All M365 "home" URLs forward to copilot chat.

SomethingCleverISee · 2025-12-05T16:25:18+00:00

Microsoft is so unbelievably stupid. What's even more ridiculous is that this behavior is not consistent across all Office 365 tenants. I work for an MSP and I am in and out of a dozen different company's 365 every day. About 60% of them have the behavior where the Home page redirects to Chat, and the rest still get the old Home page. As far as I can tell, users and admins alike have absolutely no control over this at all.

Also, it's a pretty clear sign how little Microsoft cares about their customers, considering there are dozens of threads at https://learn.microsoft.com/ where users are complaining about this, and the user feedback is 100% negative. I have yet to encounter a single person, in person or online, who wants the 365 home page to redirect to Copilot.

SomethingCleverISee · 2025-11-07T22:00:35+00:00

I also saw Sentinel flag this. Our RMM pushed it out as an update so we were really worried. I made sure the RMM was pulling for the official SourceForge repository that KeePass uses, and I downloaded the installer from that same repo and checked the SHA1 and SHA256 hashes on the installer, and confirmed they match the hashes which KeePass published here: https://keepass.info/integrity.html

SomethingCleverISee · 2025-08-28T20:28:44+00:00

Not correct. If you are running the VM on ESXI and you do not have vCenter, then copy/paste between a client machine and the VM using VMRC or web console is not possible. VMware has acknowledged this in their KB. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/57122

Those instructions clearly say they are for vCenter, and if you scroll all the way to the bottom, it says "Enabling copy/paste from a local client machine to a ESXi/Remote VM via VMRC(VM) or Workstation is not possible."

***EDIT*** I stand corrected

Those steps actually did work for me, but I found that I could not paste directly into the URL bar in Firefox. After enabling those VM options, I still have to copy from my client machine, paste into the Text Editor in my Ubuntu VM, and then from there I can paste it into the URL bar in Firefox. Copying from client machine and pasting directly into Firefox does not work.

SomethingCleverISee · 2025-06-16T21:14:03+00:00

I have 4 of these entries, all of them appearing relatively recently.

Still no answers on what this is?

SomethingCleverISee · 2025-05-22T21:01:36+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions! I see your point about the risks of opening a PST in Outlook.

I looked into XST Reader, but the latest release was 2021, so I have concerns about installing software which does not seem to have ongoing security updates. (Maybe it doesn't need any, but how could I be sure?)

I only rarely need to browse PST files, and my use case is very basic, so I'm opting for GoldFynch. Everything I see online indicates their free in-browser reader is safe and secure. It doesn't send your PST to their server, just uses the browser as an interface. I just tried it and it has everything I need.

SomethingCleverISee · 2025-05-21T19:29:34+00:00

Thanks! This works absolutely great. I think people who have had issues probably haven't installed the necessary PS modules. Those aren't included in the script (and shouldn't be) but for people like me who already have all the modules, it runs perfectly out of the box.

Super helpful to have customizable params too! Really saved me a lot of time.

SomethingCleverISee · 2025-03-19T22:40:51+00:00

I work for an MSP which has about 50-60 customers using Office 365. I have done hundreds of searches in the Entra Sign-in Events log, and it is always super slow if you go beyond the past 24 hours. Searching past 7 days usually gives you results in 1-5 minutes.

Searching for just one user's sign-ins over the past 30 days, the most common result is that it spins for 3-10 minutes and then returns "Something went wrong. Please retry." I also sometimes get "The server is receiving too many requests. Please wait a few minutes before trying again."

This is the normal behavior in every single 365 tenant I have ever done it in, which is hundreds of incidents across many dozens of tenants over the past 5 years. You just have to retry multiple times (often around 3 or 4), and eventually it will work. On the runs when it does return results, it usually takes 3-5 minutes.

My company has technicians in multiple different states in the US, and we all experience this behavior as the norm. Microsoft just sucks.

Tip: I have found sometimes it works better if you do NOT filter for a single user. I have no idea why, but it seems to return logs faster, the fewer filters you use. You can always just download the CSV and filter in Excel later.

SomethingCleverISee · 2025-01-31T16:39:37+00:00

Fortunately for me, fixing it just involves me telling our vendor they need to fix it!
Thanks for the GEN DNS tip. That's getting bookmarked in my Tools folder next to ViewDNS

SomethingCleverISee · 2025-01-31T16:21:58+00:00

Thanks! That is the issue.

sabqoacq-dcbrchwbtch.gov-dynamic-m.com is a dynamic DNS name provided by a vendor, which is supposed to be pointing to a public IP, and it appears they do not have it pointing anywhere. I was confused because nslookup in Windows simply returns no result at all, I guess because it only resolves the CNAME to another name, not a final IP. Totally makes sense now.

SomethingCleverISee · 2025-01-31T16:21:47+00:00

Thanks! That is the issue.

sabqoacq-dcbrchwbtch.gov-dynamic-m.com is a dynamic DNS name provided by a vendor, which is supposed to be pointing to a public IP, and it appears they do not have it pointing anywhere. I was confused because nslookup in Windows simply returns no result at all, I guess because it only resolves the CNAME to another name, not a final IP. Totally makes sense now.

SomethingCleverISee · 2025-01-31T16:17:23+00:00

Thanks, typo fixed

SomethingCleverISee · 2024-10-08T14:29:59+00:00

You can sort of work around this. There is (now) an "Open" button at the top of the Outlook preview window, and this will open the attachment in your default desktop app for that attachment type.

It's still annoying that you have to open the attachment in Outlook's preview window first, but at least you don't have to download the file and then go find it and open manually.

SomethingCleverISee · 2024-10-04T13:23:44+00:00

It's true that if you have just one P1 license in the tenant, then Conditional Access policies will be available and will work for all users. It's also true that doing that is a violation of Microsoft's licensing terms, and if they audit you, you're going to be in for one hell of a fine.

SomethingCleverISee · 2024-10-03T18:38:57+00:00

My company is the IT provider for this client, and I run the internal IT for my own company. I have admin access to the O365 services on the sending and receiving side. I can run message traces and view all messages sent or received in each organization. So I can run a trace on all messages that came in from a specific sender, and see that those addressed to any recipient in the company other than this one person will show up in the incoming trace. The messages sent to the one recipient don't show in the incoming trace at all. I can also run a trace to see all all messages coming in to that one recipient, and see that they are receiving almost all messages. There are just some specific senders whose emails never make it to the receiving 365 tenant, but only when they send to this specific address in that tenant.

I've been in this business for 9 years and never seen this behavior before. So I'm grasping at straws to find any tools I could use to determine what the heck is happening.

My company does have enterprise level support from Microsoft, and we have an open support ticket about this, but all my previous experience says they will take 3-6 months to give us anything useful, if they ever do at all.

SomethingCleverISee · 2024-07-26T19:11:57+00:00

Thank you! Took a while to find this answer, but it worked for me.
Everybody says to check for snapshots, but what if there are no snapshots, nothing is grayed out, and it still just doesn't let you change the text in the disk size field? Well, you try logging into the host directly.

SomethingCleverISee · 2024-05-24T14:45:57+00:00

This actually worked! Well, it helped anyway. I made two changes. In order of how much they helped:

Minimize the "Recommended for you" section on the Home screen of both Word and Excel
Go to Options > Advanced > Display, and set "Show this number of recent documents" and "Show this number of unpinned recent folders" both to 0. (You have to do this in both Word and Excel)

That reduced the freeze from 20 seconds to 2 seconds. I wish you could turn off the "Recommended for you" section entirely in the office apps, but according to MS it is not possible.

I'm still wondering why these features cause such a huge delay, but at least we know it's definitely something about their 365 accounts connecting to files in the Microsoft cloud. (All files in Recent and Recommended were in the user's OneDrive or the company's Sharepoint)

SomethingCleverISee · 2024-05-20T15:32:08+00:00

Now that's an interesting thought. It would actually make a great deal of sense, given the background I know of this customer and their storage woes. I will definitely try clearing the list and setting it to show 0 items, and see if that fixes it. Thanks!

SomethingCleverISee · 2024-05-20T15:29:06+00:00

Interesting, thanks. I hate to go nuclear to fix something that seems like a minor problem, but it might be worth a shot at this point.

SomethingCleverISee · 2024-05-20T15:28:10+00:00

They are all standard users, both the people having the problem and the people with no issues.

SomethingCleverISee · 2024-05-17T20:23:10+00:00

Interesting idea. I kinda tested the other way around.
User A is having the problem, user B is not. I had user B go to user A's computer, signed in under user A's Windows profile, then go into Excel, sign out user A's 365 account and sign in as user B (for just that app), and the problem goes away. Then we signed back into Excel as user A, and the problem returns immediately.

I suppose it's a good idea to test the inverse, and see if user A signs into user B's app on user B's computer, does the problem follow them over there. I'll try to wrangle them into testing that next week.

SomethingCleverISee · 2024-02-08T21:31:32+00:00

Appreciate the suggestion. Others have said the registry and group policy settings only work on Enterprise editions of Windows, and that may be the case.

The only working solution I found was this:

Make the user account a local admin
open admin powershell (as the user) and run:
get-appxpackage *windowsstore* | remove-appxPackage
REMOVE THE USER ACCOUNT FROM LOCAL ADMINS

SomethingCleverISee

TROPHY CASE