Office 365 Evangelist

I have been working on getting an International Office 365 user group with several Office 365 MVP’s. After a delay on my part I am happy to announce that I have setup a Mailchimp.com account for the group and a Linkedin.com group.

Please go to http://home.office365evangelist.com/Pages/Office365UserGroup.aspx to sign up for the User Group. I will be using the Mailchimp.com and Linkedin.com group to publicize the group further!

Please pass this along to anyone who think would be interested in joining.

So I blogged a little while ago about an issue with enabling Online Archive for a Migrated user in Office 365 Hybrid Deployment So I came up with a work around to fix this:

Login to Domain Controller (assumes 2008 R2 version) if not you will need to use ADSIEDIT.MSC

Open Active Directory Users and Computers

Browse to the user account you want to have enabled for Online Archive

Open the Account properties and choose the Attribute Editor tab (if this does not show up select the View menu from ADUC and ensure Advanced Features in selected)

Locate the MSExchangeVersion Attribute

Replace the value with 44220983382016

Login to Hybrid Exchange 2010 SP2 server

Launch the Exchange Management Shell (EMS)

Run the following command, replacing USERNAME with the user’s login name

Enable-RemoteMailbox USERNAME-Archive

Force a DirSync

This has worked well for me and I have not run into any issues with manually setting the MSExchangeVersion Attribute.

Microsoft announced that they updated the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant to include support the Hybrid Deployment Wizard in Exchange 2010 SP2. You can read more about the update here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/03/21/exchange-server-deployment-assistant-update-for-exchange-2010-sp2-and-office-365-hybrid-deployments.aspx

I found something new while walking through the Deployment Assistant, Tenant Monitoring. In the Deployment Assistant this is described as:

“Exchange Online monitors the health of the hybrid deployment between your on-premises organization and the Exchange Online organization. If federated sharing, transport routing and other services start to have issues, Exchange Online will notify you…”

This is on by default and will send to the mailbox of the administrator account used to set up your Office 365 tenant. You can add external addresses to get this notification. To do this you connect to Exchange Online using remote Powershell (see below for instructions on connecting Powershell to Exchange Online). Once connected run the command:

Get-OrganizationConfig | Format-List ExchangeNotificationRecipients

This will display a multi-valued property of the email addresses configured to receive the alert. If it is blank like below, they the administrator account mentioned above is the only recipient.

ExchangeNotificationRecipients : {}

Use the below command to set additional recipients for the notification:

Set-OrganizationConfig -ExchangeNotificationRecipients me@live.com, you@hotmail.com

I would recommend setting these to external email addresses you monitor, since the notifications with be stating a possible issue with the Tenant you probably do not want to use an Exchange Online email address.

Connect to Exchange Online with Powershell:

Launch PowerShell on your local machine with Admin credentials, commands below are in quotes, remove quotes and add to the PowerShell session:

“$cred = Get-Credential”

“$session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection”

“Import-PsSession $session”

You will not be connected to the Exchange Online environment. With the first command, you will get a pop-up asking for username and password; give the credentials in username@domain.com for your Office 365 tenant that has Admin credentials.

When you are done with remote PowerShell to Exchange Online run the below command to disconnect:

“Remove-PsSession $session”

I am one happy Broncos fan today, the Broncos have landed Peyton Manning to be our QB.  To have a QB of Peyton’s status is great for Denver!  Really not since John retires have we had a certified #1 top flight QB in Denver!  This changes everything, we are not rebuilding anymore, we are reloading!  I know that this move cost Tim Tebow his place with Denver, and while I totally appreciate Tebow the man, Tebow the QB was, in my opinion, not going to take us to the the promised land, the Super Bowl!

Tebow, and the Defense got us into the playoffs and won us the game against the Steelers, but Tebow can not take us any further.  I do not think Elway was lying when he said Tim would be the Starting QB going into Training Camp next year; but when an opportunity to add one of the top 5 QBs all time it became a no-brainer to go after Manning with full force.  It is all about winning now, and not hoping we can win and Tebow can improve at QB.  I wish Tebow much success in the NFL and hope he succeeds, but for me getting Manning is one of the best moves of the Elway Broncos Executive moves, not sure how he could top this other than being able to raise the Lombardi Trophy and say “This one’s for Mr.B”

So I think that Tebow must be traded for two reasons:

1. The Broncos need to let the circus leave town.  We cannot let the Tebowmaniacs start-up the first INT Manning throws or after a Broncos loss.

2. Tebow will be better off working on his game with a team that trades for him.  Tebow was not the choice of the current Broncos brain trust.  He deserves to go to a team who are 100% behind him and Denver is not that place.  Manning wants all the practice reps, and so to keep Tebow would hurt his developement.

GREAT MOVE ELWAY!  The Drive, The Helicopter, and now the Signing!

GO BRONCOS

Little Cartoon from the great Drew Litton (@drewlitton) to summarize today’s events http://www.drewlitton.com/categories-2/football/2012/03/19/elways-day-at-the-office/

So I am taking a quick detour from all things Office 365 to check out and play with Server 8 Beta. I have been running Windows 8 Beta on my Acer Iconia Tab and like it. Takes a little bit to get use to no start button but the touch interface with the Metro Start page is great!

So Catapult Systems provided me with a very nice laptop, a Lenovo W520, it has a 450GB, 8 CPU’s with multicore and hyperthreading enabled and 16GB of RAM. I use Windows 7 as my normal day to day workstation OS on a dedicated 100GB drive. The remaining 350GB drive is used for some data and dual boots. I have had a dual boot with Server 2008 R2 for some time and run some VMs there. So I want to add Server 8 Beta as another boot option. I thought I could do the same thing I did with Server 2008 R2. I downloaded the VHD from here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh670538.aspx?ocid=&wt.mc_id=TEC_108_1_33. It is nice that Microsoft provide a VHD download as well as an ISO download. So I moved the VHD to the root of my data drive and used BCDEDIT to setup another boot option.

Well that didn’t work, every time I tried to boot into the Server 8 Beta it gave me some errors about Bitlocker and tried to run repair but never did. So I did what I always do when in trouble, Bing to the rescue! I found the solution here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsdeveloperpreviewgeneral/thread/20f4dea6-f42b-41c3-9ff3-71e0b8b82340

Seems Windows/Server 8 cannot use the Windows7/Server 2008 R2 Bootloader, you need to use the Windows 8 Bootloader. So it was pretty easy to get it setup following the below steps from the above link:

1. Boot into my Windows 7 OS
2. User Disk Manager to Attach VHD
3. Set a drive letter for the VHD attached drive, I used S: for Server J
4. Open CMD as Administrator
5. Run BCDBOOT s:Windows

That is all it took. The command loads the Bootloader from for Windows 8 from the VHD and sets up Server 8 Beta as a boot option. The only thing I had to do was run MSCONFIG to reset my Windows 7 OD as the default and change the default timeout for choosing a boot option (default is 30 seconds, I reduced to 5 seconds) I then rebooted my laptop, choose the Server 8 Beta option and off and running I was!

I will be playing around with Server 8 Beta, particularly the Hyper-V role, and might have a blog post or two about my experiences.

Great news for everyone, the price of the cloud is dropping! Microsoft has cut the prices for the Enterprise Suite of Office 365. The E1 plan was $10 per user per month is now $8; the E3 plan was $24 and now is $20! Microsoft attributed this price reduction to the cost efficiencies of having more customers on Office 365 resulting in lower costs to run the system and thus they are passing the savings onto the consumers! The reduced prices take effect immediately for new and renewing customers. This is great news and it shows that Cloud computing works and that adding capacity and customers results in cost drops while increasing services offered, as Microsoft has been continuing to improve and add new features to the Office 365 stack.

I just checked on my Office365Evangelist.com tenant I have on Office 365 and see that I can add the E2 or E4 license at the reduced prices but if I add another E1 or E3 (have one of each right now) they are at the original price. Also it shows that my current subscriptions of E1 and E3 are still at the original price. So I am not sure if this will change or I am locked into the old prices until my next renewal? I will monitor this and report back if the costs of my existing plans drop to the new rates.

You can read more about the announcement here, http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft_office_365_blog/archive/2012/03/14/new-lower-prices-for-office-365.aspx They also talk about the A2 plan being free for students and teachers and faculty in the Education space!

Loryan Strant (@thecloudmouth) A Office 365 MVP and all around great guy, has developed a Mobile App for Office 365 Administration. I have been using this to administer my Office365Evangelist.com Office 365 environment and really like it. This is V1 of the app and currently can only administer Online Only Accounts but Loryan is working on the next version that can handle Federated users. Loryan is also working on integrating the RSS feeds for Office 365 service status into a live tile! Right now this App is perfect for any small business Office 365 customer, it allows you to reset passwords on the fly and also update user attributes. You can also add new online users from the mobile app!

Right now the App is available on Windows Phone 7, in my opinion, the best mobile platform; and is coming to Android soon. Loryan is also working on a version for Microsoft Partners that will, to my knowledge, allow the partner to administer Office 365 environments that they have been granted delegated administration! This will be huge for a Microsoft partner like me; the ability to help out a customer from anywhere is the best type of support and will keep the client-partnership relationship strong. I hope you will take a deep look at this great app and use it to help you and your company with Office 365 Administration.

This is a great example of a MVP giving back to the community, this is something we should all support and encourage. Loryan’s efforts show that the Office 365 environment is a living thing, and with his and numerous others the environment is alive and kicking! Please help in passing the word about this great app and the contributions of a great MVP like Loryan!

Here is the link to the Xstran page for the application, http://www.xstran.com/solutions/office-365-mobile-admin/

I am running into a problem trying to enable Online Archive for a migrated mailbox and getting this error:

[PS] C:Windowssystem32>Enable-RemoteMailbox smcneill -Archive

property ArchiveGuid can’t be set on this object because it requires the object to have version 0.10 (14.0.100.0) or later. The object’s current version is 0.1 (8.0.535.0).

+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (0:Int32) [Enable-RemoteMailbox], InvalidObjectOperationException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : 55181214,Microsoft.Exchange.Management.RecipientTasks.EnableRemoteMailbox

The environment I am working in is a Exchange 2007 on-premises with a Exchange 2010 SP2 (RU1) Hybrid server. The mailbox move to O365 works fine and so does ADFS SSO. Researching this seems that the only fix is to disable and then re-enable the remotemailbox, but this wipes the exchange info requiring the remote email address (and probably the LegacyDN) to be reset. This to me is not the best option.

When I look on the Mailbox online it has the proper version, so this appears to be a problem with the Migration process or DirSync not writing back the correct version to the RemoteMailbox object.

Any other thoughts on this?

At Catapult we utilize Office 365 and ADFS for some users.  We also have set up a SharePoint Online site for all of our SharePoint consultants to use for testing and demo purposes.  Well today it came to out internal IT department’s attention that the SharePoint consultants could not access their sites.  An error occurred when attempting to login.  Joe Stocker, Catapult’s IT Manager, wrote a great blog about the ADFS Token Signing certificate and the need to update it each year.  If you are running Office 365 with ADFS I highly recommend you read his post, http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/IT/archive/2012/03/07/cannot-sign-on-to-office-365.aspx

Good information to know and prepare for with a move to the cloud!

Microsoft has published some new tools and resources to assist Small Businesses with the transition, implementation and troubleshooting of Office 365. While the Small Business version (P plan) of Office 365 does not offer live support like the Enterprise (E Plans) of Office 365, it does not mean the Small Business administrator is on his/her own. Check out the resources below for more information. One of the top bookmarks for any Office 365 administrator should be Community Home Page, http://community.office365.com/en-us/default.aspx. This is the best place to learn about Office 365, get help via the Forums and stay up to date on new functionality and improvements to the service.

Stephen Bury posted a nice blog about the Office 365 Troubleshooting tool and Other Technical Resources for Office 365, http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft_office_365_blog/archive/2012/03/01/troubleshooting-tool-and-other-technical-resources-for-office-365.aspx

Patrick Kennedy posted a Video on transferring you domain from Office Live to Office 365 http://community.office365.com/en-us/b/office_365_technical_blog/archive/2012/03/01/video-moving-your-office-live-domain-to-office-365.aspx

Brett Hill (@bretthill) an Office 365 MVP is presenting a 1 hour Webcast March 14^th about working with Office 365 for Small Business and Professionals, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/e/2139