Lync client does not retrieve conversation history and meeting information from 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 Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.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 addition to the challenges created by the unified contacts store, my recent Office 365 migration project saw some issues where a user’s Lync/Skype for Business client failed to pick up a change in Exchange Web Services (EWS) as part of the move to Skype for Business Online.

The reason for this is unclear but I’m not the only one who’s experienced it – Richard Brynteson describes exactly the same scenario where, after a migration from an on-premises Exchange mailbox to Exchange Online, the Lync 2013 client is unable to connect to the Exchange server and pull conversation history and meeting information.

If we looked at the configuration information for the Lync client (by Ctrl+right clicking on the Lync taskbar icon), we could see that the client was not autodiscovering the move to Exchange Online and still showed on-premises Exchange details, instead of a blank EWS Internal URL and an entry of https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx/WSSecurity for the EWS External URL.

One suggestion given to me to force a new autodiscovery search was to wipe the user’s cached client information (in %appdata%\Local\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Lync\sip_alias@domainname.tld). That sounded a little destructive but Richard’s post suggests removing a single registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Lync\username@domainname.tld\Autodiscovery.

Even better though is the solution from a comment on Richard’s blog post, from “Chad”:

We’ve resolved this by having users sign out of Lync and then choose “Delete my sign-in info”, then just sign back in and their Lync client now connects to 365. We provide this as post-migration steps to users once we move their mailboxes to 365. Hope that helps and is typically easier than deleting [registry] entries.

That’s a much more user-friendly fix (which worked for me) – and it’s one to add to the project FAQ list.

Unified Contact Store requires Lync user to be migrated to Office 365 before Exchange 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.

In a recent Office 365 project, I came across an issue where, if we migrated a user’s Exchange 2013 mailbox to Exchange Online before we migrated their Lync 2013 user to Skype for Business Online, the Move-CsUser cmdlet generated an error:

Move-CsUser: Exception of type ‘Microsoft.Rtc.Management.AD.Helpers.RollbackException’ was thrown

This is described in Camille de Bay’s blog post and appears to be related to the Unified Contact Store, which is enabled by default with Lync 2013 and Exchange 2013.  There appear to be two options:

  1. Migrate Lync before Exchange
  2. Use the -force switch with the Move-CsUser cmdlet (which will result in a loss of contacts)

Dave Stork goes on to describe some issues with a combination of the UCS, Lync on-premises and Exchange Online (and these appeared to apply to my Lync 2013/Skype for Business Online hybrid solution too).

Microsoft knowledge base article 2614614 has lots more information on integrating Exchange Online with Skype for Business Online, Lync Server 2013, or a Lync Server 2013 hybrid deployment

Tools for troubleshooting Outlook autodiscover

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 my post last week about Office 365 and proxy servers, I mentioned issues with Outlook autodiscover.  These were not exactly easy to troubleshoot, often with multiple subject matter experts looking from different angles (network, client applications, Exchange, firewalls, etc.). During the process, we used a few tools (as well as examining the traffic hitting the proxy servers) and I thought I’d highlight them here (if only for my own future reference):

Office 365 and proxy servers: like oil and water?

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.

Office 365 and proxy servers don’t mix very well. Well, to be more accurate, thousands of Outlook, Skype for Business and OneDrive for Business clients, each with multiple connections to online services can quickly build up to a lot of (persistent) connections. If you haven’t already, it’s well-worth reading Paul Collinge’s blog post on ensuring your proxy server can scale to handle Office 365 traffic.

Microsoft recommends that the network is configured to allow unauthenticated direct outbound access to a published list of URLs and IP ranges (there’s also an RSS feed) – although I’ve had customers who take issue with this and don’t think it’s a reasonable expectation in the enterprise. My view? You’re adopting cloud services; your network boundary has moved (disappeared?) and the approach you take to managing the connectivity between services needs to change.

Perhaps as more people take advantage of services like ExpressRoute for Office 365, things will change but, for now, every Office 365 implementation I work on seems to involve a degree of proxy bypassing…

Some of the issues I experienced in a recent implementation included:

  • OneDrive for business unable to perform an initial synchronisation, but fine on subsequent syncs. It seems that the OneDrive client downloads http://clientconfig.microsoftonline-p.net/fplist.xml when it first syncs. We could get it to work when going through a different proxy server, or direct to the Internet; but the main proxy server had to have a list of trusted sites added. The managed services provider had previously allowed access to some known IP addresses (a risky strategy as they change so frequently and the use of content delivery networks means they are not always under Microsoft’s control), but the proxy server had the capability to trust a list of target URLs too.
  • Outlook unable to reliably redirect after Exchange mailboxes were migrated to Exchange Online. In this case, we found that, even with the trusted URLs in place on the proxy, as part of the Outlook Autodiscover process, Outlook was trying to contact autodiscover-s.outlook.com. The proxy wasn’t allowing unauthenticated access and Outlook didn’t know how to cope with the authentication request. Once autodiscover-s.outlook.com had been added to the proxy server’s unauthenticated access list, Outlook Autodiscover began to work as intended.
  • Lync/Skype for Business Online calls working internally, but not with external parties. Users dropping off the call after a few seconds. We still haven’t got to the bottom of this, but strongly suspect the network configuration…
  • Exchange Hybrid free/busy information not available cross-premises. Again, this seems to be related to the Exchange servers’ ability to see the Internet (free/busy lookups are performed by the server, not the client).

Further reading

Selectively remove tiles from the Office 365 App Launcher

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.

This time last year, Office 365 gained an App Launcher as part of a new navigation experience for Office 365 on the web. Users can add and remove tiles from this launcher – and administrators can provide new tiles to point to corporate resources – for example a CRM platform or the company intranet.

Unfortunately, not all customers want their users to use all of the features and functionality in Office 365 and the administrative controls to manage the App Launcher for all users are limited.  I’d argue that part of consuming a cloud service is adapting to new features and functionality as they are released but that doesn’t go down well with everyone, often leaving me trying to find ways to disable or hide parts of the service. The following settings may help to selectively remove tiles from the Office 365 App Launcher but It’s not always straightforward – and it’s also subject to change (with a new admin center on the way):

  • Admin: revoke a user’s administrative rights.
  • Instant messaging and web conferencing: remove the Skype for Business Online licence and this functionality will disappear (there is no associated tile).
  • Mail, Calendar, People, Tasks: remove the Exchange Online licence and these tiles will go too.
  • OneDrive for Business, Sites, Office Web Apps: remove the SharePoint Online licence (which also requires that you remove the Office Online licence).
  • Office 365 Store: a switch was recently added to disable this tile, under Service Settings, User Purchasing, Display Office 365 App Store Tile.
  • OneDrive for Business: hide in the SharePoint Admin Center settings, under show or hide options.
  • Office 365 groups: Using PowerShell against Exchange Online, edit the Outlook Web Access policy with Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -GroupCreationEnabled $False -Identity PolicyName. If you only want to apply the change to a subset of users, create a new policy and apply it accordingly.
  • Sites: hide in the SharePoint Admin Center settings, under show or hide options.
  • Delve: turn off the Office Graph in the SharePoint Admin Center settings. Delve will still be there in parts though: for example when users access their profile.
  • Sway: turn off under Service Settings, Sway, Let people in your organization use Sway. Unfortunately it won’t remove the tile [update: yes it will now!].
  • Video: in the SharePoint Admin Center settings, under Streaming Video Service, disable streaming video through Azure Media Services and disable the Video Portal.
  • Yammer: for this one you’re between a rock and a hard place: Yammer Basic is anarchic; Convert to Yammer Enterprise and the tile will be visible to users – you cannot turn it off.

Some of these options merely hide capabilities – they may not be entirely disabled – and my recommendation would always be to leave settings enabled and teach users how to make use of the platform.  In particular, turning off the Office Graph may have wider reaching implications.

Further reading

Meet the Office 365 App Launcher

Restore the Shared with Everyone folder in OneDrive for Business

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.

For a long time now, the default behaviour in OneDrive for Business has been to provide a folder (called “Shared with Everyone”) which is an easy way to share files with everyone in the organisation. By default, the permissions on this allow editing of files in the folder by “Everyone except external users” (and guest links can be provided for others – either on a view-only or an edit basis).

From 1 August 2015, Microsoft changed the default setting for OneDrive for Business so that the Shared with Everyone folder is no longer provisioned.  It can be created manually by a user, or the tenant settings for the entire organisation can be set to provision the folder by default:

Set-SPOTenant –SharingCapability Disabled –ProvisionSharedWithEveryoneFolder $true

It’s also possible to remove users’ ability to use the “Everyone,” “All Users” and “Everyone except external users” groups from the people picker in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online with the following commands:

Set-SPOTenant -ShowEveryoneClaim $false
Set-SPOTenant -ShowEveryoneExceptExternalUsersClaim $false
Set-SPOTenant -ShowAllUsersClaim $false

Enabling them is achieved with the equivalent commands but set to $true.

Upgrading to Office 2016 with an Office 365 Home subscription

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.

I’ve been trying to write a weekly Windows 10 blog post but this week has been incredibly hectic and the planned post on Windows Hello isn’t complete yet. Hopefully that will come next week…

In the meantime, I’ve been looking at updating Office on some of my PCs. Regular readers may recall that I wrote about Office 365 Home last month. I’ve been waiting for theh Windows Update process to tell me that Office 2013 was ready to be updated to 2016 but it seems that’s not how it works.  Instead, log into your Office account and click install. This will then download an installer that does the rest of the work for you and a few minutes later you’ll have the latest Office apps (replacing the existing 2013 versions).

My Office Account: Office 365 Home

Short takes: Windows/Office productivity guides and training materials

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.

Some more mini-snippets, this week with a focus on Windows 10 and Office/Office 365.

Windows 10 shortcuts and other productivity guides

A few days ago, I added a link to my delicious account with a useful list of shortcut keys for Windows 10. Quite why it’s a Word document downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center is anyone’s guess but I did find it’s one of many potentially useful productivity guides at the Microsoft IT Showcase.

Office and Office 365 training

Another resource for IT training materials, particularly around Office (and Office 365) is the Office Training Center. I’m a little embarrassed that it was one of my customers who alerted me to this… but it’s worth knowing about, with some useful guides for users – for example this quick reference card for OneDrive for Business.

Office 365 password reminder displayed on account with password expiry disabled

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 common with most platforms, Office 365 has a mechanism of password policies to set intervals after which a password must be changed; however there are cases where it may not be desirable to force password changes. In those cases, it’s possible to disable password expiry.

I came across an issue recently though where, once the password expiry notification was displayed in the Office 365 portal, even changing the account to disable password expiry wouldn’t dismiss the notification.  I think this only occurs if the password expiry has been disabled after the initial notification has triggered. I’m not sure what would have happened if I had left it to run through to expiry (I didn’t, because that would have clashed with a major milestone on our project) but it seems I’m not alone in experiencing this.

In the end, the only way I could get the notification to disappear was to changed the password (after which I changed it back again…).

Announcing posh-o365, a collection of PowerShell scripts for Office 365 management

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.

I have a growing collection of PowerShell scripts for Office 365 management and, whilst I may not be the best scripter/coder out there (I’m pretty sure there are many people who could look at my scripts and say “there’s a better way to do that”), I’m open-sourcing them in the hope that others will contribute.

The current scripts are:

  • Connect-O365.ps1 – connect to multiple Office 365 sessions in a single PowerShell window.
  • Check-ODBQuotas.ps1 – checking a list of UPNs to see if their OneDrive for Business folders have been created and, if so, if their quotas need to be set.
  • Set-O365Licences.ps1 – setting usage locations and applying/removing licences for Office 365 users.
  • Set-ODBQuota.ps1 – setting a quota for a user’s OneDrive for Business folder.

More details on the use of these scripts can be found in the readme file for the project.

Others scripts are in development for:

  • Setting restrictions on audio/video settings in Skype for Business Online.

This collection is up on github under the name of posh-o365 and I’d be interested to hear what people think of these, and what other scripts might be useful for performing Office 365 management tasks at scale in an enterprise context.