Tag Archives: SharePoint Automation

Sites.Selected permissions provisioning automation

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Scenario

You administer Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online. Part of your daily activities is providing Microsoft Graph and SharePoint Sites.Selected API permissions to other users (developers).

In Aug/Sep 2023 Microsoft pushed an update that prevents site collection admins to create or update an Azure Access Control (ACS) principal (that was the way most of developers used to get Client Id and Client secret to access SharePoint site). So your users are probably getting something like Your SharePoint tenant admin doesn’t allow site collection admins to create or update an Azure Access Control (ACS) principal message attempting to create or update SharePoint App-only principal at AppRegNew.aspx or AppInv.aspx pages. Here are more details on the issue.

Microsoft and MVPs shared some technique how to provide Sites.Selected API permissions, but dealing with scripts manually, elevating individual permissions every time you need to run the script – it all takes time and not very efficient. More and more devs are reaching you on the app. So you want to automate this process.

Solution

Solution architecture

My way to automate it includes:

  • SharePoint list as a frontend
    here you can accept intake requests, organize approval workflow and display automation results
  • Azure Function App as a backend
    here will be your PowerShell script hosted that runs on scheduled basis and takes care of actual permissions provisioning

Solution details

High-level, getting application permissions to some specific SharePoint site is a two-step process:

  1. get application registration in Azure and properly configure it
  2. get permissions for this application to a specific SharePoint site

For the first step – check this and this articles. I’ll focus on the second step below.

You can provide Sites.Selected permissions for the app to a site with

I will be using second one one. Also PnP.PowerShell will be used to get access to SharePoint intake site and read/update requests from SharePoint list and so on.

Azure App Registration

I registered an admin Application in Azure – “SharePoint Automation App”, added Graph Sites.FullControl.All and SharePoint Sites.FullControl.All permissions, then added Microsoft Graph Directory.Read.All permissions and got tenant admin consent:

I generated a self-signed certificate and added it to the app:

This app will be used to call provide permissions, and to connect to the SharePoint front-end.

Users will register their applications in Azure, add Graph Sites.Selected and SharePoint Sites.Selected permissions, got tenant admin consent, then request permissions to the specific site by creating an intake request – new list item.

Front-End SharePoint Site

I created a SharePoint site for automation. This site will play a front-end role for users. I created a list “Sites.Selected” and updated list columns so I have the following fields:

  • Target Site Url
  • Application Id
  • Permissions (read/write)
  • Automation Output

In real-world (Prod) – You can (should) also implement approval workflow as you’d provide permissions for the application to the site only with this site owner approval. The PowerShell code behind should also validate site owner’s consent with app access to site. But for the sake of simplicity I’ll skip this in my demo.

Azure Function App

I created an Azure Function App with the following parameters:
– Runtime stack: PowerShell Core
– Version: 7.2.
– OS: Windows
– Hosting plan: Consumption

And then PowerShell timer-triggered function in Visual Studio Code.

Function requirements.psd1 (it takes a few hours for Azure to install modules; while modules are installing – you might see “[Warning] The first managed dependency download is in progress, function execution will continue when it’s done. Depending on the content of requirements.psd1, this can take a few minutes. Subsequent function executions will not block and updates will be performed in the background.”):

@{
    'Az' = '10.*'
    'PnP.PowerShell' = '2.*'
}

Azure Az module to access other Azure resources. PnP.PowerShell module will be used to access SharePoint.

I will keep my admin Azure registered app in a key vault, so need somehow to let the key vault know that this specific app can access this specific credentials. So I enabled system assigned managed Identity for the Function App:

MS: “This resource is registered with Azure Active Directory. The managed identity can be configured to allow access to other resources…”.
I’m going to use an object (principal) Id of this function to grant access to keyvault.

Azure key vault

Surely we do not hard-code app secrets. So we need a key vault o store app credentials.

I created a key vault under the same resource group in Azure and named it “SharePointAutomationDemo”. Then I added a roles assignment – “Key Vault Secret User” and “Key vault Reader” to the Function App via it’s managed identity:

I also assigned “Key Vault Administrator” role to the user (developer) who will add certificates/secrets to this key vault and develop Azure function code.

Code repository

https://github.com/VladilenK/Sites.Selected-Automation

Videos

Part 1: Getting Azure App Registration with Sites.Selected API Permissions

Part 2: SharePoint and Microsoft Graph API Sites.Selected permissions provisioning automation

Sites.Selected SharePoint API

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Sites.Selected MS Graph API permissions were introduced by Microsoft in March 2021. It was a good move towards site-level access for non-interactive (daemon) applications, but still developers were limited with only what MS Graph API provides for SharePoint. SharePoint CSOM and REST API still provides much more than MS Graph API.

So developers had to use AppInv.aspx at site level to provide ACS-based permissions to their apps to be able to use SharePoint CSOM and REST APIs. The bad news is ACS-based permissions have some downsides so some SharePoint/m365/security engineers consider them legacy and deprecated. But if we decide to disable SharePoint App-only service principals – all apps with ACS-based permissions provided via AppInv.aspx will stop working.

2021: Microsoft Graph Sites.Selected API

Microsoft Graph Sites.Selected API

Recently Microsoft introduced Sites.Selected SharePoint API permissions for registered Azure Apps! So from now developers should be fully happy with API permissions provided in Azure (without SharePoint ACS-based permissions).

2022: SharePoint Sites.Selected API

SharePoint Sites.Selected API

Why is this so important? Because this should allow us to be able to switch from ACS based permissions provided in SharePoint via AppInv.aspx to Azure-provided permissions and as a consequence – disable SharePoint-Apps only principal (‘set-spotenant -DisableCustomAppAuthentication $true’).

Why we are eager to disable Custom App Authentication in SharePoint? Simply say, SharePoint App-only service principals are not trackable (they all appeared as a “spo_service@support.onmicrosoft.com” id in all logs) and hard to manage (there is no way to get list of existing/registered SP app-only service principals, sites and their owners) – see more in this article.

So, SharePoint Sites.Selected application API permissions provided in Azure is a significient step to make Microsoft 365 SharePoint environment more secure and manageble.

More on the Sites.Selected:

References

Access SPO Site Programmatically via MS Graph API and SharePoint API

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Scenario

You are a software developer. Your company uses Microsoft Office 365 (SharePoint, Teams etc.). The need is to work with a specific site collection programmatically (from code – Python, C#, Java, PowerShell, JavaScript etc.) – e.g. upload/download documents, update list items, search etc.

The code must run without user interaction (unattended, aka daemon app). Sometimes this is also called “SharePoint Automation”.

The solution is based on a new Graph API feature – Sites.Selected and a classic SP-Only app.

Solution

  1. Register an Azure App and configure it as usual.
    Select API Permissions blade and add two permissions:
    – Microsoft Graph -> Applications Permissions -> “sites.selected”
    – SharePoint -> Applications Permissions -> “sites.selected“
  2. Request “Grant admin consent” from a tenant/global admin
  3. Request SharePoint admin to run PowerShell code (e.g. this one) to assign proper permissions to your azure app for a specific site collection (consider site owner consent)
  4. (optionally) Provide SharePoint API permissions:
    (require Site Collection Owner/Admin account) – use
    https://YourTenant.sharepoint.com/teams/YourSite/_layouts/15/appinv.aspx
    to add SharePoint API permissions to your app. E.g. full control permissions to site collection would be
<AppPermissionRequests AllowAppOnlyPolicy="true">  
   <AppPermissionRequest Scope="http://sharepoint/content/sitecollection" 
    Right="FullControl" />
</AppPermissionRequests>

Consider minimal permissions (e.g. Right=”Read” see more with Sumit)

Problem Solved

  • you get access to one and only one site collection (“least privilege” principal)
  • you get both – SharePoint API and Microsoft Graph API permissions to SharePoint
  • you can use app secret or certificate to authenticate – depending on what are your security requirements

Note: if your scenario require authenticated user present – the solution would be a little different: Connect-PnPOnline Interactive with Client App Id

Update:

Sites.Selected API MS Graph permissions was introduced by Microsoft in 2021. It was a huge step forward, but still devs were limited with MS Graph API against SharePoint.
So devs had to use AppInv at site level to provide ACS permissions to their apps to use SharePoint CSOM and REST APIs.
Recently Microsoft introduced Sites.Selected SharePoint API permissions for registered Azure Apps! So now devs should be fully happy without ACS-based permissions AppInv.aspx. (See more here on disabling SP Apps Only SPNs)

Thanks to Leon Armston and Scott Murdock

Update 2:

Microsoft announced end-of-life for ACS permissions, so we’d need to avoid ACS permissions for new development.

References: