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Evotec Services sp. z o.o., ul. Drozdów 6, Mikołów, 43-190, Poland

Technical HUB

As we work for our customers, we often find ourselves in a position where we know it's not only our problem but most likely, a lot of people will hit this sooner or later. This Technical Hub provides our customers and us with solutions, scripts, and other information useful for Administrators and, to some degree, for non-technical people.

Azure Agent
28 Nov: Azure Agent – Where did my space go?
Recently I had a weird case where one of our Azure servers was starting losing space pretty quickly making Pulseway go nuts. As you can assume from the title of this post the cause for this is Azure Agent itself. But before I actually knew that I had to do some digging as it's not that obvious because Windows Explorer isn't showing anything worth checking.
PSOutlookProfile
23 Nov: Outlook – The primary account cannot be removed unless it is the only account in the profile
Last few months I'm responsible for the migration of Office 365 to Office 365. While doing so, we came into a situation where users have their old mailbox as Primary Account and new Mailbox as their secondary account. This is a quite common scenario that people are running into and something that is expected. Usually, my recommendation is: Please create a new profile for user and topic is closed. It's also quite easy to achieve this in an automated way where you delete all profiles and Outlook just goes with autodiscovery adding new account as required. That's how I have always done this till now. My Client has gone thru setting up 1000+ users with their second account in Outlook and deleting a whole profile, recreating would cause lots of downloading of emails from Office 365 that my Client wanted to avoid.
Format-Streams
18 Nov: PowerShell – Working with Format-Table in Verbose, Debug, Output Streams
As you may know, PowerShell has multiple streams. Write-Output, Write-Error, Write-Warning, Write-Verbose, Write-Debug, and Write-Information. It also has Write-Host which until PowerShell 5 was a bit special. Since PowerShell 5.1 it's a wrapper over Write-Information, so it doesn't kill puppies anymore. While I could spend the next five pages trying to give my best and describe those streams, there are already many articles describing them in detail. Please check the following link if you need that information.
PSSHaredGoods
16 Nov: PowerShell – Single PSM1 file versus multi-file modules
I've been working with PowerShell Modules for a while now, and most of my knowledge about them came from Warren F (psCookieMonster) blog about Building a PowerShell Module. It is a handy piece of information and recommended read for anyone starting up writing PowerShell Modules. He introduces an idea where a module is stored in multiple folders Private, Public, Bin, Lib and so on and having YourModule.psm1 as a wrapper for functions, binaries in those folders, where each function is stored in its file. It's an excellent concept, and I use it every day. It allows me to jump into a file quickly I want to find and fundamentally easier for development, especially in teams.
420-recipient_deferred_because_there_is_no_mdb
14 Nov: Microsoft Exchange – 420 4.2.0 Recipient deferred because there is no Mdb
Last few weeks I'm responsible for migrating from Office 365 to Office 365. Part of this migration process is to set up new Exchange 2016 server that will work as relay instead of using IIS server. I've setup hybrid, added accepted domains, prepared connectors, but there's one thing missing. Any time an email is sent via relay to a user that exists on Office 365 and at the same time exists in Active Directory email never gets there.
Bittitan
13 Nov: Bittitan MigrationWiz – Users getting undergoing maintenance message
MigrationWiz from Bittitan is one of the best tools on the market allowing for migration of user mailboxes. Whether it's a google account, exchange account or IMAP, it will help you out. Last few months I'm part of migration project that is using Bittitan at its core. One of the signature features of this tool is the ability to migrate mailboxes from Office 365 tenant to Office 365 tenant. This is not something that every application can do. Another feature (and something I want to address today) is the ability to ask users for their logins and password to migrate their data from one tenant to another tenant. While in general, you shouldn't do that and you should use migration accounts with proper permissions sometimes you have no other choice.
Synchronization Rules
09 Nov: Azure AD Connect – Synchronizing MAIL field with UserPrincipalName in Azure
Azure AD Connect is an application responsible for synchronizing Active Directory with Azure AD allowing for a natural population of users, groups, and devices in Office 365. While for most companies standard setup is very easy and most of the time touch-free, there are companies which require greater customization. During installation of AD Connector, you choose what should be used for Azure AD Username from your AD. UserPrincipalName field is an obvious choice for this and also proposed by default for that purpose. This field is utilized further by your users to log in to your Exchange, SharePoint, Teams and so on.
PSBlackListChecker Discord
03 Nov: PSBlackListChecker – Added Discord support
It's been less than 24 hours since I've released PSBlackListChecker with support, among other improvements, for Microsoft Teams and Slack and I'm now adding Discord to the mix. Discord was a popular request (well not really, just one person asked, but let's pretend everyone loves PSBlackListChecker so much that they are too shy to ask for feature requests!).