WinRM Error: Basic authentiction is currently disabled in the client configuration

When you try to establish a remote PowerShell connection to Exchange Online, you may see the following error message:

Connecting to remote server outlook.office365.com failed with the following error message: The WinRM client cannot process the request.
Basic authentication is currently disabled in the client configuration. Change the client configuration and try the request again.
For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic.
(-2146233087)

If Easy365Manager throws the error message, it may look like this:

This problem is caused by the WinRM client basic authentication being changed from the default value of ‘true’ to ‘false.’

To verify and fix this, do the following:

Ensure that the WinRM service is running. If that’s not the case, then start it:

PS C:\> (Get-Service WinRM).Status
Stopped
PS C:\> Start-Service WinRM
PS C:\> (Get-Service WinRM).Status
Running

Next, check the status of the WinRM client settings:

PS C:\> & winrm get winrm/config/client/auth
Auth
    Basic = false
    Digest = true
    Kerberos = true
    Negotiate = true
    Certificate = true
    CredSSP = false

(skip the ‘&’ if you’re running it from a command prompt instead of PowerShell)

If you can confirm that Basic authentication is set to false, change it to true using the following command:

PS C:\> & winrm set winrm/config/client/auth '@{Basic="true"}'
Auth
    Basic = true
    Digest = true
    Kerberos = true
    Negotiate = true
    Certificate = true
    CredSSP = false

There is no need to restart your system, but you need to restart AD Users & Computers to force Easy365Manager to establish a new connection to Exchange Online.