Short takes: PowerShell to examine Azure AD tenants; check which Office 365 datacentre you’re using

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

More snippets from my ever-growing browser full of tabs…

PowerShell to get your Azure Active Directory tenant ID

Whilst researching Office 365 tenant names and their significance, I stumbled across some potentially useful PowerShell to read your Azure Active Directory tenant ID.

Get-AzureAccount

I’m not sure how to map that tenant ID (or even the subscription ID, which doesn’t seem to relate to any of my Office 365 subscriptions) to something meaningful… but it might be useful one day…

Script to retrieve basic Office 365 tenant details

I also found a script on the Microsoft TechNet Gallery to retrieve basic details for an Office 365 tenant (using Get-MsolDomain, Get-MSolAccountSku and Get-MSRole).

Check which datacentre you’re connected to in Exchange Online

Office 365 uses some smart DNS tricks to point you at the nearest Microsoft datacentre and then route requests across the Microsoft network. If you want to try this out and see where your requests are heading, just ping outlook.office365.com and see the name of the host that replies:

Getting started with Yammer

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Yammer has been around for years but a while back it was purchased by Microsoft. It’s kind of like Facebook, but for businesses, and now that it’s included in certain Office 365 plans, I’m increasingly finding myself talking to customers about it as they look to see what it can offer.

The thing about Yammer though, is that it’s (still) not very tightly integrated with Office 365.  It’s getting closer in that Yammer can be used to replace the SharePoint newsfeed and that you can now log on to Yammer with Office 365 credentials (avoiding the need to have a directory synchronisation connector with an on-premises Active Directory) but it’s still very loosely coupled.

Yammer has a stealth model for building a user base or, as Microsoft puts it, the “unique adoption model” of Yammer allows organisations to become social. Most companies will already be using it in pockets, under the radar of the IT department (or at least without their explicit consent) because all that’s needed to sign up to Yammer is an email address.

As soon as two or more people with the same domain name sign up, you have a network, in Yammer terminology.

Yammer Basic

The free Yammer Basic service allows people to communicate within a network, structured around an activity feed, which is a rich microblog to track what colleagues are doing, get instant feedback on running conversations, share documents and information on projects people are working on. Users can like posts, reply, and use hashtags/topics for social linking, flag a post and point to someone in a reply. They can also create/respond to polls to get ad-hoc opinion on an issue.

Yammer Groups allow for scoped topics of conversation – for example around a project, or a social activity. Users can follow other users or groups to select information that’s interesting to them – and Yammer will suggest people/groups to follow.

Yammer Enterprise

When an organisation is ready to adopt and manage Yammer centrally, they can add IT controls (essentially, bring it under control of an administrator who controls the creation of groups, membership of those groups, and many other settings).  This is done by upgrading to the Yammer Enterprise product, either as a standalone service or, more typically these days, integrated with an Office 365 subscription (typically an enterprise plan, but other plans are available).

In theory, activating Yammer on your Office 365 subscription is a simple step (described by Jethro Segers in his Office 365 tip of the day post). Unfortunately, when I tried with a customer last week it took over an hour (with the page telling me it would take between 1 and 30 minutes, so be patient! It also needs the domain name to be verified in the tenant, which may already be the case for other services, or may require some additional steps. The whole process is described in a Microsoft blog post from the French SharePoint GBS team.

Each Yammer network has its own URI. In the case of a company network it will be yammer.com/companyname, based on the email address used to create the network.  If multiple domain names are in use, they can be linked to the same network but the network will always be private to the company that owns it. Also, I found that one of my customers had two domains registered in Office 365 so we used the one associated with the parent (holding) company for yammer, and until we repeat the process to bring in the other domains, users are authenticating with their @holdingcompanyname.com addresses.

External networks

External networks can be created for collaboration outside the company – e.g. to business partners and I have started to create them with my customers for collaborating around projects, getting them used to using Yammer as we work together on an Office 365 pilot, for example. Access to external networks is by invitation only, but can include users from multiple organisations. Each external network has a parent, which retains overall control.

Wrap-up

In this post, I’ve described the basics of Yammer. I’m sure there are many other elements to consider but this is enough to be getting started with. I’m sure I’ll post some more as I find answers to my customers’ questions over the coming months and some of my colleagues hosted a webcast on Yammer recently, which can be viewed below:

For more information, check out:

Some design principles for Microsoft Exchange

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

In a previous role, I managed a team that was responsible for Microsoft Exchange design. Working with Microsoft, we established a set of design principles, some template designs and a rule-book for any changes made to those designs. Soon afterwards, Microsoft published their Preferred Architecture for Exchange and the similarity was striking (to be honest, I’d have been concerned if it was different)!

As that Preferred Architecture is publicly available, I think it’s fine to talk about some of the principles we applied. They seem particularly pertinent now as I was recently working with a customer whose Exchange design doesn’t follow these… and they were experiencing a few difficulties that were affecting the stability of their systems…

Physical, not virtual

Virtualisation has many advantages in many circumstances but it is not a “silver bullet”. It also brings complexity and operational challenges into Exchange design, with few (if any) advantages that would not be already provided by Exchange out of the box. Exchange is designed to make full use of the available hardware and Microsoft is able to provide large, low cost mailboxes within Office 365 (Exchange Online), without a requirement to virtualise their Exchange 2013 platform. In addition to the operational and supportability complexities that virtualisation brings, virtualising the Exchange deployment requires more Exchange design effort.

Deploy multi-role Exchange servers

Microsoft’s current recommended practice is to deploy multi-role Exchange 2013 servers (i.e. client access and mailbox roles on the same server) for the following reasons:

  1. Reduced hardware. Multi-role servers make best use of processor capacity given the more powerful server specifications which are now available.
  2. Reduced operational and capital expenditure. Fewer servers to deploy and manage.
  3. Building block design which is simple to deploy and scale. Automated deployment of standard server builds.

The mailbox server role must be designed not to exceed the maximum processor capacity guidance for multi-role servers; this provides confidence that the hardware deployed can co-host all roles on a single server. This is where the Exchange 2013 Server Role Requirements Calculator comes in…

Use direct attached storage – not a SAN

Microsoft designed Exchange 2013 to run on commodity hardware and believes this is the most cost effective way to provide storage for the Exchange mailbox databases.  Changes to the Exchange 2013 storage engine have yielded a significant reduction in I/O over previous versions of Exchange, allowing customers to take advantage of larger, cheaper disks and reduce the overall solution costs. In general, Direct Attached Storage (DAS) should be used in a Just a Bunch of Discs (JBoD) configuration although there are some circumstances where a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Devices (RAID) configuration may be used.

Microsoft uses a commoditised email platform with DAS and JBoD architecture to provide and support large, low cost mail mailboxes within Office 365. There are many more solution elements to consider with a SAN (Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), fibre channel switches and SAN I/O modules) as well as additional software for managing the infrastructure and firmware to keep up-to-date. Consequently, there is an increased likelihood of technical integration issues using a SAN and, once installed, a SAN infrastructure has to be carefully monitored and managed with appropriately skilled staff. In stark contrast, the costs of direct-attached JBoD solutions is falling as larger disks become available.

Native resilience

Database availability groups (DAGs) were introduced in Exchange Server 2010 to replicate databases between up to 16 servers. A DAG with multiple mailbox database copies, can provide automatic recovery from a variety of server, storage, network and other hardware failures. Auto-reseed functionality in Exchange Server 2013 allows for automatically bringing spare disks on line in the event of failure and creating new database copies.

If four highly available copies of each database are deployed, Exchange native resilience can be used without the requirement for third party backup solutions. Only specific requirements (i.e. ability to recover to an offline datacentre; recovery of deleted mailbox outside the deleted mailbox recovery retention time; protection against operational immaturity; protection against security breaches etc.) drive a requirement for adoption of a third party backup solution

Exchange Online uses the Exchange native resilience to protect against database failures, without resorting to the use of third party backup solutions.

Whilst a DAG can support 16 servers, it may be prudent to artificially limit the number of DAG members (e.g. to 12) in order to provide flexibility in upgrade scenarios.

Site resilience

DAGs can be extended between sites and copies of databases replicated across sites to provide additional redundancy. Each member of the DAG must have a round trip latency no greater than 500ms to contact the other members, regardless of their physical location. In general, Exchange DAGs should span at least two physical sites and Microsoft also recommends that separate Active Directory sites are used.

Mailbox distribution

With multiple sites in use, the next consideration is whether both are active (i.e. providing live service) or whether one is a secondary, passive, datacentre (i.e. invoked for disaster recovery purposes).  If all active mailboxes are hosted in a single site, and all passive copies of the mailboxes reside in a secondary site, the user distribution model is referred to as active/passive. If there are active mailboxes in both primary and secondary datacentres then the user distribution model is known to be active/active.

This should not be confused with the databases within the DAG, where only one copy of each database is active at any time.

Exchange 2013 simplified the client access model and with all clients connecting using HTTPS an active/active architecture is simple and spreads the client load across all Client Access servers, making best use of the deployed hardware.

This also facilitates a simplified SMTP namespace and allows automatic site failure (assuming the File Share Witness is located in a tertiary datacentre).

Archiving

With today’s storage capabilities, large mailboxes are becoming normal.  The use of a native Exchange 2013 archive or a third party archiving solution is only required where there is a defined need for a user experience that warrants the management of email data (the ‘personal archive’ user experience, e.g. auto archive functionality) or by legal/policy requirements regarding the retention and discovery of email data (‘the regulatory archive’).

There is a common misconception that using a third party archive solution will provide a cost effective, single instance storage solution by differentiating ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ data and providing the ability to store ‘colder’ data on cheaper, slower disks. In fact, introducing a secondary system increases costs and complexity (in design and management) as well as reducing the flexibility of the solution.

Many organisations are electing to leave behind their archives with browser-only access as they migrate to larger online mailboxes in the cloud, e.g. using Exchange Online.

Conclusion

Whilst Exchange is supported in a virtualised environment, with SAN-attached storage, third party backup and making use of email archive solutions, deviating from the Preferred Architecture is a huge risk. The points in this blog post, combined with Microsoft’s advice linked above highlight the reasons to keep your Exchange design as simple as possible. Whilst a more complex design will probably work, identifying issues when it doesn’t will be a much bigger challenge.

 

Importing users to Office 365 from CSV file – username must be in UPN format

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Every now and again, I come across a piece of advice on the net from seemingly authoritative sources that’s just plain wrong. Or at least it’s factually correct but doesn’t answer the question that was asked.  One such example was a few weeks ago when I was uploading user details via CSV to bulk provision cloud accounts in Office 365.

The import was failing, telling me that “The user name is not valid. You can only use letters and numbers. No spaces”. Except that’s not really the problem here – we were using the CSV template downloaded from the Office 365 Admin Center and there were no letters and spaces.

Stupidly, I’d put in the user names – like MarkWilson – but of course Office 365 usernames are in UPN format.  What the message could (more helpfully) have said is “The user name is not valid. It should be in the format username@fullyqualifieddomainname”.

Unfortunately, there is a “verified answer” on a Microsoft Community forum post that is incorrect. It tells the original poster to download a blank CSV file from the portal and to populate that but that’s exactly what they (and I) did. The correct answer (which is a “suggested answer”, but not a “verified answer”) says to include the @domainname in the user name field in the CSV file. In my example, that would be markwilson@tenantname.onmicrosoft.com (assuming no other domain names have been associated with the tenant). So far, my requests for Microsoft to get this fixed have failed… here’s hoping that my blog post comes up in the next person’s Google/Bing search…

Changing the default app used to open tel: links on Windows

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Earlier this morning I had a missed call notification in Outlook. I clicked the number, Windows asked me which app I wanted to open that type of link (a tel: URI) and I clicked the wrong option. All of a sudden I had phone numbers opening in the Skype Windows 8 app rather than in my Skype for Business client (previously the Lync client).

It turns out that it’s a relatively simple change to make but it’s not necessarily obvious that the UI to do this is the one to change file type associations (this is a link, not a file…).

  1. In Control Panel go to Default Programs and then Set Default Programs (the quickest way is to hit the Windows key and type “Default Programs“).
  2. Scroll down to Lync (desktop). Despite the name, this is the Skype for Business desktop client.
  3. Select Lync (desktop) and click Chose defaults for this program:
  4. You’ll see that the URL:Tel Protocol entry is not checked, because it’s associated with Skype:
  5. Select the Checkbox next to TEL and click Save:
  6. If you look at the Skype program associations, TEL will now be showing as defaulting to Skype for Business (desktop):

There’s more information in Paul Thurrott’s Windows 8 Tip on Changing File Associations.

Short takes: @ in DNS records; are ‘ and & legal in an email address?; changing the search base for IDfix

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few short items that don’t quite warrant their own blog post…

@ in DNS records

Whilst working with a customer on their Office 365 integration recently, we had a requirement to add various DNS records, including the TXT record for domain verification which included an @ symbol. The DNS provider’s systems didn’t allow us to do this, or to use a space instead to denote the origin of the domain. Try googling for @ and you’ll have some challenges too…

One support call later and we had the answer… use a *.  It seemed to do the trick as soon after that the Microsoft servers were able to recognise our record and we continues with the domain configuration.

Are ‘ and & “legal” in an email address?

Another interesting item that came up was from running the IDfix domain synchronisation error remediation tool to check the on-premises directory before synchronisation.  Some of the objects it flagged as requiring remediation were distribution groups with apostrophes (‘) or ampersands (&) in their SMTP addresses. Fair enough, but that got me wondering how/why those addresses ever worked at all (I once had an argument with someone who alleged that the hyphen in my wife’s domain name was an “illegal” character). Well, it seems that, technically, they are allowable in SMTP (I struggled reading the RFCs, but Wikipedia makes it clearer) but certainly not good practice… and definitely not for synchronisation with Azure AD.

Changing the search base for IDfix

I mentioned the IDfix tool above and, sometimes, running it against a whole domain can be difficult to cope with the results.  As we planned to filter directory synchronisation on certain organizational units (OUs), it made sense to query the domain for issues on those same OUs. This is possible in the settings for IDfix, where the LDAP query for the search base can be changed.

Short takes: missing keys, closing apps and taking screen grabs

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Another post with a few things I’ve collected in my browser tabs over the last few weeks…

Locating the hash (#) key on a Mac keyboard

I love the Apple wireless keyboard that I use with my Mac Mini but tweeting without a hash key can be challenging at times…

So much for the Mac’s simplicity when I have to Google to find the hash key (it’s at Alt+3, BTW)!

Closing Windows 8 apps with the Surface/Surface Pro touch/type covers

And, talking of missing keys… the Surface/Surface Pro touch/type covers have function keys that double up as media keys so, if you want to Alt-F4 to close an app, remember that’s Alt+Fn+F4.

Snipping from “Metro” apps in Windows 8.1

If you want to snip a portion of the screen in Windows 8.x and you’re running a full-screen (“Metro”) app, then you’re out of luck – the Snipping Tool only works in desktop mode. The workaround is to take a screenshot with PrtSc and then edit the resulting clipboard contents. Hopefully this gets better in Windows 10?

So where is the PrtSc key for the Surface/Surface Pro touch/type covers?

There isn’t a PrtSc key, but Fn+space will grab the whole screen (as PrtSc does on a normal PC keyboard) and Alt+Fn+space will grab the current window and copy it to the clipboard (as Alt+PrtSc does normally).

 

The OneDrive that’s really two drives…

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Jamie Thomson and I have long since lamented the challenges of Microsoft’s two directories for cloud services and it doesn’t stop there. Take a look at cloud storage:

  • OneDrive is Microsoft’s cloud-based storage offering, accessed with a Microsoft Account (formerly a Windows Live ID, or a Passport if you go back far enough…)
  • OneDrive for Business is Microsoft’s cloud-based storage offering, accessed with an Organizational Account (which lives in Microsoft Azure AD)

Similar names, similar purpose, totally different implementation – as the OneDrive for Business product is still Groove (which later became SharePoint Workspace) under the covers (have a look at the filename when you download the client).

And look what happens when you have both products with the same email address used to access them:

Still, at least the site detects that this has happened and gives you the choice. And there is some hope for future convergence as Jamie highlights in this blog post from earlier in the year.

Earlier this week, I was helping a customer to get ready for an Office 365 pilot and they were having challenges with the OneDrive client. The version available for download from the Office 365 portal is a click-to-run installation and it didn’t want to play nicely with their .MSI-based Office 2013 installation (which should already include the client anyway). Actually, that didn’t really matter because the OneDrive client is also included in Windows 8.1, which was the operating system being used.

The confusion came with setting up the connected services inside Office:

  • To set up a OneDrive account, click on OneDrive – but that will only accept Microsoft Account credentials and, after configuration it will show as something like “OneDrive – Personal”.
  • To set up OneDrive for Business, don’t click OneDrive but select SharePoint instead. After logging on with your Organizational Account credentials, that will be displayed as “OneDrive – organisation name” (with SharePoint sites appearing as “Sites – organisation name”).

Some illustration might help so, below is a shot of my connected services. Because I’m connected to multiple Office 365 tenants, you can see that I have multiple OneDrive [for Business] and Sites entries:

If you’re trying to get hold of the OneDrive for Business sync client for SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online, Microsoft knowledge base article 2903984 has the links for the click-to-run install.  If you want an MSI version, then you’re out of luck – but you can create a customised Office 2013 installation instead as OneDrive for Business (formerly SkyDrive Pro) was originally released as part of several Office 2013 suites (as described in Microsoft knowledge base article 2904296.

Finally, if you’re trying to work out how to get a OneDrive for Business app on Windows Phone, the OneDrive app can connect to both OneDrive and OneDrive for Business.

Confused?

Some patience required when changing a display name for an Exchange Online mailbox

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Mrs W and I have been married for a long time but, until last week, she was still using her maiden name for work. Now, for a variety of reasons, is a good time for her to switch and, as we use Office 365 for her business email, I said “Yeah, it’s really simple; just let me know when you’ve told your contacts about the name change and I’ll switch it over.”

So, when the time came, I changed the display name in the Exchange Online Exchange Admin Center (no changes to her SMTP addresses were needed) and thought that would be it. Nope. Test emails sent came from the original display name. The same happened with another account that I changed the name on. Wondering if this was an Outlook issue, I tried from Outlook Web App: no difference. Test emails were sent back and forth to email addresses outside our Office 365 tenant (like my work account) and the original name stubbornly stuck – I even looked in the message headers and, there it was.

I’m not sure, but I think the issue was related to the offline address book as, the GAL reflected the change immediately but the offline GAL was still showing the old display name.

Unlike in an on-premises Exchange installation, I couldn’t update the address book: connecting to Exchange Online via PowerShell and asking for Get-Command *Offline* told me that the Update-OfflineAddressBook cmdlet is not available in Exchange Online (confirmed in the TechNet reference, which only refers to Exchange Server 2013).

Like so many things in Exchange (and I remember this from my original Exchange 4.0 training course in 1996), it proved to be one issue that’s best left for a few hours to fix itself. The offline GAL updated overnight and emails were then sent with the new display name (not sure why this affected OWA though…).

One month with the Surface Pro 3

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

When I started my current job and tweeted about my new “laptop” (a Microsoft Surface Pro 3), I was a little surprised at the reaction from some people, including one of my friends whose words were along the line of “give it a month and then then tell me if you still like it…”

Well, it’s been a month, so here we go…

<tl; dr> I really, really, like it.

That’s not really much of a review though… so here’s some of the things that are good, and some that are less so…

Starting out with the positives:

  • It’s a fully-featured PC. Every time I see someone comparing the Surface with an iPad I cringe. I tried using an iPad as my primary device and it didn’t work for me. I can see why it would for some people but I need to work with multiple applications and task switch, copy and paste text all of the time. The Surface Pro runs Windows 8.1 and does everything I expect of a Windows PC, plus the benefits of having a touch screen display and a tablet form factor.
  • The display is fantastic. Crisp, clear, 2160×1440 (as Ed Bott highlights, that would be called a retina display on an Apple device).
  • The type cover keyboard is really good. Backlit keys, easy to type on, a good size. Combined with the kickstand on the tablet itself, it becomes a fully-featured 12″ laptop and it’s far more stable than many tablet/cover/keyboard combinations.
  • I live in OneNote. I can draw with the Surface Pen now – and that is incredibly useful.
  • It’s light. I haven’t checked how light, but light enough to carry with ease.
  • The power supply is not too big – and it has a USB charging socket too. Having said that, I can usually manage on the battery to catch the train in/out of London and get through a customer meeting.

On the downside though:

  • There aren’t enough USB ports and the use of a Mini DisplayPort means I need to carry adaptors. To be fair, I carry quite a few for my other devices too.
  • The price of accessories is way over the top: type cover is a penny under £110; Surface Pen is £45; Docking station is £165. Really? Add that to the cost of the device itself and you could buy a pretty good laptop. (The Surface Pro 3 range starts at £639 but the Intel i5 model with 4GB RAM and 128GB of storage that I use is £849 and the top of the range Intel i7 with 8GB RAM and 512GB storage will set you back £1549).
  • The type cover trackpad is awful. I use a mouse. That’s how bad it is.
  • The pen takes some getting used to (this post from Microsoft helps) – and I ran through the first set of batteries in no time (this support page came in useful too).
  • I’ve had some worrying issues with resuming from standby, sometimes not resuming at all, sometimes having to go through a full reboot. I suspect that’s the Windows build it’s running though – I can’t blame the Surface for that…

I’m more than happy with the Surface Pro 3 (at least, I am until the Surface Pro 4 comes out!). I was given the choice between this and a Dell ultrabook and I’m pretty sure I made the right choice. Maybe if I was a developer and I needed a laptop which was effectively a portable server then that would be a different story – but for my work as a Consultant/Architect – it’s exactly what I need.

If you need a Windows PC, your work is mobile (and not too taxing in terms of hardware requirements), and your employer has the facilities for effective remote working, the Surface Pro 3 is worth a look. I’d even go as far as to say I would spend my own money on this device. That’s more than I can say about any company-supplied PC I’ve had to date.