Author: Adam Fowler

Security Quality Rollup Confusion – Windows Updates

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Since October 2016, Microsoft have updated their Windows Updates model (for Windows 7, 8.1, Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Server 2012 R2) to a more cumulative approach. To their credit, they had this communicated months before it started, and the word got around long before the first patch rolled out.

At the time I talked to Tom Walat who was reviewing what people thought of this model. There’s been a bit of confusion and changes in the model, including a new one for February 2017 where Internet Explorer will be seperated and have it’s own rollup. If you manage WSUS, you need to be across these changes.

There’s a great detailed blogpost on TechNet about the history and changes, as well as this really useful table:

Windows Updates for 7 and 8.1 table for Feb 2017 (source)

Here;s the TLDR version which is still long, sorry;

Since October 2016 to January 2017, there has been two main update rollups – a Security Monthly Quality Rollup which contains ‘all the patches’. In WSUS, this will have a name like “January, 2017 Security Monthly Quality Rollup for Windows 7”. There is a separate rollup for Windows 7, 8, Server 2008 R2 and 2012 R2. These are cumulative – each Rollup includes all previous rollup patches, but nothing that’s before October 2016. This is the recommended package.

There’s also the similarly named Security Only Quality Update which has just been ‘all the security patches’. This will have a very similar name, e.g. “January, 2017 Security Only Quality Update for Windows 7” again having a separate update for each OS. These are not cumulative, and each needs to be installed seperately. These updates are only required if you’re not doing the monthly rollup for some reason (e.g. one of the updates breaks something in the rollup).

Those both included Internet Explorer, but as of February 2017 that will be it’s own separate set of updates. The IE update set will be cumulative – including all older updates in each new package.

That separate IE set of patches is the Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer will be cumulative like the Rollups, where you only need the latest one.

These are big changes and it’s worth getting your head around it all – the end goal is to have only monthly updates for anything older than Windows 10.

There may be future changes as to how this model works, so make sure you keep up to date with what Microsoft is doing in this space.

Azure Active Directory – Assigning Groups to Applications in PowerShell

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Azure Active Directory Applications have been around for a while, but it’s I’ve found it hard to find good information on them beyond the biggest benefit of Marketplace Apps.

Along with my Azure AD B2B journey (still in preview at time of writing), the option of pushing out something like a SharePoint Online site as an app is one of the jigsaw pieces required to make the whole B2B process work – as a version of the apps page is displayed as the default link to anyone who accepts an Azure AD B2B invite and logs in for the first time.

MyApps – an externally invited user will only see the apps they have access to (by default, none)

I’m trying to gloss over details here, as there’s a lot of steps with different parts of the Microsoft world to get a process automated end to end for inviting external users to a SharePoint Online site – but the last step of assigning a user or group to an application has no documentation I could find, that showed how to achieve this via PowerShell.

All I want to do here, is create an Application in Azure AD, then assign a group to it. Members of the group will then see the application on MyApps.

Two different modules are required – Azure Active Directory V2 PowerShell module and Azure Resource Manager.

What we can do with these two modules is first create the application with the New-AzureRMADApplication command:

New-AzureRmADApplication -DisplayName "SharePoint Online Site A" -HomePage "https://contoso.sharepointonline.com/sitea" -IdentifierUris "https://contoso.sharepointonline.com/sitea"

Easy, now you have an application that will point to the URL entered in Azure Active Directory. Assigning a group to it is a bit trickier…

First, a few values need to be obtained:

$app = Get-AzureRmADApplication | where displayname -eq "SharePoint Online Site A"
$appid = $app.ApplicationId
$fullgroup = get-msolgroup -all | where displayname -eq "SharePoint Online Site A"

This is getting the two objects as variables – the Application itself, and the group that you want to add onto it.

Then a new Service Principal needs to be created based on the Application, as this is required when adding the group onto the application:

New-AzureADServicePrincipal -AppId $appid

Another variable is needed, which is the new Service Principal we just created:

$servicePrincipal = Get-AzureADServicePrincipal -Filter "appId eq '$appId'"

Finally, we can assign the group to the application:

New-AzureADGroupAppRoleAssignment -objectid $fullgroup.objectid -principalid $fullgroup.objectid -resourceid $serviceprincipal.objectid -id ([Guid]::Empty)

You can check that this has applied by the Azure Active Directory portal too, by going to your Active Directory section, choosing ‘Applications’ and finding your app, then go into ‘users and groups’ and find the group. You should see a ‘yes’ in the assigned field.

If there’s any interest in documenting the entire SharePoint Online and Azure AD B2B invite process and script, let me know. It’s a great way of sharing data with clients via a portal.

Update 15th June 2017

Microsoft made a change with the IdentifierURI field, which is also called AppID if you view it in the Azure portal. Previously, it could be any unique URL, it just has to be unique amongst your apps (as to why it has to be a URL at all, I couldn’t get an answer on). Now, it can be anything as long as it’s not sharepoint.com or dynamics.com as they’ve reserved those for other reasons. My example above, and what I’d been using in production was variants of sharepoint.com – as the unique URI might as well be the actual URL of the site. If you use a URL that’s not allowed anymore, you’ll get the error:

New-AzureRMADApplication : Operation returned an invalid status code ‘BadRequest’

Ancient Technology

Posted on by Adam Fowler

My father handed me a crate the other day as part of a cleanup, to see if I wanted anything he’d found.

I didn’t think the bits would be as old as they were, and thought it’d be great to share what they were. I’ve used a PS4 controller for reference as I couldn’t find a banana.

First up is a very long ISA card, from an XT PC. This was purely an IDE controller – giving you the ability to add on a floppy drive or hard drive to your PC. The board itself actually says the year of manufacture – 1985.


1985 XT PC ISA Controller Card

There’s two cables, each allowing 2 devices. This goes back to the primary and secondary days of drives, where you needed to set the jumpers correctly on the back for them to be detected properly. I measured it, and it’s 35cm long!

Next up is a 3 button serial mouse. On the back is a switch to toggle between 2 and 3 buttons, which was to work around incompatibilities between the two configurations, as mentioned on the Wikiepedia article. Of course this is an old ball mouse… and someone opened up a Microsoft Serial Mouse if you want to see the ball and wheel components.

3 button Serial PC Mouse

This one’s a bit harder to date – it’s probably XT PC era too with the 3 button switch, and long before the PS/2 mouse came out in the late 1980’s.

Here we have some hard drives. They’re 3.5″ but much chunkier than the ones of today, about double the thickness. I believe they’re both 20MB – yes megabyes! At the time of this, 360KB 5 1/4 floppy disks were the norm – About the equivalent of 55 floppies could be stored on a 20MB HDD.

20MB IDE HDDs, XT PC era (198X)

The data connector on this fits the cables on the ISA card from earlier. I remember in my childhood having a 40MB HDD bought for $600AU in the early 1990s. Back in 1990 accordign to this US copy of InfoWorld, these 20MB HDDs would have cost US$699 as an addon when buying a PC.

Last up was something I was much less familiar with – a 5 1/4 inch HDD. I found a page selling the same model if you want to buy one for yourself. I couldn’t tell from looking at the unit, but based on all the links it seems to have a capacity of 42MB.

Mitsubishi 5 1/4″ HDD back (Centre)

Mitsubishi 5 1/4″ HDD front (Centre)

There is a date on this one, 1989. Because many computers had slots for 5 1/4 inch floppy drives, it made sense to have hard drives at the same size. They fell out of fashion , and the 3 1/2 inch size became the new standard, matching the 3 1/2 inch floppy disks and drives of the time. Again this one has the same connectors as the other hard drives I have. Also, those molex power connectors survived a very long time in the PC world!

Also on the back of this drive, notice the amount of switches you need to set correctly – 14 in total. I’d be surprised if anyone misses troubleshooting an incorrectly set HDD with that many combinations of options, and slow startup times.

That’s the lot – always fun to go back over the old technology and see what was normal.

Remove Microsoft Account or Work Account

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Update 19th March 2021:

Kevin Krouch has a great script you can run across your entire tenant to identify everyone who might have a Microsoft account. Once it’s run, you can run this to only see the ‘True’ results:

$results | where HasMSAccount -eq “True”

Microsoft have an updated article on how to resolve accounts that have both a Microsoft and Work or School account attached.

Original content:

If you’re using Office 365 and/or Azure, you may have run into this scenario. If you want detailed information about Microsoft Accounts vs Work or school accounts, read this comprehensive article.

For people who set up a Microsoft Account on a work email address, and then configured it for Office 365/Azure, you’d be used to seeing this screen every time you log in:

It’s necessary, but annoying when you’re signing in a lot. I’m not sure how long this has been around, but you can change the email address associated with your Microsoft account, and move it away from your work email address.

And you may notice, there’s that ‘Tired of seeing this?’ message. My brain blocked that out, so you can follow that link too :)

Atwork have a writeup on how to change the email address (the first link gives a 404 message, but you’re still in the right place to make the changes). I tested this on my own account, and within a few minutes I was no longer seeing the choice between Work or Personal when signing into Office 365/Azure services.

Combine that with ADFS or Azure AD Connect Pass-Through Authentication to make your Microsoft sign-ins a quicker process!

Microsoft StaffHub General Availability

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Microsoft StaffHub has now globally been released (General Availability). StaffHub is a very simple web and smartphone app based scheduling system, primarily designed for shifts.

It lets admins set and modify member’s shifts, and gives simple day/week/month overviews. I quite like this simplistic approach, sometimes these solutions can be a bit overwhelming when it’s linked to several other Office 365 features that you haven’t used yet.

Microsoft StaffHub

I was honestly up and running with this in 5 minutes, including the tutorial. I’ve invited other staff members as part of adding them, and both web and smartphone views are clean and easy to read. The product itself doesn’t really do anything else – there’s chat options for the app, and file sharing, but it’s perfect for staff that don’t do much (or any) of their work on computers; or just staff that want to be able to see what shift they’re on quickly.

One point of confusion I noticed, was the invite it sends out to staff you invite only wants them to use the smartphone app, and that link won’t work from a browser. They’ll need to manually go to https://staffhub.office.com for the browser experience.

Microsoft have a great starter page along with video showing how it works. There doesn’t seem to be any integration with other systems – It’d be nice to be able to send shifts as calendar appointments and maybe we’ll see that in the future.

It’s part of the Office 365 suite, so if you already have a license you should be able to go to http://staffhub.ms/ and start playing.