Skip to main content

Modifying your Exchange Online PowerShell Managed Code to use oAuth and MSAL

While not as popular these days many .net developers may have in the past used Managed code to run Exchange Online PowerShell cmdlets to do things like assign Mailbox Permissions or run other EXO PowerShell Cmdlets to get reporting information where no other alternatives where available (or are still available). The majority of these code bases are most likely using basic authentication using something like


In this post I'm going to cover how to change your existing code, you might want to consider however making use of some of the new ExchangeV2 Powershell module functionality to improve performance and security . But to migrate existing code to use oAuth from Basic Authentication is relatively straight forward
  1. You will need some code to do the Authentication, for this I'm going to use the MSAL library because its both the recommended library from Microsoft and its easy to use. 
  2. You should create your own Azure App registration and consent to it that has the Exchange.Manage Permissions eg


(If you can't create your own app registration you can use the well-known ClientId from the V2 PowerShell Module which I've used in the below samples).

Once you have your authentication code generating a Token you then use that as the Password in the PSCrednetial object you pass in the WSManConnectionInfo object. The one thing you need to change is the WSManConnection URI to include the parameters DelegatedOrg which should be set to your domain and add  BasicAuthToOAuthConversion=true eg so your connection string should look like
https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid?DelegatedOrg=youdomain.onmicrosoft.com&BasicAuthToOAuthConversion=true
eg an Interactive Auth sample to run Get-Mailbox would look like 

If you need your code to run non-interactively with a set of credentials you can use the ROPC grant like

 



Popular posts from this blog

Export calendar Items to a CSV file using Microsoft Graph and Powershell

For the last couple of years the most constantly popular post by number of views on this blog has been  Export calendar Items to a CSV file using EWS and Powershell closely followed by the contact exports scripts. It goes to show this is just a perennial issue that exists around Mail servers, I think the first VBS script I wrote to do this type of thing was late 90's against Exchange 5.5 using cdo 1.2. Now it's 2020 and if your running Office365 you should really be using the Microsoft Graph API to do this. So what I've done is create a PowerShell Module (and I made it a one file script for those that are more comfortable with that format) that's a port of the EWS script above that is so popular. This script uses the ADAL library for Modern Authentication (which if you grab the library from the PowerShell gallery will come down with the module). Most EWS properties map one to one with the Graph and the Graph actually provides better information on recurrences then...
Read more

Downloading a shared file from Onedrive for business using Powershell

I thought I'd quickly share this script I came up with to download a file that was shared using One Drive for Business (which is SharePoint under the covers) with Powershell. The following script takes a OneDrive for business URL which would look like https://mydom-my.sharepoint.com/personal/gscales_domain_com/Documents/Email%20attachments/filename.txt This script is pretty simple it uses the SharePoint CSOM (Client side object Model) which it loads in the first line. It uses the URI object to separate the host and relative URL which the CSOM requires and also the SharePointOnlineCredentials object to handle the Office365 SharePoint online authentication. The following script is a function that take the OneDrive URL, Credentials for Office365 and path you want to download the file to and downloads the file. eg to run the script you would use something like ./spdownload.ps1 ' https://mydom-my.sharepoint.com/personal/gscales_domain_com/Documents/Email%20attachments/filen...
Read more

Sending a MimeMessage via the Microsoft Graph using the Graph SDK, MimeKit and MSAL

One of the new features added to the Microsoft Graph recently was the ability to create and send Mime Messages (you have been able to get Message as Mime for a while). This is useful in a number of different scenarios especially when trying to create a Message with inline Images which has historically been hard to do with both the Graph and EWS (if you don't use MIME). It also opens up using SMIME for encryption and a more easy migration path for sending using SMTP in some apps. MimeKit is a great open source library for parsing and creating MIME messages so it offers a really easy solution for tackling this issue. The current documentation on Send message via MIME lacks any real sample so I've put together a quick console app that use MSAL, MIME kit and the Graph SDK to send a Message via MIME. As the current Graph SDK also doesn't support sending via MIME either there is a workaround for this in the future my guess is this will be supported.
Read more
All sample scripts and source code is provided by for illustrative purposes only. All examples are untested in different environments and therefore, I cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs.

All code contained herein is provided to you "AS IS" without any warranties of any kind. The implied warranties of non-infringement, merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are expressly disclaimed.