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

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

The GET family of commands is a staple in PowerShell and the Microsoft Online ecosystem. One of the first hurdles you’ll find yourself looking to overcome is taming the wild beast that is a wide cast GET command. For example, if I was looking for a list of all users with the first name of John in a tenant of <50 users then simply running the following command and looking it over with my bare-eyes (is that a thing?) would be a viable option. (If you’re playing along @ home you

This week I have a short but accurate (you thought I was going to say sweet didn’t you?) article for you. Often in PowerShell you’ll find yourself wanting to chain together several commands, the pipeline will be your tool of choice. PowerShell turns the pipeline from the least used character on your keyboard into your best friend. Simply put the pipeline tells PowerShell to take the results from the right side of the pipeline and apply the action to the left pipeline. A Few P

One of my favorite ways to apply a change across a wide number of users or items is the use of an imported CSV. At first the process seems a bit intimidating but once you get the basic principles down you’ll be turning to CSVs for everything from changing usernames to creating images of Azure VMs. The Basics Before we dive into the syntax of the PowerShell script lets first look at creating the ideal CSV. Excel will be your best friend for creating, editing, and export CSVs.

Office 365 poses some unique challenges for some of the simplest tasks. For instance, if you want to reset a user’s password using the Web UI you’ll find you cannot simply choose the new password without forcing the user to change it upon next login. Now I admit you can make a case for this being a good for security but there exists a handful of scenarios where this can become annoying. Fortunately, using PowerShell you can easily set a new password for a user and tell Office

It was Laozi who said “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” and for every office 365 admin that first step is getting PowerShell connected to your tenant. Meeting the Minimum Before you can connect PowerShell to your Office 365 tenant, you’ll need to make sure your workstation meets the minimum requirements. You must be running Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 or later. Personally I would recommend NOT installing this on a server and instead use your loc