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While adding features to my latest update of the Create-LabUsers tool, I wanted to provide a way to generate and send test email data to randomized recipients. While generating a random list of recipients wasn’t terribly hard, what did take a bit more work is generating random text. … [ Continue reading ]
Update: I’ve added a shortlink for this tool: http://aka.ms/createlabusers.
Because you didn’t ask for it, I went ahead and added to it.
Well, that’s a lie. I actually had some really great ideas and feedback, so I’ve added a few new features that I wanted to draw attention to:
Today’s post is less about anything in particular than it is about jotting a few things down for personal reference.
I learned a couple of things over the last week while developing a tool. I’m sure I learned them once before, but as a person with finite storage and recall capacity, this tidbits were replaced by something I perceived to be of more timely import at the time (such as my kids’ birthday gifts, picking up a suit at the cleaners, a really great Detroit style pizza recipe I’ve finally put the finishing touches on, and how I’ve recently become a fan of grass-fed butter (well, technically butter made from milk produced by grass-fed cows, since you can’t really get butter to eat anything successfully)).… [ Continue reading ]
Today, while I was testing out some transport rules, I wanted to send a bunch of test messages to make sure they were firing correctly. I wanted to create some custom messages and be able to automate them, and I wanted to use an outside relay service that requires SMTP authentication.… [ Continue reading ]
As I help organizations transition to think cloud-first, one of my goals is to help them get the most out of their Office 365 investment. In this post, we’ll talk about tackling a corporate blog.
SharePoint Online comes with a number of out-of-the-box templates, and the one that most closely maps to the blog requirement is … wait for it … the blog site template.… [ Continue reading ]
While working with a customer last week, it came to my attention that the Get-UserHoldPolicies script I had put together to enumerate retention policies and eDiscovery cases that put a hold on content wasn’t displaying policies that were global. The types of policies I checked for were enumerated in a user’s InPlaceHolds mailbox property, but apparently, that field is populated only if a Security & Compliance retention policy explicitly specifies the mailbox.… [ Continue reading ]
With the advent of scammers, spammers, phishers, and other types of baddies, and the complementary rise in anti-malware, anti-spam, domain and sender verification techniques, we’re in a perpetual cat-and-mouse game. I’ve had several customers over the past few weeks ask me about best practices for configuring some of the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) features.… [ Continue reading ]
In Part 1 of this blog series, I went through the setup of the Splunk Add-On for Microsoft Cloud Services, which you can use to extract, query, and analyze data provided by the Office 365 Management Activity API. In this particular post, we’re going to explore the Microsoft Office 365 Reporting Add-On for Splunk, which you can use to review message trace data from Office 365.… [ Continue reading ]
I’ve had a number of customers ask me about configuring their monitoring systems to Office 365. So, rather than repeating the same information and re-issuing the same links (most of which contain outdated information), I’m going to put together a series on how to connect a few systems to Office 365. … [ Continue reading ]
Like most folks, I hate errors.
As a scripter, I hate seeing blood on the screen–to me, it means failure that I didn’t anticipate. When you’re trying to put tools out there for other folks to use, nothing toasts your peer’s or customer’s confidence like a tool that doesn’t fix itself or errors out without explanation.… [ Continue reading ]
Update: I’ve added a shortlink for this tool: http://aka.ms/createlabusers.
In testing out some of my other tools over the last few weeks, I’ve found it necessary to create a some test users. A lot of test users. Not a normal “a lot,” either. … [ Continue reading ]
A little over a year and a half ago, I started working on a tool for a really large Office 365 / BPOS-Dedicated migration to Office 365 Government Community Cloud. As part of that migration, I wrote this tool: Migrating EOP Settings Between Tenants. … [ Continue reading ]
Last week, I saw some internal discussion about trying to locate the source of a duplicate object error on-premises. While an advanced administrator will be able to figure it out by looking at the Connector Spaces for connected directories, it’s not necessarily obvious to a lot of people (especially if you’re not experienced with our identity management products).… [ Continue reading ]
Since the dawn of time (or at least, since the dawn of the Epoch), people have been inadvertently deleting stuff. As is attributed to Uncle Ben, “with great power comes great responsibility,” and so it is true with the system administrator. … [ Continue reading ]
Yesterday, I was asked if I had developed any testing tools for the Dynamics CRM suite availability—but, never having had to do much with them, I didn’t have anything available. I just built a quick tool today, and it covers all of the endpoints listed at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2655102/internet-accessible-urls-required-for-connectivity-to-microsoft-dynami… [ Continue reading ]