Best Practices for Managing Azure Subscriptions in Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets

23rd of February, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets makes it nice and easy to get started managing your Windows Azure services. Using the Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile cmdlet you can login into your WAZ subscription and fetch the details you need to manage your cloud services. PowerShell even saves these details locally so you can reuse them again in the future. This is great for personal accounts and small teams getting to know the Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets. However in larger organisations this can quickly lead to management issues and security risks.… [Keep reading] “Best Practices for Managing Azure Subscriptions in Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets”

Exchange 365 – Transport Rules & Distribution Groups

29th of January, 2014 / / No Comments

One of our customers is transitioning from on premise Exchange 2010 to a hybrid Exchange 365 (wave 15) environment and user management for Office 365 done through on premise Active Directory. Customer had quite a few transport rules setup up which needed to be migrated. This worked fine except for the rules using a “redirect the message to” action using a distribution group.

The error displayed in Exchange 365 generated is: The transport rule can’t be created because TR-Marketing@Company.com,… [Keep reading] “Exchange 365 – Transport Rules & Distribution Groups”

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”

Office 365 – PowerShell Setup

13th of October, 2012 / / 5 Comments

PowerShell is the most important tool for Office 365 management and I find it helpful to have everything  just one click away. The following steps will give you a desktop shortcut to launch an Office 365 PowerShell session with the cmdlets loaded.

1. Install the Microsoft Online Service Sign-in Assistant and Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell available here

2. Save the following script to c:\o365.ps1:

[code language=”PowerShell”]
$Cred = Get-Credential
Import-Module MSOnline
Connect-MsolService -Credential $cred
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange… [Keep reading] “Office 365 – PowerShell Setup”

Windows Azure Virtual Machine Domain Provisioning with PowerShell

27th of July, 2012 / / 5 Comments

Windows Azure Virtual Machines preview allows persistent Virtual Machines which retain the same private addresses on reboot. This means that Active Directory can easily run in Azure without worry of the Domain Controller IP changing. This also means that Virtual Machines running in Azure that can be joined to your on-premise Active Directory using a site-to-site IPsec VPN. The Azure VMs then act like a branch network with full connectivity. I covered setting up TMG 2010 as a VPN endpoint (instead of using Cisco or Juniper hardware devices) for Windows Azure Virtual Network in a previous post.… [Keep reading] “Windows Azure Virtual Machine Domain Provisioning with PowerShell”

Office 365 Licensing with Powershell

2nd of April, 2012 / / 8 Comments

The Basics

Recently I’ve had to explore the dark art of license assignment using Powershell. It’s not particularly well documented so this might help you…

Displaying a list of the current licensing assignment is pretty straightforward. Get-MsolUser can be used to return information on an individual or a list of users.

Get-MsolUser -All run on its own will return all of the users available in the tenant along with whether or not there is a user license assigned.… [Keep reading] “Office 365 Licensing with Powershell”