Yammer Activation in All Eligible Tenants

25th of February, 2016 / / No Comments

In an effort to drive the collaboration experience and further the adoption of Yammer, Microsoft announced on the 2nd of February that Yammer now meets all of Office 365’s security and compliance requirements and Yammer will be activated across all Office 365 tenants that contain a Yammer subscription. This will be a retrospective activation as well as being enabled by default for any new tenants. The rollout will be in three stages:

  • Wave 1 has commenced as of February 1, 2016 and includes Office 365 customers with a business subscription who purchased fewer than 150 licenses that includes Yammer and who have zero or one custom domain for Yammer.
… [Keep reading] “Yammer Activation in All Eligible Tenants”

Use MailTips to help avoid those embarrassing email slips

22nd of February, 2016 / / 10 Comments

If you’re like me you probably have a lot of email addresses that auto-complete in Outlook because you spend a lot of your professional life in email.

As some point I bet you’ve also emailed Alan Smith at an external supplier rather than Alan Smyth in accounts because Outlook auto-complete did its thing and you didn’t notice. That is, until that split second after you clicked ‘Send’ or when Alan Smith replied with an email along the lines of “Errrr, don’t think this was meant for me”.… [Keep reading] “Use MailTips to help avoid those embarrassing email slips”

Good practices for implementing a healthy Azure Active Directory identity foundation

8th of February, 2016 / / No Comments

Originally posted on Lucian.Blog. Follow Lucian on Twitter @LucianFrango for daily doses of cloud.

This is part frustrated (mild) rant, part helpful hint and like the title says: part public service announcement. While I am most definitely a glass is half full kind of person, and I don’t get stressed out much or phased by pressure much, I, like anyone, do get annoyed with certain things. Let’s start with a quick vent before continuing on with the public service announcement.

Rather then just have a rant or a whinge, let me explain the situation and by doing so I’ll most likely vent some frustration.

Deploying a Hybrid Exchange environment to integrate with Exchange Online in Office 365 can be a behemoth of a task if you lack certain things. While anyone can say any number of criteria or list off important considerations, pre-requisites or requirements, I feel that there is only one thing that needs to be addressed. One thing that sticks in my mind as being the foundation of the endeavour.

Just like the old saying goes “you can’t build a strong house on weak foundations”; the same applies to that initial journey to the cloud.

I say initial journey, as for many organisations that first step after setting up a website, which can be the beginning to being a cloud-focused organisation, Office 365 is truly the first step to move infrastructure, process and systems to the cloud that I see happen the most.

Importantly though is to realise that as amazing and full of features as Office 365 is, deploying a Hybrid environment to leverage what I consider the best of both worlds, a hybrid identity, all that matters is the existing Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS) environment. That is ALL THAT MATTERS.

Step aside Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) and Azure AD Connect (AADConnect) or even Hybrid Exchange Server 2016 itself. All those components sit on top of the foundation of the existing identity and directory services that is the ADDS environment.

ADDS is so crucial as it key link in the chain, so much so that if it has issues, the entire project can easily and quickly run into trouble and delays. Delays lead to cost. Delays lead to unhappy management. Delays lead to unhappy users. Delays lead to the people working on the project going grey.

I remember a time when I had blonde curly hair. I grew out of that and as I got older my hair darkened to a rich, chocolate (at least 70% cocoa) brown. Now, as each project gets notched on my belt, slowly, the slick chocolate locks are giving way to the odd silky, white sign that there’s not enough emphasis on a well-managed and organised ADDS.

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Delegate Mailbox Access using Groups in Exchange Online

8th of February, 2016 / / 4 Comments
A common misconception about granting mailbox access rights in Exchange Online is that you can only add access to the individual and not a group. You may have opened the Exchange Administrator Center (EAC), found the mailbox you wanted and looked at the delegated access tab. Only to be provided with a list of eligible user identity’s, but none of your on-premises security groups that have been created. Fear not, the on-premises groups just need a little remediation to the correct flavour to be seen in the picker and then applied.
… [Keep reading] “Delegate Mailbox Access using Groups in Exchange Online”

Office 365 Import Service via PowerShell

3rd of February, 2016 / / 32 Comments

UPDATE 10/02/2017

Ok, so sorry everyone, I’ve been a bit slack with this one and Microsoft have made some significant changes in this space since I blogged on it. I thought it best to get this page updated so anyone who googled it would have current info!

Firstly, Microsoft have changed the BLOB they give you for the ingestion service to write once. This of course means if you don’t place things in the right location (folder for example) it’s not going anywhere!… [Keep reading] “Office 365 Import Service via PowerShell”

Provisioning Users for Lync / Skype for Business with FIM / MIM using the Granfeldt PowerShell Management Agent

28th of January, 2016 / / No Comments

Forefront / Microsoft Identity Manager contains numerous Management Agents (MA’s) out of the box. However, a MA for Lync / Skype for Business isn’t one of them.

Over the years I’ve accomplished lifecycle management for users in Lync via FIM using methods that aren’t strictly best practice / supported (e.g. calling PowerShell from within a Management Agent Extension to enable/disable/manage policies). Whilst this functionally works the ability for end customers to maintain the implementation for changes is limited.… [Keep reading] “Provisioning Users for Lync / Skype for Business with FIM / MIM using the Granfeldt PowerShell Management Agent”

Provision Users for Exchange with FIM/MIM 2016 using the Granfeldt PowerShell MA, avoiding the AD MA (no-start-ma) error

27th of January, 2016 / / 6 Comments

Forefront / Microsoft Identity Manager provides Exchange Mailbox provisioning out of the box on the Active Directory Management Agent. I’ve used it in many many implementations over the years. However, in my first MIM 2016 implementation in late 2015 I ran into issues with something I’d done successfully many times before.

I was getting “no-start-ma” on the AD MA on export to AD. The point at which the MA sets up its connection to the Exchange environment.… [Keep reading] “Provision Users for Exchange with FIM/MIM 2016 using the Granfeldt PowerShell MA, avoiding the AD MA (no-start-ma) error”

Using powershell to add users to an Exchange Online in-place hold

22nd of January, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Originally blogged @ Lucian.Blog. Follow Lucian on Twitter @LucianFrango.

A month ago I wrote a quick post (available here) on removing users from large in-place hold polices in Exchange Online. At the time I wasn’t that familiar with the process and documentation online was limited. After sharing is caring that process I had a deeper look into the in-place hold policies for a client I’m consultant at. There was some cleanup that was required and this post explains that process as well as a streamlined way via powershell to add users to an in-place hold policy.

The problem

Over the course of any large-scale migration to Exchange Online, managed services and project resource teams coordinate to successfully migrate users and apply policies and post migration tasks. In-place hold policies and governance around storing email data for compliance and legal purposes is key for certain organisations. The larger the organisation though, the more tricky the task. The GUI or web console just isn’t enough to cater for thousands of users. Insert powershell!- it is your friend.

The solution

Overall the process to add users to an in-place hold isn’t that much different from the process of removing users from a policy. Like the previous post (available here), I’ll keep the process short and sweet to outline the steps required:

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Block Inbound/Outbound Calls on Sonus SBC 1000/2000

6th of January, 2016 / / No Comments

At Kloud we had an interesting chat amongst the UC group on how to best implement call blocking/screening on a Sonus Session Border Controller 1000/2000. We proceeded to trial various methods including a well documented ‘Action Set’ scenario, which proved to be unreliable in our implementation. It was from this we looked to a simpler method that I will share with you in this article.

The process to block a call will be to use a Call Route Type with ‘deny’ action as the destination type, rather than the standard process of the destination being a FXS, FXO or SIP signalling group.… [Keep reading] “Block Inbound/Outbound Calls on Sonus SBC 1000/2000”

Azure AD Connect – “The specified domain does not exist or cannot be contacted” when adding an untrusted AD forest

16th of December, 2015 / / 6 Comments

I ran into a little issue while on site with a customer who required AAD Connect to be configured for use in a multi-forest environment with three forests. There was a forest trust between two of the forests, however the third forest did not have any trusts in place. Prior to implementing this solution, we ran up a test environment to do a run through and document the steps required for an implementation plan.

The test environment consisted of three Windows Server 2012 AD forests all at 2012 functional level – kloudy.net,… [Keep reading] “Azure AD Connect – “The specified domain does not exist or cannot be contacted” when adding an untrusted AD forest”