Sending email as an alias (proxy address) with Office 365

Recently I got a simple task to implement LAPS for the newly created local user instead of using the built-in local administrator account. It seemed easy at first. Go to Group Policies, create a new user, add it to an administrators group, and then follow standard steps to implement LAPS. That is until you find out it’s actually not possible anymore due to password encryption key being available in the wild, which made Microsoft block that Group Policy Preference. While that road is blocked, I still need to get my user-created somehow. Let’s do it with PowerShell. It’s quite simple – use New-LocalUser a few parameters, some random password that I don’t need to save as LAPS will overwrite it. Except it’s not available on PowerShell 2.0, which is the default for Windows 7 that I have to support. Things get even more complicated if you consider that Administrators group is called differently in different countries. While I stopped supporting anything below PowerShell 5.1, I can’t say if it’s the project requirement.

Now that Pester V5 is out, I decided that I need to make sure that my Pester tests for all my modules keep on running correctly. Some substantial changes in Pester add new features, changing some things, but that also means all the tests that you have defined most likely will need a small push to get it up and running again on Pester V5. Starting this blog post, I wanted to mention that I am by no means an expert on Pester, but I do use it for some time now for most of my projects.  I am using basic functionality, but even that basic functionality stops working once you upgrade from PesterV4 to PesterV5, so I thought I would save you some time and give you a small overview of how you can quickly fix it. It works for me, but you may have to find your way to fix things.

Few weeks had passed since I’ve initially written PowerShell – Few tricks about HashTables and Arrays I wish I knew when I started. I was happily using my tips and tricks myself till today when I noticed a strange problem. Do you know how I showed you that you could use a comma to return Array with just one member (that otherwise would be unwrapped and end up a string)?

There was I, deploying PSPasswordExpiryNotifications for one of my Clients when I started getting complaints that some users are not getting their Password Expiry Notifications. Well, that’s a new one. I’ve tested this script multiple times, and it worked just fine. So I dive into the details of my script to see what I did in there (I don’t even remember anymore – it just works) to find out this little line:

I’ve been in IT for a longer time now. I’ve made my fair share of mistakes and misconfigurations. One of those misconfigurations was removing Authenticated Users from Security filtering in Group Policy Objects. While it worked fine at some point Microsoft rolled out a Hotfix MS16-07 on June 14th 2016.

FTPS and SFTP are two ways to send and receive files from remote sources. While the name suggests both do the same thing, those are different protocols, in the end, having the same goal. A few weeks back, I had to make sure I can reliably download files from FTPS server using PowerShell, and since I couldn’t find anything straightforward to use, I decided to write my own. Transfertto is a new PowerShell module that supports both FTPS and SFTP protocols. Its goal is to be the only module that you need to transfer files to and from FTP/SFTP servers.

Being a Microsoft MVP has quite a few benefits. You get to be part of unique offers that help you enhance your knowledge even further. Microsoft Learning team decided to provide free training on Microsoft Fundamentals for MVPs and the Microsoft community, so I’m sharing this with you! Starting next week, Microsoft will run each activity from 9 AM to 5 PM Eastern Standard Time (EST) or 15:00 to 23:00 in Europe (CET).

Another day, another issue one may say. Today I wanted to install one of my modules to a new server and was greeted with a well-known message (it may seem on first look): A command with name ” is already available on this system. This module ‘PSEventViewer’ may override the existing commands. If you still want to install this module ‘PSEventViewer’, use -AllowClobber parameter.

Today I saw an article on how to get Windows Version Report from Active Directory and thought that this is a cool idea. Something handy for migration scenarios or information on how up to date is your infrastructure. Since there are many ways to do the same thing I decided to tackle this myself and further include it into PSWinDocumentation.AD project. By default Active Directory stores Operating System and Operating System Version but it doesn’t really show versions one may expect.

One of the tasks I often get when setting up new Office 365 tenant or installing Exchange Servers is to change the visibility of Room Mailboxes or in some cases even standard users. There’s nothing hard about it, and there are plenty of articles about it. It’s just three simple steps.

PSTeams is a PowerShell module that helps simplify sending notifications to Microsoft Teams via Incoming webhooks. It’s easy to use and doesn’t require playing with JSON. Since version 2.0, it started to support Adaptive Cards; in version 2.1, I’ve added the ability to mention people. Today I’m introducing an easy way to send data as a table and a quick way to add a line break.

Azure AD Connect allows three ways to make sure the user password is the same in Active Directory and Office 365. Those are Password Hash Sync, Pass-Thru Authentication, and ADFS. While my preferred option to go with would be Pass-Thru Authentication, only Password Hash Synchronization is the easiest and least resource-intensive. It synchronizes user password to Office 365, and even if your Active Directory is down, you can still log in to Office 365. It’s perfect for small and even more significant companies that don’t have resources or can’t guarantee that their infrastructure will stay 100% time online so users can authenticate based on their Active Directory.