Azure

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.

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’

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!

AzureAD – Assign Application to User via PowerShell

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Scenario:

You’ve created an application in Azure AD, and want to script allocating access to the app rather than using the web interface. App show up at https://myapps.microsoft.com

Azure AD Premium is required for group access which would be ideal, but if you don’t have that you’ll need to add access on a user by user basis.

Answer:

PowerShell of course. First, you’ll need Azure AD for PowerShell (Preview version 2.0.0.17 at time of writing).

The below script which I modified from Philippe’s comment here should cover both internal, cloud and B2B invited users. The original script was using -objectid rather than -searchstring which works better and is more accurate for the internal and cloud accounts, but doesn’t work at all for B2B accounts.

The AppID can be obtained from this command:

Get-AzureADApplication -SearchString “Display Name for App”

Put the corresponding AppID into the below script, and you’re good to go. You’ll get prompted for Azure AD credentials as per usual. You can also get this

This is designed for a single user addition, but you could easily import the email addresses from a CSV file, and do a ‘for each’ on each entry like I did here.

# The UserPrincipalName or ObjectId of the user
  $userId = "[email protected]"

# The AppId (a.k.a. "client ID") of the app to assign the user to
  $appId = "AppIDGoesHere"

# Connect to Azure AD
  Connect-AzureAD -Confirm

# Get the user to be added
  $user = Get-AzureADUser -searchstring $userId

# Get the service principal for the app you would like to assign the user to
  $servicePrincipal = Get-AzureADServicePrincipal -Filter "appId eq '$appId'"

# Create the app role assignment
 new-AzureADUserAppRoleAssignment -ObjectId $user.ObjectId -PrincipalId $user.ObjectId -ResourceId $servicePrincipal.ObjectId -Id ([Guid]::Empty)

 

Note: If you try this and get the error below, it’s because the app is already assigned.

new-AzureADUserAppRoleAssignment : Error occurred while executing NewUserAppRoleAssignment
StatusCode: BadRequest
ErrorCode: Request_BadRequest
Message: One or more properties are invalid.
At Z:\script.ps1:17 char:1
+ new-AzureADUserAppRoleAssignment -ObjectId $user.ObjectId `
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [New-AzureADUserAppRoleAssignment], ApiException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Microsoft.Open.AzureAD16.Client.ApiException,Microsoft.Open.AzureAD16.PowerShell.NewUser
AppRoleAssignment