#Modern Workplace

Microsoft is retiring SMS and voice authentication service in Entra ID on 1 February 2027. Also, from 1 September 2026 onwards, users enabled for SMS or Voice will be automatically migrated to passkeys and brought into the Passkey Registration Campaign. This means that when they next sign in and complete MFA, they will be prompted to register a passkey. Understandably, this has caused a lot of chatter in the technical community and I wanted to both understand this change and the possible impacts. Before strong authentication requirements as part of passwordless came into picture, organizations relied on SMS  or  Voice as authentication methods, that have now become legacy. There is no question are these authentication methods being less secure and why there is a need to move to stronger authentication methods, however, the migration needs to be carefully planned and also prepare for any surprised that may arise. One such area organisations need to consider is Self-Service P...

Ever been in a situation when the state of the device is so bad, so unusable that it feels like you have exhausted all options and there is no hope? I think it is safe to say that most of us in the world of endpoint management, would have such days at some point in our lives. I recently delt with a device that was in a deadlock state. To give some more context, here is a snapshot of what I was dealing with - 1. The device reset had failed from Microsoft Intune and as part of the process was also deleted from the admin portal. 2. To make matters worse, the device object was deleted from Entra ID as well. (Don't ask why, it's just the way it is.:-) ). 3. The enrolled user had standard permissions and in order to elevate the permissions, one would need either a GA role or LAPS. While LAPS was configured, due to step 2, there was no way to retrieve the password, even through Graph. 4. GA wouldn't work as well as the device had lost trust with Entra ID. 5. Even if you rebooted i...

I recently encountered an issue as part of a project involving Entra hybrid join for existing domain joined devices and Co-management where devices stopped connecting to corporate wireless access points automatically. The devices would complain about missing credentials, resulting in authentication errors and eventually give up on connecting to the corporate Wi-Fi. Here is a snapshot of one such error - The environment is configured with Cisco ISE as the RADIUS solution with an authentication policy relying on PEAP MSCHAPv2 as the authentication protocol. The logs on the Cisco side reflected the same ' Internal authentication error ' as seen in the event viewer of the endpoints. This was strange at first because there was nothing set up in Intune or otherwise as part of the Co-management configuration that would interfere with the WiFi settings in general. On further investigation, it was discovered that the issue could very well be related to Credential Guard on the devices. ...

Enrolment time grouping for Android Enterprise is finally here. I had been using it for Autopilot Device Preparation (APDP) and now that it supports Android OS, I wanted to experience it first hand and capture all the caveats or gotchas. For those who are not familiar with the feature, enrolment time grouping was first introduced for Windows OS as part of Autopilot Device Preparation to speed up app and policy provisioning during device enrollment. The feature allows enrolment time grouping when you can add a Microsoft Entra security group in the enrolment profile so that devices are added to the group during enrolment, rather than after. This pre-knowledge of the security group that the device will become member of after enrollment enables Intune to deliver the configurations to the device quickly on enrollment, not only reduces post-enrolment latency but also improves productivity. If you don't configure enrolment time grouping, then Microsoft Intune can only determine the apps a...

When it comes to capturing BitLocker encryption status, there are multiple options available in the Windows compliance policy in Intune. From  Require BitLocker , Require Secure Boot to be enabled on the device , and Require code integrity under Device Health attestation, to  Require encryption of data storage on device which not only captures the encryption status of the OS drive against BitLocker, but even non-Microsoft encryption solutions. However, it is a known fact that due to delays in getting BitLocker encryption compliance to report in a timely and accurate manner, it can rather be challenging in getting the right compliance settings in place. Especially if the device compliance state is being used in Entra ID conditional access policies. Another issue that I have come across is lack of compliance reporting against BitLocker recovery key escrow. This is especially common in Co-management scenarios when the BitLocker Drive Encryption management has moved to Intune an...

Replacing a third party AV solution like Sophos with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on Windows endpoints can be a harrowing experience. However, if you know the ins & outs of the process, then it can make things a little easier. I recently dealt with the task of removal of Sophos AV as part of an implementation project for Defender for Endpoint and thought of writing a blog post on it. Hope it helps. Let's look at some of the key steps first 1. Ensure that the devices are checking into Sophos Central and are healthy. 2. Turn off Tamper Protection on the endpoints. Just like other third party AV products in the market, Sophos does support removal of their products by running the relevant product uninstallers, however, in my experience this is a hit or miss and therefore, I resorted to using Sophoszap utility which gave me consistent results. It is important to note that you should use the latest Sophoszap utility, so always check the Sophos official vendor's website for lat...