There are a few very compelling reasons to move to Office 365, and in my opinion, Office 365 Groups are at or near the top of that list. Office 365 Groups combine resources from across Office 365 in ways that are not possible on-premises to give end users interesting new functionality.
Originally, Microsoft envisioned Office 365 Groups as resources that did not need much, if anything, in the way of administrative control. The idea was that end users should be able to control their collaborative experience without pesky admins getting in their way. This, of course, is a ridiculous concept that Microsoft has since corrected. Now Office 365 administrators have the controls necessary to ensure Groups are being used in accordance with organizational data usage policies within their Office 365 tenants.
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Moving to Office 365 means a pretty big adjustment. Administrators who were used to doing things one way are going to have to make adjustments as their organizations migrate their infrastructure into Office 365. One of the areas where new Office 365 administrators often feel most in the dark about is changes in their environment.
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With the latest Cumulative Updates for Exchange server 2013 and 2016 Microsoft has made a change to “Mailbox Anchoring”. What does this mean? Why did they do it? How will it affect me? Read on, and I shall attempt to explain.
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In June of 2013, Microsoft released an update to the DirSync appliance that allowed it to sync passwords from an on-premises Active Directory into Azure Active Directory for use in authentication. Since then, Microsoft has also released AADSync, which is a more advance version of DirSync that allows for more complex on-premises Active Directory configurations to be connected to Azure Active Directory. Recently AADSync was updated to include the password sync feature.
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Microsoft has done a great job of ensuring that hybrid Exchange Online/Office 365 tenants have almost all of the features and functionality of on-premises Exchange Server deployments, without the need for running and maintaining their own servers. However, there is still one major gap companies consistently run into as they move to a hybrid Exchange Online/Office 365 environment: distribution list (DL) management.
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I’m working on an Exchange migration project. I did a green field Exchange 2013 deployment to migrate users to from a hosted solution. During the process I created about 3200 new mailboxes, and I must have done something wrong because those mailboxes ended up all clumped up in a couple of the databases. The problem I ran into is there is no good way to see your mailbox distribution across a number of databases in the Exchange Admin Console.
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When syncing your users to your Office 365 tenant via DirSync there are a number of reason that their login ID and primary SMTP address can end up being set to @tenant.onmicrosoft.com. Maybe you started DirSync before the domain was accepted in Office 365, or maybe your users UPNs are set to something other than the domain name you want to use as their primary SMTP address. Whatever the reason, once users are synced and end up with the wrong login ID, it can be a pain to change them especially for a large number of users. One way to fix that problem is with the following PowerShell command run after you connect to Azure AD via the Azure AD module.
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When we left our intrepid hero, I had just completed a very basic script to collate a single performance counter from the daily performance logs of an Exchange 2013 server into its own .blg file. The code for this script looked like this...
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If you saw my blog post last week on Pulling performance counter data from daily performance logs you now know, as I do, that Exchange 2013 records a ton of performance data on your Exchange server by default. I was recently out on a walk, where I do some of my best thinking, trying to come up with a way to make use of all that data. Thusly was the Get-EDSData project was born. I am by no means a PowerShell expert. I’m not quite a PowerShell novice, but honestly I am probably closer to being a novice than an expert.
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