A Windows computer with Windows PowerShell 5.1.

You should consider signing up for an Office 365 trial tenant. Use a non-production/dev tenant for testing.

Access to an Office 365 tenant with Global Admin permissions.

Prerequisitesįor you to follow along successfully, make sure that you have the following requirements in place. Most of the walkthrough instruction will be done in PowerShell. With that said, don’t expect to see many click-and-point instructions in this article.

Use the app and certificate to authenticate and connec to Exchange Online PowerShell.

Generate and upload a self-signed certificate.

In this article, you will learn how to prepare to use the EXO V2 module to run Exchange Online unattended scripts with app-only modern authentication. This new version added the ability to use a certificate-based authentication associated with an Azure AD app. Fortunately, Microsoft has released Exchange Online V2 PowerShell module version 2.0.3-preview. Previously, those two conditions could not be met with the existing solutions.

PowerShell scripts must authenticate securely without having to exclude a service account for multi-factor authentication in Office 365.

PowerShell scripts must use modern authentication while keeping the ability to run unattended.

Sooner than later, admins need to redesign their scripts while considering the following: Then, the plan was moved to a tentative date of the second half of 2021. Microsoft initially planned to remove basic authentication for Exchange Online on October 13, 2020. This would mean that your scripts are still using basic authentication.

However, it is unlikely that you’re using MFA to authenticate and connect to Exchange Online via PowerShell for unattended scripts. If you’re an Office 365 administrator, you’re probably using PowerShell scripts to perform various automation tasks.

Office 365 modern authentication