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Office 365 MFA is free of charge!

Where Azure MFA is only included in the paid Azure Active Directory Premium subscriptions (P1/P2 and EM+S suites), there is a free version for the Office 365 apps.

It is always a good idea to enable multi factor authentication, in case your credentials get stolen, the thief will not be able to use them because of the 2nd authentication factor. Microsoft is encouraging all their users to start using MFA, so the made it free of charge for all the apps of the office 365 suite, including Outlook, Teams, Excel, Word and many more.

First Sign in screen

The 2 factor authentication can be setup up fairly easily by the end users self. This can be enforced by the administrator by requiring 2 factor authentication. The first time a user logs on, he or she will get a notification message to setup MFA. Or you can redirect your users to the following portal to setup MFA: https://aka.ms/mfasetup

How to setup MFA for your end users?

In the office 365 portal go to the Active Users tab, and go to the Setup multifactor authentication page (see below)

In the preview version of the admin center, the More menu on the Active Users page, with Setup Azure multi-factor auth selected.
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How to deploy Azure File Sync

You still have your old network drives? Still need to setup a VPN to access your file shares? Or have you migrated all your files to Azure file share but you need a higher performance for your Autocad files?

High level overview of Azure File Share Sync

Wait no longer, Azure File Sync to the rescue! Where you would have your Azure File Share for sharing files, you can use Azure File Sync to make a local cache of your Azure files, or sync your local file server to Azure Files. In this manual we will help you setup Azure File Sync with a existing Azure File Share. I already have a Azure File Share, mapped as a network drive Z:

Azure File Share mapped as the Z: Drive
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What is Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EM+S)?

Enterprise Mobility + Security is a Microsoft solution specially developed for management and securing users, company data and applications. This gives you and your users always secured access to your company information without ever worrying about security!

With EM+S we are moving from a managed device to data management and security. This means that it will not only protect your device, but most important, it will take care of security on a document level where you can prevent that confidential data is readable by unauthorized persons.

By using this security suite you can prevent abuse of stolen credentials when one of your users is tricked by a phishing email. You can limit access to company data to only trusted devices (Company and BYOD) by using the Intune portal. But we can limit access to it as well with IP black / white listing. This includes Geoblocking as well, it is impossible to travel from the Netherlands to Russia for example in 5 minutes.

To protect your valuable company data I recommend to always use EM+S for optimal protection. If you want the security to be at its best, E5 is your way to go!

Main features

  • Simple management and security of your devices
  • Multifactor authentication (MFA)
  • Selfservice portal for password reset en securitygroep management
  • Application company portal
  • Mobile device management (MDM)
  • Integrated device management (Laptop/Desktop)
  • Securing company data en restrict access to company data
  • Conditional access (geo-blocking and more)
  • Advanced Threat Protection with reporting
  • Risk-Based conditional access (E5 only)
  • Privileged identity management (E5 only)
  • Intelligent data classification and labeling (E5 only)
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Uninstall Office 365 Click-To-Run Updates

There are cases where you want or need to uninstall an Office update. Office 365 installations use a different update than the old Office 2013 & 2016 installations. Where the old installations are a point in time installation, click-to-run always downloads the latest version and then runs the setup. You can revert to an older version but its different than in the past where you could just uninstall an KB update.

Steps

Step 1: Check build number and find previous build number

In one of your office programs go to the options menu and go to Office Account. Find your current and previous version on the Microsoft website: Update history Office365 ProPlus by date

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Sync existing office 365 tenant with local active directory

Recently we created an AAD tenant that has no on-premises AD domain counterpart.
Now we are facing an issue where we want to be able to use the identities in this tenant to log into some servers. It would appear that we would need to domain join these servers, but we can’t do this without AD. The question is, how can we continue to setup these servers?

If the servers are hosted on the Azure IaaS platform you can choose to go ahead with Azure AD Domain services as I wrote before:
https://www.cordenboer.nl/2019/04/22/azure-ad-domain-services-an-option-or-not/

But today we are going to install a new domain on-premise. The domain name isn’t relevant for the sync with Azure AD / Office 365. But the UPN for the end users is important! So first we can add the UPN domains by going to the Domain and Trusts console. Add the required domain names.

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