Office 365 Evangelist

Microsoft built into Outlook 2007/2010 a nice way to test Outlook AutoConfiguration.  This can be a very helpful tool to check to see what settings are being applied to Outlook for connecting to an Exchange organization.  Below are the steps to use this tool and some help with analyzing the results:

1.  Outlook needs to be running to launch the AutoConfiguration tool.

2. To launch the tool locate the Outlook icon in your system tray (this is the area by the date and time in the taskbar, normally on the lower right side of the screen).  You might need to select the up triangle to locate the hidden icons.

3. Hold down the Ctrl key and right mouse click on the Outlook icon

4. Select the Test E-mail AutoConfiguration menu item

5. Your email address should be listed, un-check Use Guessmart and Secure Guessmart Authentication and click on Test (to test for another email address enter it as well as the password for that account)

6. Above are the results from the test when I ran it against my company email account from internal to our network.  If you have Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTPS) enabled in your environment or are utilizing Office 365 then I recommend running this test external to your network as well.  You can also utilize this site, https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/ to test connectivity for Exchange on-premises and Office 365.

So what are we looking at above?  in the first two screen shots I am displaying the output from the Results tab.  These two shots show the settings that are being applied to my Outlook configuration for connecting to my company’s Exchange Organization.  The top one shows the  Protocol: Exchange RPC settings, these are the settings that will be used when I am local to my company’s network.  The second one shows the Protocol:Exchange HTTP, these are the settings used for Outlook Anywhere when I am external to my company’s network.  Review these settings and ensure the proper Server names and URLs are being applied to the client.

The last screen shot above is showing the output from the Log tab.  If you have no output in the Results tab this is where you can trace how the Outlook client attempts to locate the Autodiscover service for your Exchange organization.  If Outlook cannot contact the Autodiscover service then it cannot determine the settings to be applied.  The second line shows a URL that is found from Active Directory since I ran this internal to my network, the SCP or Service Location Point.  The SCP is set my the Exchange Admin for your organization to make Autodiscover easily found when in the domain.  If I had run this external to my network, it would go through a progression of trying URLs based on my email domain (will add this later tonight from home).

So use this tool to help troubleshoot problems with connectivity to Exchange, it is a great tool and I use it often when doing Exchange migrations.  It is also helpful to troubleshoot authentication pop ups.  These sometimes happen not for connecting the client to the mailbox but for things like Offline Address Book (OAB) download.  So if you get authentication pop ups randomly check the URLs for OOF, OAB and Unified Messaging and ensure they are properly configured.  If these URLs are not configured properly then Outlook might connect and be able to send and receive email just fine, but have other issues.

Hope this helps you out!

The Broncos, especially the Offense and Special Teams, deliver a big lump of coal to the fans today!  Tebow regressed, 4 interceptions, 2 of those returned by the Bills for touchdowns.  The Special teams were anything but, giving up big kickoff and punt returns, one punt return for a touchdown.  So they loss 40-14 and the faiders beat the chefs so it comes down to win next week at home against the chefs for the division title!

So it goes to show that the iPhone/iPad devices rule.  I say this being a very strong supporter of Windows Phone 7, but numbers don’t lie!  Today the Lync Mobile client was released in the Apple App Store and this blog site saw its highest traffic to date!  I am not saying this to brag as I have only been on this site for just about two months, but it is nice to see traffic pick up.  The primary reason for the spike in traffic is due to my posting here last Monday talking about Microsoft releasing the Lync Mobile Client (http://office365evangelist.com/2011/12/12/microsoft-releases-lync-mobile-client/) At the time of writing I made a bad assumption that all platforms (Windows Phone 7, Android and IOS) had released on the 12th.  This was incorrect, only Windows Phone 7 had the Lync client in the Marketplace.  Android released later last week and as I stated IOS today.  The post links to two documents for additional steps needed to ensure that a company’s Lync On-Premises or Lync Online with Office 365 is properly configured to ensure connectivity with the Lync Mobile Client.

Catapult Systems, my company, was part of the TAP program and we had access to the beta revs of the Lync Client.  I had actually been running it for about three months prior to the RTM launch last Monday.  I really like the ability that the client adds to my HTC Titan.  It does not replace the full Lync Client on my laptop, but helps in a pinch to see why co-workers and send a quick IM or even better now have one touch connection to a Lync Meeting.  Having Lync call me for the meeting is way better than dialing the proper number and entering the meeting code and my PIN.

So are you thinking about moving to Office 365?  Are you wondering about how your companies data will be handled and protected in the cloud?  Well Microsoft has put together a new website, The Office 365 Trust Center, http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/trust-center.aspx#fbid=b_ypwK7x5Q2.  This site will give you the information you are looking for and needing to assist with a migration to Office 365.  This site details the way Microsoft handles the data stored in Office 365.  It has four Trust Principles:

1) Your Privacy Matters

2) Leadership in Transparency

3) independently Verified

4) relentless on Security

I encourage you to review the information on this site to find out details on how Microsoft stores and protects your data!

I received a notice that I have been invited to take two beta exams for Office 365. The testing will happen in January and if I pass both with be an MCITP for Office 365!

So I received some feedback related to my post yesterday about the Lync Mobile app being available for all mobile platforms.  It appears I spoke to early.  While Lync Mobile for Windows Phone 7 is available and working great I might add.  It appears the IOS and Android versions are not available yet.  Here is a link to a Microsoft site that should have the most up-to-date information regarding the other mobile platforms availability, http://lync.microsoft.com/en-us/Product/UserInterfaces/Pages/lync-2010-mobile.aspx

Great news for all Lync users and companies out there.  Today Microsoft released the Lync Mobile client for Windows Phone 7, iPhone, iPad, Android and Nokia’s Symbian devices.  So now a user can use the mobile app to see presence information, conduct IM conversation and join Lync meetings easily from thier mobile device.

To ensure that the Lync Mobile client can successfully conect to your Lync environment (on-premises or Lync Online via Office 365) there are some additional configurations required.  Below are links to go to to find out the proper configuration settings needed for the Lync platform that you are utilizing:

For Lync Server on-premises deployments: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh690988.aspx

For Office 365 Lync Online: http://community.office365.com/en-us/w/lync/1040.aspx

Microsoft has released SP 2 for Exchange 2010 and with any service pack great things and fixes are included!  The best part of this service pack will be covered last in this post…..hint hint hint, it has to do with Office 365!

First the fixes, SP2 includes all fixes up to and including Update Rollup 6 for 2010 SP1.  as with the majority of service packs there are no new major fixes included, just a super rollup of the 6 Update Rollups released since SP1.  Here you can find the complete list of all updates in each of the Rollups, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh672189.aspx.

New Features, again normal for a service pack is the inclusion of new features.  here is the list:

1. Address Book Policies

This is a great new feature.  having an address book policies allows administrators to control which GAL, Offline Address book and other address books that a mailbox user will see.  This allows for separation of GAL and address book information for users.  This way an administrator can have an expanded address book consisting of contacts that only pertain to the Sales department, and instead of everyone seeing these contacts, the address book can be targeted to sales users only.  I have had several client ask for this type of functionality in past Exchange implementations and glad to see it implemented.

2. Cross Site Silent Redirection for Outlook Web App (OWA)

This will allow, with Forms Based Authentication (FBA) enabled on the CAS servers to silently redirect a request for OWA to another better suited CAS server.  This can greatly benefit a company that has one internet ingress point but a disperse Exchange deployment.  The CAS server in the Internet site will silently redirect the OWA request to the CAS server nearest the user’s mailbox server.

3. Mini Version of OWA

This is a mobile browser ( read phone) focused OWA experience.  It does not contain all of the functionality in the full OWA but focuses on basic functionality for accessing and email account, managing the calendar and reading, responding and composing new emails

4. Mailbox Auto Mapping

In 2010 SP1 added a new feature to automatically map (via Autodiscover) additional mailboxes that the user had been granted full permission to in the Outlook 2007/2010 profile.  While this was a good thing to help with granting the permission to the mailbox and have it automatically show-up for the user without any client side configuration, it had some drawbacks.  If a user had been granted full permission to the additional mailboxes in the Outlook profile could affect performance.  Now and Admin can disable the auto-add feature when granting permissions with the Add-MailboxPermission cmdlets.

5. Multi-Valued Custom Attributes

Microsoft added 5 new multi-valued attributes to be able to store 1,300 values for mail receipt objects.  Several cmdlets can take advantage of these new multi-valued attributes.

6. Litigation Hold

Prior to SP2 an admin was unable to delete a mailbox that had litigation hold applied.  Now several cmdlets have been update to allow for the deletion of the mailbox with an IgnoreLegalHold switch.

And now for the Office 365 Related features!

7. Mailbox Replication Service

When configuring a Hybrid deployment and the ability to move a mailbox from on-premises to the cloud (or another forest) an admin had manually configure the web.config file on the CAS servers.  Now the admin can use set-WebServicesVirtualDirectory to enable the settings without touching the web.config file on each CAS server.

And the BIG one!

8. Hybrid Configuration Wizard

This wizard will greatly reduce the amount of steps needed to implement a Hybrid solution between on on-premises organization and the cloud.  A Hybrid deployment allows the on-premises and cloud based mailboxes to function as if they were in the same organization.  This wizard will improve the ability of a company to seemless move to the cloud with a Hybrid deployment during the migration phase or to provide seemless long-term integration for a company that does not want to move all mailboxes to the cloud.

Read more about the Hybrid Configuration wizard here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh529921.aspx

My goal is to test out the new wizard soon when I enable my new domain, office365evangelist.com with an Office 365 environment.  I plan to blog about my experience and provide any best practices with my implementation.

The Broncos continue their great second half run of the season with a big win on the road at Minnesota!  For those of you that know me I am not a huge Tebow fan, and I think today showed why I am still not convinced that an offense designed around him and the run can work in the NFL.  The Vikings loaded up the line and dared the Broncos and Tebow to pass (not probably the best idea for them against any team since they were ranked 29th against the pass coming into this week).  Tebow did make them pay for that strategy, not with gigantic numbers and not with a surgeon-like passing game but he got the job done!  He finished 10-15 202 yards and 2 TDs.  Both TDs were to a wide open receiver, Demaryius Thomas, who had some invisibility cloak on as the Vikings DB seemed to ignore him all day! Willis McGahee continued his great running, gaining 111 yards on 20 carries and a TD.

The Defense was challenged by Ponder’s passing and the hard running of Gerhart.  But they were able to get two INTs, one for a pick 6, and a forced fumble and recovery.  They were without Von Miller today but Mario Haggan filled in most admirably, he had the pick 6 and lead the team with 12 total tackles!

And a big thank you to the Oakland Faiders for laying an egg against the Dolphins!  The Broncos are now tied for the AFC West lead with the tie-breaker right now over the faiders due to a better division and conference record!

So I went ahead and purchased Office365evangelist.com and now this blog is hosted there!  Feel like a proud papa with my new domain.  Next up will be to get an Office 365 environment setup using this domain.