Resolving Skype for business 2015 Backup service “ErrorState” issue

23rd of July, 2017 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been working with one SFB customer recently. I met some unique issue and I would like to share the experience of what I did to solve the problem.
Issue Description:

When I went through the Lync Event logs, I noticed the SFB FE servers are having lots of LS Backup Service with Event 4052, Event 4098 and Event 4071. Error logs are saying 
“Skype for business Server 2015, backup service users store backup module has backup data that never gets imported by backup pool.Backup… [Keep reading] “Resolving Skype for business 2015 Backup service “ErrorState” issue”

Setup a Power BI Gateway

21st of July, 2017 / / 2 Comments

Scenario

So, you have explored Power BI (free) and wanted to start some action in the cloud. Suddenly you realise that your data is stored in an on-premise SQL data source and you still wanted to get insights up in the cloud and share it with your senior business management.

Solution

Microsoft’s on-premises data gateway is a bridge that can securely transfer your data to Power BI service from your on-premises data source.

Assumptions

  • Power BI pro licenses have been procured already for the required no of users (this is a MUST)
  • Users are already part of Azure AD and can sign in to Power BI service as part of Office 365 offering

Pre-requisites

You can build and setup a machine to act as a gateway between your Azure cloud service and on-premises data sources.… [Keep reading] “Setup a Power BI Gateway”

One meeting to allow them all

19th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

The day is getting closer where you can look to Microsoft Office 365 Skype for Business to be able to meet all the capability of your UC collaboration platform in the cloud. The hardest part is knowing what is available and what would you need to purchase to make the complete package for your organisation.
E3 licenses will get you the Skype for Business cloud platform for IM/P, Web and Video Conferencing within your organisation and federated Skype for Business partner organisations.… [Keep reading] “One meeting to allow them all”

Brisbane O365 Saturday

19th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

On the weekend I had a pleasure of presenting to the O365 Saturday Brisbane event. Link below
http://o365saturdayaustralia.com/
In my presentation I demonstrated a new feature within Azure AD that allows the automatic assigment of licences to any of your Azure subscriptions using Dynamic Groups. So what’s cool about this feature?
Well, if you have a well established organisational structure within your on-premise AD and you are synchronising any of the attributes that you need to identity this structure, then you can have your users automatically assigned licences based on their job type, department or even location.… [Keep reading] “Brisbane O365 Saturday”

Implementing Bootstrap and Font-awesome in SharePoint Framework solutions using React

6th of July, 2017 / / 8 Comments

Responsive Design has been the biggest driving factor for SharePoint framework (SPFx) solutions. In a recent SPFx project for a customer, we developed a component using React, Bootstrap and Font-awesome icons for a responsive look and feel. While building the UI piece, we encountered many issues during the initial set up, so I am writing this blog with detail steps for future reference. One of the key fixes mentioned in this post, is for the WOFF2 font-type file which is a component in font-awesome and bootstrap.… [Keep reading] “Implementing Bootstrap and Font-awesome in SharePoint Framework solutions using React”

Decommissioning Exchange 2016 Server

26th of June, 2017 / / 2 Comments

I have created many labs over the years and never really spent the time to decommission my environment, I usually just blow it away and start again.
So I finally decided to go through the process and decommission my Exchange 2016 server in my lab environment.
My lab consisted of the following:

  • Domain Controller (Windows Server 2012 R2)
  • AAD Connect Server
  • Exchange 2016 Server/ Office 365 Hybrid
  • Office 365 tenant

Being a lab I only had one Exchange server which had the mailbox role configured and was also my hybrid server.… [Keep reading] “Decommissioning Exchange 2016 Server”

DKIM for Custom Domain in Office 365

14th of June, 2017 / / No Comments

 
As Office 365 service keeps adding new features and functions, it is important for global admins to keep up with the latest offerings and service enhancements office 365 provides. In this blog post I am going to discuss one of the security feature offered by office 365 and how it can be beneficial to organizations when it comes to securing their office365 tenants. This feature is called DKIM. DKIM has been offered by Microsoft for some time now and most of the organizations are using it quite effectively.… [Keep reading] “DKIM for Custom Domain in Office 365”

Exchange 2010 Hybrid Auto Mapping Shared Mailboxes

30th of May, 2017 / / 2 Comments

Migrating shared mailboxes to Office 365 is one of those things that is starting to become easier over time, especially with full access permissions now working cross premises.
One little discovery that I thought I would share is that if you have an Exchange 2010 hybrid configuration, the auto mapping feature will not work cross premises. (Exchange 2013 and above, you are ok and have nothing to worry about).
This means if an on-premises user has access to a shared mailbox that you migrate to Office 365, it will disappear from their Outlook even though they still have full access.… [Keep reading] “Exchange 2010 Hybrid Auto Mapping Shared Mailboxes”

Try/Catch works in PowerShell ISE and not in PowerShell console

30th of May, 2017 / / No Comments

I recently encountered an issue with one of my PowerShell scripts. It was a script to enable litigation hold on all mailboxes in Exchange Online.
I connected to Exchange Online via the usual means below.

$creds = Get-Credential
$session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $Creds -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $session -AllowClobber

I then attempted to execute the following with no success.

try
{
Set-Mailbox -Identity $user.UserPrincipalName -LitigationHoldEnabled $true -ErrorAction Stop
}
catch
{
Write-Host "ERROR!"
… [Keep reading] “Try/Catch works in PowerShell ISE and not in PowerShell console”

Synchronizing Exchange Online/Office 365 User Profile Photos with FIM/MIM

23rd of May, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

This is Part Two in the two-part blog post on managing users profile photos with Microsoft FIM/MIM. Part one here detailed managing users Azure AD/Active Directory profile photo. This post delves deeper into photos, specifically around Office 365 and the reason why you may want to manage these via FIM/MIM.

Background

User profile photos should be simple to manage. But in a rapidly moving hybrid cloud world it can be a lot more complex than it needs to be.… [Keep reading] “Synchronizing Exchange Online/Office 365 User Profile Photos with FIM/MIM”