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From time to time, I run into environments where things are configured in “non-standard” ways. Granted, we don’t have a lot of specificity or documentation around some attribute configurations because the default configuration has been tested by the people who created the software and works in almost every conceivable situation. … [ Continue reading ]
A few months ago, I developed a script/tool to use for a rather large customer divesting from an Office 365 Dedicated environment. As part of the exit, they wanted a contact object in their GAL for every user, contact, and distribution list that existed in the source Office 365 environment.… [ 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 ]
On a project earlier this year, I had to create random passwords for user accounts as part of a provisioning tool. Perpetually trying to find the fastest way to do something, I came up with a one-liner that you can use to create a random text string from the following ASCII printable characters:
!”#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~0123456789
To create the passwords, I use this bit of magic:
PS> $Password = ([char[]]([char]33..[char]95) + ([char[]]([char]97..[char]126)) + 0..9 | sort {Get-Random})[0..8] -join ''
PS> $Password
Z-=$fNgb!… [ Continue reading ]
Today, I saw a question come up as to how to block a message when it’s sent to two different classes of users at the same time. Let’s say you want to be able to send to John@domain1.com, Bob@domain2.com, and Jane@domain3.com (list 1) or to Mark@domain4.com, Sue@domain5.com, and Mary@domain6.com (list 2), but any time those users from both list 1 AND list 2 appear in the To/CC of the *same* email message, you want it to be blocked. … [ Continue reading ]
In my last Google migration post, I talked about creating a MigrationWiz project with the correct resource and folder mappings to support a large-scale project.
One of the requirements is that the resource calendar *must* be opened/mounted on the calendar of the admin user that you’ll be using on the Google side. … [ Continue reading ]
*Update*
The script for this post has been updated with new parameters and requires a new version of the BitTitan PowerShell Module.
Tonight, while working with another consultant, we ran into a migration challenge–how to migrate Google resources and calendars to Office 365 shared mailboxes.… [ Continue reading ]
Today, I had a customer ask me for an ActiveSync device report. Normally, this is a somewhat simple task (Get-Mailbox | Get-ActiveSyncDevice), but in a large environment with hundreds of domains representing different agencies or business units, that is kind of an unwieldy report to run (as well as including a lot of data for out-of-scope users).… [ Continue reading ]
So, during the course of my current project, I’ve been able to re-use a lot of scripts that I’ve spent years developing and reworking. This time through, though, I’ve found that in trying to make them consumable by other people, I need to update them with command-line parameters (you know, like some sort of grown-up scripter).… [ Continue reading ]
I had a customer migrate some mailboxes a few weeks ago, and they’re now just getting some NDRs. Here’s a sample NDR:
To fix this, you can take the NDR that you receive, copy/paste it into this function, and then take the resultant decoded x500 address and add it back to the proxyAddress array for the recipient.… [ Continue reading ]
I wrote the original Proxy PAC tool for a customer almost a year ago, and since have added a lot of new functionality. Rather than updating my previous blog posts about it, I thought I would start a fresh thread. If you want some background on how Proxy PAC files work and how to distribute them to your users via GPO or WPAD, I would suggest taking a look at my posts dealing with those topics:
Now, on to the new stuff.… [ Continue reading ]
* UPDATE* After doing this originally, I decided to take a different route and write it back to the on-premises AD, so that way, the objects are synchronous. This post now reflects the updated content.
A few weeks ago, I had an issue where I needed to remove a proxy address from the proxyAddresses array of a user being synchronized to Office 365. … [ 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 ]
Update: There are new cmdlets available for this task. This blog is for historical reference only. A new, updated process is available here (https://www.undocumented-features.com/2017/04/29/disable-office-365-groups-creation-redux/).
Office 365 Groups are a (somewhat) new feature that act both like a distribution list and a public folder or shared mailbox. … [ Continue reading ]
While working on my latest project, I encountered a significant number of objects with malformed SMTP addresses. These appeared to have been objects that had been somehow manually modified over the years by directly writing to the proxyAddresses attribute in Active Directory, bypassing an API that would check for correctly-formatted addresses.… [ Continue reading ]
So, a million years and tens of thousands of lines of code ago, I wrote a script for a customer to populate the Office 365 UsageLocation property (Set-MsolUser -UsageLocation) with the ISO country codes from Active Directory. In Office 365, UsageLocation is used to determine what features are available to your users.… [ Continue reading ]
Earlier this week, a question popped up on a distribution list for managing an opt-out process with Exchange Online. That wasn’t the first request I’ve seen for such a tool (in fact, I had my own customer asking for something similar). … [ Continue reading ]
One of the first steps in preparing for an Office 365 migration is running a tool we provide called IDFix. The goal of this tool is to help minimize identity issues when migrating to the cloud. Most identity issues come down to two issues:
The first issue is pretty easy to deal with–IDFix will identify objects with offending characters and the attributes where they exist, and will even make some recommendations. … [ Continue reading ]
I saw an interesting question floating around a discussion alias earlier today–how to return different IP addresses for the same hostname from different DNS servers for users that are in different regions (for example, have DNS servers on the east coast return “1.2.3.4” for my.domain.com and DNS servers on the west coast return “5.6.7.8” for same name–the trick being that domain.com is an internal Active Directory DNS zone). … [ Continue reading ]
During migrations from third-party platforms like Gmail or various POP3 providers or from hosted Exchange environments, we frequently see customers provisioning remote mailboxes for shared resources.
This works fine for three out of four recipient types.… [ Continue reading ]