Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

With the full depreciation of Basic Authentication around the corner I've put together a Github doc to show one implementation of using MSAL with the EWS Managed API that supports both Hybrid Modern Authentication and token caching and refresh. It can be found  https://github.com/gscales/EWS-BasicToOAuth-Info/blob/main/EWA%20Managed%20API%20MASL%20Token%20Refresh.md

Last July Microsoft announced here they would be disabling basic authentication in EWS on October 13 2020 which is now a little over a year away. Given the amount of time that has passed since the announcement any line of business applications or third party applications that you use that had been using Basic authentication should have been modified or upgraded to support using oAuth. If this isn't the case the time to take action is now. When you need to migrate a .NET app or script you have using EWS and basic Authentication you have two Authentication libraries you can choose from ADAL - Azure AD Authentication Library (uses the v1 Azure AD Endpoint) MSAL - Microsoft Authentication Library (uses the v2 Microsoft Identity Platform Endpoint) the most common library you will come across in use is the ADAL libraries because its been around the longest, has good support across a number of languages and allows complex authentications scenarios with support for SAML etc. The ...

Microsoft have just released the Mail.ReadBasic permission into beta for the Microsoft Graph endpoint  https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/blogs/new-basic-read-access-to-a-users-mailbox/ which is a much needed addition that allows the creation of automation and apps that can just access messages at a more meta information level without having access to the Body or Attachments. Privacy and security are always pressing issues especially around email so this can turn down the privacy concerns while also reduce the security concerns of giving full access to content.  Lets look at one use case for this new permission which is getting the Message Headers from a Message that has arrived in a users Mailbox that you suspect might be spam but you want the header information to do some analysis. Normally if you wanted to build an app to automate this you would have to at least assign Mail.Read which would give full access to all email content in a Mailbox (either deleg...

This is a continuation somewhat of my previous post on using a generic oAuth script to access EWS but in this post I'm going to look at how you can authenticate as a Guest user to a tenant you have been granted Guest access to and then access the resources like a Unified Office365 Group or Teams( because Teams uses Groups) via the Graph API. To Access another tenant as a Guest (considering that Guest Access is enabled and you have accepted the invitation and logged in at least once with that user) you need to generate an Access Token against the Target tenants endpoints. To do this you can discover what a particular tenants Authentication and Token endpoints are by making a request like the following $RequestURL = " https://login.windows.net/{0}/.well-known/openid-configuration " - f $TargetDomain $Response = Invoke - WebRequest - Uri $RequestURL $JsonResponse = ConvertFrom - Json $Response . Content This will return a result like the following Out of thi...

Microsoft recently posted an update that will affect those people who use EWS in applications and script against Office365  https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2018/07/03/upcoming-changes-to-exchange-web-services-ews-api-for-office-365   While 2020 is a few years away what this means is that if you are using Basic Authentication in your EWS scripts or applications that on the 13th October 2020 your app will stop working. Given the amount of time you have and the changes required to support oAuth nobody should really be caught out by this but procrastination and people not understanding legacy applications will mean I'm sure this date won't pass without any infamy. Within PowerShell scripts you have two options to generate the oAuth tokens you need to keep you script working. One is to use a dependency library like ADAL to do it which Ingo posted a really good write up for https://ingogegenwarth.wordpress.com/2018/08/02/ews-and-oauth the other is just create some ...

The Outlook REST API 's https://dev.outlook.com/ which are part of Office365 and Exchange 2016 is one of the ways new feature are being delivered for Mailbox clients which previously where delivered via EWS operations. They are also part of the Graph API https://graph.microsoft.io/en-us/docs which is Microsoft's envisioned unified data access API that has the ultimate goal of allowing you to access all your data endpoints via a single interface/endpoint. In this series of posts I'm going to be looking at writing a PowerShell module that uses the REST API to access Mailbox data and some of the new Exchange features like Groups and the focused Inbox. To keep things simple and flexible I'm not going to use any helper libraries (like the ADAL library or the Outlook Services Client) which I hope will make the script as portable and easy to use as possible with the one downside of while making the code a little more complex  I'm going to use the...