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Now you can use your own company standards with Maester custom tests

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I thought checking to see if they were filled in or even formatted correctly wasn’t enough.. now you can config the validation.json file in the Validating folder with your company standards to make only those values pass. Here are the fields so far, and will be adding more!

  • ENTRA.UV.1001 – Company Name
  • ENTRA.UV.1002 – Street Address
  • ENTRA.UV.1003 – City
  • ENTRA.UV.1004 – State
  • ENTRA.UV.1005 – Postal Code
  • ENTRA.UV.1006 – Country
  • ENTRA.UV.1007 – Business Phone Number
  • ENTRA.UV.1008 – Job Title
  • ENTRA.UV.1009 – Department

Hope you like this new update and let me know if you run into any issues or want to see any other updates. Please don’t forget to star the repo and share to get the word out so more people can add theirs.

Have a great day!

GitHub: Custom Maester Tests
Website: Custom Maester Tests
Website: Offical Maester Website

If Maester couldn’t get any better…Custom Test Collection now available

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The time has finally come. I have created a public repository to store custom Maester tests for everyone. As well as a website for deeper understanding where needed. I haven’t seen anyone else do it yet, and worse case scenario, people can just use the ones that I create, but I envision others adding theirs to this too. Yes, you will have to create the function, test, and the markdown file (I and/or others can help), so that we can have a collection of tests that anyone can pick and choose which ones they want to add to their Maester and customize it to their needs. They don’t need to be 365 related either, as they could be checks for Windows 11 settings, server configs, or check that a certain OU should only has these mentioned users or computers and to make sure that doesn’t change.

This is still in its early stages and would love any feedback to make it better while still showing that it is a companion to Maester. I wanted to get the framework started to that we can start gaining the benefits from the repository while still making it easy to use.

I hope you are excited about this as I am, and we can create a large community collection of tests.

Please star and share the repo. Open issues for tests that you want to see and if you already have one or can make it, put that in the issue. Let’s make all our IT lives easier and safer.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and hope you find value in this and can share your knowledge as well.

Website: https://devclate.github.io/Custom-Maester-Tests/
GitHub: https://github.com/DevClate/Custom-Maester-Tests

I’m also working on a module for the Entra attribute fields that will fix any issues by either manually typing in the correct value or only allow company standard values.

1k Downloads and more

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Wow, can’t believe it! 1,000 downloads of 365AutomatedLab! Thank you all! And I just want to start out saying apologies for not updating it more. Big work projects, summer, and life got in the way, but learned a lot and can’t wait to spread that info.

Still saddened that Microsoft hasn’t brought back the free Developer tenant program, but you can still use these in production to standardize adding and removing objects when dynamic groups aren’t an option. Please let me know if there are any features you wish it had, and I’ll see what I can do.

I did make a quick update to the module due to the PnP.PowerShell module changes where I removed the Connect-PnP in functions as you cannot use the old way anymore. I didn’t want you or others to be blocked from using those functions because of it, but will be adding back the newer way in the near future, I just want to find the best way to give you options to connect. If you already have a working function, I’d be glad to add it as well.

In addition to 365AutomatedLab, I’d been working on 365AutomatedCheck which is still in beta, but it checks if your 365 tenant is formatted and/or configured correctly to your company standards. Some of its capabilities are making sure that field values follow company standards, making sure phone numbers are filled in, and even on the fly correcting of those fields. This isn’t a Maester replacement, in fact all of the Pester tests work in Maester, and encourage you to add these to your Maester setup, but as of right now the auto correct fields function doesn’t work. Maybe we can make that happen!

Again, thank you for using 365AutomatedLab, as this is a fun side project for me, and never thought it would get this much traction. It’s a dream come true, and can’t wait to start working on it again!

Hope you have a great day!

365AutomatedLab
PowerShell Gallery: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/365AutomatedLab/2.11.0
GitHub: https://github.com/DevClate/365AutomatedLab

365AutomatedCheck
PowerShell Gallery: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/365AutomatedCheck/0.0.11
GitHub: https://github.com/DevClate/365AutomatedCheck

Maester
PowerShell Gallery: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Maester/0.3.0
GitHub: https://github.com/maester365/maester

PnP.PowerShell Announcement
https://github.com/pnp/powershell/issues/4250

Module Monday July 31, 2023

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Well, here it is!  Module Monday, but this one is a module I’ve been working on for a bit and figured it’s time to put it out to the community for others to enjoy and improve. Have you had to test PowerShell scripts on your 365 tenant and really didn’t want to use your production environment, but wanted to keep the close as possible for testing accuracy? Then you’ll want 365AutomatedLab in your tool chest. It can also be used to add multiple users to an environment from an excel sheet or add multiple groups to a user per their title from an excel sheet. Hope you check it out and leave some feedback! So much I want to do with it and super excited about this project that I feel can help so many!

I’ll be doing some blog posts and video tutorials in the near future. Any preferences?

Thanks to Andrew Pla for the extra push 😆

https://github.com/DevClate/365AutomatedLab

One-Liner Wednesday July 26, 2023

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Ever needed to check a computer or server and see how much disk space is being used? It could be for multiple reasons such as are any disks too low on space, too much available space assigned(think VMs where you need storage for a new server, but assume all of your storage is tied up), or you just need to see drives that have more than a certain amount of free space due to company standards.

This little one-liner is a great template for you then. This one liner will show any drive on the current computer that has more than 30gb of space free. You could easily change the “-gt” to “-lt” and only show drives with less than 30gb of space free.

Get-PSDrive -PSProvider 'FileSystem' | Where-Object { ($_.Free / 1GB) -gt 30 } | Format-Table -AutoSize

I know your thinking, I can easily click on my computer and check hard drive space, but what about if you have 10, 100, or 1000+ devices you have to manage? Do you really want to do all of those clicks? You could even set this up as a scheduled task and have it notify you, send to teams/discord/etc, or even email a Distribution List with a report. That sounds like a lot better idea than wasting time clicking around.

If your curious on how to have this capture multiple computers, one way is:

$Computers = 'Computer1', 'Computer2', 'Computer3'  # Replace with your computer names or IPs

$ScriptBlock = {
    Get-PSDrive -PSProvider 'FileSystem' | 
    Where-Object { ($_.Free / 1GB) -gt 30 } | 
    Format-Table -AutoSize
}

foreach ($Computer in $Computers) {
    Invoke-Command -ComputerName $Computer -ScriptBlock $ScriptBlock
}

I hope you found this one-liner useful, and would love to hear how you use it or have used it in the past! And as always if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out and if I can’t help you out, and I can find someone that can.

Read-Only Friday 365 Developer Program

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Want to have some fun with Office 365, but don’t want to mess up your production environment? Or what about being able to try out scripts and not having to brace yourself as you run them and hope they don’t clear out all your data? Now you can do whatever you want with the Microsoft 365 Dev Center.

That is right, up to 25 E5 licensed users at your disposal for 90 days and will be renewed as long as you are using it. They will even create 16 users for you, mail traffic, and more. This isn’t just for PowerShell, this all aspects of 365.

Awesome, right? Here are few examples:

  1. You could copy up to 25 of your current users and import them into this Developer tenant and test scripts see exactly how it would work with your information. Think of those times where you test a script with fictional users and your script works perfect, but once you put it into production, your script fails because one username had a character that your test data didn’t have. Now your spending unnecessary time trying to figure out what went wrong when it worked perfectly in proof of concept.
  2. You want to test new features or policies, but you don’t want to enable them in your production environment, as your not 100% sure how it will react to your environment. Configure this test environment how your current tenant is then enable those features or policies you want to test. Much safer to test in the dev environment, then do it in production and all of a sudden your users can’t access critical resources or anything at all!
  3. Your boss wants you do a proof of concept on how to streamline the onboarding process and to make it as simple as possible for the organization. It is recommended that you use Sharepoint and Teams as the company already uses both and are familiar. Instead of using your production environment, you can do this all in the dev tenant without affecting anything in production. You can even invite key players in this project to login and test it with you. Now you don’t have to worry about a teams alert that you setup for when a new hire has been added to AD or Microsoft Entra ID spamming a your production channel because your script or flow errored.

These are just a few scenarios that the 365 Dev tenant can be useful, but there are so many more. I’m barely scratching the surface, and hope you sign up right away for this if you haven’t already. It is free, if you administer or develop 365, you need this.

I hope you found this helpful, and if you have any questions, I’d be glad to help out in anyway I can.

Sign up for the Microsoft 365 Dev Center