Robert Pearman

The Office Deployment Tool (ODT) has been around for many years now, although you may be unfamiliar with how it works and the tasks you can accomplish using it. In this article, I will focus on the uses of the ODT and the XML file itself rather than where it fits into a wider deployment process.

I was working on a ticket this week in which a user would try to join a meeting, and Microsoft Teams would freeze for several minutes, waiting for the audio and video to initialize. To solve the issue, I had to change the Teams permissions to allow access automatically to the cam and the microphone. In this post, I will show you how you can change the cam permissions for any kind of conferencing app for your entire organization.

If you have a Microsoft 365 business subscription, you can use the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center to configure Office remotely. In addition, you can receive reports about your Office installations.

A support ticket came in recently, in which a client asked whether they needed to upgrade their Microsoft 365 license to encrypt email in Outlook.

You may be familiar with the Conditional Access policy feature in Azure AD as a means to control access to your tenant. In addition to granting or blocking access to the tenant as a whole, it is possible to restrict certain user actions. One important action you should consider controlling is from where a user can enroll in multifactor authentication (MFA).

Microsoft will enable the new number matching feature by default in February 2023. Number matching for Azure AD MFA is almost the reverse of the multi-factor authentication you know. With number matching, a number is displayed to a user when they sign in, and instead of entering this number on the device, they log in to confirm the number on the MFA device. Temporary Access Pass is another feature that allows you to help end users who are unable to meet sign-in criteria.

With the procedure described in this post, you can ensure that only devices with an assigned Microsoft 365 compliance policy are able to sign in. This way, you will significantly improve the security of your Microsoft 365 deployment.

Managing Google Chrome using Group Policy is not a new idea. Because Microsoft Edge, as you may know, is based on Chromium, you can update your Group Policies to manage Edge as well.

To disable Windows search highlights in corporate environment makes sense because this new Windows feature only distract users. In this post I will explain how you can turn off these search enhancements as they are sometimes called with Group Policy and PowerShell.

Recently, it appears that Chrome and Edge notifications are being hijacked into pushing people onto fake antivirus websites, such as the one in the example image below. As part of my work on the helpdesk, I often see firsthand how users are tricked into opening PDFs or clicking on links. Thus, we decided to block browser notifications. The procedure described here also works for Microsoft Edge.