Recent problems with Microsoft 365 PowerShell modules afflicted the ability of Azure Automation runbooks to execute cmdlets Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK and Exchange Online Management modules. The root cause is a decision to remove support for .NET6, but the worrying point is the lack of awareness within Microsoft engineering that Azure Automation is where many critical scripts run. Better pre-release testing is definitely needed.
V2.26 and V2.26.1 of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK were low-quality, buggy disasters. Microsoft aims to fix the problem in the next version to make it possible for the SDK to work with Azure Automation runbooks again and address many of the obvious problems that should never have appeared outside Microsoft. It will take time for customer confidence to be restored.
The developers rushed out Version 2.26.1 of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to fix some obvious issues. Alas, problems persist in PowerShell SDK cmdlets, including licensing failures and an issue that prevents the Connect-MgGraph cmdlet from being able to obtain an access token from Entra ID. My advice is to stay with V2.25 until Microsoft resolves the problems and generates a new stable version of the SDK.
A bunch of problems with V2.26 of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK V2.26 make the software unusable. Not only did Microsoft do a horrible job of testing the new release before making it available to customers, but they also failed to communicate the level of change in the new SDK and how it could impact Azure Automation runbooks.
In this primer, we cover how to create and execute Azure Automation Exchange Online runbooks (scripts) using cmdlets from the Exchange Online management module. Some setup is necessary before runbooks can process Exchange cmdlets, but once the necessary resources and permissions are in place, it’s all plain sailing. The next challenge is how to output data created in a runbook…
This article covers how to use HVE with Azure Automation to send email. HVE is Exchange Online’s High Volume Email solution for internal communications. In the discussion, we cover how to retrieve credentials from Azure Key Vault, how to retrieve data from a web page, and how to bring everything together in a message submitted to HVE.
This article describes how to use Azure Automation for audit searches. The runbook runs an audit search to find events for specific operations, refines the set of events found by the search, and sends the information by email. Hopefully, someone will respond to the message and do the right thing to check the insight derived from the events.
The second part of the Azure Automation runbook primer brings us to output, specifically how to create items generated by a runbook in a SharePoint Online list. Once in the lists, items can be processed using Power Automate, Power Apps, or Power BI or exported to Excel. It’s a great way of capturing information generated by background jobs.
Microsoft plans to retire Azure Automation Run As Accounts on September 30, 2023 and replace them with managed identities. I don’t have any issue with the proposal because managed identities are more secure and a better overall solution. It would have been nice if Microsoft had communicated the change more broadly. I guess if you were in the know, you found out about this development, but maybe the average Microsoft 365 tenant administrator might have struggled to discover what’s happening.
This article explains how to make Teams policy assignments using an Azure Automation runbook and some of the modernized cmdlets available in the Teams PowerShell module. Not everything worked as smoothly as we’d like, but like most PowerShell scenarios, there’s usually a workaround available to get the job done. It just needs to be found.
Before an app or an Azure Automation account can use the Teams PowerShell cmdlets in a script or runbook, it must have the permission to act as an administrator. In this article, we cover how to assign the necessary role to a service principal.
This article describes how to use the Exchange.ManageAsApp permission to allow Azure AD apps to run Exchange Online PowerShell cmdlets. You can do this in the Azure AD admin center for registered apps, but when the time comes to allow Azure Automation runbooks to sign into Exchange Online with a managed identity, you must assign the permission to the automation account with PowerShell. Easy when you know how, hard when you don’t!
