Brian Reid – Microsoft 365 Subject Matter Expert

Category: exchange online

  • Getting Started with Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection

    Announced a few months ago, Advanced Threat Protection became generally available on 1st June. I have been involved with trialling this product during the beta and so I thought I would note down a few thoughts on setting this up and what to expect now that it is publicly available. Advanced Threat Protection is an…

  • Using Office 365 PST Ingestion Service

    [Updated 10th Nov 2015 with tips on managing bad items in PST files]Its been in private preview for a while, and recently entered a free preview for any Office 365 subscriber to try. So I gave it a go and have the following tips and guidance. Preparing to upload PST files You can upload PST…

  • 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…

  • The Case of the Disappearing Folders

    Here is a issue I have come across at one of my current clients – you create a folder in Outlook 2013 when in the “Mail” view (showing only mail folders – your typical default view) and the folder does not get created. For example, in the below picture the user is in the middle…

  • Group Policy Import To Fix Google Chrome v37 Issues With Exchange Server and Microsoft CRM

    A recent update to Google Chrome (37.0.2062.120) removed the ability to support modal dialog boxes. This are dialogs that require your attention and stop you going back to the previous page until you have completed the info required – these are very useful in workflow type scenarios. Google claim that as 0.004% of web sites…

  • Exchange Online Free/Busy Issues with OAuth Authentication

    Update: 10 Dec 2014: It is reported that this issue is fixed in CU7 for Exchange Server 2013 OAuth authentication is a new server to server authentication model available in Exchange 2013 SP1 and later and Exchange Online (Office 365). With OAuth enabled and Exchange hybrid in place and where you have multiple endpoints of…

  • 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…

  • Continuing Adventures in AD FS Claims Rules

    Updated 20th April 2017 There is an excellent article at http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2012/06/26/an-adfs-claims-rules-adventure.aspx which discusses the use of Claims Rules in AD FS to limit some of the functionality of Office 365 to specific network locations, such as being only allowed to use Outlook when on the company LAN or VPN or to selected groups of users.…

  • Exchange Web Services (EWS) and 501 Error

    As is common with a lot that I write in this blog, it is based on noting down the answers to stuff I could not find online. For this issue, I did find something online by Michael Van “Hybrid”, but finding it was the challenge. So rather than detailing the issue and the reason (you…

  • Getting Exchange Message Sizing Raw Data

    On the internet there are a number of resources for collecting the raw data needed to size Exchange Server deployments. These include: http://blogs.technet.com/b/neiljohn/archive/2011/08/09/user-profile-analysis-for-exchange-server-2010.aspx (Neil Johnson – User Profile Analysis for Exchange Server 2010 ) http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/bb94b422-eb9e-4c53-a454-f7da6ddfb5d6 (“mjolinor” – the primary source of the script used here) This blog outlines my process for collecting the data needed…

  • Using Microsoft Rights Management from Microsoft Office

    This article is the second last 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 and emails in Microsoft Office 2010 or later. This means your…

  • Configuring Exchange On-Premises to Use Azure Rights Management

    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 enabling on-premises Exchange Servers to use this cloud based RMS server. This means your…

  • Is Your SenderID/SPF or DKIM Record Correctly Configured

    With Microsoft having just announced that DKIM is coming to Office 365 soon (release notes here) and SenderID is already available, I thought this is a good time to write a blog on the use of DMARC to show if your records are correct. DMARC is a protocol that allows you to see the effect…

  • DLP Templates

    At the Microsoft Exchange Conference 2014 in Austin, Texas I ran a session on DLP templates. This blog post was linked from the slides and contains the examples I used in the session. To download any of the samples click the links below: ContosoPharma.xml – the DLP data classification file to add the ability to detect…

  • 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…

  • Enabling and Configuring AADRM in Exchange Online

    This article is the fourth in a series of posts looking at Microsoft’s new Rights Management product set. In the previous post we looked at turning on the feature in Office 365 and in this post we will look at how to manage the service in the cloud. In this series of articles we will…

  • 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…