Category: cloud

  • Exchange Hybrid Wizard – New Tenants and Missing Errors

    Exchange Hybrid Wizard – New Tenants and Missing Errors

    Rumoured to be fixed end of June 2023 A short blog post on this issue – you see in the Microsoft Exchange Server Hybrid Configuration Wizard logs the following error “Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message: Connecting to remote server outlook.office365.com failed with the following error message : For more information,…

  • SSL Inspection and Office 365

    Lots of cloud endpoint URL’s break service flow if you enable SSL Inspection on the network devices between your client and the service. My most recent example of this Enterprise State Routing in Windows 10. Microsoft have a list of URLs for the endpoints to their service, where they are categorised as Default, Allow or…

  • Configuring Sync and Writeback Permissions in Active Directory for Azure Active Directory Sync

    [Last updated 9th November 2022 – note that Microsoft now include this functionality in their own product as written at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/hybrid/reference-connect-adsyncconfig#set-adsyncexchangehybridpermissions] [Last updated 11th November 2019 – added support for Exchange Server automapping support, which was announced during Microsoft Ignite 2019 and will be supported in the first half of calendar year 2020. This is…

  • Managing Office 365 Groups With Remote PowerShell

    Announced during Microsoft Ignite 2015, there are now PowerShell administration cmdlets available for the administration of the Groups feature in Office 365. The cmdlets are all based around “UnifedGroups”, for example Get-UnifiedGroups. Create a Group Use New-UnifiedGroup to do this. An example would be New-UnifiedGroup -DisplayName “Sales” -Alias sales –EmailAddress sales@contoso.com The use of the…

  • Speaking at TechEd Europe 2014

    I’m please to announce that Microsoft have asked me to speak on “Everything You Need To Know About SMTP Transport for Office 365” at TechEd Europe 2014 in Barcelona. Its going to be a busy few weeks as I go from there to the MVP Summit in Redmond, WA straight from that event. My session…

  • Creating Mailboxes in Office 365 When Using DirSync

    This blog post describes the process to create a new user in Active Directory on-premises when email is held in Office 365 and DirSync is in use. With DirSync in use the editable copy of the user object is on-premises and most attributes cannot be modified in the cloud. Creating the User Open Active Directory…

  • Enabling Microsoft Rights Management in SharePoint Online

    This article is the fifth in a series of posts looking at Microsoft’s new Rights Management product set. In an earlier previous post we looked at turning on the feature in Office 365 and in this post we will look at protecting documents in SharePoint. This means your cloud users and will have their data…

  • Exchange DLP Rules in Exchange Management Shell

    This one took a while to work out, so noting it down here! If you want to create a transport rule for a DLP policy that has one data classification (i.e. data type to look for such as ‘Credit Card Number’) then that is easy in PowerShell and an example would be as below. New-TransportRule…

  • An “Inexpensive” Exchange Lab In Azure

    This blog post centres around two scripts that can be used to quickly provision an Exchange Server lab in Azure and then to remove it again. The reason why the blog post is titled “inexpensive” is that Azure charges compute hours even if the virtual machines are shut down. Therefore to make my Exchange lab…

  • Highly Available Office 365 to On-Premises Mail Routing

    This article looks at how to configure mail flow from Office 365 (via Exchange Online Protection – EOP) to your On Premises organization to ensure that it is highly available and work in disaster recovery scenarios with no impact. It is based on exactly the same principle to that which I blogged about in 2012:…

  • Errors in Moving Exchange Archive Mailboxes to Office 365

    I was trying to move an Archive mailbox to the Office 365 service from my demo environment the other day when I came across an error I thought I would note down here for completion. I could not find the error elsewhere on the internet An archive mailbox must be enabled before it can be…

  • Creating an Azure VPN with a Draytek Router

    The Microsoft Azure cloud operating system can be connected to your network by way of a virtual private network or VPN. Azure lists some supported devices and provides configuration scripts for them, but does not include the Draytek range of devices. Draytek devices are common in the small business market and for techy home users.…

  • The New Rights Management Service

    This blog is the start of a series of articles I will write over the next few months on how to ensure that your data is encrypted and secured to only the people you want to access it, and only for the level of rights you want to give them. The technology that we will…

  • Moving Exchange Online Protection Junk Mail to the Junk Email Folder

    If you use Exchange Online Protection (EOP) to filter your email in the cloud and to remove spam and malware before onward delivery to you, and if you use Exchange 2007 or later on-premises, then you need to configure Exchange to move detected spam to the Junk Email folder in Outlook. By default EOP detects…

  • Domain Secure and Edge Servers

    I was asked a question recently on the Microsoft Certified Master course for Exchange 2010 and was told that the answer was not clearly written up on the internet. So I thought I would write this blog post. The question was based on the idea that Domain Secure worked from a Hub Transport server in…

  • Forefront Online Protection for Exchange Spam Filtering to Outlook’s Junk E-Mail Folder

    Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) is a cloud hosted email anti-spam and antivirus filtering system. Amongst the options to filter away your spam, one of the options to to allow the email to be flagged and sent on into your on-premises email system, and then managing it there. If you have Exchange 2007 or…

  • Creating GeoDNS with Amazon Route 53 DNS

    UPDATE: 13 Aug 2014 – Amazon Route 53 now does native GeoDNS within the product – see Amazon Route 53 GeoDNS Routing Policy A new feature to Exchange 2013 is supported use of a single namespace for your global email infrastructure. For example mail.contoso.com rather than different ones for each region such as uk-mail.contoso.com; usa-mail.contoso.com…

  • Highly Available Geo Redundancy with Outbound Send Connectors in Exchange 2003 and Later

    This is something I’ve been meaning to write down for a while. I wrote an answer for this question to LinkedIn about a week ago and I’ve just emailed a MCM Exchange consultant with this – so here we go… If you configure a Send Connector (Exchange 2007 and 2010) or Exchange 2003 SMTP Connector…

  • Office 365 and Dynamic Distribution Groups

    Updated Dec 8th 2011 to remove reference to LegacyExchangeDN In Office 365 with Hybrid Deployment, if you create Dynamic Distribution Groups on the on-premises Exchange organization, these objects are not replicated to Office 365 via DirSync. Therefore for mailboxes in the Office 365 cloud they will not see the Dynamic Distribution Group in their Global…

  • Adding Servers to ADFS 2.0 Farms – Subject Alternative Name Issues

    When you add additional servers to an ADFS 2.0 farm and you have used a subject alternative name from your certificate to create the first server in the farm the additional servers will not be able to join the farm. If you have used the subject name on the certificate all works fine. You get the…