Category: Uncategorized

The problem of synchronizing pictures from HR to Entra ID / Microsoft 365

Just recently, I had a customer that wanted to synchronize photos for their employees from HR to Entra ID. Here is my experience on this issue, as it was surprisingly difficult to do it “properly”.

When I do integrations like this, I want to make them stateless whenever possible, as the complexity is just so much lower with no state to manage at all. After digging around the Graph endpoint documentation and doing some testing, I found that when we upload a new picture, Microsoft is doing some kind of processing of the image data that we upload, removing metadata and saving it as JPEG.

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Mass reconciling / reprocessing access packages into groups

I just had a customer where there were around 3000 access package assignments that has not successfully added users to groups, for some reason. The way to fix this is to find the assignment and click “Reprocess”:

Clicking this button thousands of times is not really how I wanted to spend my evening, so we therefore wanted to figure out which users were affected, and triggering a reprocess for all of these.

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EntraIDAccessToken, our open module for simplifying Entra ID authentication in your PowerShell scripts and modules

Ok let’s say you are building a new PowerShell module or script and you would like to be able to run it on Windows virtual machines locally in your own datacenter, in Azure Functions, in GitHub Actions, in Azure DevOps Pipelines, in Automation Accounts or any other method of running PowerShell – this is perfectly possible, but how can you have it authenticate to Entra ID without a gazillion lines of code? Any how do you test that each scenario actually works? I present to you EntraIDAccessToken – a free and open module for authenticating to Entra ID, both for Microsoft Graph and any other integrated API.

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Converting AD groups to Entra ID groups

Finally, the public preview of Group Source of Authority is out! What does this mean for you and me? Well, you can take any number of the groups you are currently synchronizing from Active Directory to Entra ID (which are currently read only in Entra ID), and make them writable in Entra ID. And you can even have turn the solution upside down, having Entra ID update the AD group when members are added/removed!

Let’s dig into this feature!

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Accessing resources cross tenant using managed service identities

Up until now there has been no good way to have a managed service identity on tenant A granted access to resources or graph scopes in tenant B. Finally there is a way to achieve this!

There is a little caveat though, and that is that you will still need another app registration, but by using this new preview, we no longer need client secrets or certificates. Let’s have a look at how this works!

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Using PowerShell and Graph to handle access package assignments

The Microsoft Graph is powerful, however it can be a bit daunting at times due to the sheer number of endpoints and parameters. Just for the access package feature of entitlement management, you have endpoints for assignments, approvals, approval stages, resource role scopes, assignment policies, assignment requests, catalogs, resources… you get the point. In this blog post we will be working with assigning existing access packages to users, just because that is a simple process that might be difficult to understand from the documentation.

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Issuing Custom Security Attributes in Entra ID tokens

Custom security attributes in Entra ID is a feature that allows you to add attribute sets and attributes to your tenant, which you can use on all your user and application objects. A fairly common ask in Entra ID is the ability to store “secret data”, such as social security numbers, and making sure only certain principals can read these values. Here is where custom security attributes come into play. You can add an attribute set “PersonalInformation” to your tenant, and add “SSN” as an attribute to this attribute set. You can then tag each user with values, which only will be readable by those assigned the “Attribute assignment reader” role on tenant level or attribute set level.

However, currently Entra ID does not allow for these to be a part of issued tokens, not part of outbound synchronization rules and not as criteria for criteria based groups. So yeah, not really a first class citizen currently. For issued tokens, we can do something about it though!

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