Hiding Portal Buttons from Normal Users

Recently, one of my co-workers was assigned to work with me to learn some FIM and to help, where possible, with some configuration.

One of the things on my list of “things to do” was to find a way of hiding certain portal buttons from a normal users view – after all they are not (currently) going to be allowed to use the portal for any self service task yet – that might come later….

So, I sent my co-worker off to find and implement the solution in the test environment, thinking “It can’t be that hard…”

I had already implemented the following solution to hide New and Delete User buttons:http://blogs.msdn.com/b/connector_space/archive/2014/10/02/5-minute-fim-hacks-hiding-the-quot-new-quot-and-quot-delete-quot-user-buttons.aspx

A week later we met to see how much progress had been made, he had found the following information (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2139.how-to-remove-new-delete-and-other-buttons-from-fim-portal-pages.aspx), but didn’t really understand what it meant. So, we went through it together. I must admit, when I first read it through, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me either, but after a few re-reads it clicked into place.

This was done around 1 month ago and already I’m forgetting the actions that were carried out, so I’m going to document the steps in a more verbose fashion here for future reference.

Create new search scopes, using the original Search Scopes’ values as the basis. The resource type shold be “Resource”.

SearchScopes

I had already setup a new Usage Keyword “PrivilegedUsers”, that I was using to control the things that the helpdesk users would see to do their admin tasks. So, in the original search scopes this keyword needs to be added and the BasicUI and GlobalSearchResult keywords should be removed. Then in the (new) copies of the search scopes, BasicUI and GlobalSearchResultshould be present.

Original and New Search Scope Usage Keywords:

Do an IIS reset….

Now on the home page, choose one of those new search scopes and do a “blank” search. Copy the URL that this search went to – note that the UI of this search presents only the details button.

Do the same thing for each of the new search scopes, copying the URL’s for later….

Now we need to make those URL’s available via the portal UI. We need to do this for both the Navigation Bar and Home Page, so create new resources, using the information within the originals as the basis. The only change that I made was to remove the reference to (DGs) and (SGs) for the top level items and to add a description “User Read Only view” for those new items with the same name (so that I could tell the difference):

NavBarResources

Use the URL’s that were obtained from the search scopes to define the behaviour of the Resource:Behaviour

Do an IIS reset….

If you copied the Parent Order and Order values of the original Resources, the result is a little messy from the Administrators POV, as all of those items are crammed together. Unfortunately, I know of no way to hide an item from the admin, so I just rearranged the order of the layout. It displays as follows after re-arranging both the Nav Bar and Home Page Resource orders:

HomePage_Admin

A normal user looking at the portal sees this, the links go to the URL’s in those Search Scopes defined earlier:

HomePage_User

And when looking at for example “Distribution Groups”, sees that Details button only:

HomePage_User_Result

The PrivilegedUsers view, looks like this:HomePage_PU

And if a member of PrivilegedUsers uses the Distribution Groups (DGs) link, they see this – note all of the buttons are available:

DIst_PU_View

If I remember missing something or something not being quite right, I’ll be back to correct…

emailAddressPresent Flag Setting and Checking Email Suffix Validity

In my Organisation, not all users have a mailbox, while others are just mail enabled.

In order to define XPATH filters for those people who should be allowed into a distribution list, managed by the portal, I needed to set a flag.

This boolean flag defines if they could be mailed and therefore should belong to a distribution list.

A nice add on was the fact that it allowed me to check the mail suffix of the user as part of the import process. Only those suffixes defined in the array are allowed, only suffixes that the Exchange Organisation is authoritative for. This check exists, because sometimes people just add a new suffix, or make a typo – this bit of code highlights those events.

Looking for (and finding) odd ID’s

As I have said previously, the HR data that feeds FIM is out of my direct control and has had some data quality issues.

As a result, I have ended up putting some consistency checking into my code. I’ll present a few from my MVExtension here, what I’m tending to be looking for is where the user has already been provisioned, but then the reference has been deleted in HR, but no-one has told me so that I can tidy up the account in AD and FIM.

The ID’s that showed up after putting in the bit looking for FIM only references, was caused by disconnecting a table that validates historical end dates. I was assured that I would not need it anymore, because the end dates would not be randomly set to a period in the past that mean that I would never receive that update… However, this did not pan out, so I re-attached the table, but did not reset the MV object deletion rule afterwards, so I ended up with ID fragments in the portal – referenced only by ObjectID.

Again I used the Lithnet PowerShell module to clear these up. There were around 40 to do, so I just got the ObjectID’s from the job xml, put them in a text file and ran this:

 

O365 License Management, Using AD Groups

Previously, I wrote the following post about license management: https://365.oholics.net/office-365-licence-management/. This post relied on text files to hold the UPN of users who should have specific licenses.

I now have a new script the does that same task but uses AD groups to hold the licence entitlements. I have placed a copy of the script below.

One thing of note (a bug), that will be present in the previous script, is that of assigning a licence that is in conflict with an already applied license. This issue arose while testing this new script, notably for users who were being entitled to a Project licence.

During processing, I was seeing errors like “Conflicting Service Plans: SHAREPOINTWAC_EDU, SHAREPOINTWAC_EDU” and “Conflicting Service Plans: SHAREPOINTSTANDARD_EDU, SHAREPOINTENTERPRISE_EDU”. Where this part was present in both of the license collections – the one already applied and the project license that was to be applied.

The solution is messy, but does work.

First the “base” user licence “STANDARDWOFFPACK_FACULTY” must be removed, and then replaced by the same license, but with more disabled components – in this case EXCHANGE_S_STANDARD, SHAREPOINTSTANDARD_EDU and SHAREPOINTWAC_EDU. Once that is complete and verified, then try to apply the complete Project license.

The complete script is here:

Removing IE Proxy Settings

So, now we have gone full circle! There is now a need to remove the proxy settings from one of those VPN connections described in the last post.

For the machines that are supported within my group, the settings should be consistent, but there is the possibility that extra settings have been added by the user. So, I did a little discovery first:

The resultant file shows mostly what I’m expecting to see, with a few other things like Vodafone dongles, user defined connections etc.

Removal can be easily carried out by trimming the setting script (from the last post) to no longer publish the one to be removed, then use a GPP item to remove the key relating to the VPN proxy settings, to be removed.

For those other groups, within the organisation, who do not have such consistency; the results of the script can be analysed in Excel to see what is “out there”. Then another (not yet written script – because I don’t think I’ll need it) can be used to find those binary values which match those that are to be removed and then subsequently remove them.

I like scripting…. 😉

Setting IE Proxy Settings

A number of years ago, I rationalised the way that IE proxy settings were delivered to supported systems. Previously, this had been done via installation scripts, which were not enforced after application, so were prone to subsequent error.

To achieve consistency and ease of deployment Group Policy was used. Back then there were Internet Explorer Maintenance GPO settings, which allowed the LAN Proxy setting to be deployed easily. However, I also wanted to make consistent the delivery of VPN settings. This was also achieved by using Group Policy to deliver a VPN address book (rasphone.pbk) to the clients.

In order to get the correct proxy settings assigned to those VPN connections, I used a little scripting.

First, find out on my test machine what the text in the IE proxy GUI translated to, where I had already setup the VPN connections and set the correct proxy settings:

Then use the results of that to create a new vbs script to be pushed out as a User login script:

Getting license details for your licensed O365 users

Part of the process of getting the script in the previous post working was having a record of who is licenced *now*.

This was done using the following script. Note that the commented lines must be un-commented to log the data, I am currently using this script to keep the AD groups up to date , hence the Add-ADGroupMember lines are uncommented. AD groups will soon be replacing the text files.

Office 365 Licence Management

Since introducing O365 to my organisation, there has been a steady flow of people wanting to use services within it. The licences for which have been applied on an ad-hoc basis by several global admins.

Now we are in a position to make these services more official/ production, I needed to licence those users who were not yet licensed, plus sort out the improperly licensed people.

It seems that either one of those global admins who was assigning licences or maybe self registered users were getting the Information Worker licences – e.g. STANDARDWOFFPACK_IW_STUDENT. This was not desired, so my script had to sort those out as well!

Additionally, people whose status changed from being staff to anything else needed to have any staff licence revoked and replaced with a student licence – and vice versa.

I also wanted to control who should be given those individual licences, like Office Pro Plus and Dynamics. For the moment, those entitled to these licensed are held in text files – I’m working on migrating to using AD groups instead, but for now just needed something that just works!

The script logs added and removed licences, to C:\Office365-Scripts\Licencing\LicenceManagement.txt

Error emails are based on the content of the $error variable, using a function to generate the mail body.

Here is the script:

Replacing the ADFS Service Certificate

The initial service certificate used for my ADFS service was relatively simplistic – containing only one UPN suffix.

Recently, the security team stated that they wished to start using InTune, via SCCM. Thus, I needed to enable the Workplace Join functionality on the ADFS server farm.

In order to do so, I obtained a new certificate with the additional SAN: enterpriseregistration.<MyDomain>, then I needed to replace the service certificate on the ADFS servers in the farm. This process was followed:

  1. Install new certificate on all ADFS servers in the farm
  2. Allow the ADFS service account read permissions on the private key
  3. On the Primary ADFS server, set the new service certificate
  4. Obtain the certificate thumbprint from the new certificate, e.g.: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  5. On all ADFS proxy servers – Set-WebApplicationProxySslCertificate -Thumbprint: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  6. On the Primary ADFS server – Set-AdfsSslCertificate -Thumbprint: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  7. Restart ADFS service on all servers

8. Test, by doing a federated login via portal.microsoftonline.com

Getting PiGlow working on Arch Linux with Raspberry Pi 2

It initially seemed like a trivial task; after all getting the PiGLow working under Raspian was very simple!

But under Arch the method is significantly different…So, after digging about, getting all the pieces together – this is what I have and it works!

Now to get this to run on start-up…