3rd party app management with SCAPPMAN (pt. 1)

by | Jul 30, 2021 | Cloud, Endpoint & Security, Microsoft

Scappman_logo (1).gif

Introduction

SCAPPMAN is a “Software as a Service” platform that allows organizations of any size to simplify and manage application and patch management for Microsoft Intune.

It is a Belgian-based start-up that made the choice of opting for a full cloud management experience (the customer does not have to install or maintain any components themselves), and aims to be known for its expertise, innovation and flexibility.

Because especially patch management can be a burden within the built-in components of Microsoft Intune, many organizations can surely benefit from this solution!

In the first section of this series, I will focus on licensing and onboarding.

Licensing

A 30-day trial (which is automatically started at onboarding through this link is the first step into “scappman-world”. It allows you to fiddle with a fully functional environment and start deploying & updating apps.

After the initial 30 days, you are offered to convert the trial towards a full “subscription”. The step gathers all assigned Microsoft Intune SKU’s and provisions a scappman license for it.

This is a double-edged sword; you can have 200 Intune licenses available in your tenant, but only 20 assigned.
Only the 20 users will be licensed for scappman. However, all 20 users will be taken into account, and there is no way to only license scappman for a limited scope of users within your tenant. (Which actually makes sense, you don’t want to secure only a subset of users of your organization, right?)

Pricing is quite transparent and based on the following graduated scales:

# of usersprice per user per month
1-50€ 2
51-250€ 1
251-5000€ 0,3
All prices are ex. VAT and based on a monthly subscription.

Onboarding

This will be by far the shortest topic that I will cover throughout this entire series. Because – and I am not approaching this from any commercial angle- onboarding really is a breeze.

You browse to https://portal.scappman.com, click register and sign in with Global Admin credentials. Then, a confirmation screen appears which will create an app registration with the following permissions:

This allows SCAPPMAN to integrate with your existing Azure AD and Endpoint Manager environment, and to act as an additional layer for application management and patching.

After signing in, the portal opens, which is your “access” to all of SCAPPMAN features, opens:

What’s next?

In this “episode”, I discussed both licensing and onboarding. In the following days and weeks, I will be focussing on actual configuration and daily usage of SCAPPMAN. Stay tuned!

Retrieving all Hybrid AAD joined Devices

by | Jul 23, 2021 | Azure AD

When starting a pilot for Hybrid Azure AD join, it can be useful to keep track of the number of devices that currently are already Hybrid Azure AD joined.

The most straight-forward way to do so is within the GUI of the Azure AD portal:

However, when used for reporting or other reasons, a scripted solution often is a better fit. The below PowerShell snippet returns all devices that are:

  • Known in Azure AD
  • Joined in a local domain
  • Running Windows 10

A requirement to run this script is being connected to Azure AD by using Connect-AzureAD for instance.

Get-AzureADDevice -All $true |Where-Object {($_.DeviceTrustType -eq "ServerAD") -and ($_.DeviceOSType -eq "Windows") -and ($_.DeviceOSVersion -like "10*")}

Run AAD Connect Sync & Monitor Status

by | Jul 22, 2021 | Azure AD, Scripting

Depending on the size of an AD environment (and more specifically, the number and location of objects that are in scope to be synced), a delta sync can take anywhere between a couple of seconds and significantly longer.

Checking if a sync currently is running is possible using a couple of methods. When sticking to PowerShell, the following commands can be utilized:

Start-AdSyncSyncCycle: running this command interactively when a sync is running will result in an “in your face” error message similar to the following:

Get-AdSyncScheduler: this command outputs the configuration settings of the sync process and also includes the state, wether or not it is running:

While all of the above are usable, they are not that user friendly, and require a user to retry the command in order to know *when* sync has been completed.

The below PowerShell code (let’s not call it a script, shall we?) does the following things:

  • Checks if a sync process currently is running
  • If not, starts a delta sync
  • Notifies the user / admin when the delta sync is finished
# verify if ADSync module is loaded, and if not, load it.
$module = Get-Module "ADsync"
if ($module -eq $null)
{
Import-Module AdSync
}else
{
    Write-Host "ADSync Module already loaded"
}

# verify if a sync is currently running. If not, start a delta sync
$sync = Get-AdSyncScheduler

if ($sync.SyncCycleInProgress -eq $False)
{
Start-AdSyncSyncCycle -Policytype "Delta" |Out-Null
}

# periodically test if sync is running until it's... not running anymore
do {
    Write-Host "Azure AD Connect Sync Cycle in Progress..." -ForegroundColor "Yellow"
    $sync = Get-AdSyncScheduler
    
} until ($sync.SyncCycleInProgress -eq $False)

Write-Host "Azure AD Connect Sync Cycle is finished." -ForegroundColor "Green"