Free Microsoft Azure/Office365 Fundamentals Training starting February 6th 2023

Hosting your VM’s in Azure Cloud is excellent. You have all those features, professionally managed and virtually limitless. I don’t want to take your time to sell you Azure Services but to share a solution to one of the things I had to solve in Azure and sooner or later you may end up with on. During the test restore for Active Directory and multiple other machines which were much older (or newer) then Active Directory Domain Controller that was restored it turned out one can’t log in to most of the devices. First of all your domain password is already changed, but that can quickly be addressed. Your second and more significant problem is Network Level Authentication (NLA), and your 3rd problem is broken trust relationship.

Sending emails in Microsoft Exchange world using an alias for an account has always been a pain. It required working with workarounds such as setting up Shared Mailbox or Distribution Groups and using SendAs permissions. For years admins around the world were asking Microsoft to change this, and finally, in April 2021, they did! It’s a new feature of Office 365, and it requires action from Office 365 Administrator.

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.

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.

PSTeams is a PowerShell module that helps simplify sending notifications to Microsoft Teams via Incoming webhooks. It’s easy to use and doesn’t require playing with JSON. Since version 2.0, it started to support Adaptive Cards; in version 2.1, I’ve added the ability to mention people. Today I’m introducing an easy way to send data as a table and a quick way to add a line break.

Two years ago, I wrote a PowerShell module called PSWinDocumentation.O365HealthService. The idea was simple – replicate Health Service data Microsoft offers in Office Portal so you can do with data whatever you want and display it however you like. I’ve written about it in this blog post. A few weeks back, someone reported that the module stopped working, and  I’ve confirmed it indeed no longer works! Initially, I thought that maybe some data format changed, as it changed multiple times, or perhaps the date format was wrong again, but no. Microsoft has deprecated Office 365 Service Communications API reference and instead tells us that Service Health is now only available via Microsoft Graph API. Is it only me who didn’t get the memo about this?

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.

Recently I’m doing yet another migration between Office 365 tenants using Bittitan Migration Wizard. It’s a great tool and takes away a lot of headaches when dealing with the migration of mailboxes or OneDrive data. Unfortunately, like with many blogs on my website I had to hit yet another error. This time error occurred when I tried to assign User Migration Bundle license to users on the Migration Wizard.

Today I’m pushing forward with PSWinDocumentation project. I’ve fixed some bugs but I also added a couple of new features. I did lie a bit in the first sentence because this time it’s not all me. I got help from Mateusz Niemczyk who is a certified AWS engineer working for Euvic with me on some projects. If you’ve not yet guessed where I got him involved from the introduction – yes we’re adding basic AWS data support to PSWinDocumentation. But that’s not all…

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.