When migrating from Hosted Exchange to Office 365 I needed to migrate the mailboxes of users. As the number of users were limited I decided to do a quick and dirty export / import using a .pst file. After the fist mailbox I did a quick check to make sure all data had been migrated correctly. I noticed that the mail only went back one year. Continue reading
Office 365
Merging calendars in Outlook
I was recently migrating from Hosted Exchange to Office 365. As the number of user accounts was limited I decided to go for the quick and dirty manual data migration. Export the Hosted Exchange user mailboxes from Outlook to a .pst file and import it into the Office 365 user mailbox in Outlook. Very straight forward and easy to do. The migration seemed to have gone smoothly until one of the users noticed that their calendar was missing. How did I miss that? Continue reading
Changing the password policy for mobile devices on Office 365
When setting up Office 365 I changed the default password policy for mobile devices to the following:
- Minimum password length of 8 characters.
- The password needed to consist of lower and uppercase letters, numbers and symbols.
Very securing and smart to do, right? Continue reading
Permanently removing deleted user accounts from Office 365
While migrating from Exchange to Office 365 I ended up creating, deleting and recreating a lot of user accounts. When you delete an user account from Office 365 it is not deleted immediately, but rather suspended. This is nice, because it means you can recover if deleted by mistake. After 30 days the user accounts are automatically permanently deleted.
Removing and recreating a user account sometimes seems to create problems, so I decided to find out how to permanently remove deleted user accounts manually. This post describes how this can be done using PowerShell and the Azure Active Directory (AD) Module. The Azure AD Module for Windows PowerShell let’s you perform AD administrative tasks such as user management, domain management and configuring single sign-on. Continue reading
Change the default administrator email address on Office 356
When setting up Office 365 a default domain account.onmicrosoft.com is setup. This domain cannot be removed. An administrator account is created as part of this domain. It has the email address [email protected]. The administrator needs to use this email address to log on to Office 365. What if you want to use your own email address instead? It took me a while to figure out how to change the the default email address to my own email address. Continue reading
Change the language of Office 365
Do you need to change the language of Office 365? Some how this is a little tricky as the language needs to be changed in two places:
- For most components use the Office 365 settings.
- For Outlook, Calendar, and People use the Outlook Web App Options.
In this blog post I explain how to change the language in Office 365 and an important gotcha when it comes to the names of default mailbox folders. Continue reading
Setting up catchall under Office 356
I’m busy migrating from Hosted Exchange 2007 to Office 356. While setting up the mailboxes I thought it was time to solve one of my long time irritations that my current hosted Exchange setup does not support catchall for my mail domains. It turns out that this is not straight forward to setup as Microsoft does not support it.Yes I know there are a lot of people out there who think it is bad practice to setup a catch all mailbox. Personally I use it for convenience and I think it is more customer friendly for the non tech savvy people out there. And no I do not mind going through (a lot of) spam mail to find that little gem.
O well, I Googled around and found a great blog post that explains the basics how to setup a catchall email address. However the instructions did not work as is for me and I feel they are not complete. Let me rephrase that last statement: I think Office 365 has been updated since the post was published and therefore some parts no longer work as described. Anyway, I decided to write this blog post that should cover all aspects of setting up a catchall email address under the current version of Office 365, as of 24-11-2015 🙂 Continue reading
SPF TXT record not recognized by Office 365
Setting up Office 365 I entered the SPF TXT record as specified by the instructions.
- Record type: TXT
- TXT name: @
- TXT value: v=spf1 include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all
- TTL: 3600
When I ran the verify functionality on the Office 365 admin console it indicated that the SPF TXT records could not be found. Continue reading
Problem setting up SRV records for Office 365
Setting up Lync for Office 365 I ran into a problem that the SRV records were not being recognized. The instructions in Office 365 are to define two SRV records for Lync. My provider is Linux based, so setting up the SRV records is a little bit tricky. Anyway the general DNS instructions of Office 365 expect every field of the SRV record to be a separate field. Continue reading
Adventures of a space monkey 