Hi all,

Today we’re going to change the branding of the Office365 portal. Something that helps clients identify that they are logging into the correct portal and are entering their usernames correctly. The great thing about this is you can have your own support information directly on the office365 portal.

you should make notes of some prerequisites before you start:
Company branding is a feature that is available only if you are using the Premium or Basic edition of Azure Active Directory, or are an Office 365 user. To check if branding is available you can try the following link

If you’ve checked that you can use branding, and you have your Office 365/Azure Admin account available you first log in on the portal at https://portal.microsoftonline.com, If you’ve previously used Azure you can directly log into Azure using https://portal.azure.com

After logging in browse to the admin panel and click on the “Azure Active Directory” link in the sidebar. This will open the Azure Portal. In case you have never signed into the Azure portal you will be forced to fill in some minor information such as e-mail address and physical address.

When logged into the Azure Portal you can click on Azure Active directory in the sidebar. You will not be presented with the following screen, Click on the area i’ve marked as yellow;

After clicking, a new sidebar appears and you can select the option to “Configure Company Branding Now”. You can upload your images directly and also change the login tips and support information. After uploading your images you can log out of the portal. When logging in again you will see the branding as soon as you’ve entered your e-mail address or when you log into the portal using the URL https://outlook.com/tenantname(e.g. outlook.com/constoso.onmicrosoft.com). If you want users to access the webmail or portal using their own domain-name my advise would be to create a forward from webmail.clientname.com to https://outlook.com/tenantname.

An example of the branding can be found below;

Happy branding! 🙂

Lately we’ve been running into issues with client’s connecting to Office 365 and having high latency with this connection. this results in issues such as “Outlook is not Responding” & “Getting data from server outlook.Office365.com”. Both of these issues disappear when running in Cached mode due to less data-traffic being required for normal operations such as opening e-mails and retrieving folder lists.

After researching we’ve found that this is mostly related to enormous detours that the ISP was taking to reach the Office 365 back-end. Mostly due to “cheaper” connections to the DUB(EU) or AMS(EU) data-centers of Microsoft. A good example of this can be seen with the Dutch ISP RoutIT, where you have 28 hops on average to the Office 365 back-end(of which 90% is still in their network), but only 5 hops to the Azure back-end strangely enough. After contacting Microsoft Support we’ve got the dreaded answer: Please invest into an Express-Route solution to circumvent these issues or have the provider resolve the connection problems.

We have multiple small sites with 5+ users that simply cannot afford this, and the clients can’t accept this latency. So we decided to ignore Microsoft’s advice and go on our own path of discovery 😉 After reading some of the service descriptions we’ve found that Microsoft assures better connections from Azure to Office 365 by using extensive QoS, and of course simply because the virtual machines are in the same network as the Office 365 services.

I’ve created the step-by-step below to research, test, and implement a solution.

Research

first we needed to discover if the client actually suffered from this issue:

• Open outlook on a user with connection issues.
• Right-click the tray icon, while holding CTRL and click on “Connection Status”
• In online mode you’d want the AVG. Proc time to be lower than 25(Cached mode this can be anything from 25-300)
• In online mode you’d want the AVG RTT Time to be lower than 200(Cached mode this can be anything from 0-1000)
• If you have results higher than above, you are possibly having issues connecting to outlook.office365.com and a poor-man’s ExpressRoute might help you run your outlook in Online mode.

After these tests, we run a Traceroute to tripple-check if the route is the issue, or if the connection latency itself is the issue. You expect a traceroute to Outlook.office365.com to always be less than 20 hops, preferably in the 10-15 range, such as my results;

tracert outlook.office365.com

Tracing route to outlook-emeacenter.office365.com [132.245.229.114]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms    <1 ms     1 ms  xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
  2     9 ms    9 ms    10 ms  xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
  3     7 ms     8 ms     7 ms  ae0-33.crt02-gsw.redhosting.nl [178.238.96.45]
  4     4 ms    4 ms    12 ms  ae0-31.crt01-nkf.redhosting.nl [178.238.96.37]
  5     4 ms    4 ms    13 ms  ams-ix-2.microsoft.com [80.249.209.21]
  6     6 ms    7 ms    14 ms  be-62-0.ibr01.amb.ntwk.msn.net [104.44.9.134]
  7     13 ms    12 ms    15 ms  be-7-0.ibr01.ams.ntwk.msn.net [104.44.5.33]
  8     14 ms    16 ms    16 ms  ae63-0.am3-96c-1a.ntwk.msn.net [104.44.5.1]
  9     6 ms     5 ms     5 ms  132.245.229.114

Trace complete.

If you have results as above, this solution might not be the one for you, Of course you can continue testing below but YMMV.

Create Virtual Machine Azure for performance tests & RRAS

Create a virtual machine in the Azure portal with the following specifications and configuration, If you have never created a virtual machine please use the  following guide on the Microsoft website. The interfaces changes every couple of months so its best to use the resources from Microsoft themselves.

Configuration:

• at least 1 Core
• at least 1.75GB of RAM
• Static Internal IP for the server
• Allow traffic: SSL to server(443)
• Install the following roles: Remote Access, DHCP Server.
• Setup DHCP and Remote Access.

After configuring the Azure side of the requirements make sure you configure SSTP VPN connections(Not required – For testing only.) and allow Router advertisement and IP forwarding. If you require a SSL Certificate you can use a free certificate from LetsEncrypt for this test.

After performing all configurations connect to the SSTP VPN from a client that experienced issues. Remember to set the “Use default gateway on remote network” to force all traffic over this tunnel for the sake of the test. Restart outlook and perform the testing steps once more. You should see a lower AVG. Proc Time and lower AVG. RTT Time. Have the user work on the SSTP connection for a day to see if they actually see a noticeable difference. If this is the case, its time for a more permanent solution.

Create IPSec tunnel

If the tests above have been performed, and you are ready for a permanent solution you can use Azure to create an ipsec tunnel, for that I advise the following guide.

After configuration of your ipsec tunnel, remember to tunnel all Office 365 traffic using the Microsoft IP address list found on this link. You can choose what traffic you route over the tunnel and what traffic you’d prefer using your local internet connection. When using the IPSEC tunnel remember that you must use your RRAS server as the gateway or else the routing will end on the side of the the Azure S2S VPN.

an ipsec VPN Tunnel and RRAS for NAT/Routing costs about 90% less than ExpressRoute, and might resolve most issue you have with sluggish outlooks, or slow responding Office 365 services.

Happy O365ing.

Azure MFA is a fantastic product – Its easy to setup and maintain, and not very costly to purchase (for pricing, click here). The great thing about Azure MFA is that it becomes very easy to secure your local directory, but also your remote desktop connections or RDS your 2008/2012 farms. There is just one downside; Out of the box Remote Desktop(terminal services) security does not work on Server 2012R2. I’m not sure why Microsoft decided to not support 2012R2 RDP access. I actually have a ticket outstanding with the Azure MFA team.

Of course there a solution; instead of securing direct RDP access, you can decide to secure Remote Desktop Gateway and have your users connect to the Remote Desktop Gateway. This might sound like a large change but I always advise my clients to use RD gateway – mostly due to it being accessible from almost all locations due to running on port 443 and having SSL security is a nice added bonus.

To add MFA to RD gateway we need to perform the following prerequisites ;

1. Deploy a standard RD-Gateway, with NPS. This can be done on a separate server, or on the RDS server if you have a small farm.
2. Deploy Microsoft Azure MFA on a different server, Please note: MFA and NPS cannot run on the same server due to NPS and MFA Radius clients running on the same ports. For a good tutorial on how to install Azure MFA see the following link: link
3. Open port 443 to your RD gateway server.
4. Choose a shared secret and note it – We’ll use the example “ThisIsNotASecret”

After performing the first 3 steps, its time to set up RD Gateway, NPS and the Azure MFA Server

RD Gateway setup:

• Open the RD Gateway console, and right-click the server name, choose the tab “RD CAP Store”
• Turn off the “Request clients to send a statement of health” check box if you have clients that are not NAP capable.
• Select “Central server running NPS” and remove the current server if there is any, Now enter the hostname of the MFA server and our selected shared secret “ThisIsNotASecret”.
• Close the Console – we’re done on this side. 🙂

NPS Setup:

• Open the NPS console and go to RADIUS Clients, Right click and select New
• Enter a friendly name – e.g. AzureMFA and note this.
• enter the IP of the MFA server & our selected shared secret “ThisIsNotASecret”
• click OK and move to “Remote Radius servers” in the left hand menu.
• Double click the default TS Gateway Server Group and click edit, select the Azure MFA server from this list and click on load balancing.
  • Change the priority to 1 and the weight to 50
  • change the number of seconds before a connection is dropped to 45 seconds.(could be less, but I select 45 seconds to keep uniformity among servers)
  • Change the number of seconds before server is unavailable to 45 seconds.(could be less, but I select 45 seconds to keep uniformity among server
  • Click OK and close this window. Move to Connection Request Policies
• You should see the default connection policy here – disable or delete this, as we will create our own policies.
• Right click the policies and select “New” Name this policy “Receive MFA Requests”. The settings for this policy are:
  • NAS Port type: Virtual(VPN)
  • Client Friendly Name: AzureMFA
  • Authentication Provider: Local Computer
  • Override Authentication: Disabled
• Create another policy and name this “Send MFA requests”. The settings for this policy are:
  • NAS Port type: Virtual (VPN)
  • Accounting provider name: TS GATEWAY SERVERS GROUP
  • Authentication Provider name: TS GATEWAY SERVER GROUP
  • Authentication provider: Forwarding request
• And that concludes the NPS setup. Almost there! 🙂

Azure MFA Setup:

The last steps are fairly straight forward:

• Open the MFA administrator console and select the RADIUS option in the left hand menu.
• Enable Radius and on the clients tab add the IP of the NPS server.
• enter the shared secret “ThisIsNotASecret”.
• Now select the tab “Targets” and enter the IP of the RDS Server.
• Go to the left hand menu and select user. Enable a user for tests with SMS messages or the app.
• Open the Windows Firewall for inbound Radius traffic
• Test! 🙂 If you followed the manual to the letter you now secured your RD Gateway with MFA.

 

Happy MFA’ing! 🙂