Recently I has a customer who suffered a bit of an on-premises outage after moving to Office 365. At the time of the outage the customer was using ADFS and DirSync for their Exchange Online mailboxes, and they ended up losing ADFS and DirSync.
Read moreIf “the cloud” fails it will be because of governments
I try to stay fairly apolitical in this space. That is generally not too difficult because my personal politics tend to be fairly close to “If it’s coming from a professional politician it’s a bad idea and maybe even a dangerously bad idea.”, so I don’t really have a “side” on most political arguments.
Read morepublic folder updates in cu6 improving scale and more →
Coming Soon: Portland Office 365 Users Group
Office 365 user groups are the new thing, so I figure the good people of Portland need to get in on this trend. I’ve started working on organizing a quarterly meeting of the Portland Office 365 user group, and I’m here today to announce my plans and ask for your assistance and participation.
Read moreUninstalling DirSync
One of Microsoft’s main feature claims for DirSync is that it has an appliance like setup. I have probably installed 100 DirSync servers, and can confirm that the install process for DirSync is as appliance like as it gets. The process of uninstalling DirSync is, however, nowhere near appliance like
Read moreAzure Active Directory Connect: Solving a problem or adding to one?
Enterprise deployments are complicated. When you add “cloud” services to enterprise deployments, they become much more complicated. I think we can consider those two statements axiomatic at this point. If we want to add a third axiom to the list, saying that people want simple solutions would fit the bill. Microsoft knows all three of these things, and bless their little hearts they really do try to make things as simple as they can. I have no doubt what-so-ever that their hearts are in the right place, but sometimes that is not enough.
Read moreGet-EDSData v3
The new phonebook is here!
OK maybe you don’t need to be that excited about this version of my Get-EDSData script. I have just completed rewriting this script to work off a CSV file instead of using parameters for input. This means that you can create a csv file with a list of as many performance counters as you’d like and then run Get-EDSData against that csv file to find out if those performance counters went over the thresholds you sent during the period of time you have Daily Performance Logs on your Exchange 2013 server.
Read moreImport-Module DirSync
With the latest version of DirSync, Microsoft has created a full PowerShell module for DirSync instead of that semi-module we used to have to run to get the Start-OnlineCoexistanceSync command. Since we figured out that we can run Import-Module DirSync now to get the Start-OnlineCoexistanceSync cmdlet, I figured there must be other commands in this module. So I did some poking around to see if I could find out what they might be.
Read moreConnections conference sessions
It is my great honor to say that Tony Redmond, whose many books have been my primary resource for learning Exchange, has asked me to speak at the IT Connections conference in Las Vegas this September. I am both excited and more than a little bit nervous about speaking at this event, but I guess the only way to grow is to push yourself outside of your comfort zone.
Read moreGet-EDSData part 2
When we left our intrepid hero, I had just completed a very basic script to collate a single performance counter from the daily performance logs of an Exchange 2013 server into its own .blg file. The code for this script looked like this...
Read moreThe Get-EDSData project
If you saw my blog post last week on Pulling performance counter data from daily performance logs you now know, as I do, that Exchange 2013 records a ton of performance data on your Exchange server by default. I was recently out on a walk, where I do some of my best thinking, trying to come up with a way to make use of all that data. Thusly was the Get-EDSData project was born. I am by no means a PowerShell expert. I’m not quite a PowerShell novice, but honestly I am probably closer to being a novice than an expert.
Read morePreventing accidentally deleted accounts from syncing via DirSync
Believe it or not, I’ve done some pretty dumb things. I’ve deleted all kinds of things that I should not have, and I’m fairly confident that I’ll do more dumb things in the future. The best I can do is know that I am going to screw things up and try to figure out ways to make sure I can recover from screw ups when they happen. It that vein, I was pretty happy to discover a new DirSync setting that helps prevent the accidental deletion of large numbers of AD accounts from Azure AD and/or Office 365.
Read morePulling performance counter data from daily performance logs
Exchange 2013 collects a lot of performance data on itself by default. By a lot I mean that your Exchange 2013 server has data for about 3,000 performance counters for the last seven days sitting there waiting for you to access them. The problem, however, is that it is not readily apparent how to use this data in its native form. If you open the DailyPerformanceLogs folder on your Exchange 2013 server (C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\Logging\Diagnostics\DailyPerformanceLogs by default) you will see 7 rather large files there with the extension .blg. On my lab servers they tend to run about 750MB each. If you open one up with performance monitor you’ll see a useless tangle of lines that will lend you absolutely no assistance in diagnosing the performance issues on your Exchange server. So how do you glean useful information from these logs? Well read the answers are below.
Read moreOffice 365 tenant administrator roles have changed
For the last 3 years, Office 365 has had a rather poor set of choices for the roles you can assign to your administrators. The old administrator roles for Office 365 are; Billing admin, Global admin, Password admin Service admin, and User management admin. I don’t think that these roles are terribly self-explanatory to most of the people to whom they would be assigned, and they don’t really map to real world jobs that administrators do. The only role there with usable administrate rights is global admin, the other roles are all for some level of running Office 365 itself. The Global admin role has all the rights to all the constituent parts of Office 365; Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint. In the real world, there are not many people who actually know how to work those 3 different technologies. As of this morning, Microsoft has changed the roles groups into something that looks like it makes more sense.
Read moreOffice 365 feature release roadmap
I’m a pretty big fan of Office 365, not just because Office 365 migrations are the majority of how I make a paycheck. In general I think Office 365 is the current best example of “the cloud”, meaning Office 365 is the most complete and useable group of workloads that business IT departments can outsource to make both their and their users work lives better. That being said, I do have a few of issues with Office 365 and most of them are communication.
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