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

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

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