Understanding Password Sync and Write-back

15th of May, 2017 / / 5 Comments

For anyone who has worked with Office 365/Azure AD and AADConnect, you will of course be aware that we can now sync passwords two ways from Azure AD to our on-premises AD. This is obviously a very handy thing to do for myriad reasons, and an obvious suggestion for a business intending to utilise Office 365. The conversation with the security bod however, might be a different kettle of fish. In this post, I aim to explain how the password sync and write-back features work, and hopefully arm you with enough information to have that chat with the security guys.… [Keep reading] “Understanding Password Sync and Write-back”

Surface Hub – Skype for Business Login Failure

28th of March, 2017 / / 2 Comments

Excitement has grown around the Kloud office of late as each state waits with anticipation of a Surface Hub arriving to connect to our Skype for Business environment. The 84 inch Surface Hub destined for our Adelaide Boardroom which I nicknamed ‘Godzilla’ has had only one problem since installation, it fails to login to Skype for Business. Which makes this device go from a high end meeting room endpoint to a what I could only say is a giant tablet for games of tick tac toe, therefore this became my problem rather quickly.… [Keep reading] “Surface Hub – Skype for Business Login Failure”

Azure AD Connect – Upgrade Errors

16th of March, 2017 / / No Comments

 
 
Azure AD Connect is the latest release to date for Azure AD sync or previously known as Dirsync service. It comes with some new features which make it even more efficient and useful in Hybrid environment. Besides many new features the primary purpose of this application remains the same i.e. to sync identities from your local (On-Prem) AD to Azure AD.
Of the late I upgraded an AD sync service to AD connect and during the install process I ran into a few issues which I felt are not widely discussed or posted on the web but yet are real world scenarios which people can face during AD connect Install and configuration.… [Keep reading] “Azure AD Connect – Upgrade Errors”

It's time to get your head out of the clouds!

27th of February, 2017 / / No Comments

head-in-the-clouds1
For those of you who know me, you are probably thinking “Why on earth would we be wanting to get our heads out of the “Cloud” when all you’ve been telling me for years now is the need to adopt cloud!
This is true for the most part, but my point here is many businesses are being flooded by service providers in every direction to adopt or subscribe to their “cloud” based offering, furthermore ICT budgets are being squeezed forcing organisations into SaaS applications.… [Keep reading] “It's time to get your head out of the clouds!”

Send mail to Office 365 via an Exchange Server hosted in Azure

24th of February, 2017 / / No Comments

Those of you who have attempted to send mail to Office 365 from Azure know that sending outbound mail directly from an email server hosted in Azure is not supported due to elastic nature of public cloud service IPs and the potential for abuse. Therefore, the Azure IP address blocks are added to public block lists with no exceptions to this policy.
To be able to send mail from an Azure hosted email server to Office 365 you to need to send mail via a SMTP relay.… [Keep reading] “Send mail to Office 365 via an Exchange Server hosted in Azure”

Free/busy Exchange hybrid troubleshooting with Microsoft Edge

24th of February, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Those of you who have configured Exchange hybrid with Office 365 before know that free/busy functionality can be troublesome at times and not work correctly.
Instead of searching through Exchange logs I found that you can pin point the exact error message through Microsoft Edge to assist with troubleshooting.
To do so;

  1. Open Microsoft Edge and login to Office 365 OWA (https://outlook.office365.com/owa) with an Office 365 account
  2. Create a new meeting request
  3. Press F12 to launch developer tools
  4. Conduct a free/busy lookup on a person with a mailbox on-premises
  5. Select the Network tab
  6. Select the entry with “GetUserAvailability”devtools-getuseravailability
  7. Select the body tab (on the right hand side)
  8. The MessageText element will display the exact error messagedevtools-messagetext

Exchange Server 2016 in Azure

23rd of February, 2017 / / 13 Comments

I recently worked on a project where I had to install Exchange Server 2016 on an Azure VM and I chose a D2 sized Azure VM (2 cores, 7GB RAM) thinking that will suffice, well that was a big mistake.
The installation made it to the last step before a warning appeared informing me that the server is low on memory resources and eventually terminated the installation, leaving it incomplete.
Let this be a warning to the rest of you, choose a D3 or above sized Azure VM to save yourself a whole lot of agony.… [Keep reading] “Exchange Server 2016 in Azure”

Exchange Server 2016 install error: “Active Directory could not be contacted”

23rd of February, 2017 / / No Comments

I recently worked on a project where I had to install Exchange Server 2016 on an Azure VM and received error “Active Directory could not be contacted”.
To resolve the issue, I had to complete the following steps;

  1. Remove the Azure VM public IP address
  2. Disable IPv6 on the NICipv6-disabled
  3. Set the IPv4 DNS suffix to point to your domain. If a public address is being used it will be set to reddog.microsoft.com by default.dns-suffix

Once done the installation could proceed and Active Directory was contactable.

Angular Bag of Tricks for SharePoint

21st of February, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

I’ve been using Angular 1.x for building custom UI components and SPAs for SharePoint for years now. There’s a lot of rinse and repeat here, and over time my “stack” of open-source custom Directives and Services that make Angular such a powerful framework, have settled down to a few key ones that I wanted to highlight – hence this post.
Some may be wondering why am I still working almost exclusively with Angular 1.x? Why not Angular 2, or React, or Aurelia?… [Keep reading] “Angular Bag of Tricks for SharePoint”

Monitor SharePoint Changelog in Azure Function

10th of February, 2017 / / No Comments

Azure Functions have officially reached ‘hammer’ status

I’ve been enjoying the ease with which we can now respond to events in SharePoint and perform automation tasks, thanks to the magic of Azure Functions. So many nails, so little time!
The seminal blog post that started so many of us on that road, was of course John Liu’s Build your PnP Site Provisioning with PowerShell in Azure Functions and run it from Flow and that pattern is fantastic for many event-driven scenarios.… [Keep reading] “Monitor SharePoint Changelog in Azure Function”