Category: Office 365

  • Office 365 Hybrid Coexistence and Edge Server

    One of the delights in my job is when Microsoft give me a call and ask me how something works in one of their products! Such a call came today and it involved get Office 365 hybrid coexistence working with an Edge Server. Exchange Server Deployment Assistant does not have the answer to this issue;…

  • OWA and Moving Mailboxes to Office 365

    Lets imagine a scenario where you are using an on-premises Exchange Server and users’ use Outlook Web App, and then you move some mailboxes to the Office 365 cloud with Hybrid Coexistence enabled. The user might not know their mailbox has been moved and so yesterday they went to https://mail.company.com/owa, but today they need to visit…

  • Assign Specific Licences in Office 365 Via PowerShell

      To add specific licences to users in Office 365 without using the portal, and to assign subsets of the licences available requires two things. First you need to enumerate the licences and licence service plans, then you need to assign the new plan you have created to your users. This can be performed in…

  • 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…

  • Migrate to Office 365 Using the Command Line

    Cutover Migrations and Staged Simple Exchange Migrations from on-premise and hosted email systems can be done by the remote PowerShell command line (Powershell to Exchange Online). The help for New-MigrationBatch claims that migrations from Hotmail are possible, but the actual commands are not working at this time. Doing a migration via the command line is…

  • Fixing Exchange Online Hydration Issues With Enable-OrganizationCustomization

    “Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation” is an error you can see in Office 365 Rich Coexistence when you are first configuring the settings. There are other errors that can occur which also are the result of the same issue, for example I have seen “Error when getting bip rule” and…

  • 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…

  • Mismatched Archive GUID for Moving Archive to Office 365

    If you create an archive in Office 365 for a mailbox on-premise you might find that it does not work – the actual archive is not (as of time of writing) created correctly. What’s the way around it? The way around it is to create the archive on-premise and then move the archive to the…

  • Office 365 DirSync Schedule

    The DirSync process sync’s every three hours by default, with  a random number between 1 and 10 minutes is added to the SyncTimeInterval to provide an additional time buffer to this three hour period. This schedule can be changed by editing Microsoft.Online.DirSync.Scheduler.exe.Config in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Online Directory Sync. Change to read a different value for hours:minutes:seconds…

  • Free/Busy Cross-Forest Working One Way Only

    Or indeed, not working at all! I had the issue of it working one way only (On-Premise Exchange organization > Office 365) but the other way (cloud to on-premise) did not work at all. The answer is shown in this video http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/us/details/a16a9d39-416a-4b01-a88f-5ff511580424 This covers the reasons why Free/Busy (and the other federation features of MailTips,…

  • Publishing ADFS Through ISA or TMG Server

    To enable single sign-on in Office 365 and a variety of other applications you need to provide a federated authentication system. Microsoft’s free server software for this is currently Active Directory Federation Server 2.0 (ADFS), which is downloaded from Microsoft’s website. ADFS is installed on a server within your organisation, and a trust (utilising trusted…

  • PowerShell Script To Update All UPN’s

    This quick script will process all your user accounts in the domain and change the UPN for each of them to a new one, which you need to specify in the script in advance of running it. This script is useful for Office 365 Rich Coexistence (Hybrid) scenarios which require that the UPN (User Principal Name)…

  • Changing ADFS 2.0 Endpoint URL for Office 365

    If you are configuring single sign-on for Office 365 then you will need a server running Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 (ADFS 2.0). When you install this you are asked for a URL that acts as an endpoint for the ADFS service, which if you are publishing that endpoint through a firewall such as TMG…