Cleaning Up Old Planner Tasks with PowerShell
Microsoft Purview supports retention policies for Planner tasks and that’s the supported way to remove old tasks from plans. But you can also remove old Planner tasks with PowerShell. Just for fun, we show how to find and delete old tasks using the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. Cleaning out obsolete tasks that have been hanging around plans for years speeds up client access. It’s a form of colonic irrigation for plans! https://office365itpros.com/2026/08/19/clean-up-planner-tasks/Calculating the Licensing Requirement for Entra Conditional Access Policies
After the discussion about the licensing gap prompts shown in the Entra admin center, here’s a PowerShell script to compute the set of user accounts that should have Entra P1 licenses. The information comes from the conditions property of conditional access policies with group and directory role membership expanded to find individual accounts. The set is checked against the set of users licensed for Entra P1 to find the accounts that need to be licensed. https://office365itpros.com/2026/08/18/find-entra-p1-accounts-to-license/How to Use JSON Batching to Permanently Remove Mailbox Items
Following up on the primer explaining how to use JSON batching, this article expands on the principles explored in the primer and explains how to permanently remove batches of mailbox items. Removing mailbox items requires more care and attention than updating some Entra ID user accounts, and we explain what the batch commands are to effect both permanent and recoverable deletions. A full working script is available for you to try out. https://office365itpros.com/2026/08/17/json-batching-mailbox-items/Creating a Week-by-Week Report for Open Planner Tasks
Accumulating statistics for open tasks in a Planner plan is helpful to understand how active team members are in clearing assigned tasks. Creating a report showing how the number of open tasks vary by team member over a six-week period delivers another type of insight. It’s the kind of thing that PowerShell is very good at. If data is available, we can report it in different ways! https://office365itpros.com/2026/08/11/open-tasks-report/How to Find Inactive (Stale) User Accounts
Inactive accounts can soak up a lot of paid-for but unused product licenses. With increases for Microsoft 365 licenses due to come into effect from 1 July 2026, it’s time to find and remove unused licenses from inactive user accounts. We discuss two approaches by using the Microsoft 365 Licensing Report or a PowerShell script that assesses inactivity based on sign-in dates and refresh token baselines. https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/09/find-inactive-accounts/How Permissions Creep Can Halt the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK
The Microsoft Graph PowerShell Command Line tools app is how people run Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK cmdlets. The app can suffer from permissions creep, meaning that over time, the app accrues a set of delegated permissions used by people to access different types of Microsoft 365 and Entra ID information. All is fine until an internal limit is reached, at which point authentication fails and some permissions must be pruned. https://office365itpros.com/2026/07/23/permissions-creep-sdk/How to Identify Obsolete SharePoint Online Sites with PowerShell
Microsoft 365 has been around for many years, and it’s likely that a tenant has some obsolete SharePoint Online sites. The LastModifiedDateTime property is an unreliable basis to make the decision because background processing can update the property. This article explains how to identify obsolete sites based on usage data extracted from the Microsoft Graph. Combining the usage data with basic site properties taken from SharePoint creates a report that should help administrators to figure out what sites they should consider removing. https://office365itpros.com/2026/07/13/find-obsolete-sites/The Grief and Joys of New PowerShell Releases
A new version of the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK (V2.38) is available, as is a new version of the Exchange Online Management module. They don’t work well together. It’s annoying and beyond frustrating that two critical PowerShell modules in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem cannot work together. If anything, the situation is getting worse. On the upside, I found out about two cmdlets that I might never use – but who knows! https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/22/powershell-woes-and-cmdlets/Using Graph Delta Queries with Entra ID Groups
Delta queries are a Microsoft Graph mechanism to allow applications to query resources to find objects that have changed since a baseline was established. The technique is most useful for applications that need to synchronize a local store with online content. It’s not an appropriate method to use for reporting changes to Entra ID groups because knowing that an object changed doesn’t mean much by itself. https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/25/graph-delta-queries-entra-id-groups/I built a free, open-source M365 security assessment tool - looking for feedback
I work as an IT consultant, and a good chunk of my time is spent assessing Microsoft 365 environments for small and mid-sized businesses. Every engagement started the same way: connect to five different PowerShell modules, run dozens of commands across Entra ID, Exchange Online, Defender, SharePoint, and Teams, manually compare each setting against CIS benchmarks, then spend hours assembling everything into a report the client could actually read. The tools that automate this either cost thousands per year, require standing up Azure infrastructure just to run, or only cover one service area. I wanted something simpler: one command that connects, assesses, and produces a client-ready deliverable. So I built it. What M365 Assess does https://github.com/Daren9m/M365-Assess is a PowerShell-based security assessment tool that runs against a Microsoft 365 tenant and produces a comprehensive set of reports. Here is what you get from a single run: 57 automated security checks aligned to the CIS Microsoft 365 Foundations Benchmark v6.0.1, covering Entra ID, Exchange Online, Defender for Office 365, SharePoint Online, and Teams 12 compliance frameworks mapped simultaneously -- every finding is cross-referenced against NIST 800-53, NIST CSF 2.0, ISO 27001:2022, SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS v4.0.1, CMMC 2.0, CISA SCuBA, and DISA STIG (plus CIS profiles for E3 L1/L2 and E5 L1/L2) 20+ CSV exports covering users, mailboxes, MFA status, admin roles, conditional access policies, mail flow rules, device compliance, and more A self-contained HTML report with an executive summary, severity badges, sortable tables, and a compliance overview dashboard -- no external dependencies, fully base64-encoded, just open it in any browser or email it directly The entire assessment is read-only. It never modifies tenant settings. Only Get-* cmdlets are used. A few things I'm proud of Real-time progress in the console. As the assessment runs, you see each check complete with live status indicators and timing. No staring at a blank terminal wondering if it hung. The HTML report is a single file. Logos, backgrounds, fonts -- everything is embedded. You can email the report as an attachment and it renders perfectly. It supports dark mode (auto-detects system preference), and all tables are sortable by clicking column headers. Compliance framework mapping. This was the feature that took the most work. The compliance overview shows coverage percentages across all 12 frameworks, with drill-down to individual controls. Each finding links back to its CIS control ID and maps to every applicable framework control. Pass/Fail detail tables. Each security check shows the CIS control reference, what was checked, what the expected value is, what the actual value is, and a clear Pass/Fail/Warning status. Findings include remediation descriptions to help prioritize fixes. Quick start If you want to try it out, it takes about 5 minutes to get running: # Install prerequisites (if you don't have them already) Install-Module Microsoft.Graph, ExchangeOnlineManagement -Scope CurrentUser Clone and run git clone https://github.com/Daren9m/M365-Assess.git cd M365-Assess .\Invoke-M365Assessment.ps1 The interactive wizard walks you through selecting assessment sections, entering your tenant ID, and choosing an authentication method (interactive browser login, certificate-based, or pre-existing connections). Results land in a timestamped folder with all CSVs and the HTML report. Requires PowerShell 7.x and runs on Windows (macOS and Linux are experimental -- I would love help testing those platforms). Cloud support M365 Assess works with: Commercial (global) tenants GCC, GCC High, and DoD environments If you work in government cloud, the tool handles the different endpoint URIs automatically. What is next This is actively maintained and I have a roadmap of improvements: More automated checks -- 140 CIS v6.0.1 controls are tracked in the registry, with 57 automated today. Expanding coverage is the top priority. Remediation commands -- PowerShell snippets and portal steps for each finding, so you can fix issues directly from the report. XLSX compliance matrix -- A spreadsheet export for audit teams who need to work in Excel. Standalone report regeneration -- Re-run the report from existing CSV data without re-assessing the tenant. I would love your feedback I have been building this for my own consulting work, but I think it could be useful to the broader community. If you try it, I would genuinely appreciate hearing: What checks should I prioritize next? Which security controls matter most in your environment? What compliance frameworks are most requested by your clients or auditors? How does the report land with non-technical stakeholders? Is the executive summary useful, or does it need work? macOS/Linux users -- does it run? What breaks? I have tested it on macOS, but not extensively. Bug reports, feature requests, and contributions are all welcome on GitHub. Repository: https://github.com/Daren9m/M365-Assess License: MIT (free for commercial and personal use) Runtime: PowerShell 7.x Thanks for reading. Happy to answer any questions in the comments.
