Problems setting storage quotas in OneDrive for Business? Check that site collection storage management is set to manual!

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 Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.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 weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about controlling OneDrive for Business syncing to prevent data copies on non-domain-joined PCs. Since then, I’ve had to add a post script to highlight a known issue with domain joined PCs failing to sync OneDrive for Business, even when added to a safe list, which is fixed by the 12 May 2015 update for OneDrive for Business (see Microsoft knowledge base article 2986244).

I also wrote in that post about problems setting storage quotas in OneDrive for Business using Set-SPOSite -Identity https://tenantname-my.sharepoint.com/personal/firstname_lastname_tenantname_onmicrosoft_com -StorageQuota 2048

Set-SPOSite : Cannot get site https://tenantname-my.sharepoint.com/personal/firstname_lastname_tenantname_onmicrosoft_com.
At line:1 char:1
+ Set-SPOSite -Identity
https://tenantname-my.sharepoint.com/personal/firstname_lastname …
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Set-SPOSite], ServerException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ServerException,Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell.SetSite

After raising a service request with Microsoft (which took over a week to be escalated after a few days of the initial team failing to resolve it) and then engaging the Microsoft Onboarding Center instead, I finally got to the bottom of the issue. The problem was that Site Collection Storage Management in SharePoint Online was set to Automatic. Once this was changed to Manual, I could successfully apply the quotas to users’ OneDrive for Business sites.

Office 365 (SharePoint Online) Site Collection Storage Management settings

As well as using PowerShell (Get-SPOSite -Identity https://tenantname-my.sharepoint.com/personal/firstname_lastname_tenantname_onmicrosoft_com), you can check the current storage quota in the browser, under Site settings, Storage Metrics:

One Drive for Business storage quota reduced to 2GB

Unfortunately this setting has to be applied on a per-user basis, after the user has already logged on to OneDrive for Business (which provisions the storage).

Adding Microsoft Azure services to an existing Office 365 tenant

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.

If you have an Office 365 subscription, you use Microsoft Azure because Azure Active Directory is the underlying directory service – regardless of your chosen identity model (even if you use federated identity, you’ll sync your users to the cloud).

Within the Office 365 admin center, is an Azure AD link although, if you click on it you may find you need to sign up for an Azure subscription. Don’t worry about this – it’s just provisioning access to the management portal – and once you have access, you’ll find your Azure Active Directory and can configure settings like logon page branding, self-service password reset, multi-factor authentication, etc.

When I clicked though, I was confused to see that all I had was Active Directory and Settings – no virtual machines, SQL, networks, or anything other Azure services.

Azure - AD created by Office 365

So how do you go about adding Microsoft Azure services to an existing Office 365 tenant? I asked my colleague Tim Siddle (@brainchyldeuk) who told me the simplest way is to sign up for a free one-month Azure trial.

Even if that’s not available (in my case Azure said I already have a subscription), it will let you either sign up for a different offer (on a pay-as-you-go basis) or view existing subscriptions.

Azure - Free Trial is Not Available

After running through the PAYG subscription sign-up process, where I verified my phone number, supplied credit card details and agreed to the terms and conditions, my Azure management portal was looking much more complete and, as can be seen from the screen shot below, I now have two distinct subscriptions on the same account – one for my Access to Azure Active Directory (part of my Office 365 subscription) and one for Pay-As-You-Go access to other Azure services.

Azure - Management Portal showing multiple subscriptions

Finally, if you’re worried about what all this might cost, there’s an Azure pricing calculator.

Microsoft Office 365 Home: Office on up to 5 PCs/Macs, 5 tablets and 5 phones – legally – without breaking the bank

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 mentioned previously that I’m planning on writing a series of Windows 10 blog posts over the coming months, but what about the apps I use every day?

Most people buy PCs with Windows 8, upgrade to 8.1 and then 10 for “free” but then find they need some Office productivity tools.  For a long while, my family was using Office from a number of sources:

  • Office 2010 on my wife’s work PC, purchased outright from the Microsoft store back when I had MVP benefits.
  • Office 2013 on my work PC, provided by my employer.
  • Office 2013 on the Family PC, purchased under the Home Use Program (HUP) with my previous employer’s Enterprise Agreement (EA).

Recently, a new PC for my wife meant that I decided not to reinstall Office 2010 (which is just about to drop out of mainstream support). The family PC also got a rebuild after a hard disk failure and my change of employer a few months ago means I’m no longer covered by an EA to use the HUP copy.  My children increasingly use Office applications (including the lesser-known ones like Publisher) and we really needed to sort something out.

Office 365 Home - transcript with MicrosoftI use Office 365 at work and I expect I could have asked to use that on a home PC (it covers me for up to 5 devices) but then I found Microsoft Office 365 Home. For under £80 a year (or just under £8 a month), I can get a legal copy of Office on all of my family’s PCs, my Mac, and our other devices (up to 5 PCs/Macs, 5 tablets, and 5 phones).  Those who do have HUP rights may still be better off, depending on the number of PCs they use and the number of copies of Office they need to buy at £9.95 each, although, with the launch of Office 2016 next week, my PCs will get updated to the latest copy – without me having to go out and purchase upgrades.  And, should I remove Office from a PC (like the demo PC I have on loan at the moment), then the license goes back into the pool for me to deploy again elsewhere (I wasn’t sure if that would be the case, so I checked with Microsoft).

It’s a really good deal (cheaper than upgrading my Office 365 E1 plan to an E3 – although that would give me some extra benefits too) but it’s not just Office either. We each get 60 free Skype minutes a month (could come in handy for calling our friends who recently moved to Australia!) and our OneDrives (I’ve recently given the kids OneDrives too so their files are backed up to the cloud if something happens to the family computer again…) are now each upgraded to 1TB of cloud storage.

Strangely, although it’s branded Office 365, everything is linked to Microsoft accounts (not work or school accounts – previously known as organisational accounts), but I guess that’s because it’s a consumer product. I can view all of my details, including which devices have Office installed, in my account settings, as well as sharing the subscription with other family members for them to install on their devices.

Office 365 Home - Managing installed copies

I’m not sure how heavily promoted Office 365 Home is, but it’s certainly worth considering if you have multiple PCs that need Office in your home.

Refresh or reset a Windows 10 PC

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.

Having a demo PC on loan from Microsoft at the moment, means that, from time to time, I want to undo some of the changes I’ve made and restore default settings. This is where the ability to refresh or reset a Windows 10 PC comes in.

PC Refresh and Reset have been Windows features since Windows 8, but it’s the first time I’ve used them.  The intention is that a refresh reinstalls Windows whilst retaining data, applications and settings. A reset restores the PC to the out of the box settings.

Unfortunately, attempting a reset from my Windows 10 installation media didn’t help much, resulting in a “There was a problem while resetting your PC” message.

The resolution was to instigate the reset from within Windows (Settings., Update and Security, Recovery, Reset this PC), rather than from “Repair my computer” in Windows Setup.

Windows 10 - Update and Security - Recovery

The PC will reboot and a progress screen (similar to at Windows startup) will show “Resetting this PC” and the percentage complete. Then , the next phase is “Installing Windows”. After this, select regional settings, accept the legal agreement, customise settings and wait for setup to complete (including critical updates).

Within half an hour or so, I’d reset the PC to its initial state and was able to start work again, knowing that my previous “fiddling” and application installations would no longer interfere with my work.

Short takes: checking your IP in Google; writing to a text file in PowerShell; and confirming which IE security zone a website uses in Internet Explorer

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 eclectic mix of snippets merged into a single blog post…

What’s my IP address?

Ever want to check the IP address of the connection you’re using? There are lots of websites out there that will tell you, or you can just type what is my IP into Google (other search engines are available… but they won’t directly return this information).

Writing output to a text file in PowerShell

Sometimes, when working in PowerShell, it’s useful to pipe the output to a file, for example to send to someone else for analysis. For this, the Out-File cmdlet comes in useful (| Out-File filename.txt) , as described on StackOverflow.

Internet Explorer status bar no longer shows security zone for a site

Last week, I was trying to work out which security zone a site was in last week (because I wanted to see if it was in the Intranet zone, whilst tracking down some spurious authentication prompts) but recent versions of Internet Explorer don’t show this information in the status bar. The workaround is to right click any black space in the website and select Properties. Alternatively, use Alt + F + R.

Check the security zone in Internet Explorer

Can’t add a domain to Office 365 because it’s already in use

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.

Adding a domain name to Office 365 is usually pretty straightforward. That is unless it’s already been used for another tenant that you don’t have access to – perhaps a trial that’s expired? Or someone signed up for some Microsoft Online services using their work email address but doesn’t have administration rights?

Sorry, you can't add domainname.tld here because it's already in use

I came across exactly this scenario with a customer last week – although luckily we managed to extract ourselves from the situation. Actually, there’s some pretty good documentation from Microsoft on the topic: “How to manage a domain already in use by people in your organization who signed up with their work or school email address“.

What we did was to:

  • Sign up for a Power BI trial (we couldn’t sign up for Office Online at work as it said it wasn’t available in our region, and Office 365 for education was not an option for us either) using an email address at the domain name we wanted to reclaim.
  • Once the new trial was in place, logon to the portal and click the Admin tile in the App Launcher, which starts a wizard to become the administrator for the associated Office 365 tenant.
  • Create a DNS entry to prove ownership of the domain.
  • Change any account using the domain name that is to be reclaimed over to their tenantname.onmicrosoft.com address for logon.
  • Log off/on.
  • Remove the domain from the tenant (and then leave it to expire in time…).
  • Add the domain to the tenant where it should be used.

 

Pick the primary domain when activating Yammer on an Office 365 tenant

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.

One of the challenges with working with Office 365 for a living is that it now offers a pretty broad range of services. I work in a unified communications and messaging team (think Skype for Business and Exchange) but I also need to know about:

  • Windows identity topics including Active Directory (AD), Azure Active Directory (AAD), Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS).
  • Windows server roles/features like Web Application Proxy as well as the obvious infrastructure services candidates (DNS, etc.).
  • SharePoint – if not to set up site collections etc. then at least to manage OneDrive for Business.
  • Office – integration of office apps – desktop and mobile.
  • Yammer

(…and the list goes on)

Yammer can be challenging, partly because it’s still fairly loosely-coupled to Office 365, but also because it keeps changing (as do all of the Office 365 services, I guess).  Last week I was working with a customer who had several domain names on their Office 365 tenant and who wanted to bring them together in Yammer.  Unfortunately I’d already activated Yammer Enterprise on their Office 365 tenant, using the domain name for one of their subsidiary companies and you only get one shot at the initial activation.

After raising a service request, we were directed to a Microsoft Office support page on consolidating multiple Yammer networks… but any subsequent moves will result in data loss – which is why it’s important to pick the primary network when activating Yammer (you can export the data, but often the Yammer networks are unmanaged, informal networks created by employees outside the control of the IT department). I’m hopeful that Microsoft will be able to switch the primary network for us before merging the networks.

Default site collections in SharePoint Online

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 an Office 365 tenant is created with SharePoint Online, several site collections are created.  It can be confusing to work out what each is for, so here’s a quick reference, based on the SharePoint 2013 sites – I guess this may change as SharePoint 2016 is rolled out.

  • https://tenantname.sharepoint.com – team site for the company – you can always create more, but this is the “top of the tree”.
  • https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/portals/community – not sure about the purpose of this one, although I suspect it’s a SharePoint 2013 community forum.
  • https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/portals/hub – Office 365 Video.
  • https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/search – the search site for the tenant
  • https://tenantname-my.sharepoint.com – the site collection for all of the users’ OneDrive for Business sites, each one named https://tenantname-my.sharepoint.com/personal/UPN (with the .s replaced by _s).

Note that the SharePoint URL is one of the few places where the Office 365 tenant name is exposed to users.

Connected accounts in Office 365 (Exchange Online)

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 customer who is adopting Office 365 – but in a targeted manner for certain parts of his business. The business case just doesn’t stack up for a total deployment but he does want to make the most of the features and functionality that are available, to showcase how it really can be used to those who are on the platform.

Because his email is still on the corporate mail platform (where the MX records point), and there is no Exchange hybrid connectivity configured, we’ve been looking at the use of connected accounts in Office 365 – so that certain key members of staff can use Exchange Online mailboxes without actually migrating their email service.

It’s an unusual scenario, and generally only mentioned as a quick and dirty solution to get people using Office 365 in pilot.  Even so, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work for a more permanent solution – provided that the on-premises mail server can be reached from the Internet using POP3 or IMAP4 (preferably secured with SSL) and that it’s well-understood that Exchange Online will poll for new mail less frequently than a direct connection from Outlook to the source mail server would.  It’s also useful for pulling email from third party mail platforms into your Exchange Online mailbox (I use it for Hotmail).

The latest advice from Microsoft on using the feature can be found in the connect email accounts in Outlook on the web Office support page and there’s also some useful information on connected accounts in the Office 365 community.

Using the Lenovo B50 all-in-one PC as an external monitor

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 weeks back, Microsoft asked if I’d be interested in writing some Windows 10 blog posts if they could arrange a demo machine for me for a few months.  I thought it seemed like a good idea, signed the paperwork when it came through, and promptly forgot about it whilst I immersed myself in work!

Then, earlier this week, I got a text from my wife that said:

“[…] We have a mystery parcel from Lenovo here… [my son] is speculating… what time will you be home this evening? […]”

At first I had to think “what have I bought from Lenovo?” (funnily enough, that’s what Mrs W was thinking too…) but then I remembered the PC that Microsoft were sending…

I got home to find my two geeks apprentices, aged nearly-9 and nearly-11, desperate to see what was in the box and help me set it up.  Within minutes, the Lenovo B50 all-in-one PC was taking up a sizable chunk of my desk and, over the next few months I’m hoping to write at least one Windows 10 post each week.

Having an all-in one PC has another use though: I’ve been considering buying a new monitor for a while, to use with my company-supplied Surface Pro 3 when I’m working at home and I wondered if the B50 would do the job for the next few months. As it happens, yes it will – the tech-specs include both HDMI output (to a second monitor) and input – but I couldn’t work out how to get it working (and both ports are labelled as output). I knew it was possible though as Brian Fagioli’s Betanews review mentions using the all-in-one as a display.

Eventually I found Lon Siedman’s video review which showed how to do it – pressing a tiny button on the lower-right side of the screen, just above the power button, to accept input on the HDMI port closest to the left-side of the screen.  It’s still amazing though that the Surface Pro 3’s 12″ display runs at a higher resolution than this 23.8″ beast!