ll have to use the Exchange 2016 Media.

I hope you’ll never have to do this but with Setup.exe there is a /mode switch which you can use to remove a failed Exchange install. This is the only way, you cannot remove the install through add/remove programs. The command looks like this “Setup.exe /mode:uninstall /iacceptexchangeserverlicenseterms”  

Learn more at: https://technet.microsoft.com/library(EXCHG.150)/ms.exch.setupreadiness.InstallWatermark.aspx 

or use setup.exe /?

After successfully removing the Exchange installation I removed the AD objects associated with Arbitration mailboxes and re-run Setup.exe /prepareAD. All the correct mailboxes were recreated in the Default Users container as they are supposed to.

• Now it’s time to enable those mailboxes…

After recreating the mailboxes with the Exchange 2016 Media I followed what I would normally do and re-enable them through the shell. Okay new error, WTH? You mean to tell me I can only do this through the Exchange 2016 Shell, but I haven’t gotten a server even installed yet. Now we have a Chicken or the egg situation.

• Do we try and install Exchange 2016 again? You Feeling Lucky?

That was the only thing I could think of to do and the internet was no help with that question. So I ran setup again and prayed to the Microsoft gods while crossing everything and holding every lucky charm I could find.

Must have been the lucky rabbits foot, because this time around we were successful at installing Exchange 2016.

After rebooting the server all arbitration mailboxes appear on the new Exchange server.  

• Moral of the story

Talk to your customers about failed or improperly decommissioned servers. Double check your arbitration mailboxes prior to any upgrade. It may just save you a few hours of Google-fu. Also, always keep a lucky rabbits foot close at hand. 

Lets Talk About Azure AD Conditional Access and Automatic Device Registration

Let's talk about Azure AD Conditional Access for a second. 

Its deceiving, like rob you in the night after you thought you were friends deceiving. I say this for two reasons. 

1. In the rules for Conditional Access there is an option that is labeled 'domain joined'. This is misleading. What this is really checking against is if the device is registered within Azure AD and domain joined. If the device is domain joined but not registered then it won't honor the conditional access controls. Registration can happen automatically for domain joined devices once some configuration is done on prem (more on that later).

2. Conditional Access only supports applications that use modern auth. This wouldn't be so big a deal if when you enabled Conditional Access it disabled legacy authentication methods. It doesn't. What this means is all your fancy layered rules can be defeated by someone in China firing up Outlook 2010 and using a compromised account. Don't believe me? Take a look here. 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-conditional-access-supported-apps

Microsoft's suggested fix is to stand up ADFS and use claims rules to block legacy auth....not much of a fix in my opinion.

I want to circle back around to point number 1 and talk about how to do automatic registration of domain joined devices. 

Its not my style to just rehash all the steps in another article unless I had some sort of gotcha moment during it. The steps to enabling this feature can be found here 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-conditional-access-automatic-device-registration-setup

What I do want to touch on is some scenarios I had thought about when doing this. First some background info on how the registration works. Windows 10 devices have the logic to join Azure AD baked into the OS. You configure your SCP point and configure ADFS if you have it and you're off to the races. 

A little caveat that I found out is that my devices would not sync unless I was also syncing their Computer Account Object. I believe this is due to Windows 10 machines not being tied to a user account when they sync (more on that later). I did some testing and what I saw when I stopped syncing the Computer Objects was that it also removed my registered devices out of Azure AD. That is gotcha #1

Windows 7 devices are a little different. They require a small MSI package to be ran to force a registration since they do not have the baked in logic. What I found when testing these guys is that they are tied to a user, whatever user's login triggers the join gets the device put in their name. This means that only users that are being synced into Azure AD can register. Gotcha #2. If a non synced user tries it will fail silently. 

What is interesting though is that if a synced users stops syncing or gets removed from Azure AD the device will remain and not be associated to any user, like the Windows 10 devices.

So huge wall of text. Here's a picture of my devices and the output of dsregcmd /status on a successfully joined Windows 10 machine to make it all better.

See ya later!

Adding Additional OUs to AAD Connect Sync Filter

Hello again internet. Had a quick post I wanted to write up on changing or adding new OUs to your AAD Connect sync filter. 

First lets start off with a little background information. After you install AAD Connect by default it runs what is called a 'Delta' sync every 30 minutes. This sync only syncs changes made to objects since the last sync. 

The inverse of this is an 'Initial' sync and runs a full sync against all objects regardless if they have been changed or not. This feature is useful for 2 reason. 

1. Running an Initial sync is like giving AAD Connect the old turn it off and back on. Doing this can actually alleviate certain sync errors. I don't actually believe this is an intended use or feature of the Initial sync but what works in the field isn't always what works on paper.

2. Running an Initial sync will pick up any changes to your object filtering, such as adding or changing what OUs you are syncing. A regular Delta will not do this. 

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Now that we have that out of the way lets get into how to actually change what OUs you are syncing. The easiest and best way to do this is through the 'Synchronization Service' GUI. If you ever messed with AAD Connects predecessor, Dirsync, then this will look familiar. 

Once you are greeted with the console above you want to go to the Connector button across the top ribbon. When you arrive at this page you want to right click the connector with your local domain name and choose properties. 

Once inside of the properties you want to drop down to Configure Directory Partitions and then choose the Containers button.

You will then be greeted with a login prompt. Enter admin credentials with the proper permissions, which could vary depending on if you used express or custom setup. Once inside you will see a GUI with your AD layout. A simple check of the box, just like what you did during setup, can remove or add any OU. 

Once you have done this you will want to run an Initial sync. You can kick these off from the GUI but its messy. I reccomend using powershell. You can use the command

start-adsyncsynccycle -policytype Initial

Yes that is the word sync in there twice. You can also use this command to do a -policytype Delta switch for those times you want to manually kick off a sync. 

Once you run this Initial sync all the objects in your new OUs should start syncing!

If anyone stumbles upon this hope it helps you out some.

Intune NDES Connector

Hello Everyone!

Short post here today. 

I have recently been doing a lot more Intune work and ran into a small gotcha that was not documented by Microsoft anywhere. 

I am not going to dive into the details of setting up an NDES server or PKI infrastructure, god have mercy on you if you have to do this and dont know how, but what I will do is link you to some good articles.

The official document from MS - Take heed my warning comment and the one from Sassan!

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/intune-classic/deploy-use/Configure-certificate-infrastructure-for-scep

My prefered document

https://www.scconfigmgr.com/2016/04/12/prepare-your-environment-for-scep-certificate-enrollment-with-microsoft-intune/

Both very similar documents but the second one is easier to follow and a little more fleshed out in my opinion. 

What I want to address today is this part


This is where you create the certificate that the Intune Connector is going to use. What it doesnt tell you is that this connector does not accept certs issued with a template above schema version 2.

See here



So if you are using custom templates and are on more than schema 2 do not copy from that template, use the built in template.

The Intune Connector does not tell you why the install fails, only that it does.

Somtimes I just....


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