The hosting venue has changed to serve you better.
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
I happened to run into the same issue twice in one week–once with a large customer, and once with one of our partners.
Here's a synopsis of the issue:
Mailboxes cannot be migrated via 3rd-party tools because msExchMailboxGuid attribute in cloud is populated due to DirSync/AADSync.… [ 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.
import-module MSOnline
$cred = Get-Credential
Connect-MSOLService -credential $cred
I’ve been battling an issue for a few days now and finally stumbled upon a workable solution via PowerShell.
One of my customers has an existing Exchange 2007 deployment. The OWA instance is configured to only use NTLM authentication. ExRCA (http://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com… [ Continue reading ]
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 ]
So, you had a bit of nasty malware. You’re almost back to square one, but have now found yourself in the unfortunate position of having missing services–specifically the Background Intelligent Transfer Service and Windows Update services.
Never fear. These, too, can be recreated in the event that your System Restore points are borked. … [ Continue reading ]
Ran into an interesting customer issue regarding connecting to a wireless network. For whatever reason, this laptop can’t see the wireless network (though others in the office can). This laptop can connect to other WiFi networks without issue.
My laptop, for example, was able to connect without issue. … [ Continue reading ]
Tonight I found myself recovering a VM on a Windows 2008 R2 cluster connected to an MD3000i SAN. To make very long and painful story short, it appears that someone applied a series of Windows Updates and then a Dell DSM update that screwed up the multipathing.… [ Continue reading ]