Error when trying to open a OneDrive uploaded file from Outlook client application: The page that you are trying to access cannot be loaded

From the first look this error definitely sounds like “Office 365 ATP Safe links or Safe attachments” policy components blocking the files behind the scenes, but it’s not !. Well, it could be the same error in such scenarios but in my case, Safe Link or Safe Attachment policies were not the issue.

Scenario: Users trying to share content within the organization by uploading them to a OneDrive/SharePoint location chosen from the dropdown as attached to the Outlook email on the go.

Attach a file to email and upload it to OneDrive/SharePoint

Attach a file from SharePoint/OneDrive

Once added the cloud based file to the mail, this is how it looks. Then send it out

Emails are smoothly delivered to the recipients however, when they try to open them (by simply clicking on the URL), recipients get the above error (The page that you are trying to access cannot be loaded)

This happens only when:

• Users use desktop application of Outlook (not happening in OWA, files are accessed in OWA without an issue)
• Or, Attached the file in to OneDrive or SharePoint as shown below (not happening when file URL is pasted to Outlook email)

The environment had Office 365 ATP safe link and Safe attachment policies implemented properly. And the exceptions are added to trusted partners across the globe for this company (as a multi-national)

Resolution: Due to the criticality of this organization-wide behavior, I worked with Microsoft Support team towards a fix and here’s what we did.

We ran a fiddler session while opening the file from both OWA and Client App and reviewed the recording – OWA is working fine while outlook not able to access the wrapped URL. It looked like outlook API used for calling ATP is not functioning well.

Microsoft further analyzed by collecting below information and then engaged the Product Group:

• Collect fiddler trace for both OWA and Outlook to make comparison
• Copy the Wrapped URL from OWA and Outlook
• Collect the corresponding message sample

As of now, Microsoft Product Group for ATP have not identified if it is a misconfiguration or product related bug, however, I receive constant responses stating that they are actively working towards a resolution. I will update this space as soon as I hear anything applicable towards a resolution/ETA.

Workaround: The only workaround for this is to request users to make use of Outlook Web whenever a file needs to be opened that is received via an email.

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Legitimate emails (Including Internal Emails) get constantly quarantined in Office 365 Exchange

Sometimes emails hit the Quarantine state because the message is spam-ish or potentially malicious to be delivered to the end user (Admin quarantined). Usually when end users notify you regarding the legitimate email being quarantined, review section in Office 365 (https://protection.office.com/threatreview ) protection blade will help you to retrieve, review and release those legitimate messages to intended users. However, I faced an abnormal situation of “Internally shared emails were frequently quarantined for no valid reason”. And, they had no suspicious behavior/trend.

Whenever there is a legitimate email being quarantined, we can fetch it from the review section. Simply by typing the sender address or subject line will sort the message and allow us to review it and then take the necessary action.

These messages below are obvious Malwares and Phish. So this is not my concern at all ! O365 security is doing a great job here catching hundreds of malicious items daily !!

But how about these two cases?

• Legitimate/genuine mails are admin quarantined – from a trusted partners or external vendors/customers being regularly admin quarantined even without reaching to end user spam folder?
• Even internal emails shared within the organization being admin quarantined?

Workarounds?

Whitelisting won’t fix this – Filling up your whitelist is not a good idea as “Whitelisting” and address or domain means, it will completely bypass the spam filter which is an obvious risk.

On the 1st case, the external domain is a very valid domain with a valid SPF and email content didn’t seem to match any suspicious trend policy. I can simply go ahead and release these messages if this happens occasionally but that’s not the best practice in this modern era. Adding these internal addresses is not recommended either (you should not add your own domain/emails to whitelist in Exchange online) .

Resolution?:

Bottom-line is, those emails are marked as Phishing meaning that there’s a link somewhere in that email that’s broken and doesn’t go where it states it should. However, as I submitted these emails to Microsoft and raised a support ticket, I was informed that this is an issue Microsoft Spam team/product group is currently working diligently to fix this issue soon. Hence at this point of time, it is a waiting game and just a matter of baring with them during the process.

ETA: None as of now

I will update this post as soon as I receive a progress update from Microsoft support.

Silence when Microsoft Teams queue call put on hold

Recently I noticed at one of our major client’s Teams Voice setup that on hold music never played for queues when agents put callers on hold, instead it goes silent which makes callers wondering what’s going on with the call.

This is a vital feature specially for a call queue as it gives clarity for callers to understand the status of the call. Agents mostly put callers on hold to get things done offline to meet callers requirements so the music of course make the caller relaxed while agent helping them out behind the scene.

First thing I had to check is, if the feature is enabled from the Teams Admin Centre –> Call Queues –> Choose the affected queue –> Of course it has

However, it seemed the file hasn’t recognized by Teams or probably the file is faulty which could have caused the silence during hold.  Till I locate the original file, I added a temporary classic music clip to verify if that picks by Teams. And it did ! Hold music played like charm when the agent put me on hold.

Blocking spam senders and domains in Office 365

Security is a one of the most significantly improved areas of Microsoft Office 365. If you are using Exchange Online mailboxes under your Office 365 tenant or a consumer of standalone exchange online protection (EOP), your emails are protected either way.

Exchange online protection (a.k.a EOP) Is part of the Microsoft’s email safety roadmap which constantly evolves in a unmatched cross-product approach. As email usage has rapidly grown, so has the email security concerns. The idea behind EOP is to provide a range of comprehensive abilities in order to protect millions of users from Junk, phishing (fraudulent mail threats) and malware attacks which are some of the well-known types of email related abuses.

Exchange Online however, has the built in ability to protect you from many threats. Nevertheless, there could be some scenarios that you need to manually handle as an Exchange/Office 365 Administrator. The following article will show you on how to prevent receiving spamming emails from a specific address, domain because, there can be rare cases that one or few emails able to get through EOP and hit the user mailbox (again, very rarely).

In my case, it was the following email which arrived in few user mailboxes (looked obviously spam and the user immediately reported to me). At this point, we can make use of “Blocked Sender List” in Exchange to prevent this happening again. And, as EOP spam filtering learns from known spam and phishing threats and user feedback, it’s a great idea to submit these kind of messages to Microsoft so that they will use it to train the AI based component behind the EOP.

---

From: Sonia Luton <staffprojectz@post.cz>

Subject: Project

[EXTERNAL EMAIL]

Hi Melina,

There is something i need you to do for me. Let me know if you are available. I am going into a meeting with a limited access to phone calls, just reply my email and i will get back to you.

Thanks,

Sonia

---

So the address is staffprojectz@post.cz and the domain is post.cz. From Office 365 Exchange Admin Centre, navigate to Exchange admin center and “Protection” –> “Spam Filter” . Click on the “default policy”

The following flyout will be opened. Navigate to “Blocked lists”

Click on the + icon to add a new blocked sender and insert the desired address.

Then let’s add the domain too for blocking.

Once added, the domain will be in the blocked list and Office 365 will entirely block any emails from this domain.

Save it and monitor your email traffic time to time to identify if it’s being blocked.

Microsoft Teams getting more features in early 2020 (cool stuff to be rolled-out)

Microsoft Teams has recently hit 20M users and now undoubtedly one of the highest used productivity apps in the market. Not only the enterprises but also government and education sectors rapidly adopting Teams for their daily communication and collaboration needs as this simple handy tool is very effective and efficient.

Teams get even better this year with more new features planned to be rolled out. Let’s have a sneak peak at the highlighting ones.

1. Multi Window

A fantastic new feature which allows you to be more efficient specially during those meetings where you struggle to switch across. Multi-window experience is something critical for productivity apps such as Teams and its now scheduled to roll-out in early this year. Definitely the most awaited one for me personally as a heavy Teams user (in fact I never close Teams interface)

2. Private Channels

All teams are split up into channels, private channels allow you to have a private space within your team only visible to the people you gave permission to.

3. Message extensions

Another great addition to Teams. You can now easily start polls and surveys from the chat window and meetings, so you can have real-time feedback and answers from the audience just within Teams.

4. Pinned channels

With Pinned channels, you can pin your most-used or favorite channels and easily find them in the top left corner of the Teams interface.

5. Share to Teams – Outlook Integration

A Share to Teams button is now available on Outlook, you can also reply to Team conversations within Outlook.

6. Whiteboard Integrated

During a Teams meeting, with this new feature, you can open the Whiteboard and take notes as well as inviting people to the board after the meeting which would be a great addition for Teams rather than using other tools.

7. Live Captions

As participants are speaking in Teams meetings, their words will be captured in real time and appear underneath, so people can easily follow along by reading in a particular language.

8. Tasks Integrated

One of those many integrations coming in early 2020, Tasks will now be right within your Teams interface. You can access your Microsoft To Do, Outlook and Planner tasks all in one window from Teams and you can also choose the view that works for you among boards, lists, charts, and schedules.

Identifying the creator of an Microsoft Team (Who created this Team)

This really sounds like its available out of the box right there in the group’s metadata column, apparently its not. You can see who the current admin is, but not the original creator (although usually that is probably the same). In PowerShell there is a property for “Created On” but no “Created By“.

In my case, I had to find out the creator of a specific Microsoft Team but Teams didn’t have the metadata of the Creator so the only way to find out seemed by tracing the Office 365 Audit Logs.

Office 365 Audit Logs can get you plenty of information which you can’t observe directly from the workload UI or PowerShell.

First and foremost, in order to extract the logging details, Audit Log capability must be running in your tenant.

Use this command via PowerShell to enable it if you haven’t. And, after enabling you must wait for a while to allow the logs analytics component to record the logs (won’t be available immediately)

Connect-ExchangeOnline
Set-AdminAuditLogConfig -UnifiedAuditLogIngestionEnabled $true

Detailed information of enabling/disabling Auditing in Office 365 is right here – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/turn-audit-log-search-on-or-off?view=o365-worldwide

Searching for activities (Teams Creation in this case)

Head on to protection.office.com and navigate Search –> Audit Log Search

“Created Team” log activity is available under Microsoft Teams category in the Audit Log. You can simply type “Teams” to get the category and choose the event type underneath it.

Define the time period, select the activity type and search –> And there is it ! I now have the details I was looking for.

This simply allow us to see the creation details of any Team within this tenant.

Moving Microsoft Teams Data Location

If you are a existing Office 365 customer who have been waiting Microsoft to allow you to move your Teams data location, It’s now time to do it.

Office 365 now allows you to decide where your Teams data residency should be. We have noticed that most of our clients got their Data residency set to Australia as the data region.

Microsoft now offer existing O365 customers listed in the following table an option to request early migration of organization’s core customer data at rest to their new datacenter geo.

Changing the geo location is completely taken care by Microsoft behind the scene. You as a customer, only have to opt-in to allow Microsoft to do this in the backend (despite your request, this will anyway happen eventually) and the change is seamless with no user interaction, interruption.

To see your current data location for each workload, go to Office 365 Admin center –> Settings –> Settings –> Organization Profile

Navigate to Data Location to see where your data currently resides

Switch to Data Residency and “check the tick box” below to opt-in. You will not see this option if:

• Your tenant is not eligible for the Office 365 Move Program. Eligibility is determined by tenant signup country.
• All of your core customer data at rest is already located in the new geo (see Data Location section of the page).

And wait for a few months as advised in the notification. Microsoft will notify you stage-wise in the Office 365 Message center when the activity is being actioned or completed.

Note: The information on this page only applies to customers who had existing Office 365 tenants before the new datacenters in their geo launched.

More details are here – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/Office365/Enterprise/request-your-data-move