Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Sync Multiple AD Forests and Google Apps Directory into Office365


I have recently began using a product called CloudAnywhere from CloudiWay which has some really excellent features like:
  • Syncronise multiple Active Directory Forests and passwords into Office365
  • Syncronise Google Apps Directory into Office365.
I recorded a VIDEO showing some of the features of the product.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

PST Capture - no mailboxes found for exchange online

PST Capture 2.0 is a great tool from Microsoft and works really well when migrating PST files into Exchange Online. I recently had a problem when trying to select destination mailboxes , The solution is really simple. You need to get your tenant server name and you can do this by browsing to www.outlook.com/contoso.com and taking note of the server name and then entering it in the Exchange Online settings in PST capture as per the image below.

You can download PST Capture 2.0 HERE
PST capture requires Outlook 2010 x64
You can download Office 2010 x64 Service Pack 2 HERE
October 2013 Cumulative updates for Outlook 2010 can be downloaded HERE
Office365 Single Signin Assistant can be downloaded HERE

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Google Apps - Office365 equivalent services

The table below outlines the services offered in Google Apps for business and the matching services in Office365 that provide matching and enhanced functionality.

Most notably 50GB mailboxes , 25GB Skydrive Pro






Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Bulk activation of users in Office365

I recently had to activate 2000 Exchange Online P1 users and 100 Office365 E4 Users.

So how can we do this quickly?

Powershell to the rescue.

Ensure that the Windows Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell is installed. Launch the module and run the following commands.You can download the module HERE

I need a CSV file for Exchange Online Plan 1 users and Office365 E4 users. To do this I run the following powershell commands to export all unlicensed users to a csv file.

Get-MsolUser -all | where {$_.isLicensed -eq $false} | select-object userprincipalname | out-file c:\users.csv

I can then review the contents of this csv file and create two csv files.

Exchange Online Plan 1 users : p1.csv
Office365 E4 users : e4.csv

Connect-MsolService (Enter Global Administrator credentials)
Get-MsolAccountSku (Take note of the account skus)

Assign a usage location to each set of users with the following powershell commands. The usage location in this example is Ireland IE

Import-Csv -Path c:\P1.CSV | foreach {set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName $_.UPN -UsageLocation IE} 

Import-Csv -Path c:\E4.CSV | foreach {set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName $_.UPN -UsageLocation IE} 

Then assign a license to each set of users.

Import-Csv -Path c:\P1.CSV| Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName {$_.’UPN’} –AddLicenses “Contoso:EXCHANGESTANDARD” 

Import-Csv -Path c:\E4.CSV| Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName {$_.’UPN’} –AddLicenses “Contoso:ENTERPRISEWITHSCAL” 


And there we go all users activated.


Sunday, August 25, 2013

Exchange 2003 - Exchange Online Co-Existence



A customer recently asked me how do we enable co - existence between Exchange 2003 and Exchange Online wave 15. The upgrade path from 2003 to 2013 on premise or Exchange online can take a few too may steps. So as per my previous blog posting , I have chosen Quest On Demand as my migration tool of choice for moving customers to Exchange Online.

A cut over migration using the Exchange Online native migration tools is often not practical for enterprise customers , simply because of the volume of data , amount of users , bandwidth.

So Quest on Demand comes to the rescue.
In this example I will using contoso.com as the external email domain and will not be using windows azure directory sync and will describe in sequence the steps required for co-existence.

  1. Add contoso.com to the domains section in your exchange online tenant , verify ownership of the domain and then set the domain usage to use exchange online.
  2. On the exchange 2003 server, browse to exchange system manager , expand mailboxes and then in the actions menu , export to list. This will export a list as a text file which you can then open in Excel. I normally then present this excel file to my customer and ask them to remove users that do not require migration. Once that has been done , we have our user list for migration.
  3. The next step is to bulk create exchange online external contacts. The method for creating exchange online contacts is described HERE in an Office365 Wiki Page. We will use the user list that was exported from exchange 2003 to populate the csv for external contacts. I normally create contacts for all existing mail users.
  4. We then Create an Outbound Connector for Contoso.com with the following configuration.
    Name: Contoso.com
    Connection Type: on premise
    Retain Service Headers on Transmission: True
    Connection Security: Opportunistic TLS
    Outbound Delivery: Route mail through smart host
    (add in the name of the mx record value for contoso.com)
    Domains: Contoso.com
  5. * Lets say we were migrating 50 users per evening.
  6. We would delete the external contacts for the users that we want to migrate and run the following commands in the windows azure active directory module for powershell Get-MsolUser –ReturnDeletedUsers | Remove-MsolUser –RemoveFromRecycleBin -force
  7. We would then create the users in Exchange Online via the sample user csv and populate the csv with the user details we obtained from exporting user details from exchange online.
  8. We would then set the usage location with the following command  in the windows azure active directory module for powershell
    Get-MsolUser -UnlicensedUsersOnly |Set-MsolUser -UsageLocation IE
  9. We would then assign a license to the users we created  in the windows azure active directory module for powershell.
    Get-MsolUser -UnlicensedUsersOnly | Set-MsolUserLicense -AddLicenses “Contoso”:EXCHANGESTANDARD
  10. Now we are ready to use Quest On Demand. We use the same user names that we just created to create the Quest On Demand migration text file.
  11. Quest on Demand will also allow us to set the forwarding per user. The on premise user's mailboxes will forward mail to each user@contoso.onmicrosoft.com. When email arrives at the Exchange 2003 server , if the user is an exchange online user then then mail is forwarded to the user's proxy address.
  12. Lastly add : spf.protection.outlook.com to your existing SPF record.
And that is it. 

Exchange online users can browse the global address list and send email to users and not know where the mailbox is located in Exchange online or Exchange 2003 on premise.

Exchange 2003 users can browse their global address list and send email to users and not know where the mailbox is located in Exchange online or Exchange 2003 on premise.

Note:
When an Exchange 2003 mailbox has been migrated to Exchange online the user must have a minimum Outlook client version of Office 2007 SP3 should they wish to use a full Outlook client.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Quest on Demand Email Migration to Office365


I do not mean to sound like a Quest Sales Man , But this product from Quest truly is a super product.

It allows you to migrate email from the following sources.

Microsoft Exchange 2000/2003/2007/2010
IMAP
Lotus Notes
Microsoft Bpos
Microsoft Live@edu
Microsoft Office365
Novell Groupwise
Sun One / iPlanet
Pop
Windows Live Hotmail

You can then migrate to the following targets

Microsoft Exchange 2010/2013
Office365
Microsoft Live@edu

So why would you use this service?

A couple of reasons, It is hosted in Windows Azure and can allow for zero touch migrations.Exchange 2007 messaging platforms upwards give us the ability to implement hybrid environments which can then create a platform which will allow rich co-existence and migration.

Its a hell of a lot cheaper than the full email migration products from quest.

It can migrate from Lotus Notes!!!

I have worked on quite a few corporate companies that  acquire companies. Extracting email from a business first before an AD consolidation project makes the AD consolidation project a lot easier and a tool like this allows zero touch email extraction into a companies own on-premise exchange messaging environment or into my preferred platform Office365.

I have taken some screen shots of how easy the wizard is to begin a migration. In this example I   wanted to migrate from Exchange 2010 to Office365 wave15. So before I did that , I created an application impersonation role in the exchange 2010 on-premise environment and one in the Office365 environment.



After that we sign into the Quest On Demand Portal HERE

Then agree to the service's agreement and select your data center location.

Then create a Migration Plan. There are four simple steps.

  1. Connect to the email services
  2. Import Mailboxes
  3. Choose what to migrate
  4. Migrate
On the connections tab you connect to the source exchange 2010 messaging platform and enter the credentials of an account that has the application impersonation. There is a test connection tab to verify connectivity.

Then you connect to the target , in this case Office365. You will need to add an exchange license to the office365 account in order to make it a member of the application impersonation group. Microsoft throttle the amount of data that can be migrated into Office365. So you can add multiple accounts for the target to increase migration throughput.

In section 2 you specify the source and target mailbox which is populated by a simple text file.
You then select what to migrate.

Finally you begin migration.

And once all the mail has been extracted from the business and when the ad consolidation project has been complete , you can refer to one of my previous blogs HERE on how to convert existing Office365 users to federated users.

Monday, June 17, 2013

Error adding second adfs server with ucc cert


I recently tried to add a second adfs server to an adfs farm and got the error message above. I was using a ucc cert which had the adfs service name.

So to fix it you add the second server via the command line , a typical command would be as follows.

FsConfig.exe JoinFarm /PrimaryComputerName ADFS-SRV /ServiceAccount Contoso\adfsservice /ServiceAccountPassword password /CertThumbprint "ef 72 a6 78 c0 ab 4a bf 07 10 7e e4 86 f5 5e ba 2a 3c 99 6b"

And the output from the command will be as per the image below.

.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Windows Azure Active Directory Sync Tool


The windows azure active directory sync tool , has a new feature. 'Password Synchronization'

This is a really neat feature and will meet the needs of most businesses that need to synchronize identities to office365. Setting up ADFS farms is often overkill for small businesses as to do it properly you need a minimum of 4 servers. Two adfs proxy servers and Two adfs lan servers each in a  different site for redundancy and high availability.

Now with password synchronization you only need one server or can install the dirsync service onto an existing server.So how do we configure password synchronization.


  1. Create a dirsync service account and add the account to the 'FIMSyncAdmins' group on the server where you plan installing the service.
  2. Create this shorcut on the desktop '"C:\Program Files\Windows Azure Active Directory Sync\SYNCBUS\Synchronization Service\UIShell\miisclient.exe"
  3. Then as per the image below , right click on 'Active directory Connector', 'Configure Directory Partitions' and then 'Containers' and select the OU's that you want to synchronize.

So that is how to set up password synchronization.You need an adfs farm if you want Single Sign on, But single sign on is only for web services like 

OutlookWebApp
Sharepoint 
portal.microsoftonline.com

So if a customer is going with only exchange online then this can be setup very quickly and passwords will be synced.

Now one more thing , after you reboot the 'Forefront Identity Manager Synchronization Service'wont start! So how you get around this is as follows. 

  1. Create an OU and add the DirSync Server into that OU. 
  2. Add the DirSync Server to that OU.
  3. IN GPO Management , Block Inheritance on the OU.
  4. Create a group policy object as follows. Navigate to 'Computer Configuration\Policies\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\User Rights Assignment'
  5. Located "Login as a Service" and add  the service account for the synchronization engine which could be typically 'AAD_95a9bb5e2ba4'
  6. Link the GPO to the OU prevously created and enforce the policy
  7. Logon to the DirSync server, GPUPDATE/FORCE
  8. Log off
  9. Log on 
  10. Start the service
  11. Or you could simply use gpedit.msc and edit the local policy on the machine.

At the time of writing this post , the version of windows azure directory sync tool was Forefront Identity manager 2010 R2 Version: 4.1.3451.0






Friday, May 17, 2013

Quest NME migrations with Exchange Online Wave 15


I have done quite a few Lotus Notes to Exchange online migrations using Quest's Notes for Exchange migration toolkit.

One of my favorite features is the admin pool. 

So what is the admin pool? The admin pool creates a pool of global administrators that can be used for migrations as Microsoft throttle the amount of data that can be migrated per user name. An example of an admin pool is displayed below.




This feature works great when migrating to a Wave 14 Exchange online tenant but not so well when migrating to a Wave 15 tenant.If you want to use an admin pool to migrate to a wave 15 you need to submit a service request to Microsoft and below is an extract with the instructions from Quest.

Microsoft has informed our Product Team that they are changing the procedure for requesting exemption to the PowerShell throttling.
Each Tenant Admin, as an Office365 customer, please submit a service request individually. Microsoft would like to receive requests directly from the Tenant Admin.
The Tenant Admin should open a service request and reference "Bemis Article: 2835021".  The Microsoft Product Group would also need following information in the request:

1.     The tenant domain (tenant.onmicrosoft.com)
2.     The version of Exchange (These requests should all be for Wave15)
3.     The number of mailboxes that are being migrated
4.     The number of concurrent admins accounts that will be used for the migration
5.     The number of concurrent threads that will be in use
6.     The number of runSpaces will be created per minute
7.     The proposed limit (powershellMaxTenantRunspaces, powershellMaxConcurrency, etc.) and number to increase the limit to

For items 6 and 7, Tenant Admin may probably need to take the total number of threads across all migration machines that you plan to use and add a buffer because it is not easy to know in advance how the timing of the runSpaces will occur.

As a result, it may be safe to assume that  all potential runSpaces could be created within a minute, so 6 & 7 should probably both be submitted as the total number.

More Information About # 6 & 7

If there are 5 migration consoles designated for the migration and running 3 threads each, it is safe to assume that you may have 15 runSpaces created per minute.

In case of you may decide to increase threads or add migration consoles later, even it is safe to assume that you may have 15 runSpaces per minute, to provide a buffer, you may want to ask 25 or 50 (each)  powershellMaxTenantRunspaces, powershellMaxConcurrency, etc. 

Microsoft will only do this for a minimum of 1000 users that are migrating to Exchange online. 

So the way I got around it was by doing the following.In this instance there were 3 nme migration machines.


  1. Create New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role "ApplicationImpersonation" –User admin@contoso.onmicrosoft.com
  2. Then create 3 nmeadmin accounts and assign an exchange online license to each account.
    nmeadmin1@contoso.onmicrosoft.com
    nmeadmin2@contoso.onmicrosoft.com
    nmeadmin3@contoso.onmicrosoft.com
  3. Install the Windows Azure Directory module for powershell on each nme machine which you can download HERE
  4. Create an Admin Role called Quest , add in the following roles
    Application Impersonation & Migration
    as per the image below
  5.  Add the 3 nmeadmin accounts as members to this role.
  6. Add the 3 nmeadmin accounts as members to the Organization Management - Admin Role
  7. On each of the nmeadmin machines configure an Outlook client for each of the nemadmin accounts. So one account per machine and do not enable caching.
  8. So when you come to the point of migrating enter nmeadmin1 credentials into the migration wizard on machine1 , nmeadmin2 credentials on machine2 and nmeadmin3 credentials on machine 3 as per the image below.
This will then allow you to migrate from Lotus notes to Exchange online wave 15. I am sure Quest will resolve the admin pool issue as it is such a cool feature and really speeds up for migrations.

At the time of writing this post this relates to Quest NME version 4.7.0.82 displayed below.



Saturday, May 11, 2013

Cloud Accelerate Partner Support


One of the benefits of being a Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner is that you can get dedicated  Cloud Partner Support which is available 24 Hours a day 7 days a week.

So how do you access this benefit as there is no dedicated phone number.

The way you access the Cloud Partner Support team is by logging a service request via your partner tenant. So you can log a service request through your own partner tenant for one of your customer's tenants.

This really is an excellent service. Its like having a Microsoft Premier Support contract. I have logged a number of service requests via the Cloud Partner Support team and their response time is excellent.

HERE is a document providing an overview of the Cloud Deployment Program Overview

QUEST NME unable to create admin pool


In the image above I ran into an issue when trying to create an admin pool for on Quest Notes For Exchange migration toolkit.This was for a migration to Exchange Online.

So the first thing i did was set-executionpolicy unrestricted -force on both the x64 and x32 versions of powershell. But that didn't fix the issue.

Most enterprises have quite a few group policies and sometimes these policies are applied before the machines have been moved to an OU that has inheritance blocked.

So to remove the group policies causing the issue. 

Browse to HKLM\Software\micrsoft\windows\currentversion\group policy and then delete any S-x-x-xx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxx keys.

Ensure you have the Windows Azure Active Directory Module for powershell installed on all the nme machines.


Once I had removed all the group policies I could create the admin pool and proceed with migrations.

Saturday, May 4, 2013

An internet connection is required to ensure that your subscription for Microsoft Office is not interrupted


I have a customer that has a new wave 15 Office365 tenant and click to run is not compatible with Windows XP. Like most corporate customers , my customer had a proxy.

So I ran the Office365 readiness assessment tool which you can download HERE 

The results of the test stated that Office365 ports could not be contacted.

The reason for this is because Office365 communicates to the service via networkservice.

Lets say my proxy was 1.1.1.1:8080 then run the following command and Office will activate fine.

bitsadmin /util /setieproxy networkservice MANUAL_PROXY 1.1.1.1:8080 “”

If you need bitsadmin for xp you can download it HERE .


Monday, April 29, 2013

Exchange Hybrid GAL not populating

As per one of my previous posts HERE on how to edit active directory attributes , When dirsync  is enabled it wont populate the GAL with exchange online and exchange on-premise.

Lets say my email address is sean@contoso.com. 

You need to populate some ad attributes.

Proxy Address: SMTP:sean@contoso.com & smtp:sean@contoso.mail.onmicrosoft.com
Target Address: SMTP:sean@contoso.mail.onmicrosoft.com
UPN:sean@contoso.com

So after those attributes have been synced via dirsync run this powershell command in the exchange management shell 

Enable-RemoteMailbox sean@contoso.com -RemoteRoutingAddress sean@contoso.mail.onmicrosoft.com

So once this is done all you need to do is apply a license and usage location to sean@contoso.com

And then the GAL will be populated between Exchange On premise and Exchange online.

Friday, April 26, 2013

An encrypted connection to your mail server is not available


I have been working on a Hybrid Exchange project recently and when I was using my own laptop on my customer's  domain , I could connect to a test exchange online mailbox without any issues.

But any machine on their network could not connect via autodiscover to an exchange online mailbox.So a couple of points to note.

When running an exchange hybrid the 'autodiscover.contoso.com' will point at your hybrid servers and when the outlook client hits the hybrid server the client will be directed to the correct mailbox location by the hybrid server.

So our good friend the Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer can perform a test on both an on prem exchange mailbox and an office365 mailbox and when the outlook client hits the https://autodiscover.contoso.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml the outlook client gets routed to the correct mailbox. But in the case of an exchange online mailbox , http redirection occurs until it reaches the exchange online autodiscover.xml which for example could be https://autodisocver.contoso.mail.onmicrosoft.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml

Another test we can do is by running the 'Test Email AutoConfiguration' tool in Outlook as per the image below. There are quite a few re-directs until outlook finds the correct exchange online mailbox.
So in my particular scenario my Outlook could connect fine but domain joined laptops could not and this was because of a group policy which is displayed below which was blocking the http redirects required to connect to the exchange online mailbox.

So how to fix this , well firstly remove the group policy and secondly you can edit 4 registry settings as follows and as per the image below in hkey_current_user\software\microsoft\office\14.0\outlook\autodiscover

ExcludeHttpRedirect 0
ExcludeHttpsAutoDiscoverDomain 0
ExcludeHttpsRootDomain 0
ExcludeSrvRecord 0


So now all your Outlook clients in Hybrid mode will be able to connect via autodiscover.








Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Exchange Hybrid Mailbox Migrations slow when using TMG



When using Exchange online in Hybrid mode , if you want to have a unified global address list with exchange online users and onpremise users then you need to create on premise blank mailboxes for the users that you want to use exchange online and then create 'remote move requests' to move the onpremise mailboxes to exchange online.

During the move request , if you open the log you may see 'Relinquishing job because the mailbox is locked'

So in order to fix this and really speed up the remote move requests we need to go to the intrusion prevention section of TMG and then the Behavioral Detection\Configure Flood Mitifgation Settings as per the image below.


We click on the link for Configure Flood Mitigation Settings and then click on 'IP Exceptions' and create a new computer set. In the image below I called it 'Exchange Online Protection' and add a computer set with the exchange online protection range as per the image below


All of the Exchange Online Protection IP ranges can be found at this SITE 

You can susbscribe via RSS feed HERE to the Microsoft Online IP Ranges 

So now Remote move requests will migrate a lot quicker :) 


Saturday, April 20, 2013

Migrating Lotus Notes users into an Exchange Hybrid

In this post I just wanted to highlight what active directory attributes need to change on a user account when you have an existing Exchange Hybrid and want to migrate Lotus Domino users into exchange online.

Primary Email Address: Sean@contoso.com
Hybrid email Domain: contoso.mail.microsoft.com

The existing users that have exchange mailboxes will already have exchange active directory attributes. So lets take a look at what happens when you migrate an on premise exchange mailbox to exchange online.

When you run dirsync , a proxy hybrid domain is created in the example above it is contoso.mail.microsoft.com. So when you initiate a 'new remote move request' and move an onprem user to the cloud the user becomes a mail contact and their routing email address becomes

So how do we populate the active directory users that have came into our active directory from Lotus notes with the right attributes so that when they sync with dirsync to exchange online they will have the correct PRIMARY email address and be able to co-exist with the onpremise users.

We use my good friend ADMODIFY to modify some key attributes

So in this example the default email address policy is firstname.secondname@contoso.com

So we connect to our active directory via admodify and select all the users or organisational units we want to modify and add them to the list we then enter '%'givenname'%.%'sn'%@contoso.com' on  the email address tab


So now that we have modified this attribute the user's primary email address will be 'firstname.secondname@contoso.com' when synced with dirsync.

We need to make sure the users have the correct UPN and this can be done by viewing one of my previous blogs HERE

We need to modify one more attribute as these users will be in exchange online and will need to co-exist with the exchange on premise users.So as per the image below  we enter the following syntax 'SMTP:%'givenname'%.%'sn'%@contoso.mail.microsoft.com' in the 'targetAddress' attribute.


So the beauty of ADMODIFY is that you can modify thousands of users attributes in a couple of minutes and if something goes wrong it writes the config changes to an xml file. So you can quickly undo the changes you made if there were problems.
SO KEEP THE ADMODIFY CONFIGURATION XML FILES SAFE!

Lets say you don't want some users to sync to exchange online , you can filter them by what organisational unit gets synced or you can use admodify again to modify a custom attribute by entering 'nooffice365' as per the image below in the 'extensionAttribute10' attribute


Ok so now we have users in exchange online and we have no dirsync error notification emails. How do we mass activate them. Well we run two powershell commands.

  1. We set the user's location , in this example the country is US
    Get-MsolUser -UnlicensedUsersOnly |Set-MsolUser -UsageLocation US
  2. Get-MsolUser -UnlicensedUsersOnly | Set-MsolUserLicense -AddLicenses “Contoso.com”:EXCHANGESTANDARD
Now we have populated our Active Directory with all the correct attributes that will enable co-existence and mass activated those users via powershell.

So now its over to my choice of software for Lotus Notes migration.

I will post a step by step blog on setting up quest nme next month. This post was to show people how to prep ad and exchange online for mass migration to exchange online where an existing hybrid was in place.

Note:
Quest NME will not populate the GAL as the source directory will be Lotus Notes and target directory Exchange Online.So to populate the gal after you have made all the attribute changes above run this command in the exchange management shell Enable-RemoteMailbox sean@contoso.com -RemoteRoutingAddress sean@contoso.mail.onmicrosoft.com