If you're a Windows 10 or 11 user you'll be familiar with the toast notifications that appear in the bottom right of your screen. These are a great way to get a quick message to the user without interrupting what they're doing. In this article we'll look at how to send a toast notification from PowerShell.

We could use the excellent BurntToast PowerShell module to send a toast notification, but in the interests of reducing the number of third-party modules installed on client machines we'll be using the underlying .NET APIs directly as our needs are fairly simple.

Sending toast notifications is fairly simple once you get to grips with the underlying XML schema but we want our Toasts to be next-level so we're going to make them

Creating Fields​

We're adding three role custom fields for devices with the Windows Laptop role:

You will find more excellent uses for NinjaOne custom fields on the Dojo, on Stephen Murphy's blog and on Luke Whitelock's blog.

Custom fields are a great way to store arbitrary data from your devices in NinjaOne. In this post I will explore a few examples, some using code from CyberDrain, which store data in NinjaOne custom fields.

This post was updated on 2022/12/22 to add a new script to run a speedtest on a device and store the results in NinjaOne.

Background information​

Ninja doesn't currently support native AV monitoring via Windows Security Center, integrated AV packages are monitored but what if you need more?

Creating Fields​

We're going to create one role custom field for devices with the Windows Desktop or Windows Laptop role:

I'm the author of the NinjaOne PowerShell module so when I was looking for a quick way to identify duplicate devices I turned to that module and the NinjaOne API to find a solution.

About this script​

This script is a quick way to identify duplicate devices in your NinjaOne instance. It can return a full listing of all devices grouped by serial number, it can also just return the ID, last contact date and serial number for the device with the oldest last contact date.

Did you know, when you have a retention policy configured for OneDrive in Microsoft 365 you lose the ability to recursively delete folders. The OneDrive client often handles this by recursing through the folder tree to remove the online copies but sometimes that doesn't work and in those cases you can end up stuck with a folder tree that you would have to manually recurse to remove the offending folders by first emptying them entirely before OneDrive will let you delete them.

Well that's never going to happen ;-)

Enter PowerShell.

:::info Required Modules You'll need the PnP.PowerShell module for this script. Install with Install-Module 'PnP.PowerShell' :::

title: Getting computer information from your NinjaOne agent into your HaloPSA self service portal authors: mikey tags: [ HaloPSA, NinjaOne, PowerShell ]​

Background information​

The NinjaOne agent gives you the ability to customise your system tray and add things like about text, email links, a help request form, a URL and other things. Unfortunately HaloPSA doesn't currently support hooking into NinjaOne's help request form (don't worry, we're talking to NinjaOne and Halo Service Solutions about this!) so we're left with a bit of a workaround as a solution.

I've released another PowerShell module; this one is called MSGraphMail and it's a simple PowerShell Graph API email client implementation which was requested by one of our MSP customers to help with transitioning their setup from a legacy SMTP server to Microsoft 365 without redeveloping a very bespoke workflow!

About this script​

HaloPSA is improving at a phenomenal rate - one of the latest enhancements relates to embedding the "customer portal" inside Teams for easier access by customers - this is early days for this enhancement to Halo and at present there isn't really a way to push this tab into customer environments... Until now!

Using the script below you can push any website as a tab to your customers' Teams environments. First a couple of configuration pre-requisites.

1. You'll need to have setup the Secure App Model (Thanks Gav for the superb write-up!)
2. You'll need to know the name of the Team and Channel you want to deploy the tab - currently the script will use the same details for all customers!