Office 365 company branding requirements have changed

*** Update ***

The issue with my tenant not displaying company branding as it used to was due to a bug in the interface. Microsoft have now rectified that and I have access to company branding as I once used to.

It seems that the requirements to configure Office 365 company branding have changed. The official documentation is here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fundamentals/customize-branding#license-requirements

which says:

License requirements

Adding custom branding requires one of the following licenses:

Azure AD Premium 1
Azure AD Premium 2
Office 365 (for Office apps)

However, I definitely know this wasn’t the case until very recently, because a tenant I have without Azure AD P1 or P2 that allowed company branding configuration and now does not. So, something has indeed changed recently and I can find no acknowledgement or documentation of that. The existing branding of the tenant remains unchanged but I can no longer make changes.

If you don’t have Azure AD P1 or P2 in your environment you can always sign up for a 30 day trial and make changes. However, after that 30 days ends you’ll need to buy a full Azure AD P1 or P2 license it seems, if you wish to modify the company branding it seems.

I would have thought that in a world where we want to make tenants more secure using something like branding to help reduce the risk of phishing attacks tricking users into putting their details into false portals, the ability to brand a tenant would be available to all licenses.

Hopefully, this is simply an over sight by Microsoft and the ability is returned. However, for now it appears they are fully enforcing the licensing when it comes to company branding and requiring an Azure AD P1 or P2 licenced user to make changes.

CIAOPS Need to Know Microsoft 365 Webinar – December

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Join me for the free monthly CIAOPS Need to Know webinar. Along with all the Microsoft Cloud news we’ll be taking a look at Power Virtual Agents.

Shortly after registering you should receive an automated email from Microsoft Teams confirming your registration, including all the event details as well as a calendar invite.

You can register for the regular monthly webinar here:

December Webinar Registrations

(If you are having issues with the above link copy and paste – https://bit.ly/n2k2212

The details are:

CIAOPS Need to Know Webinar – December 2022
Friday 16th of December 2022
11.00am – 12.00am Sydney Time

All sessions are recorded and posted to the CIAOPS Academy.

The CIAOPS Need to Know Webinars are free to attend but if you want to receive the recording of the session you need to sign up as a CIAOPS patron which you can do here:

http://www.ciaopspatron.com

or purchase them individually at:

http://www.ciaopsacademy.com/

Also feel free at any stage to email me directly via director@ciaops.com with your webinar topic suggestions.

I’d also appreciate you sharing information about this webinar with anyone you feel may benefit from the session and I look forward to seeing you there.

Microsoft 365 incident response training

In early 2023 I’ll be running an incident response training course for Microsoft 365 environments. Training will held over four consecutive weeks. Each session will be two (2) hours and run from 9am Sydney time.The dates are:

Wednesday January 11th 2023 – Before an incident. What you need to do to prepare

Wednesday January 18th 2023 – During an incident. What you need to do when an incident occurs

Wednesday January 25th 2023 – After an incident. What needs to be done after an incident has occurred

Wednesday February 1st 2023 – Lab exercises and group best practice discussions

The sessions will be recorded and other materials from the sessions (checklists, etc) will be available to attendees afterwards.

This event will be conducted remotely via Microsoft Teams.

The aim of this training is to help you better prepare for a security incident inside the Microsoft 365 environment. You’ll learn what settings you should enable and what processes you should have in place before an incident occurs. The sessions will also take you through common examples of incidents and help you understand what needs to be done when they occur and how to minimise risk and impact to a business. The sessions will also take your through the post-incident process to build confidence with what information needs to be maintained and how to prevent similar incidents re-occurring. The final session will be a group hands on lab and discussion so you can put all the skills you have learned to the test.

The price for this event will be:

Gold Enterprise Patron = Free

Gold Patron = $33 inc GST

Silver Patron = $99 inc GST

Bronze Patron = $176 inc GST

Non Patron = $399 inc GST

You can learn more about the CIAOPS Patron community at www.ciaopspatron.com.

I hope that you’ll join me in January for this event as I believe it provides some much needed training in a very important aspect of managing and securing Microsoft 365. If you are serious about security for Microsoft 365, then you need a plan and this training will aim to give you just that plus some experience to boot!

You can register you interest in attending this course here – http://bit.ly/ciaopsroi after which I’ll be in contact with you to arrange payment and get you enrolled.

As always, if you have any questions about this training please email me on – director@ciaops.com.

I hope to see you there.