The hosting venue has changed to serve you better.
I meant to post this earlier, but I wanted to let everyone know that I’ve had the great honor of being able to write a book with some of the titans of Microsoft Consulting Services. The book has all new content for Office 365 based on our experience in the field, and even features current service release updates. … [ Continue reading ]
For those of you that have embarked upon the trek to Office 365, you’ve undoubtedly run (or at least heard of) IDFix. It detects and fixes a number of conditions that will cause the directory sync to report errors.
Today, I want to focus on a tool I wrote for a customer almost 2 years ago that addresses conditions not yet identified or remedied by IDFix. … [ Continue reading ]
Today, I had to subtract one list of users from another list of users. Some Excel wizards can do this with VLOOKUP, but I spend more time in trial-and-error with VLOOKUP and verifying my results that it would take to just do a CTRL-F for every object. … [ Continue reading ]
I’ve run into this delightful scenario a few times–the network team generates CSRs and certificates for the environment, and since they want to do SSL termination on their network devices, complete the certificate process there. When you ask for an export of the certificate from, say, an F5, they will just give you the unsigned certificate–so that when you import it into your server, you end up with something unusable, since it has no private key.… [ Continue reading ]
From time to time, we update the URLs and IP addresses that our services use. This happens as a normal course of business (deploying new services, adding new capacity in datacenters or regions). If your organization is trying to filter network traffic, you need to make sure you are allowing your users to these services. … [ Continue reading ]
*UPDATE* We have deprecated the Service Health Dashboard RSS Feed. For service health updates, you can go to https://portal.office.com/adminportal/home#/servicestatus.
Periodically, services in Office 365 may become affected by a number of things (network availability, regional network disruptions, upgrades to the service environment, etc).… [ Continue reading ]
Over the years, I’ve come to develop a lot of solutions (processes, scripts, workflows, and other tooling) to help customers get the most out of their investments and solve business problems.
One of the most important habits I’ve developed is making sure that I write everything down, since many customers will have similar types of issues or requirements. … [ Continue reading ]
WinRM, for those of you not in the know, is really the Microsoft answer to an age-old problem in the Windows world–remote command and task execution. It’s the Windows equivalent of the Unix rsh, a native implementation of the PsExec (albeit, with the added complexity that seeps into nearly all Microsoft technologies). … [ Continue reading ]
Here are some handy one-liners that you may find useful when managing Office 365.
Ok, some of them are a few lines, but they’re still handy.
So, you’re transitioning your Exchange 2003 environment to an Office 365 environment and desperately want to drop kick your Exchange 2003 server out the door. After migrating everyone’s email, you open ESM, delete all of the mailboxes and start to uninstall Exchange. … [ Continue reading ]
Boot from VHD is a great technology that enables you to host multiple self-contained operating systems on a single hard drive. Similar to dual-booting, but you don’t have to worry about installing applications over each other or overwriting program file updates because your secondary OS is fully contained within a single virtual hard disk file. … [ Continue reading ]
For any of you that use Postini for email services, setting up reinjection for the receive connectors in Exchange 2007 is a lot more work than allowing connection and relay through a vSMTP server in Exchange 2003.
Exchange 2007 has a lot of great features, such as the uber-powerful Exchange Management Shell.… [ Continue reading ]
LDIFDE is an oldie-but-goodie tool for finding specific information in Active Directory. If you know the name of the attribute that contains the data you’re looking for, you can construct a pretty powerful query.
For example, you can search for all computers in the Active Directory domain mydomain.com:… [ Continue reading ]
We have a customer with an IIS 6.0 application that crashes randomly–either the Application Pool worker process runs the server out of memory or hangs.
If you have a need to recycle the Application Pool between scheduled maintenance intervals, there are a couple of available solutions.… [ Continue reading ]
I recently found myself in a spot where I needed to troubleshoot a delegate issue–a user was set as a delegate but no longer was with the company and didn’t have a mailbox anymore, so periodic NDRs were being generated for mail destined for the delegate.… [ Continue reading ]