Office 365 Evangelist

It occurred to me that I have not touted the newest Business Unit within Catapult Systems, my company (well I wish it was MY Company, but I do work for them). We started a new Cloud Services Unit the first of this year to focus on Microsoft Cloud Services, Office 365, Intune, CRM Online and Azure. This new Business Unit is based in Austin, TX with a tele-sales group and remote delivery consultant group. Our goal with this new unit is to cover the entire United States, which are not already covered by one of our local geographical offices, for all Cloud Services.

We are off to a great start, the launch of the new Business Unit coincided with our new website launch, http://www.catapultsystems.com/ . This new website is very much focused on Catapult’s commitment to Cloud Services. I assisted with the Cloud Services message on our website, check out why you should choose Catapult as your Cloud Partner, http://www.catapultsystems.com/CatapultSalesDocuments/Catapult-Solution-Sheet-Why-Cloud-Services.pdf and why Microsoft Office 365 should be your Cloud Choice, http://www.catapultsystems.com/CatapultSalesDocuments/Catapult-Solution-Sheet-Why-O365-Cloud-Office.pdf I wrote the majority of those two White Papers, and think they really make sense for a company looking to move to the Cloud.

I encourage you to let us know if you are interested in a move to the Cloud, http://www.catapultsystems.com/cloud/request-quote

Interested in learning more about Data Loss Prevention on Office 365 and Exchange 2013, read my article here

Sorry for the delay on the recap, was a very busy week, with work and personally getting my house sold and finding a new one!

The April meeting was Tuesday the 23^rd, and we had Vaultive’s Steve Coplan (@stavvmc), Sr. Director of Marketing and Strategy, present to the group on Vaultive’s email encryption service. The service allows for encrypting email at rest within Office 365 Exchange Online. It was a great presentation and here is the PowerPoint deck Steve used.

After the presentation we had a lively discussion about Office 365 Wave 15 Upgrades. Several people shared their experiences and issues with the upgrades that they have already completed. Martina Grom (@magrom) and Nicki Borell facilitated much of this conversation. Several members provided some links around the Upgrade process:

Service Upgrade Autodiscover Article on community.office365:

http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/manage/correcting-autodiscover-and-dns-settings.aspx

Good pointers in this list regarding MX:

http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/manage/office-365-administrator-task-wiki.aspx

Service Updates:

http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/office_365_service_updates/default.aspx

To wrap up the meeting we discussed Public Folders in Exchange Online Wave 15 and how to migrate from existing on-premises Public Folders to Exchange Online. One good link was shared around scripts for Pubic Folder Migrations:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27582

While I didn’t start the recording when the meeting started, I did start it right before Steve’s presentation, here is the meeting recording.

I am working on a project that has us migrating approximately 2,400 mailboxes from Exchange 2003 to the New Office 365 (Wave 15). As you are probably aware it is not possible to install an Exchange 2013 server into an Exchange Organization that has Exchange 2003 servers, here is a link to the supported scenarios, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh534377(v=exchg.150).aspx So we went with the next option, using an Exchange 2010 Service Pack 3 Hybrid Server. We were able to get Hybrid installed along with Identity Federation setup with DirSync and Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). We had verified Single SignOn as well as mail flow between on-premises and Office 365 and did a mailbox migration for a mailbox we created on the Exchange 2010 Hybrid server to Office 365. Everything was going smoothly.

Next step, we attempted to migrate a mailbox directly from the Exchange 2003 server to Office 365. First attempt was met with a failure on corrupt item count being exceeded. Easy enough, we used PowerShell to submit the Move Request and increased the BadItemLimit to 25. Well this migration failed as well, after reviewing the Migration log more closely it appeared that no successful items were migrated, the first 25 items attempted to be migrated were failed with corruption. Ok, maybe this is a messed up mailbox (it was a test mailbox that has been around for a while) again back to PowerShell and set the BadItemLimit to Unlimited. Failed again! Now I began researching and reaching out to my fellow MVP’s and my Microsoft Contacts. Long story short here is I found this to be somewhat of a known issue, you cannot migrate from Exchange 2003 directly to Office 365 even when using a supported scenario with a Exchange 2010 SP3 Hybrid Server. The only way that is currently available to get a mailbox migrated from Exchange 2003 to Office 365 is to do a dual hop; Exchange 2003 migrated to Exchange 2010 and then migrate to Office 365.

We tested this out and it the dual hop migrations completed just fine. While this is not ideal at all it does have one small benefit. Migrating from Exchange 2003 requires an offline migration, meaning the user cannot access their mailbox while it is being migrated. When we migrate from Exchange 2010 to Office 365 this is an online move, meaning the end user can be using Outlook or OWA to access their mailbox while it is being migrated. This small benefit allows for the downtime migration, from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 to be done over LAN speeds and thus the downtime is shorter. Once the mailbox is located on Exchange 2010, the user can access the mailbox while we conduct the Exchange 2010 to Office 365 migration over the internet. Small victory! But this method does require more administrative overhead, end user communication and additional storage on the Exchange 2010 server to temporarily host the mailboxes while in transit from 2003 to Office 365. Our plan is to migrate user mailboxes in batches, moving a group from 2003 to 2010 the immediately to Office 365. This will minimize the additional storage on the Exchange 2010 server versus migrating all mailboxes first to 2010 and then to Office 365.

One decision we are still discussing is how to handle mobile devices. We are thinking about only touching, or having the users reconfigure the devices once, after the final migration to Office 365. Again still working on this, but we feel the phones might be “offline” for about a day or so. We will be talking to the business about this decision.

We did submit a Support Request via Office 365 to also validate the need for two hops in this scenario. Support did verify that right now this is the only way to migrate a mailbox from Exchange 2003 to Office 365 Wave 15. Support did ask us to run another migration from Exchange 2003 to Office 365 directly with some additional logging to assist them in gathering information and looking for a possible fix to enable direct migrations. I will keep monitoring this and if a solution becomes available I will either update this post or more likely create a new blog post.

I have also request that the link that I shared earlier in this post be updated to have a note that two hops are needed to migrate from Exchange 2003 to Office 365. Hopefully this gets updated soon.

UPDATED: We received the below information from Microsoft Support:

 We have been working with the backend teams on the offline mailbox move issues between Exchange 2003 to O365 via Exchange 2010 hybrid.

We understand that the fix is being rolled up rigorously to mitigate this issue and the problem should be fixed in the next 10days. I will keep you posted once the rollout have been completed.

Another issue that we ran into as part of this project is that the client is primarily using Outlook 2007 as their client. They did not enable RPC Over HTTP in Exchange 2003 (now called Outlook Anywhere) so the Outlook client did not have the checkmark set for Outlook Anywhere set:

(The above picture is from Outlook 2013 but is very similar in other Outlook versions)

This prevented the Outlook client from being Auto-configured for Office 365 after the migration completed. If we created a new Outlook profile it Auto-configured just fine and connected to the mailbox in Office 365.

What we found during testing is that we needed to enable this checkbox prior to Outlook being launched for the first time after the final Office 365 migration. Group Policy to the rescue, we added the Outlook GPO ADM and were able to configure a GPO to turn on (checkmark) the Outlook Anywhere feature in the Outlook client and this solved the issue.

While the headline does not constitute an emergency for anyone, I want to get this out to as many Office 365 customers and clients as possible!

I just got copied on an email to one of my Office 365 clients that begins with:

As you can see above Microsoft can validate the version of browser that Office 365 users are connecting with. They are starting the process of contacting admins for Office 365 Tenant who have clients connecting with IE 8, and making them aware that IE 8 will not be a support access method to Office 365 after April 8, 2014. Again this is not an emergency, but Microsoft is trying to give enough advanced warning to its customers about the end of life for IE 8 to allow the IT departments of the affected Tenants time to research, plan and upgrade IE to 9 or 10 before its too late.

Even if you did not receive notice from Microsoft about this, I highly recommend you take inventory of your machines to determine if any are still running IE 8 and work to put a plan in place to upgrade to IE 9 or 10 by next year.

The April meeting of the Office 365 International User Group is scheduled for Tuesday April 23rd at 1pm Mountain time/7pm GMT/UTC. This is a milestone event, as this will be on the 1 year anniversary of the first IUG meeting! I will look to have some special for this meeting! See below for a link to the ICS file to add this to your calendar!

I am switching it up and taking more advantage of SkyDrive. You will notice the link above is now shared via my SkyDrive! This will save me several steps of publishing the blog, why didn’t I do this sooner?

On the 26^th we had our March meeting of the Office 365 International User Group. I have been very busy at work lately, well busy is an understatement, I have been slammed! Thankfully I was able to secure a speaker for this meeting last week while at the Austin, TX airport. Darrell Webster (@DarrellCWebster) graciously agreed to present on Interactive OneNote and SharePoint Social, thank you Darrell. His presentation was very interactive and showed how OneNote is not just a personal note taker and repository, but a very strong collaboration tool for internal and external projects. Darrell did a great job including the audience with an interactive demo of OneNote. Darrell then showed off the new Social aspects of SharePoint, what was great about his presentation is that all that he showed could be done on-premises with SharePoint but more importantly with SharePoint Online. We learned about how to follow users, posts and even documents. The latter is something that is very cool, now you can follow a document and get a message that someone has updated the document.

If you missed it, here is a link to information about the Windows 8 OneNote App working with Office 365, http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-onenote/archive/2013/03/21/update-to-the-onenote-windows-store-app-now-available.aspx

Darrell brought up some great functionality with OneNote that he recommended that be included in our future meetings once our Office 365 IUG Tenant is upgraded to Wave 15. Speaking of upgrades, we had a good discussion about the upgrade process and the feeling is that Microsoft does not have this process down to perfect. Several attendees mentioned issues with their upgrades resulting in issues from mail delivery issues (mainly specific to forwarders) to upgrades taking much longer than stated and resulting in a Tenant being in mixed mode, Exchange Online gets updated but Lync and SharePoint still on the previous version. One issue that was identified is to ensure that a customer has updated their Office 365/Exchange Online MX record, http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/manage/office-365-administrator-task-wiki.aspx#MX%20Record.

We also had some other good discussions on the new Service Descriptions that have been moved to TechNet, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819284.aspx I actually did a quick poll and found most attendees liked the new format and location versus the previous Wave 14 Word files. We did discuss that while the new location makes it easier for the Service Descriptions to be updated, it is hard now to provide them to a client. I noticed during the discussion that it was brought up you can create your own TechNet download, I missed the link during the discussion (long story, my Lync client died trying to present, so I lost the IM conversion) but found this blog post that talks about it, http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_resource_kit/archive/2011/07/29/build-your-own-book-of-technet-articles.aspx

Good news! For the second meeting in a row I remember to hit that elusive record button. If you missed the meeting or would just like to relive the magic, here is the link, http://sdrv.ms/16iLWE4

Yesterday I received the following comment on my Office 365 Service Upgrade (Wave 14 to Wave 15) Post:

“Turns out You’re another typical Microsoft sycophant. Did you notice the now in excess of 2000 Microsoft Office 365 Forum entries from small businesses like mine that are absolutely B*ll S**t over Microsoft’s treatment of office 365 early adopters using 365 2010 that will have to wait for up to 9 months for their upgrade. It would be nice to see blogs like your’s that I have previously respected actually criticize the handling of this upgrade. From the perspective of small business early adopters we’re being screwed.”

First thing I had to do was look up the word Sycophant I disagree strongly that I apply to the definition of that word, but that is not the reason for this post.

I would like to explain why I feel Microsoft, and other Cloud Providers, are in a tough place with upgrades to their Cloud Services. On the one hand you have customers like the one who posted the comment above. The day that Microsoft is able to upgrade their Office 365 Tenant to Wave 15/vNext it should be done! And any delay is penalizing the customer for being a loyal customer and in the commenters own words “From the perspective of small business early adopters we’re being screwed.” This perceived bias against existing customers being penalized is nothing new, many times loyal long term customers feel slighted by companies trying to lure new customers with price cuts, new features, etc.

On the other hand if Microsoft did upgrade every one of their existing clients to Wave 15/vNext of Office 365, they would be receiving a similar backlash from clients that are comfortable on the existing version and want to wait before being upgraded. These type of clients want to control the change within their environment, even when it extends to the cloud. These clients would rather rely on other customers upgrading first and learning from those who go first how the transition goes and then when ready have their Tenant upgraded.

I think a move to the cloud needs to be examined by companies and really the company needs to ask itself, “With a move to the cloud am I willing to give up some of the upgrade control I currently have with my services”. While this is probably not the most important question regarding a move to the cloud, I think it is one that is not really thought of until a situation like the one we are talking about now arises, upgrade of Office 365 from Wave 14 (2010 versions) to Wave 15 (2013 versions) services. This is an important questions because with a move to the cloud, the company give up some control on when, and even if, you will go through an upgrade of the service. The company now relies on the Service Provider, Microsoft in this case, to handle the upgrade and the cadence of the upgrades. This needs to be fully understood and accepted by a company moving to the Cloud. When a company runs the services on-premises, they have complete control as to when and even if they will upgrade to the latest version. An on-premises company might decide that new feature X is so compelling that they must upgrade immediately, or they might find no compelling reason to upgrade at all and totally skip a version.

So back to this upgrade cycle of Office 365 from Wave 14 to Wave 15. I am sure if you asked Microsoft, they would have loved to been able to send out an email on February 27^th asking each customer if they wanted to upgrade now, in four months or in nine months. Then based on the responses upgrade the customers according to their wishes. This of course what not possible, and without going into details I know and probably more that I don’t know, it is just not possible. Microsoft has numerous datacenters and so many servers it is probably hard to get an accurate count on any given day due to all the provisioning and de-provisioning going on daily. Ensuring that the services are up and running and eliminating downtime and service interruption is at the core of running Office 365. They have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.9% uptime that is financially backed. So Microsoft has to ensure the upgrade process to get customers to the latest version does not impact the service they are providing.

Side note on this, I find it humorous that companies that move to the Cloud immediately believe that running Exchange is so easy that an outage should never happen. I have personally seen companies that I know struggled keeping a single Exchange Server running on-premises for 3 days at a time being the loudest complainers when an hour outage is suffered by Exchange Online. Microsoft does strive for 100% uptime, and even with planned maintenance does come closer to this that most any other individual company could come close to running the services on-premises. So guess what I am saying, is yes it is big news when Office 365 suffers an outage or even a service degradation, but cut some slack and think back to when your company was running the services on-premises and remember the challenges keeping everything running 100% of the time!

To upgrade a customer in a multi-tenant environment requires that not just the customer’s primary servers that host them are ready for upgrade, but that the secondary servers within the customer’s datacenter as well as the secondary servers in the alternate datacenter are also ready for upgrade. Remember, Office 365 enables a customer full datacenter redundancy as well as Disaster Recovery to an alternate datacenter. Again prepping and ensuring the servers are ready for upgrade are done with the #1 goal of no service outage or degradation. Someone might ask, why not just buildout a completely new environment that could host all of the existing customers and move everyone over to it? Well that is great in theory, but that costs money, and one reason most companies go to the Cloud and specifically Office 365 is that the price is right. For Microsoft to need to double the amount of servers, storage, power, cooling, etc what do you think that would do to the price of the service?

I guess getting back to my point about upgrades, is as a company with services in the Cloud you give up some of the control you had when running the services on-premises. You need to understand this. If you can’t accept this, maybe the Cloud is not a good fit for you, or you are not a good fit for the cloud, whichever way you look at it. I am sure this explanation with lead my commenter above to still think I am a sycophant, and I will still disagree, but many things go into the process of providing a robust, highly available and upgradable Cloud, and I am just trying to get Cloud customers to understand and realize that there is a bigger picture than just your Tenant in the Cloud!

Some pretty good blog post recently have been published by the Office 365 team:

http://community.office365.com/en-us/blogs/office_365_technical_blog/archive/2013/03/09/what-exactly-do-you-get-in-an-office-365-plan.aspx – What, exactly, do you get in an Office 365 plan? Also info on the new Service Descriptions

http://community.office365.com/en-us/blogs/office_365_technical_blog/archive/2013/03/08/updated-exchange-server-2010-deployment-assistant.aspx - Updated Exchange Server 2010 Deployment Assistant – Updated to support Exchange 2010 SP3 and Hybrid with the New Office 365

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2013/03/04/exchange-server-2013-deployment-assistant-available.aspx – Exchange 2013 Server Deployment Assistant – still does not cover Hybrid with Office 365 but it is coming

http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft_office_365_blog/archive/2013/03/07/new-lync-online.aspx - The New Lync Online

http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft_office_365_blog/archive/2013/03/04/office-15-minute-webinar-and-office-365-small-business-premium.aspx - Webinar about the new Office 365 Small Business Premium

http://community.office365.com/en-us/blogs/office_365_technical_blog/archive/2013/03/11/microsoft-connectivity-analyzer-mca-1-0-and-microsoft-remote-connectivity-analyzer-rca-2-1-release-announcement-we-ve-been-busy.aspx – Microsoft Connectivity Analyzer 1.0 released

http://community.office365.com/en-us/blogs/office_365_technical_blog/archive/2013/03/06/new-ignite-webcast-understanding-dirsync.aspx - Ignite Webcast, Understanding DirSync

Some notes and nuggets around the new Office 365 (Wave 15)

New Service descriptions are located here, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819284.aspx These have been moved to TechNet, they are no longer Word document downloads like the previous Office 365 version was. I seem to remember the reason for the move is to allow them to be updated at a quicker pace.

Haven’t mention this is a while, but I highly recommend you check out the Community site for Office 365, http://community.office365.com/en-us/default.aspx This is a great place for information about all things Office 365. It includes Blogs, Forums, Wiki and Troubleshooting sections. Via the Community Site you can find great Ignite Webcasts about Office 365, the next one is scheduled for Wednesday March 6^th at noon Pacific Time, the topic for this Webcast is Hybrid Deployments, http://community.office365.com/en-us/blogs/office_365_technical_blog/archive/2013/02/27/new-ignite-webcast-hybrid-deployment.aspx. A sister site to the Community is The Grid, http://community.office365.com/en-us/grid/default.aspx, this also has great information about Office 365!

Here is a good post about the SkyDrive Pro limits and workarounds, http://community.office365.com/en-us/blogs/office_365_technical_blog/archive/2013/02/25/skydrive-pro-library-limits-and-workarounds.aspx

Here is another great new series that just had its first Episode, The Garage Series, http://community.office365.com/en-us/blogs/office_365_technical_blog/archive/2013/03/01/the-new-office-what-are-your-options-what-s-changed-and-what-s-new.aspx

I have created a Yammer group for the Office 365 International User Group, https://www.yammer.com/office365iug/, please feel free to join!