Using Cloud sync to sync AD to existing Entra Accounts
I want to sync in premise AD accounts with existing Entra accounts. The email on both accounts is the same, and I added the Entra/o365 suffix to the domain and set the UPN to that suffix, making both UPN(s) the same. It did not sync. It created a NEW Entra account. I thought I covered all my bases. How can I get on premise AD and existing Entra accounts to sync? thank you
Group-Based Licensing (E3 → Business Premium): MutuallyExclusiveViolation – Months Unresolved
We operate a Microsoft 365 environment with Entra ID, Intune, and Exchange Online. For months, we have been dealing with a critical issue that remains unresolved to this day — despite an active Microsoft Support ticket. The Technical Problem: During the migration of approximately 87 user accounts from Microsoft 365 E3 to Business Premium (SPB) via group-based licensing in Entra ID, all affected accounts receive a MutuallyExclusiveViolation error. Microsoft's backend treats E3 and Business Premium as mutually exclusive, blocking the SPB assignment — despite sufficient licenses being available. A sequential approach (removing E3 first, then assigning Business Premium) is not an acceptable solution: a test run proved that this causes a complete loss of Exchange Online access. For a rollout across 87 productive user accounts, this is not viable. What is required is a seamless, atomic license swap at the backend level — exclusively via group-based licensing. The Support Problem: Two support engineers assigned — zero technical progress. Instead of a substantive solution, we received standard documentation steps that do not address the actual problem. A false resolution notice was issued — the issue had demonstrably not been resolved. Our own PowerShell tests (Get-MgUser, Get-MgSubscribedSku) and CSV exports from the Entra ID portal disproved this conclusively. Committed updates from the Engineering Team were not delivered. Instead, automatically generated follow-up emails were sent with no substantive relation to the ongoing case. An additional unexplained behavior: a test user appears in the error report of a license group they were never added to — a further backend inconsistency that has not been investigated. Current Status: The ticket has been open for months. 87 user accounts cannot be migrated to Business Premium. An escalation to the Team Manager has been initiated. No resolution is in sight. My Question to the Community: Has anyone experienced a similar issue with MutuallyExclusiveViolation in group-based licensing (E3 → Business Premium)? Is there a known workaround or an official Microsoft statement on this? Ticket Reference: #2604241410000669
Made a self-hosted Entra ID governance portal for app/identity sprawl (open source)
Our tenant ended up with hundreds of app registrations and enterprise apps, and the native portal makes you dig through a separate blade for every basic question. Who owns this app? Which secrets die next month? What hasn't been signed into in a year? Which ones have scary Graph permissions? There's no single view for any of it, and half the ownership info was missing anyway. Entra ID Governance, access reviews, PIM all exist, but they felt heavy (and licensed) for what I actually wanted, which was just a fast list I could scan for routine cleanup. So I built one. Lightweight portal that runs entirely in your own subscription: One grid for App Registrations, Enterprise Apps, Managed Identities and Privileged Users Risk flags per identity: expiring/expired creds, high-risk permissions, no owner, stale sign-in, no CA coverage Ownership tracking, review and owner-change workflow, CSV export Tenant health score and a consent posture dashboard Optional expiry email notifications (needs a SendGrid key) Reads Graph through a managed identity, so no app secrets for data access and nothing leaves your tenant Runs about $26-30/month (one B2 App Service plan). B1 is also supported, but it's noticeably slower. It's not a replacement for Entra ID Governance or PIM, more of a cheap everyday hygiene thing. Full disclosure, I used AI building this and writing this up. I designed the architecture and functionality, tested it and ran it against my own tenant. It's open source and deployable with Azure DevOps or an Azure CLI script. Data never leaves your own tenant. Repo (screenshots + setup): https://github.com/nicolaibaralmueller/entra-identity-governance-portal Would love feedback, especially what you'd want it to flag that it doesn't, or where the risk scoring feels off. Been building it on and off for a few months with a lot of iteration. Hopefully this could be useful for others as well.
passkeys in the Authenticator app regarding attestation
I have a question about passkeys in the Authenticator app regarding attestation in connection with QR code-based cross-device sign-in. When we register a passkey with attestation enabled in the Authenticator app, it can be used to complete the sign-in process on another device via QR code and Bluetooth Low Energy. According to Microsoft’s documentation, this shouldn’t be possible with attestation enabled, yet it works. What are we misunderstanding here? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/authentication/how-to-enable-authenticator-passkey Thanks for your inputs. JohannesAdvice required for temp / agency staff
Hi All I hope you are well. Anyway, I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. We have Android devices in Entra Shared Device Mode (Multi App) which any of our employees with a valid UPN can logon to. All good there. What we need is a solution for temporary or agency staff. This would be staff that could be called on at very short notice and may not stay around for long. For security and audit reasons, we'd rather not create "userless" accounts. Is there anything in Entra / Entra Shared Device Mode that can achieve this? Info greatly appreciated. SK
ID token issued by AAD doesn't match public signing key
Hi, I've encountered an issue that ID tokens (JWT) issued by AAD do not match a public signing key. This is my JWKS url: https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flogin.microsoftonline.com%2F1d063515-6cad-4195-9486-ea65df456faa%2Fdiscovery%2Fv2.0%2Fkeys&data=02%7C01%7Cyu.kuang.lu%40LEGO.com%7C83d34dcb3e744cd9498508d8294edcdf%7C1d0635156cad41959486ea65df456faa%7C1%7C0%7C637304765982427993&sdata=9WgGhPx7T%2B9ngD3RSu6zT3ePFwIfr3IwKk2m9JiNAxE%3D&reserved=0 However the ID token I receive has a unmatched kid like below { "typ": "JWT", "alg": "RS256", "kid": "ylQQc6jLgNEIt8AMAPm8jR27QCE" } It's been working fine until a couple of days ago. It is mentioned somewhere that AAD rotates public keys but it seems tokens might be persisted without knowledge that the signing key has changed. However access token match one of the keys like { "typ": "JWT", "nonce": "ExKWqBKO2TvzbusXVkALk0RQhka3YiNxEKQg69gs27Q", "alg": "RS256", "x5t": "huN95IvPfehq34GzBDZ1GXGirnM", "kid": "huN95IvPfehq34GzBDZ1GXGirnM" } Is this the expected behaviour? AAD is my IDP and AWS Cognito is the auth server in my set up. Because of this issue, Cognito is unable to verify signature of ID tokens therefore users can sign in but cannot proceed further because of this. Has anyone come across a similar issue before?
Introducing the Entra Helpdesk Portal: A Zero-Trust, Dockerized ITSM Interface for Tier 1 Support
Hello everyone, If you manage identity in Microsoft Entra ID at an enterprise scale, you know the struggle: delegating day-to-day operational tasks (like password resets, session revocations, and MFA management) to Tier 1 and Tier 2 support staff is inherently risky. The native Azure/Entra portal is incredibly powerful, but it’s complex and lacks mandatory ITSM enforcement. Giving a helpdesk technician the "Helpdesk Administrator" role grants them access to a portal where a single misclick can cause a major headache. To solve this, I’ve developed the Entra Helpdesk Portal (Community Edition)—an open-source, containerized application designed to act as an isolated "airlock" between your support team and your Entra ID tenant. Why This Adds Value to Your Tenant Instead of having technicians log into the Azure portal, they log into this clean, Material Design web interface. It leverages a backend Service Principal (using MSAL and the Graph API) to execute commands on their behalf. Strict Zero Trust: Logging in via Microsoft SSO isn’t enough. The app intercepts the token and checks the user’s UPN against a hardcoded ALLOWED_ADMINS whitelist in your Docker environment file. Mandatory ITSM Ticketing: You cannot enforce ticketing in the native Azure Portal. In this app, every write action prompts a modal requiring a valid ticket number (e.g., INC-123456). Local Audit Logging: All actions, along with the actor, timestamp, and ticket number, are written to an immutable local SQLite database (audit.db) inside the container volume. Performance: Heavy Graph API reads are cached in-memory with a Time-To-Live (TTL) and smart invalidation. Searching for users or loading Enterprise Apps takes milliseconds. What Can It Do? Identity Lifecycle: Create users, auto-generate secure 16-character passwords, revoke sign-in sessions, reset passwords, and delete specific MFA methods to force re-registration. Diagnostics: View a user's last 5 sign-in logs, translating Microsoft error codes into plain English. Group Management: Add/remove members to Security and M365 groups. App/SPN Management: Lazy-load raw requiredResourceAccess Graph API payloads to audit app permissions, and instantly rotate client secrets. Universal Restore: Paste the Object ID of any soft-deleted item into the Recycle Bin tab to instantly resurrect it. How Easy Is It to Setup? I wanted this to be universally deployable, so I compiled it as a multi-architecture Docker image (linux/amd64 and linux/arm64). It will run on a massive Windows Server or a simple Raspberry Pi. Setup takes less than 5 minutes: Create an App Registration in Entra ID and grant it the necessary Graph API Application Permissions (e.g., User.ReadWrite.All, AuditLog.Read.All). Create a docker-compose.yml file. Define your feature toggles. You can literally turn off features (like User Deletion) by setting an environment variable to false. version: '3.8' services: helpdesk-portal: image: jahmed22/entra-helpdesk:latest container_name: entra_helpdesk restart: unless-stopped ports: - "8000:8000" environment: # CORE IDENTITY - TENANT_ID=your_tenant_id_here - CLIENT_ID=your_client_id_here - CLIENT_SECRET=your_client_secret_here - BASE_URL=https://entradesk.jahmed.cloud - ALLOWED_ADMINS=email address removed for privacy reasons # CUSTOMIZATION & FEATURE FLAGS - APP_NAME=Entra Help Desk - ENABLE_PASSWORD_RESET=true - ENABLE_MFA_MANAGEMENT=true - ENABLE_USER_DELETION=false - ENABLE_GROUP_MANAGEMENT=true - ENABLE_APP_MANAGEMENT=true volumes: - entra_helpdesk_data:/app/static/uploads - entra_helpdesk_db:/app volumes: entra_helpdesk_data: entra_helpdesk_db: 4.Run docker compose up -d and you are done! I built this to give back to the community and help secure our Tier 1 operations. If you are interested in testing it out in your dev tenants or want to see the full architecture breakdown, you can read the complete documentation on my website here I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or any feature requests you might have!
Challenges with custom data provided resource reviews
I was thrilled to see the ability to review disconnected applications in Entra, and even more thrilled to see that the permission and its description are available to the reviewer, which addresses a significant gap present in group-based reviews. However, the current decision-tracking approach does not adequately replicate the closed-loop remediation model typically found in traditional IGA access reviews for integrated applications. Requiring reviewers to upload confirmation that revocations have been completed is problematic. This approach does not mitigate the core risk: access may remain in place due to fulfillment errors or be incorrectly retained, and the reviewer may unknowingly validate an inaccurate state. This can lead to a compliance incident or audit finding. A more effective solution would allow reviewers to upload a current export of access data, enabling the review system to reconcile intended revocations against the actual state. Any discrepancies could then be flagged for remediation where revocations were missed or have failed, or for validation where access was revoked and immediately reinstated (e.g., due to reviewer misjudgement), ideally supported by corresponding ticketing or justification. There are currently a lot of gaps in Entra ID access reviews, and while this new feature arguably resolved the worst one, I think it's headed down the wrong path. I am curious about other people's thoughts.
