PowerShell Deployment of Web Application Proxy and ADFS in Under 10 Minutes

14th of August, 2013 / / 17 Comments

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Updated 10 September 2013: tested with Windows 2012 R2 RTM and the script functions as in R2 Preview. Outlook Anywhere bug in the Preview code has been fixed and Outlook now works with RTM. Updated the script to correct Autodiscover ExternalURL
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In this post I will be discussing deploying a highly available Windows 2012 R2 Preview ADFS and Web Application Proxy solution using only PowerShell. This was done as a proof of concept to compare the time taken as well as complexity to build and configure a Reverse Proxy solution to replace a UAG 2010 array.… [Keep reading] “PowerShell Deployment of Web Application Proxy and ADFS in Under 10 Minutes”

Autodiscover Troubleshooting

9th of August, 2013 / / No Comments

Notes from the Field

I have been onsite working on remediating a partially completed Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 migration. This environment was then configured for Exchange Online Hybrid using ADFS 2.0 and Dirsync.

After reviewing the Autodiscover configuration, I discovered that something wasn’t right. In addition to this, I had received the following issues list from the customer.

Symptoms

  1. Outlook for Office 365 mailboxes is not able to be configured using Autodiscover. This occurred on both domain and non-domain joined machines.
… [Keep reading] “Autodiscover Troubleshooting”

Wave 15 Shared Mailboxes in a Hybrid Configuration

8th of August, 2013 / / 1 Comment

Notes from the Field

I have been working on a customer site for some time now and have recently been migrated to Wave 15 of Exchange Online.

It was brought to my attention during the week, that since the migration, Shared Mailboxes which were created via the Exchange Online EAC could not receive external email. Shared mailboxes which were created in the on-premise environment and then migrated to Exchange Online are working as expected.

Note: The support staff have already created the Shared mailboxes using the Exchange online EAC and these mailboxes already have significant amounts of mail contained within.… [Keep reading] “Wave 15 Shared Mailboxes in a Hybrid Configuration”

SSL SAN Certificate Request and Import from PowerShell

30th of July, 2013 / / 4 Comments

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Updated 5 August 2013: allow wildcard subject names e.g. “CN=*.showcase.kloud.com.au” which get written to disk as ‘star.domain’ e.g. ‘star.showcase.kloud.com.au’
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Automating a certificate request with PowerShell should not be hard – but it is. Exchange has had offline certificate requests with New-ExchangeCertificate since PowerShell was introduced with Exchange 2007. Lync has had online certificate requests using Request-CsCertificate since Lync 2010 and GUI based online requests from the OCS days. I had a requirement to script the request, issuing and importing of a certificate request including multiple domain SAN (Subject Alternate Name) entries.… [Keep reading] “SSL SAN Certificate Request and Import from PowerShell”

Windows Azure Active Directory Module and Online Services Sign-in Assistant

18th of July, 2013 / / 2 Comments

Back in 2012, we talked about Office 365 – PowerShell Setup.  This was back in the days prior to the Microsoft Online Services Sign-in Assistant RTW, and before Windows 8 had gained a lot of traction.  Recent updates however have not made this such a straightforward process.

My first attempt at installing the Windows Azure Active Directory Module on Windows 8 failed with the error “must have microsoft online services sign-in assistant version 7.0 or greated installed”.  … [Keep reading] “Windows Azure Active Directory Module and Online Services Sign-in Assistant”

Publish Lync 2013 with 2012 R2 Preview Web Application Proxy

15th of July, 2013 / / 16 Comments

I discussed the new Windows 2012 R2 Preview Web Application Proxy (WAP) remote access role in a previous post Windows 2012 R2 Preview Web Application Proxy – Exchange 2013 Publishing Tests. I showed how to publish Exchange 2013 (except for Outlook Anywhere which isn’t working) and a claims based application.

In this post I am going to cover:

Publishing Lync Applications

Lync has a few different namespaces that need to be published:

  • Lync External Web Services (which includes the Lync Web App and Lync Scheduler)
  • Lync meeting join
  • Lync dialin page
  • Lyncdiscover for client autodiscover
  • Office Web Apps Server for PowerPoint sharing

Lync applications cannot use Preauthentication and have to use Pass-through which lets the backend server provide authentication.… [Keep reading] “Publish Lync 2013 with 2012 R2 Preview Web Application Proxy”

Windows 2012 R2 Preview Web Application Proxy – Exchange 2013 Publishing Tests

3rd of July, 2013 / / 51 Comments

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Updated: 10 September 2013

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Updated: 15 July 2013

  • I have heard from a member of the Web Application Proxy product group who said there is a bug in the Preview version that prevents Outlook Anywhere from working. They say it will be fixed in the RTM version
  • Lync 2013 and  Office Web Apps 2013 have been tested and work with some configuration changes.
… [Keep reading] “Windows 2012 R2 Preview Web Application Proxy – Exchange 2013 Publishing Tests”

Office 365 Sharepoint – Search Results web part returning incorrect results for sites

26th of June, 2013 / / 1 Comment

I have been using Search Results Web Part (SRWP) in previous version of SP and it is a convenient way to display results filtered by content type, URL…etc without worrying about user permissions as it is taken care by SP Search.

In SP13 Online I came across a problem where the results returned from SRWP are incorrect when filtered on sites:

Results Preview display correct results – total of 12:

preview results

Results displayed on SRWP – total of 10:

webpart results

This issue is due to “trim duplicates” setting in the web part.… [Keep reading] “Office 365 Sharepoint – Search Results web part returning incorrect results for sites”

Exchange Online Inactive Mailboxes

20th of June, 2013 / / 5 Comments

In an enterprise deployment of Office 365 Wave 14, one of the recurring pain points was how to handle mailbox data retention once a user left the business and the data is required for compliance purposes. There were a number of options available to handle this:

  • Leave the mailbox in-situ and disable the user account
  • Change the license SKU to Kiosk Plan 2 as it’s a cheaper license cost and disable the user account
  • Migrate the departed user mailbox back to the on-premises hybrid Exchange platform
  • Use a 3rd party cloud archive solution

While all of these will work, on an enterprise scale they’re quite clunky and even with an identity management solution in place, they’re not particularly practical or cost effective.… [Keep reading] “Exchange Online Inactive Mailboxes”

SharePoint Web Service Caching using WCF Custom Channel

16th of June, 2013 / / 1 Comment

The New SharePoint App Architecture

To be honest, I’ve had this code for a while now sitting in the blog cupboard. It was originally intended to be used as part of a global content management system delivering content from a single SharePoint authoring point to many distributed content delivery systems. Since then, events have conspired to bring it back out of the cupboard but for a slightly different purpose. As I said in my previous blog, two things have happened in the world of SharePoint:

  • SharePoint went “Online” which means it is hosted centrally in a data centre (most likely) far-far away.
… [Keep reading] “SharePoint Web Service Caching using WCF Custom Channel”