Simple tips for Office 365, PowerShell, Azure, and the Microsoft Online Ecosystem

This post is a bit narrower in scope than my others but I think the solution is too cool not to share so here goes… Office 365 has a very helpful (no sarcasm) feature which auto-maps mailboxes for Outlook users if said user has Full Access permissions to the mailbox. For example, if Norma in accounting has full access to the Accounting shared mailbox then it will automatically appear in her Outlook without her having to follow this process (The Old Way). If Norma’s assistant,

Once upon a time in a far far land called Microsoft Online there was only 1 level of admin rights on a tenant. Global Admin. If you wanted to delegate Exchange admin rights you had to also grant full access to SharePoint, Azure AD, Licensing, Lync, etc. This caused great strife in the Microsoft kingdom and one fateful day Microsoft announced management roles. Below are the various roles Microsoft offers as of today and a brief description of the rights each role grants. You c

Some problems only reveal themselves at scale. For instance, the get-msoluser commandlet only returns the first 1000 results, a problem that most 999 user and smaller companies don’t lose sleep over. One problem that I often encounter in large organizations is determining the owner of a specific email address. Does AP@BigCompany.com belong to a distribution group, resource mailbox, shared mailbox, or Suzy in accounting? Who known if the address is even in use at all?! This si

One of the goals of this blog was to make me filthy rich so I could buy a yacht. The other was to help reveal some of the cooler Office 365 features to people that otherwise may have overlooked them. So on that note I want to show you an easy way to create a global mail group for everyone on your tenant. I don’t know of a single project that I’ve worked on where we haven’t been asked to create such a group within 3-4 days of setting up the tenant. Office 365 offers a feature

Those of you that read last week’s post on Enforcing Cell Phone PINs are primed in the ratio of security vs user happiness. For newcomers I offer the following graph. 75% of joking aside, as an Office 365 admin it’s your job to keep the tenant and its users secure while minimizing the impact to productivity. To that end, you will find that email is going to be the attack vector where you wage war. Previously we covered round 1 of beefing up Exchange Online Protection and this

They say you don’t know what you got until it’s gone. I say “They” because after 5 minutes on google I still wasn’t sure who the original source was and I began to realize it’s not super important to the point of this post. We’re here to talk about requiring your users to have a PIN on their phone’s lock screen. Adding a PIN to your phone is not going to be the silver bullet to making sure sensitive content is safe but it’s about as good of a start as you’ll find. Requiring t

It was Tove Lo who said “If we’re talking body, you’ve got a perfect one”. Few know that the Office 365 product group wrote a similar lyric of “If we’re talking deleted items, you have 30 days”. Out of the box Office 365 will purge deleted items after 30 days. The good news is this is easily changed, before we show you how to do that I think it’s worth explaining WHY this occurs. If you sign into the Office 365 Exchange Control Panel you’ll see the compliance tab show below.

Previously we kicked off our series on fighting SPAM in Office 365 and I promised some unique tips on battling the bad guys. However, before we go diving into building elaborate rules to snag SPAM you’ll want to lay down the ground work to prevent said rules from stopping important messages. One of the most common Office 365 concerns I see is how to ensure mail from specific vendors or customers is not getting caught in Quarantine or getting rejected, these rules will do just

This week’s tip is short and sweet but I’ve seen the question come up a lot so I feel like it’s worth covering. My favorite PowerShell commands are those that help you accomplish something that you simply cannot do with the UI, my Password Management post has a few good examples of this. Hiding a Mailbox, Distribution Group, Resource Mailbox, or Shared Mailbox is as easy as checking a box. But if you go to hide a Mail Contact or Mail User you’ll be sorely disappointed to find

Let’s speak openly and honestly about the default settings for Office 365 SPAM protection. They suck. Out of the box Office 365 is more likely to help you pick out which safe to buy to house all the money that the Nigerian prince is going to send you instead of letting you know it’s a scam. There is hope though, Office 365’s SPAM / Virus protection can be taught some new tricks to help give your users a fighting chance. E pluribus unum This post is the first of what will be a