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January 9, 2016February 24, 2021

Wipe Content from an Exchange Online Mailbox

This tool has been updated with new options. See https://bhr.62e.myftpupload.com/2017/10/19/update-to-wipe-exchange-online-mailbox-script/. This tool also has a new home: https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Wipe-ExchangeOnlineMailbox/

Periodically over the years, I’ve run into content problems trying to migrate data to Exchange Online using third-party migration tools–they somehow get stuck, don’t like something existing in the destination mailbox (or didn’t write it properly in the first place) and you need a clean mailbox to restart the process. … [ Continue reading ]

December 9, 2015

Add Office 365 Tenant Proxy Address to Exchange objects with Email Address Policy Disabled

If your organization is like a lot of them out there, you have mailbox users without the email address policy applied. It’s a pretty common practice to work around name changes, users with similar names or middle initials, or one-off primary SMTP addresses.… [ Continue reading ]

December 3, 2015August 27, 2021

Finding Active Directory objects with Inheritance Disabled

From time to time, an issue that crops up during Exchange or Office 365 migrations is the dreaded “insufficient access rights:”

It’s commonly manifested like this (though I have seen it displayed other ways as well):

Warning: Unable to update Active Directory information for the source mailbox at the end of the move.

… [ Continue reading ]

November 30, 2015September 13, 2018

Removing a folder across OneDrive for Business sites

This tool has been deprecated and replaced with the OneDrive for Business Admin Tool: http://aka.ms/OneDriveAdmin.

On a customer call a few weeks ago, I was asked if we could remove a specific folder across all (or a subset of) their OneDrive for Business sites. … [ Continue reading ]

November 18, 2015January 25, 2023

Reset AADSync or AADConnect Password Hash Sync Configuration

While troubleshooting a Password Hash Sync issue with a customer, I found myself needing to trigger a full password hash sync for various connectors. Password Hash Sync is a separate process from the AADSync process. It’s not a difficult process, but becomes time consuming (especially if you have a lot of connectors from which to choose).… [ Continue reading ]

November 16, 2015

Office 365 PAC File

When we talk about Office 365 services with our customers, a lot of the discussion revolves around the networking components. While we generally have a “good idea” of networking, we’re not experts in your technology and will frequently tell you to go talk to your vendors. … [ Continue reading ]

November 2, 2015August 1, 2022

Exchange 2013 Management Server for Office 365

For most of our large enterprise, commercial, and government customers, an Exchange hybrid environment provides a validated and supported method for deploying, migrating, and managing both an on-premises Exchange organization as well as Office 365.

In some cases, though (such as migrating from a hosted platform or other 3rd-party products that don’t have Active Directory integration), you may not need everything hybrid provides or may not have a need to support the infrastructure migrating mailboxes cross-premises. … [ Continue reading ]

October 15, 2015

Add an Email Address Template to all Email Address Policies

So your company just bought another company. Or you’re moving to Exchange Online. Or you registered a new domain. Any reason, really, that you could want an email address template added to all of your Email Address Policies.

Not so bad if you have one or two policies But what if you have 10? … [ Continue reading ]

October 15, 2015

Bulk Upload Photos to Exchange Online

Ever since the advent of DirSync, you’ve been able to add a picture’s binary content to the thumbnailPhoto attribute in AD and synchronize it to Office 365. This blob would be rendered as a photo next to the user’s name in Outlook, OWA, and Lync. … [ Continue reading ]

October 12, 2015

Subscribe to the Office 365 URLs and IP Addresses RSS Feed in Outlook

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 ]

October 12, 2015

Subscribe to the Office 365 Service Health Dashboard RSS Feed in Outlook

*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 ]

October 9, 2015January 25, 2023

Switching from Federated to Cloud Auth (AD FS to Dirsync/AADSync + Password Hash Sync or Password Hash Sync Failover)

A few years ago, we released “DirSync with Password Hash Synchronization,” and it was kind of an all-or-nothing choice. You could either have a synchronized account database with synchronized password hashes (so users would authenticate in the cloud), or a federated environment. … [ Continue reading ]

October 1, 2015

Storing PowerShell Credentials in the local user registry

From time to time, it may be necessary to save credentials for automating some portion of a script or function. Here is a method to save and retrieve those credentials as a secure string from the current user’s registry hive as opposed to saving them in plain text or as a secure string in a file. … [ Continue reading ]

September 30, 2015

Configure Coexistence Mail Routing without a Secondary Routing Domain

Recently, I had to work with a customer whose existing mail host was (surprise) not excited to configure a secondary domain for us to help migrate out of the hosted environment.

To give a little background, when we configure a traditional hybrid environment (I love using those terms together), we are configuring two disparate environments to share a single address space. … [ Continue reading ]

May 13, 2015

Manually configure Outlook for Office 365

In case you ever need to configure Outlook for an Office 365 tenant that *does not* have AutoDiscover records published, here is how to do it.

1. Log into PowerShell for tenant and run the following command:
Get-Recipient | Select-Object Identity,Mail,ExchangeGuid | Export-Csv .\recipientlist.csv… [ Continue reading ]