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 ]
How to Merge Duplicate Mail-Enabled User and Contact Objects
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:
- Invalid characters in key attributes
- User objects with duplicate values in indexed attributes (duplicate objects)
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 ]
Creating a Pinpoint DNS Zone
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… [ Continue reading ]
Updating Remote Recipient Types on-Premises
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. You can run New-RemoteMailbox for a regular user or specify a Type (Room or Equipment) to get the appropriate mailboxes. … [ Continue reading ]
Backup and Restore Distribution Groups from Exchange or Exchange Online
I’ve been involved in a lot of Exchange migrations over the years, to and from all sorts of different environments.
On a current engagement, I had to export a ton of cloud-managed distribution lists and their members from Office 365 / Exchange Online Dedicated and import them into Office 365 Multitenant. … [ Continue reading ]
Remove an unwanted ProxyAddress pattern from users via AADConnect
I had an interesting request from a customer the other day where they were synchronizing Active Directory into two disparate environments–Office 365 and another hosted Exchange environment. In their new Office 365 environment, they didn’t want any address proxies matching a particular pattern to be part of a user’s proxyAddress array–BUT–they also didn’t want to remove them from their on-premises accounts since they are being used by their other hosting environment as an application routing address.… [ Continue reading ]
Office 365 License Assignment
There is perpetually a lot of angst around licensing users for Office 365 workloads. Most of my customers over the years have wanted to ease into deployment, only enabling certain services at a time. Of course, as an evergreen service, we are always adding features, leading to new service plans to disable as you discover them.… [ Continue reading ]
Remove a user’s oldest ActiveSync device
A few weeks ago, I saw something come up for a peer that needed a way to manage the maximum number of ActiveSync devices that a user had connected in Office 365. Using only native Exchange policies, we can’t do that (MDM solutions solve this problem by manning the Exchange ActiveSync quarantine). … [ Continue reading ]
Using XML to Backup and Restore Office 365 Settings
Frequently, I am asked to make changes to a customer's environment. I'm a belt and suspenders kind of guy, so my backups have backups. At any rate, normally when I am performing changes in a tenant (or Exchange on-premises environment, for that matter), I make two sets of backups–one by piping a Get-cmdlet to Export-CSV (so I have a readable copy), and one by piping the same Get-cmdlet to Export-Clixml (so I have a way to set the nodes as parameters and import them back).… [ Continue reading ]
Customizing the Windows PowerShell Console
Another blog on customizing the PowerShell console? Really?
Yes. This is actually what I use on a day-to-day basis as a consultant managing many projects at once. I find that I’m usually running various PowerShell sessions concurrently and having to keep which one is which can be difficult without having to stop and check which server or Office 365 tenant I’m connect to, or what type of activity I’m performing.… [ Continue reading ]
Extending Active Directory Users and Computers with Custom Attributes
If you’ve ever wanted to add columns for unlisted attributes to Active Directory Users and Computers, you’ve been out of luck without editing the displaySpecifiers manually.
Until I had enough of it.
How does it work? I’m so glad you asked. … [ Continue reading ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
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 ]
