Bittitan MigrationWiz – Users getting undergoing maintenance message

In the last few days, I’ve got two reports that my PowerShell module for Office 365 Health suddenly started giving errors. This was a bit weird because it worked perfectly fine on my end. But while I could understand one person having an issue of their own, with their network or firewalls, if the second person comes along with the same report, that means something else is going on.

A few weeks ago, I posted a concept migration diagram for Office 365 to Twitter and Facebook. Today I thought I would show you how you can do it yourself using PowerShell and PSWriteHTML PowerShell module. When I started working on this, I’ve thought I want to create before and after infrastructure to see how it will look when migration ends. I’ve initially planned to assign myself an Office 365 Visio Plan 2 license and do something manually, thinking it may be just much easier. Unfortunately for me, there were no free Visio licenses in my tenant, and my laziness took over, so I’ve decided to give it a go using PowerShell only.

Hey there! Today, I wanted to introduce you to one of the small but excellent module I’ve created called the O365Synchronizer. This module focuses on synchronizing contacts and users. If you’ve ever been tasked with synchronizing Global Address Lists (GAL) across different Office 365 tenants or just wanted to sync GAL with user mailboxes so they can access contacts directly on their phones, this tool is for you.

Office 365 is an excellent cloud service. But like any service, there’s some infrastructure behind it that has to be cared for. Since this is Cloud, Microsoft does this for you. But any problems Microsoft has to have some impact on your end users. And you may want to have that visibility for your users. Microsoft provides this to Admins when they login to the portal, but while useful you may want to use that data in other ways than those planned by Microsoft.

When you’re using Office 365 and want to send an email, you have two choices SMTP or Microsoft Graph API, which is a “new” kid on the block. For some time, I’ve used Microsoft Graph exclusively to send emails in favor of SMTP as it’s much easier to manage and generally works over HTTPS. If you type in google “Send email graph API PowerShell,” you will get lots of hits as bloggers, and Microsoft has already covered this topic. It’s even more critical than ever because Basic Authentication is deprecated in Office 365. To help out with the transition, Microsoft even released its PowerShell module. With Send-MgUserMail proposed as a way to send emails via Graph API, you will notice it’s far from being easy & user-friendly. Over two years ago, I released a PowerShell module called Mailozaurr (some people may not like my modules’ naming – but that’s how I roll!). In a blog post, Mailozaurr – New mail toolkit (SMTP, IMAP, POP3) with support for oAuth 2.0 and GraphApi for PowerShell, I’ve shown a basic functionality on how to send emails using SMTP OAuth 2.0 or Graph API, which aims to be drag & drop replacement over Send-MailMessage and is supposed to be as simple as possible to send an email with a low effort and high readability. You can also read on sending emails using Graph API by Tony Redmond in his blog post Moving on from Send-MailMessage: Sending Email from PowerShell using the Graph API.

Office 365 is a huge beast. It has so many services that it’s hard to track all of them. It’s even harder if you want to manage Office 365 using PowerShell. Microsoft makes many different PowerShell modules available for you, such as AzureAD, AzureADPreview, ExchangeOnline, MicrosoftTeams, and recently, Microsoft.Graph. But even with so many different modules, there are still tasks that Microsoft won’t let you do from PowerShell. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to do it. I’ve spent some time tracking how Microsoft does things while you click thru the interface and created an O365Essentials PowerShell module that can do it in an automated way.

Working with Office 365 is my bread and butter in the last few months. I’m a System Architect and I am dropped in multiple projects, both new and old, to fix certain aspect and get out before anyone sees me. One of the common tasks I get is to provide some data about users stored in Office 365.

I’ve been managing mail service for users for a lot of years now. I don’t do it daily but I’ve spent my fair share of time analyzing spam emails. Mail vendors are doing what they can fighting spam, but it’s not easy. Each month, each year spam is getting more sophisticated. Spam emails either look like a legit email, or worse someone is targeting your company trying to get them to transfer money into a wrong account. While most of those end up in spam, there are those that come thru. It’s even worse if the company you work with has not implemented SPF or their SPF is configured to soft fail which can’t be treated as spam.