This article is a documentation for another script which I have written and would like to make available to the community. The script refers to the conditional access policies. And can be used in several ways. The admin should be able to create a simple report of the existing conditional access policies for his customers. […]

Introduction In this article, I describe one of the most elaborate scripts I have ever written for the community. This script is about defining a standard for how a tenant assessment can be carried out. Everyone who works as a consultant, solution architect or similar in the Microsoft 365 world faces more or less similar […]

Preliminary information This article, or rather this script, is based on the GitHub script of the AdminDroid team. Before I get to my script and my article, I would like to point out the initial script that motivated me to create my script and this article for the community. Thanks again to AdminDroid for making […]

I’m excited to share a new PowerShell script I’ve developed that dives into Microsoft Teams presence data and generates a graphical report. This script allows you to analyze user presence within your tenant over the past week, offering valuable insights into how your teams are engaging and collaborating. Understanding user presence in Microsoft Teams can […]

Introduction I’ve delved into the world of PowerShell scripting to create a solution that records and reports the current utilization of meeting rooms in Exchange Online. If you’re looking to optimize your meeting room usage and get detailed insights, this script is for you!   Script Overview The PowerShell script I’ve developed is designed to […]

In today’s digital landscape, automating processes is an essential part of increasing efficiency and maximizing productivity. In this blog post, I will introduce you to a powerful PowerShell script that greatly simplifies the registration of applications in Microsoft 365. This script provides a complete solution that not only automates app registration, but also generates a […]

Recently, an unexpected problem popped up with some ConditionalAccess policies: it is not possible to enforce controls. Applications show up as ‘excluded’ from the targeted resources when ConditionalAccess policies are evaluated. This behaviour allows users to access resources without MFA or compliant devices. This is possible for Applications which use Entra ID as Idp or […]

This article is a sequel for my blog article ‘How to build a call center with Microsoft Teams’ and describes how we can extend our Call Center configuration with the callback function. This is another step that we have the possibility to further improve our Call Center and all this without using 3rd party tools. […]

Microsoft Forms is a powerful tool in the Microsoft 365 suite that allows users to create various types of forms such as surveys and quizzes. In this blog post, we’ll explore how to manage forms that are online for an extended period and how to set up automatic notifications for new responses. What is Microsoft […]

Microsoft 365 provides companies with numerous protective measures that ensure a high level of security for all applications and data. However, a prerequisite for the secure use of Microsoft 365 is that the security functions are actually licenced, activated, used and actively managed. In addition, all users and administrators must be informed about the risks […]

In today’s digital landscape, where communication and collaboration often occur virtually, ensuring user privacy and fostering trust has become paramount. Microsoft Teams, a cornerstone of modern communication, offers a robust recording feature. However, the act of recording meetings can raise concerns about privacy and transparency. To address these concerns, Microsoft introduced the concept of explicit […]

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve been awarded the prestigious Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for the sixth year in a row! I’m recognized within the “M365 Apps & Services” category, a designation that reflects my continued passion for helping others navigate the ever-evolving world of Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity suite. For those unfamiliar, the […]

It’s been a few days now since Microsoft announced the next Exchange Server version. You can read my article and the corresponding link to the Microsoft announcement again at the following link:  This article takes a closer look at the first further questions about the new Exchange version.    Does the new Exchange Server require […]

Microsoft, or rather the relevant product teams, have today made a number of announcements regarding the Deprecation of various services. Here is a summary of the announcements. The three most important points announced are as follows:   Abolition of Basic Auth for Outlook.com Basic authentication is a common method that applications use to connect to […]

Microsoft Copilot is not a tool that only needs to be planned for use in the future, no, it is already here and supports us in our daily work today. In this article I will explore Copilot based on Microsoft Learn. This article is a basic summary of information which, in my opinion, is a […]

Microsoft has done it again! What? More feature updates in the Microsoft Teams area. Okay, that’s not much of a headline, as all products and especially Microsoft Teams are constantly being developed further. This article is about a new feature called Private Line. With private line, users will be able to have a private second […]

As an honoured Microsoft MVP immersed in the ever-evolving landscape of technology, I witness first-hand the perpetual metamorphosis of tools designed to elevate our daily workflows, maximizing productivity and efficiency. Amidst this dynamic backdrop, Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 emerges as a beacon of innovation, captivating the attention of professionals worldwide. Having devoted a significant […]

Microsoft revealed today their plans for Microsoft Exchange. This means that a new Exchange version is being released. This is correct, but…   In the middle of next year, the new Exchange will arrive. It will have some differences, beginning with the name. It will not have a year number as before, but a final […]

This article is a continuation – i.e. Part 2 – of the article Recommendation – Microsoft 365 authorization concepts – Part 1. In this article, the following topics are now dealt with to complete the start for understanding an authorization concept: Configuration of Exchange online RBAC at Administrative Units level Configuration of automatic users, guests […]

In today’s digital landscape, businesses are increasingly grappling with the repercussions of cybercrime. Cyberattacks are escalating in frequency, and the resulting damage is growing at an unprecedented rate. Among the most significant vulnerabilities for organizations are their passwords, which serve as the entry point into an account and, consequently, represent the weakest link in their […]

Microsoft 365 administrators have various roles and tasks that they need to manage to ensure that the organization runs smoothly. Authorization concepts that are familiar from the on-premise world cannot be replicated 1:1 in the Microsoft Cloud. In order to ensure data security, several steps need to be implemented. These are as follows:   PIM: […]

For larger environments and/or infrastructures that have more complex network architectures, it can be important to split up the topic-related endpoints and distribute them to dedicated proxies. With Microsoft 365 (as well as other Microsoft services such as Azure), the “best practice” statement is to define local brake out points so that the corresponding services […]

Especially during a messaging migration, situations may arise where external message forwarding has to be set up for several users. One of the reasons, given as an example, may be that the affected users have to be migrated to a new tenant and a new primary SMTP has to be used on this tenant. To […]

Foreword In this article, I describe one (of several) ways in which a mailbox migration can be carried out from, for example, an old on-premise infrastructure to a new Exchange online migration. In my practical example, the two sites are on different tiers, and have no connection to each other. Once again, this is one […]

For the Episode 233 of the #MVPbuzzChat interview series, I was invited by my fellow M365 Apps & Services MVP and Microsoft Regional Director Christian Buckley.   This podcast was a bit special for me (in a positive way) Christian set up this episode as an interview and we talked about various topics. You can […]

Creating a standardized and consistent naming convention for IT infrastructures based on Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure is essential for efficient management. The following guidelines should be adhered to: General Principles: Consistency: Maintain consistency across all resources, ensuring a uniform and predictable structure. Readability: Names should be easy to read and understand, avoiding unnecessary abbreviations. […]

There are various reasons why the Outlook cache needs to be deleted. One of the most common reasons is after a migration, for example to Exchange online. The Outlook cache can be deleted in various ways. However, as an administrator, we are interested in doing this centrally from one place. In this article, I would […]

From time to time I get requests from customers for the following scenario: The customer basically has a hybrid infrastructure, must (or wants to) continue to operate Exchange on-premise. However, the customer wants to protect the Outlook Web App (OWA) of the on-premise messaging infrastructure with Multi Factor. On the one hand, this can be […]

Since its launch in 2017, Microsoft Teams has stood by a unique perspective: integrating communication and collaboration seamlessly into a unified experience. The platform serves as the focal point for scheduled meetings, calls, chats, document collaboration, app integration, and more, offering users a single space for collaborative work. Infused with AI capabilities, Teams has evolved […]

With the recent General Available of New Teams on Mac, there are changes that impact the management of some tenants regarding new Teams and Microsoft Teams classic (formerly Microsoft Teams).   Users can switch seamlessly between New Teams and Microsoft Teams classic via an in-app toggle. However, there are effects on tenant management that administrators […]

Microsoft recently announced that the Microsoft Graph API for Microsoft Teams live events will be terminated for commercial customers. The reason for this is that Microsoft will be focussing on the Townhall functionality in the future. This is more or less the replacement for Live Events. Users who still use this API have until spring […]

Microsoft is becoming more and more a telephony provider. With the possibility of building a call centre with native tools (i.e. without 3rd party tools), Microsoft has taken another big step towards playing in the top 3 league of telephony solutions. Microsoft Teams has been offering the possibility to build call center solutions for some […]

Depending on the tenant configuration, there may be problems with the rollout of Team Certified phones. Here is a solution: Teams Certified phones can be rolled out in different ways. These rollouts generally work very well. If not, however, troubleshooting can become a considerable challenge. When a company plans a rollout, there are several points […]

In this article I would like to return to an old series. It’s about PowerShell commands that we should all know. The commands we are looking at today are all for Microsoft 365 and its services.   1. Connect with SDK (and the needed permissions) As already known, Microsoft will soon withdraw the Azure AD […]

As Microsoft Teams continues to replace conventional telephony systems, there are more and more tasks to be done in this area that we are normally used to doing in a conventional telephony system. In this article we will deal with a smaller topic, which is nevertheless very important. From a user perspective, we can block […]

This script helps to create dynamic Azure AD groups based on the PowerShell module Graph SDK. The idea is that organizations have different autopilot profiles. These can differ by region, language or other elements. In order to roll these out in the best possible way with little effort, it is recommended to work with dynamic […]

After several years we have decided to redesign our website. We hope you like the new design… On this occasion, we have also prepared a short video for you, which introduces the functionality of the new site. Thank you for your loyalty over the past years! ❤️  

Today is the sixth of July and I am extremely pleased to have received an email from Microsoft on this special day. Those who are familiar with the Microsoft MVP Award or are Microsoft MVPs themselves know on this day whether they have also been awarded an MVP by Microsoft in the new fiscal year. […]

For a given occasion, I have rewritten the script: Add BULK Users from CSV to Azure AD Group.   The functionality is almost the same. The following points have been adapted: Instead of the Azure Active Directory module, the script now works with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK module. If the required module is not […]

This script is for the following use case: An administrator needs to add multiple users from an organisation to an Azure AD group. This can be done in different ways. On the one hand in the Azure Admin Portal or via Powershell.   In my variant, I have created a script that can massively simplify […]

Some time ago, one of my customers had the problem that after his environment was migrated to the cloud (hybrid with Microsoft 365), some users had sporadic logon problems with Microsoft 365 services. The phenomena can be described as follows: Users can log on to Microsoft 365 Services via the browser without any problems (everything […]

Ongoing management is required as new employees start, or if their needs change. Learn how to manage voice user configuration, including enabling voice services and adjusting voice configuration. I have therefore decided to publish this 8-part series on my blog. What is important to me personally is that most of the sources of the 8-part […]

Audio Conferencing settings allow you to enable or disable, set options such as default Conference Bridge numbers for users, and to perform tasks such as resetting a user’s PIN. Voice settings for users include the call sharing and group call pickup features of Microsoft Teams. These features enable users to share their incoming calls with […]

After you have assigned the correct licenses, the next step is to configure the user’s online phone settings. You’ll perform these steps using Teams PowerShell module. To establish a remote PowerShell session with Teams, you first need to install the Teams PowerShell module.   After you install the module, you can establish a remote session […]

To use Direct Routing, you’ll first need to assign the following licenses to a user: Microsoft Teams Microsoft Teams Phone Skype for Business Plan 2 Optionally, Audio Conferencing, or Audio Conferencing Pay Per Minute   These licenses are including in Microsoft Enterprise E5 (with Teams Phone) and Microsoft Business Voice SKUs. You can use the […]

Before you can enable Direct Routing for users, you’ll need to have configured it at the organization level. This will include configuring an on-premises Session Border Controller (SBC) or use settings provided by a telephony provider that offers a Direct Routing service. Followed by configuring voice routing, emergency calling, and if necessary, high-availability functionality.   […]

While you can assign a multitude of policies to Teams users, two important policies for Voice are dial plans and calling policies. A dial plan is a named set of normalization rules that translate dialed phone numbers by an individual user into an alternate format (typically E.164) for purposes of call authorization and voice routing. […]

After assigning licenses to users for Teams Phone, you’ll then need to assign phone numbers and emergency locations. In European countries/regions, the emergency location is associated with the phone number when you get it from Microsoft 365 or Office 365 or when you transfer a phone number over to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. In […]

To use Teams Phone, you’ll first need to assign the following licenses to a user: Microsoft Teams Microsoft 365 Teams Phone Optionally, Audio Conferencing, or Audio Conferencing Pay Per Minute These licenses are including in Microsoft Enterprise E5 (with Teams Phone) and Microsoft Business Voice SKUs. You’ll also need to assign a Calling Plan license. […]

After you have set up your organization’s configuration for Teams Phone with Calling Plans or configured a partnership with your provider using Operator Connect, you then need to enable users to make and receive PSTN phone calls. This ability allows you to selectively enable Teams Phone services for only users who need the functionality, or […]

My daily work with Microsoft 365 includes not only Microsoft Teams Enterprise Voice (or Microsoft Teams Phone as it is properly called), but also other aspects such as Exchange online, SharePoint migrations, data classification and so on. Another important part is the backup of data that has been migrated to the Microsoft Cloud in the […]

Since more and more companies are replacing their conventional telephony infrastructure with Microsoft Teams Enterprise Voice, telephony behaviour is also changing. This is visible on various levels: on the one hand, despite PSTN telephony, more and more calls are being made using SIP – especially for international calls. On the other hand, the classic company-internal […]

Microsoft is currently working on a major update for the Microsoft Teams Client for Windows. Microsoft Teams is increasingly becoming the central interface for daily work. Be it for chat functionality, collaboration or telephony. Despite all the advantages that Microsoft Teams brings with it, it is also known that the Teams client is a performance […]

After we have dealt with the various roles and capabilities of Microsoft Teams in the article Designate Teams admin roles, today we will look at the overview of add-on licences for Microsoft Teams. Depending on the desired functionality in Microsoft Teams, with a focus on Enterprise Voice, corresponding add-on licences are required. Of course, how […]

In this article I would like to take a closer look at the different Microsoft Teams Admin roles.   My experience on the “Battlefield” is that during the project phase or shortly afterwards, the question always comes up: “What authorisation do I have to assign to the various support organisations? It is important to consider […]

This article serves as documentation for the script, which is stored on GitHub. The corresponding script can be downloaded from the following link. It is often the case that we have to adapt the Team Calling Policies for several users. This can be done in two ways. via the Microsoft Teams Admin Center via PowerShell […]

Microsoft Temas is becoming more and more the central working point where, regardless of the industry, companies are focusing more and more. In my case, I see this especially in the voice sector. But of course there are also other areas where I personally have more and more points of contact. One of these points […]

After a two-year break, a physical Ignite took place from 12 to 15 October for the first time since the pandemic. Whereby physical is only partly correct. This year’s Ignite was a hybrid event. Hybrid in this case means that about half of the sessions were held in Seattle and the other sessions were spread […]

A few weeks ago, I wrote a PowerShell script concerning the Teams Voice Admin Tool. This script received a good response from the community, and I am very pleased that I was able to help some people with their daily work. In the meantime, I have developed the script further and added more options. Since […]

An extremely important element in the field of telephony, apart from incoming calls and their management, is the element of outgoing calls. Each user has his or her personal telephone number, which also appears on the display when an outgoing call is made to the other party. Now, however, there is a requirement – especially […]

Some time ago, Microsoft announced a new function for Teams. This is the Microsoft Teams Push to Talk function, which has already been rolled out in the meantime.   But what do we have to do in order to be able to use this feature at all? How can I use this application on my […]

It is the first of July 2022 and, just like a year ago, it is with great pleasure that I can write that I have been awarded another year as a Microsoft MVP. I feel immensely honoured by the trust that Microsoft has placed in me for another year. Of course, I would like to […]

I was looking for an easy way to distribute Teams Voice policies for several users. I came up with the idea of doing this via PowerShell.   In this article, I describe the functionality of my PowerShell script, which I wrote and made available to all of you on my GitHub repository.   I hope […]

It’s almost time for the 5th edition of the Cloud8 Summit. As things stand, it seems that the COVID pandemic is largely over. At least until the autumn. However, we all hope that no major restrictions and case numbers are to be expected. One of the many advantages of the current situation is that there […]

In this blog article I describe the functionality (documentation) of my latest script for Microsoft Teams. It is about deleting the Teams cache for one or more users. This can be done in different ways. On the one hand, there is a really great tool by Johannes Huber under the following link: Teams Cache löschen […]

In this article I describe the functionality of my Powershell script tool for managing Microsoft Teams Voice. I have developed a PowerShell tool that should simplify the daily and non-daily work with Teams Voice.   This tool has three categories, which are divided into the administration of phone numbers for users, the creation of callflows […]

In this article, I describe the most important points about email encryption in a kind of FAQ. We have all heard a few buzzwords on this topic in the past, and we know most of them… And still there can be question marks again and again. I hope this article sheds more light on the […]

Not every company uses Microsoft Intune or System Center, but this does not mean that tools such as Microsoft Defender for Endpoint cannot be used. Only the distribution of the corresponding onboarding packages is not necessarily as simple as when, for example, Microsoft Intune is in use. Many tasks have to be done manually. To […]

Since I rely heavily on standardization for my clients, I have created a new script that I would like to share with you here. You can find the GitHub link at the end of this article. Why does it make sense to create and manage licence groups in a standardized and automated way? There are […]

In this article I describe another small script that should simplify the daily work with Microsoft Intune. This is about the topic of share mapping. For this purpose I have created a script where certain configurations can be made. After this script has run successfully, we get a small PS1 file as output, which we […]

This article is a follow-up article based on my article “Microsoft Intune Automatization Script“. In this article, I introduce you to another script on the topic of Microsoft Intune and explain it to you here. This time it’s about deploying various applications which can then be used for the Endpoint Manager. I wrote this script […]

I am currently working on a new project involving the integration and configuration of Microsoft Intune in a hybrid environment. Since there are always the same tasks in this scenario, I have now written a PowerShell script that processes the most important recurring tasks. This way I can ensure that certain configurations are standardized for […]

In the first parts of the series “.NET Assemblies In PowerShell”, I wrote about managing existing Active Directory groups and user accounts without the PowerShell ActiveDirectory module. This time, I will show you how you can create new Active Directory objects with PowerShell by using the namespace System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement. This namespace is available on any Windows […]

New user interface The most obvious change is the new taskbar, which now displays pinned program icons centered at the bottom of the screen by default, just like on the Mac. But that’s it for the similarities. The new start button opens an entirely new floating start menu, which is also positioned centrally. The live […]

Today is the first of July and I am extremely pleased to have received an email from Microsoft on this special day. Those who are familiar with the Microsoft MVP Award or are Microsoft MVPs themselves know on this day whether they have also been awarded an MVP by Microsoft in the new fiscal year. […]

Along with emailing and chatting, telephoning is one of the most important communication tools of our time. Even more, long before we could write emails or chat, the telephone was one of the communication tools that kept our lives and our economy alive, along with the fax. In the past years, especially during the pandemic, […]

For almost a year now, we have had to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of us can work from home, but unfortunately not all. From a CISO’s point of view, one of the challenges is to ensure that internal company documents remain internal and are not duplicated without permission. Microsoft offers “Sensitivity Labels” for […]

Cloud services from Microsoft, Amazon, Google and other service providers have been booming not only since the Corona crisis. Of course, the Corona crisis has given these technologies an exponential boost. However, using these technologies is the one thing, one of the new challenges is to have our data, meta data, statistics and reports easily […]

We are currently in the planning phase for the second cloudeight virtual summit, which will take place on November 13th. After the success of the first edition, we have decided to hold a second event already this year What is it about? The second virtual cloud summit is a technology event that will focus on […]

Strong passwords are an important basis for protecting your data. Unfortunately, many users still use the same passwords for all profiles or use simple combinations such as Welcome123 or their name. But how do you make a password really secure and what tricks can you use to professionally enhance the protection of your data? Here […]

This PowerShell based tool is used to cover various before and after tasks. More specifically, it covers the tasks involved in handling the Microsoft Intune deployment stick which I described and deployed in my other article. My PowerShell based tool has 3 options. I would like to describe them briefly:   Export Intune Configuration File […]

There are different ways to roll out Windows 10. One option that is becoming increasingly popular is the deployment with Microsoft Intunes. If you are familiar with Microsoft Intunes, you will soon notice that there are also different ways to configure Intunes. I will not go into the chapter Intune itself in this article. However, […]

Since 22 October 2009 I am now a Xing Member. However, I did not have the Premium Subscription for a long time. At the beginning Xing was very innovative and the perfect platform to network and make new contacts. Xing was the perfect alternative to Facebook, which was on my radar at the same time. […]

Have an employee leaving and need to block access to data and email? To do this: Go to Active Users. Select the user you want to block and choose Reset password. Expand OneDrive Settings. Next to Sign-out, select Initiate. Note: Sign-out for some apps might not be immediate. Follow up with more actions in this […]

Today is the first of July. This is a very special day for every Microsoft MVP. On this day the new fiscal year at Microsoft begins and this also means that the new MVP cycle starts. On this day (or let’s say the night before the first of July) most MVP’s are more tense than […]

In this article I would like to talk about the deployment of Office 365. We can prepare, automate, customize, etc. a lot in our Microsoft Admin Portals. Nevertheless, it happens again and again that parts of the service do not work. My experience has shown me that in more than 90% of the cases, one […]

  Unfortunately Microsoft is about to retire the Technet Gallery. For me this gallery was a fantastic repository to look for scripts which can help me in my daily work. Over the years the Technet Gallery has accumulated an incredible amount of scripts.     I also make my own scripts available to the community […]

The current COVID-19 threat forces more and more companies to use collaburation tools. There are some on the market which are better or worse for this purpose. I myself as a consultant advise my customers on the topic of Microsoft Teams. One question that comes up again and again is the storage of company data. […]

What is the Azure Application Proxy? Azure AD Application Proxy is a feature of Azure AD Premium and Azure AD Basic. It allows publication of internal web-based application to provide Internet access to authorized users in the corporate domain. The Azure AD Application Proxy can be used in place of internal Web Application Proxy Servers […]

At the end of April, Microsoft announced in its Message Center update that Microsoft Bookings, a self-service scheduling tool, will be available for Office 365 from mid-May. Read in this article what you should know about it. What is Microsoft Booking? Microsoft Bookings is an online and mobile app for small businesses who provide services […]

The first Cloud8 virtual event will take place on May 22. Here in this article I describe briefly what it is all about… What is Cloud8? Cloud8 is a platform that offers summits at regular intervals. Due to the current COVID-19 threat, these are primarily virtual events. All sessions are hosted by Microsoft MVPs and […]

Recently, one of my customers reported a problem that he was unable to delete a mailbox of a former employee. When trying to do this in the Exchange admin Center (EAC), he received the following error message:   I tried to delete the mailbox via the Exchange Management Shell, but I knew that this probably […]

    What has been mentioned for a long time is now becoming a fact, Microsoft Kaizala will be integrated into Office 365. Almost a year ago, Microsoft announced that Kaizala will become a permanent part of Microsoft teams:   “we will be bringing Kaizala capabilities into Microsoft Teams as an integrated offering. We expect […]

Microsoft sees midsize businesses as users of Office 365 and is setting things in motion to facilitate the migration of a local Exchange environment to the online office. For example, the Microsoft Hybrid Wizard with the Hybrid Agent has received an update that has been available since last February and was updated in April 2019. […]

Every Microsoft product is very complex in itself, depending on the role and functionality there are different communication channels and protocols which communicate with each other. The same is also true for Exchange. Although Exchange has been rolled out again as a multirole system since the 2013 version, we are thinking back briefly to the […]

Prolog There are several ways to create a Certificate request (CSR) for SSL Certificates. There are a large number of tools that can help or assist you in this process. Personally, I like to use PowerShell for this. There is a module in my Exchange Suite which you can download HERE and create a CSR […]

Prolog Recently, I have been getting inquiries from customers, who have the following scenario: The environment was originally an on-premises infrastructure. Then the customers have decided to switch to Office 365 and implemented this step as follow:   The AAD was configured to sync the user accounts to the cloud, but without the Exchange attributes.  […]

With Intune you can manage devices and apps of your employees as well as their access to your company data. To use this Mobile Device Management (MDM) system, devices must first be registered for the Intune service. However, there are several ways to register your employee’s devices. Each method depends on the type of device […]

Prolog At this point I am happy to present the third part of my series “Phishing attack simulation”. In this article we will focus on Brute force Password (Dictionary) attacks. A brute-force attack dictionary is an automated, trial-and-error method of generating multiple passwords guesses from a dictionary file against a user’s password. Identical to Spear […]

Prolog In my last article about this topic I have described how you can perform simulated phishing attacks on your own infrastructure. This is all about raising the awareness of your own employees. If you haven’t read this article yet, I recommend you do that later. This article is based in many points of the […]

In this article I have decided not to write a technical contribution. Here you can see a video of me thanking you for all your support in 2019. I look back a little bit what happened last year and also a little bit to see what will happen in 2020. I hope you enjoy the […]

Prolog One of the biggest dangers in the industry for IT professionals is attacks on their own company network. There are different types of attacks. As I have described in a previous article, one of the biggest threats are phishing attacks. There are several providers of employee training aimed at improving awareness of such attacks […]

Prolog This article is about an old school topic. In the last few weeks after my vacation, I was supporting a company who had issues between a server and the mail environment to send emails. In this company, the messaging environment is configured that only authenticated systems are allowed to send messages. This I have […]

Microsoft Ignite this year is already finished, and it was a huge event and It was an honour for me to visit it this year in Orlando. However, during the last couple of days on Ignite, I wrote daily a splitter in my Blog, in which I wanted to show this Event through my Eyes […]

Here we are, the last Day at Microsoft Ignite 2019 has come 🙁 This article is not about a lock back, but if I do it for a moment, it was a very good Event for me this year…   On this last day I have only two left sessions ready to intend, one of […]

Day four at the Microsoft Ignite 2019. If you ever was wondering what equipment Attendees are carrying on during the day, here a short view about it. I always have a Backpack with me, there inside you can find a Bottle of water (At the Ignite you get drinks for free, but those are sweet […]

Day three at the Microsoft Ignite 2019, it is unbelievable how fast the time flies. It is halftime again and my day started with a premiere for me. Greg Taylor, Director of Product Marketing for Exchange Server and Exchange Online has invited the MVP’s which are connected to Exchange and Office 365 to a Breakfast […]

Second day at Ignite started very early for me, this year I didn’t travel alone from switzerland to U.S. My wife came up with me for few days. Today she has continued her part of traveling to Los Angeles and I had to get up super early. To be precise at 04:15 in the morning… […]

Here we are, Microsoft Ignite 2019 has finally started. Yesterday on Sunday I was the whole day on a MVP pre-workshop, so I knew that there will be some cool announcements this Week. However, we will know more about that this week. After arriving today, the most of the visitors first went for their Microsoft […]

Microsoft Office 365 allows us in a very easy way to encrypt messages to our recipients. To be able to use Message encryption we need to have either an Office 365 Enterprise E3 or E5 Plan or a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 Plan. If we don’t have one of those plans but at least […]

In a few days the Microsoft Ignite 2019 in Orlando will start. I am super exited about it and can’t wait to meet all the people there again, to visit the sessions and get the newest news from Microsoft Mechanics. This will be my second Ignite and last year I was looking for articles like […]

  Last week Microsoft has announced surprisal, that the support of Exchange 2010 will be extended for few more months till October 13, 2020. So, what that means for us?   Prolog Exchange Server, like almost all Microsoft products, has a support lifecycle during which we provide new features, bug fixes, security fixes, and so […]

  Microsoft has announced that Skype for Business will be retired on July 31st, 2021. At the Ignite 2019 in Orlando FL were many sessions about Microsoft Teams and it was kind of clear, that Microsoft Teams will replace Skype for business in the nearest future. Now it is clear when that will happen. In […]

I am proud to announce that I was awarded today by Microsoft, with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for 2019–2020 for Office Apps & Services.   Thank You! I want to give a special shout-out to everyone who supports this Blog. Your comments, your follows, your likes and your shares–they have all brought […]

I am working many years in IT, most ot the time with the messaging and emailing. My first steps I have made with postfix, Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2003. However, let us have a short look about Messaging, Emailing and communication. The definition of Emailing is: An e-mail is a message in the form of […]

Prolog Recently I had a small project by one of my customers. This customer company has bought another company and one part of the project was to bring this two companies  closer to each other step by step. However, one of the project points was to create a federation between both Organizations. One company – […]

Each of us has had issues with Outlook OneDrive or other Office 365 themes in the past. Microsoft has provided some time ago a new tool, which they have named SaRA. In this article, I’d like to talk a bit more about this very helpful tool. SaRA stays for Microsoft Support and Recovery Assistant for […]

The last part of my trilogy is about the weakest link, our employees. Some of the things you will read in this article, you already know from one of the previous two articles. When I write that our employees are the weakest link in a security concept we do not have to take this personally. […]

In the first part of my small trilogy we have learned about the risks, which are waiting over the Emails.  In this article we will have a closer look about most common types of attacks against a company in general. We only can get prepared to defence ourselves against crime methods and attacks we know. […]

Working in IT shows us that one of the main things we must think about is to defend our organization from several types of cyber attacks. In this and next two articles I am writing about what we must think to stay successful out there in the world wide web.   When we talk about […]

Time by time customers are asking me if it is possible, to move sent mails from shared mailboxes, to the sent items folder of the shared Mailbox. Here is a small Desmond and Alexios example from the Marketing department of Contoso are responsible for the shared Mailbox [email protected]. However, customers are writing emails to this […]

On March 14th 2017 in New York, Microsoft has announced that MS Teams will be released worldwide. Not sure if at this time it was clear, what MS Teams would become until today (and in the future).   Today, every day more and more people are joining Teams. The thing that was missing was a […]

Thanks to the globalization, companies worldwide are working closer with each other. However, not all companies are using the same messaging solution. In this article, I want to show, how to be able, that Exchange users are able to see the availability (free/busy) of G Suite users.   Preparation on G Suite The first thing […]

In the first part of this series, I described how you can add and remove members to and from Active Directory groups in PowerShell, without using the ActiveDirectory module, but just by using the .Net namespace System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement. In this part I want to show how you can work with the members of a group, as […]

A few days ago, I had to configure a few mailboxes for enabling message copy while sending. However, this is not the point at this moment. When I ran the PowerShell command, I got the following output:   The error says that this command only works for user or shared mailboxes. In the first moment, […]

The most popular way to manage Active Directory with PowerShell is to use the cmdlets provided by the PowerShell module ActiveDirectory. Most of you probably know some of these cmdlets and have already used them quite a bit. If so, you probably also know that this module is only available after you install the Active […]

Working as a consultant for multiple customers forces us to connect multiple times a day to different Exchange Online management shell’s. Everyone has his own way to save the connection command for the Exchange Online PowerShell. I had the command always saved in a ready to use Notepad document. However, since I am always using […]

Few weeks ago, I was working on a migration project between two independent domains. The project by itself was huge because there were multiple teams working on too. In this project, we had to migrate the Active Directory including the SID history, Exchange SAP Skype for business and much more other things.   However, because […]

The single biggest threat to our business’s online security is malicious emails. As responsible Messaging Administrators/Engineers/Architects, it’s up to us to require email security best practices among our users and institute a security-minded culture within our organization.   Contrary to popular myth, the most effective hacking techniques require almost no technical skill. A hacker needs […]

Some days ago one of our users has opened a ticket that he is not able to change his Outlook language settings across the Outlook Web App (OWA). After logging in to OWA he chose in the right corner the options to change his settings. When he went to Options > General > Region and […]

I just had to do some additional work in a project we have just finished. One of the main tasks has been adjusting some permissions for shared mailboxes. In this article, I wrote down some usefull PowerShell commands for managing shared mailboxes.   What is a shared mailbox? A shared mailbox is a type of […]

This short article is about a returning question about how to add or remove smtp alias addresses using the Exchange management shell.   Before we start, we need to check how the mailbox is configured and which the mail address aliases we have already set are. To do that we can run the following PowerShell […]

In the company I am working for, we have some multiple Exchange projects. To set them up in a standardized way, we are installing them with some PowerShell scripts.We can do the same for some configuration tasks. Dominic and I wrote a script, which will do some necessary configurations for us. This will save a […]

If we want to import PST files into an Exchange mailbox, we can use the PowerShell CMDlet New-MailboxImportRequest. The PST files that we want to import must be available through a file share, because the CMDlets only accept UNC paths. To import a PST file, we use the following command: New-MailboxImportRequest -Mailbox ‘Name of Mailbox’ […]

The story is often the same one: I get invited for a workshop from a customer about projects for messaging and/or Office 365 topics and one of the main questions is about on-premises Exchange, Hybrid Exchange and/or Exchange online. However, there is a confusion in the IT world out there about these topics. The question […]

Many companies are still using the on-premise version of Exchange Server. And the IT departments have faced the decision of migrating currently used variant. You ask yourself the question: is a migration to Exchange 2019 worthwhile? And if so, how much effort does a migration mean? Some days ago Microsoft has released the 2019 version […]

On October 31 Microsoft will disable TLS 1.1 for Exchange. If you have not changed your environment to TLS 1.2 yet, you should do that asap! Here, the way how you can do this for Exchange server 2010  on Windows Server 2008 R2:   Disable SSL 3.0 The most steps we need to do are […]

Bevor I start writing this Article, I want to mace clear, I don’t get paid for this Post from the Quest company. The oppinion and expirience about the Quest On Demand E-Mail Migrator are mine.   A few days ago I had to go for a workshop to one of our customers. This customers infrastructure […]

  Seems like Microsoft really cares a lot about the ideas that users post on the Intune Feedback page. 🙂 Again, like in my other post about Intune MAM for On-Prem Exchange, they finally implemented a feature in Microsoft Intune which was long and eagerly waited for. I’m just giving you a brief summary here. In […]

Microsoft Ignite this year is already finished, and it was a huge event and It was an honour for me to visit it this year in Orlando. However, during the last couple of days on Ignite, I wrote daily a splitter in my Blog, in which I wanted to show this Event through my Eyes […]

Last day at Microsoft Ignite 2018, for me personally there are two sessions waiting for me. The Expo has already closed, and some Attendee already went home. For me that is not an option, even if there are only two sessions left, they were absolutely worth to go. – At least I see it like […]

Day four has just ended, it was a long one. I look back to the Universal Studios party back as well. But let us follow the day from the beginning. My day stated a bit stressy today. Somehow my alarm did not work or I simply did not hear it. I jumped into the shower, […]

Day tree is just over and the halftime of the Ignite 2018 is already reached. Walking around the convention centre I hear more and more people who are coughing around and walking slower and slower. This do not surprise me really because inside the air conditioners are cooling the temperature down, so we need to […]

Day one has already passed, and I am looking forward for day two… My second day on the Ignite stated from the session view a bit later. That means, I had time to meet people and visit Quadrotech and other exibitors to have nice speach with them…   1st session today My first session today […]

First day on Ignite is over, and here we go with Ignite Splitter for the first day… When I was booking the Tickets from Zurich to Orlando, I had to fly over New York. I took the opportunity and stayed some couple of days in the City, which never sleeps to visit Brooklyn Bridge, the […]

Here is another article before my Ignite journey this year. 🙂 Today I want to write about activating multi factor authentication (MFA) in Office 365. However, I guess for the most people, this is not a big deal. I simply thought that this chapter is missing in my blog and that is why I decided […]

So far, the subscriptions of the consumer versions of Office 365 were limited to two devices: home subscribers were allowed to install the Office palette for the five users distributed on ten devices, for personal customers, the limit was on one PC or Mac plus a tablet. Microsoft is now changing the licensing provision: In […]

Soon, the Ignite 2018 in Orlando Florida will start. For me personally, after some Tech Summits this Ignite will be my first one. I have already started to create my schedule for this event.   There are so many sessions I would like to go… To be able to manage all of them, I should […]

Microsoft has fulfilled the promise about enabling Gmail users to collaborate with others, using Azure Active Directory (B2B) without the requirement to have a Microsoft account. Microsoft has made the next big step to cooperate with the big players, being itself one of it. Approximately one year ago, Microsoft has announced that there is an […]

Company e-mails have to follow some policies before they can be sent out from an organization. If these policies are strict or not depends on the business field. To get an example from a customer company I am working with: They are signing ALL their e-mails by using S/MIME while e-mails to some specific partners […]

Our 2nd level support came up to me earlier this week with a with a request about calendar permissions. He asked me if there is a way to get a report about, which user has which permission on which Room mailbox calendar. However, this can be done in multiple ways, I prefer to use PowerShell […]

Internet emails are designed to carry the IP address of the computer from which the email was sent. This IP address is stored in an email header, delivered to the recipient along with the message. Email headers can be thought of like envelopes for postal mail. They contain the electronic equivalent of addressing and postmarks […]

Microsoft make teams available as a free version, regardless of an Office 365 subscription. Free version is offered in 40 languages and is ideal for freelancers, startups or small businesses, write the Redmond. Free version offers unlimited messaging and search up to 300 users. Users get 2GB of personal storage plus 10GB of storage for […]

We have a new employee in our company, who starts his work as junior System Engineer. However, as a junior there are still many things to learn and I am also responsible to show him some things from the Microsoft Exchange and Office 365 world. Honestly saying, I like the new Guy, he is motivated […]

By preparing tasks for a customer’s Enterprise Vault  I had to figure out on which Mailbox Database and on which Exchange server a user mailbox is located. However, the easiest way to figure this out is to use PowerShell. For this case, I had to hit the following command to the Exchange Management console: Get-Mailbox […]

Today I had to prepare some things for migration between two Active Directory forests. Both sites have a 2-Way trust between and this trust will be killed after the migration. The 2nd (new) forest has everything what is needed. An Exchange environment, Skype for Business, Sharepoint, etc. A working college, who is responsible for this […]

It is already some time ago that I have posted a PowerShell script to the community. So I thought why not share one of the latest ones I have written.   This time it is about installing ADFS. In the past I have written some articles about ADFS like: MFA with MS Auth. App for […]

As far we know until today, the best solution form the Microsoft point of view is, to use ADFS to authenticate on-premises users for cloud services such as Azure or Office 365. This is working very well and there are many articles about how to configure the clams etc. can be found in internet and […]

Microsoft has announced about new feature that soon it will be possible to add third party storage for Outlook Web App (OWA). Microsoft is more and more opening the door for third party features. This time they have announced that soon it will be possible, to enable third party storage for OWA.  Today Microsoft has […]

There are many articles in the field about migrating from on-premise Exchange to Office 365, but how about migrating from Google’s Gmail to Office 365? There are several ways of migrating to Office 365, the most common way I have described in another article on my Blog HERE. Some of these solutions also work for […]

More and more Customers are going to use Exchange online or other Microsoft Cloud services. One of them, which is connected to Messaging, is Exchange Online Protection (EOP). EOP is a cloud-hosted email filtering service designed to protect customers from spam and malware and to implement custom policy rules. EOP is licensed on a per-user […]

Customers, which are planning to migrate to Exchange online, asks mostly the same questions. How much do it costs to run Exchange online? How the migration has to be made? Which DNS settings has to be made? How about the Mail domains? Moreover, many more…   However, also often asked questions are about the limits […]

Have you ever thought about your email privacy?   People email each other everyday for different purposes. From holiday greetings to breakups to business marketing, you can send an email to separate recipients worldwide. But, you’d be wrong if you think that your privacy is safe simply because your email was between you and your […]

After an organization has deployed Office 365, the companies’ administrator roles will be changed. Each company needs an administrator, who is responsible to track, what the company users are doing with E-Mails, Documents, SharePoint etc. for the various security and compliance reason of the organization. In the Office 365 admin center Microsoft has given us […]

Today I had to install new Exchange 2016 CU on a customer’s exchange environment. Normally that is an easy going thing and I wouldn’t write an article about that. However, by this customer I came across an installation problem during the update.   I was running like always my pre setup steps for suspending the […]

Microsoft has announced that the Office 365 Portal will introduced in the new Microsoft 365 admin center. The new admin center will be generally released in the end of July.   Admins previously using the Office 365 admin center to manage Office 365 will now use the Microsoft 365 admin Center. The Microsoft 365 admin […]

Microsoft sunk a data center in the sea. The company wants to accelerate the development of self-sufficient underwater data centers with this pilot project, said Microsoft UK on Wednesday.   The container-sized data center on the seabed is a prototype. According to Microsoft, approximately twelve-meter-long white cylinder full of computers can store and process data […]

Time by time I am getting the same questions from customers, which I try to explai them. Lately one of the most asked question is about S/MIME. What is S/MIME? How it works? What about the encryption issues which was found out in May 2018? In this article, I will explain all about S/MIME what […]

There are several ways how we can create email address policies for an Organization. In the companies where I consult, I have noticed, that one of the common ways, is not that much known, how it should be. That is the reason, why I want to write this article about creating E-Mail address policies by […]

In all projects in which I am consulting with my customers, most of the questions are about the functionality of ADFS and the cloud identity. In one of my Articles I have described, how we have to configure ADFS for Office 365. In this article I have also shown the picture below, how the sign-on progress […]

In one of my LAST articles I have described the MX-Records and the SPF-Records, how they work and why we need them. In this article I would like to tell you more about Autodiscover, CNAME and A-Records. Why we need them and which DNS category is needed for what. Note, there are more kind of […]

It’s now already some years I am supporting companies with their journey to the cloud. Having read the Microsoft announcment about their plans to build two new Datacenters offering Microsoft Online Services in Geneva and Zurich, I am pretty sure that Engineers like me still will have enough to do for the coming years. So […]

PGP and S / MIME encryption is not nearly as reliable as expected. Inadequate standards, outdated technology, and malicious programs could allow attackers to gain access to encrypted email. A research team around Sebastian Schinzel of the University of Applied Sciences Münster has taken a closer look at the standards and concrete implementations of email […]

In the last general availability Microsoft has finally launched the Multi-Geo option for Exchange online. So, what that means for us and our customers using Exchange online? If we talk about Multi-Geo, that means we have a single Office 365 Tenant but our Company has Offices all around the world. As example, in the Office […]

In the past I have described how we can delete old EAS devices from our Exchange on-premises and/or Exchange online environment. More about that you can find HERE. However, sometimes we just have to know how many and which devices are using ActiveSync on our Office 365 tenant. In this article I will show you […]

If we want to use cloud services it is necessary to understand how DNS works. In this specific article I want to write about DNS records which are needed for the mail flow with Exchange online. Note: I focus in this article the way by using EOP, there are also other solutions we could go with, […]

Many articles were written in the past about migrating environment to Office 365. In this article I don’t want to do through the same again. However, let us talk instead about what we have to think about before we go through this (project) way.   How to start – Step 1: Inventory Microsoft has a […]

By most of the  companies I know or I was working with, there are two scenarios when I was speaking with them about the cloud and Office 365. Number one: They have an existing business on-premise, which is working mostly well, but the lifecycle of the hardware and software version is reached. Number two: Startup […]

I guess many of you who are reading my blog are also working in the Messaging and/or Cloud area. That means that you also perform Exchange migrations or you are planning them. Earlier this week I was running a clean up after an Exchange migration and I have noticed many Mailboxes with “AvailableOnly” or “none” […]

Administrating and operating windows services can be done in different ways, one of the most useful ways is to do it with PowerShell. With PowerShell we can connect to remote server, to the Cloud and create scripts for automatization. On my Blog and all around the tech Blogs in the Internet you can find a […]

This week, I was on a technical board and had to explain to customers on the level of CTO (chief technical officer) how a hybrid Exchange environment works and how it has to be installed. That is why I cached the moment to write this article, which contains the main points of my presentation. The […]

Microsoft has announced a new major update that group members are able to receive group emails in their personal mailboxes. What that means to us? With this update, we are able to create new Office 365 groups in our Outlook. The default subscription option is now set in the way, that we receive emails sent […]

By using Office 365 we have a new horizon of opportunities and features we can go with. In the other hand we also need to think/talk about roles for managing our new horizon. Office 365 is coming with a bulk of new admin roles, which we can assign to our users in our organization. Microsoft […]

Today, more and more companies are moving their IT environment to the cloud. One of the main services, which is moving to Office 365 is messaging. Companies are mostly having their own Exchange environment on-premises, are using third party messaging systems (like Zimbra or UNIX solutions), or a Exchange solution hosted by a third company. […]

Archiving emails is a progress many of us knows. Let us have a look back how the scenario was couple of years ago: In the time, we were working with Exchange 2003, 2007 or 2010 a setup of a hosted Exchange I was operating looked like this: We had a few CAS servers, few Hub […]

End-to-end encryption is the most secure way to communicate privately and securely online. By encrypting messages at both ends of a conversation, end-to-end encryption prevents anyone in the middle from reading private communications. Microsoft has implemented Message Encryption in Office 365 that protects and controls sensitive emails. These enhancements are aimed squarely at helping by […]

This week I had the opportunity to review the Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery Tool. The background for this is, that in any Exchange Organization it can come to corrupt EDB files. There are many ways and tolls how we can handle them. I tried the tool from Stellar and my experience with it was […]

A couple of months ago, I was working on a project to reveal the power of Microsoft Intune for my company. One of the requests was to find out if we could apply Intune MAM policies on Outlook mobile used by on-premises mail box users. We kind of found out pretty soon that this was […]

While I am writing articles on my Blog and surfing on different Forums and Social medias I always have two kind of goals. First, helping other people like I got help in the community. Second, trying to help in a easy and fast way. Sometimes there is a clear question and a clear answer. Sometimes […]

It look’s like I will start a series with this kind of articles. Thank you guys for your resonance and all of your feedback over the different channels… Today, I will continue with some new commands for you. However, even this time it is the same mind set like in the previous articles 10 Usefull […]

The standard setting of Azure instance with ADFS is well known, standardized and implemented in the field.  We use an ADFS environment to create a federation to the Azure AD and decide which things we want to sync by Azure connect and which not. The permission handling for resource groups is managed by RBAC-Roles. The […]

One of my customers has bought another company, so they needed to add the new company domain to their environment. This company has a hybrid exchange organization and I had to do some simple steps. As a first step I recommend you to start the PowerShell documentation as I have described in one of my […]

Recently I was asked for one of my customers how he can find out his Tenant ID. The Office 365 Tenant ID is a globally unique identifier (GUID) that different from out Tenant name and/or domain. However, this is not a problem, because there are just some few reasons, why we need to figure out […]

Having password policies in a company is good! Very good! And important! Using on-premises active directory and GPO’s makes it very easy to handle password policies. If we have an Office 365 environment managed by Microsoft onboard tools such as ADFS and AAC we also don’t have to think to far how to handle password […]

There are many cool scripts on the Technet about mailbox size and quota reporting. The same about searching for them on Bing or Google. Sometimes we just are searching for remembering a simple PowerShell command and not too much text to read in articles. For this reason I have created on my Blog the Technical […]

The Exchange Team released the March updates for Exchange Server 2013 and 2016, and these Cumulative Updates contain a ton of fixes. Like the previous Cumulative Update for Exchange 2013 and Exchange 2016, these Cumulative Updates support .NET Framework 4.7.1. Be advised that .NET Framework 4.7.1 will be required for the next cycle of quarterly […]

Last weekend I had to work on a change request in a company. Our guys from the network team had to change some physical switches and the most of our physical servers which were connected to this specific switch where for around two hours north on a redundant network setting. At the same time I […]

Before you install Exchange 2016, you need to review the topic to ensure that your network, hardware, software, clients, and other elements meet the requirements for Exchange 2016. In addition, make sure you understand the coexistence scenarios that are supported for Exchange 2016 and earlier versions of Exchange.   There are different scenarios of supported […]

Shared mailboxes are great. They can be used for a variety of scenarios within your environment.   What is that for a feature? Emails can be sent as the shared mailbox itself or on behalf of it by member(s) of the mailbox, assuming proper permissions have been granted. This feature is designed to retain a […]

Microsoft has been rapidly expanding its cloud infrastructure to meet increasing customer demand in Europe and today announced the availability of new cloud services in France and the expansion of cloud services from new datacenters in Germany and Switzerland. “As a company, we’re focused on empowering every organization and person on the planet to achieve […]

After all the positive feedback to my article “10 Useful PowerShell cmdlets for Exchange” (thanks again to Steve Goodman), I have decided to write a second part of it with another 10 useful PowerShell commands for Exchange and Office 365. Same procedure as the last time. Some of you may already know the commands, but […]

Your email account is a gold mine for hackers. And yet many people still aren’t taking basic precautions to secure their accounts. Here are five essential steps for safe email. Hacks are surprisingly commonplace. In 2014, for instance, nearly half of all American adults had some form of data stolen from corporate servers in a […]

Last month one of our Junior Engineers got a task to move some outlook information’s to the O365 Mailbox. It was a restore from a PST backup which was made before this company has moved their mail infrastructure to exchange online. In this short article, I want to show you step by step how to […]

Do you like my posts about Office 365, Exchange, ADFS and PowerShell? So why not subscribe to my newsletter? Get a mail once a week with all infos about what I posted in the previous week. No SPAM, and no sharing of e-mail addresses! I take your privacy seriously! Hope to see you soon on […]

In one of my last articles, I wrote about installing, customizing and about the functionality of the ADFS servers. Today I want to write about the ADFS / Azure Multi-Factor Authentication server (MFA). In Q2 of the last year Microsoft announced an app called “Microsoft Authenticator”. The functionality is similar to Google’s authentication App “Google […]

On the Ignite 2017 Steve Goodman held a very good session about 10 useful PowerShell commands, which are important to know as an Exchange admin. I am going to present you these 10 commands here, with a little explanation for each of it. Some of the commands are more known that others, but I hope you […]

Today I want to write about some small issue one of my customers just had.This customer has installed an exchange server in a new forest.The installation went quite smoothly and after the setup was done, my customer wanted to start the exchange management shell. When he started the Shell there where a lot of error […]

Here some short article for today… In the morning an IT admin was asking me if it is possible to configure the out of Office message daily. When a user (let’s call him John) is on vacation, normally he sets an Out of Office message in his Outlook or OWA. If a user (let’s say Sofia) […]

Almost everyone is using Cloud services, there are a lot of them like Azure, Office 365, G-Suite, Dropbox, AWS. Some of them we are using for private, but the most of it for our daily business. There is a smooth way Microsoft offers us to be able to use single sign-on (SSO) on the most […]

When I studied at the Technical University in Chur, there was a generational gap Type between our professors who learned the program with punch cards and us, students who were using keyboards. Recently, when I spoke with a student who works with me in the same company, I got there is a similar gap today […]

One of my customers is running an exchange environment with multiple Accepted Domains. The reason for that is that this company is a Holding and it has a bulk of sub companies. Normally the sub companies are using the Mail service from the Holding environment. Now one of the sub companies wants to use an […]

Last week I had to update a customers Exchange server envoriment with the new CU Pack. It’s an Exchange 2016 environment, so I needed to install the CU8 from Microsoft. If you want to know when, which Exchange version is released and you also need to know the build number, simply follow this Link to […]

Sometimes the simplest things need the most time to find out. There are many different versions of Exchange servers installed worldwide. Unfortunately not all of them are running with the newest updates. The reasons for that can be different. Time by time, I as a Messaging Engineer have to troubleshoot, administer, or change things in […]

The basic scenario in hybrid Exchange environments is that we have to create an Exchange mailbox on-premise, which has to be synced to Exchange Online (O365). Note: In this graphic I didn’t differ between on-premise or EOP mailflow, thats why I show both solutions.   The game plan is mostly the one where you create […]

There are different reasons to have a hybrid infrastructure. One of them can be that the HR is, for legal reasons, not allowed to move their mailboxes to the cloud. But in this article I will not write about reasons why a hybrid mail environment could make sence. I want to present a solution how […]

At the Ignite 2017 Microsoft presented a bulk of new features which are waiting for us in 2018. One of them is the message encryption in Office 365. In this article I want to tell you more about that:   Till today, or lets say till +/- 2016 most of us had this kind of […]

A new ransomware strain dubbed as “ransomcloud” has been developed and it can encrypt online email accounts like Office 365 and Gmail in real-time.   The new ransomware strain was reportedly developed by a white hat hacker associate of Kevin Mitnick, Chief Hacking Officer of cybersecurity company KnowBe4.   Similar to other methods of ransomware […]

This day’s I spoke with on of our Junior Engineers about Microsoft certifiations an certification paths. He wasn’t sure which way he wanna go and where he wanna get the senior status. Microsoft changed in the end of the year 2016 the certification paths’s. Now it os more easy to find the own way to […]

In the end of September 2017 Microsoft has announced a significant update to the scalability guidance for Exchange 2016. If we knew till then that the maximum recommendation for memory was by 96 GB, Microsoft changed it now to 192 GB. This effects of corse the Exchange Sizing Guidance, which you can find here and […]

By using Office 365 you are syncing your local Active Directory with Azure AD which is comming together on Office 365. For best practise of Microsoft the way to sync the informations we should use AADConnect.   Office 365 creates new users automaticaly with Default Language settings of O365 Tenant. For multi Language companies this […]

A few days ago I got a customer request about User photos. The company had just migrated from Exchange 2010 to Office 365 and was planing to demote the old onpremise Exchange server. The company policy says, that every user has to have a users photo in own profile. But there where around 20% of […]

On December 19th Microsoft has announced thr Cumulative Update 8 (CU8) for Exchange server 2016. With the CU8 Microsoft fixed the following problems: 4056329 Can’t access EWS from Outlook/OWA add-ins via makeEwsRequestAsync in Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2013 4054516 “Your request can’t” error when accessing an archive mailbox via OWA in Exchange Server […]

This Days Microsoft announced that Office 365 will enable Email Address Internationalization (EAI) support in Q1 2018. This can have important implications for hybrid Exchange organisations. The announcement you can find in the Link or you simply read it here: “Out of 7.6 billion people in the world, only 360 million are native English speakers. […]

Today I received a Email from Microsoft that they began with the Rollout of Microsoft To-Do. But what is Microsoft To-Do? Microsoft To-Do is a new Office 365 feature which will help you, to organizate daily routine. After downloading the To-Do App for your Mobile Device, the App gives you every Morning a fresh start, […]

By setting up or configuring software it is always necessary to make documentations. To document the installation or configuration steps there are a lot of tools on the market. One of them is a Microsoft onboard tool, which is called “Steps Recorder”.To start it you simply hit the Windows Start Button on your keyboard and […]

Meltdown is currently thought to primarily affect Intel processors manufactured since 1995, excluding the company’s Itanium server chips and Atom processors before 2013. It could allow hackers to bypass the hardware barrier between applications run by users and the computer’s core memory. Meltdown, therefore, requires a change to the way the operating system handles memory […]

The online version of Exchange (Office 365) does not have the same EDB to PST conversion features that its on-premise version has. However, there are still a few ways that Office 365 mailbox items can be exported to PST. I ran into the odd situation today where a customer wanted to export away from Office […]

Today one of my Customers contacted me that he is not able to start his Outlook Client after migrating his Windows profile. He received the following error Message: so, how to fix this isue? there are some multiple ways which could help you:     1. Run the /resetnavpane command The navigation pane is the […]

One of my customer runs a hybrid exchange environment. By the onboarding process of new employees he needs to create the AD user and Mailbox onpremise. After creating the Mailbox and if is needed (depends on Company Police) the Customer moves the Mailbox to the exchange online. Here it is important to be sure that […]

Today Proton Technologies Ltd. presented a new feature in their portfolio. Proton is a know swiss company who created a full End-to-End Encryption Mail service and VPN service. The End-to-End Encrypted Mail service you can use for free and it is marked as open source. Now Proton presented the new feature “encrypted contact manager”. What is […]

Background Some time ago I was on a very interesting project about on-premise infrastructure, Exchange online and 3rd party player for Skype for Business. This constellation had a couple of challenges to cope with. The Exchange organisation was set up in a hybrid mode. All warmbody Mailboxes where located on the Exchange online and all […]

After the migration to Exchange online there are Users, which have language Issues. This kind of problem occurs mostly by not native speaking users, which have different languages for their Operating System (OS) and their Outlook. An example how that could look you can see here: In this example you see, that some menues are […]

After migrating several users from Exchange 2010 to Exchange Online it can happen that some of the users are not able to receive e-mails from external senders. In a normal case, you would go and check the send/receive connector settings. You can find more info about this in the following article: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms.exch.eac.connectorselection(v=exchg.150).aspx   But this […]

2018 is already knocking at the door and more and more of my customers find their way towards the cloud. On one hand to Office 365, but mostly towards Exchange Online. During the Ingnite 2017, besides the announcement of Exchange Server 2019, Microsoft finally approved the upcoming support for tenant to tenant migrations. This helps […]

In a project I was running some time ago, one of the main Tasks was to move on-premise Mailboxes to Exchange online. The migration went more or less smooth, but there was one mailbox which I wasn’t able to migrate. By checking the migration status with Powershell: Get-MigrationUser -BatchId <BATCH ID> | Get-MigrationUserStatistics I got […]

Usually my posts are all about server related topics. But from time to time some Outlook issues appear on my desk, too. They are not always easy to identify. (Server issue or client issue?) Therefore I’ll write a little post today about corrupt Outlook calendar entries and how I fixed it. A few days ago, […]

If you’re administrating an Exchange organisation there are different ways to do it. The simple way is to use the webbrowser for the ECP. But what about PowerShell? The most common ways are to connect remotley to the Exchange server and then start the Exchange Management Shell or to use the Import-PSSession cmdlet to use […]

Earlier this month I had to make some cleanups in a customer’s Exchange infrastructure. On one side, I had to identify empty Distribution Groups and on the other side I had to clean up unused Mobile Devices (Active Sync) partnerships. The Exchange Organization contains more than 5’000 warm Body (User) Mailboxes from which almost everyone has […]

In some situations we have to Export all the Distribution group and all the members of it to a CSV file. There is no command let available to retrieve the distribution group and distribution group members in bulk. Pipe line won’t work in this case. DisplayName Alias RecipientType Recipient OU Primary SMTP address Distribution Group […]

I recently had a problem with an Exchange Online tenant. There was an external mail contact which was previously synchronised from Active Directory to Exchange Online. So I had deleted the on-premise active directory mail contact but it still existed in Exchange Online. When I tried to delete the contact it gave the following errror message.   […]

On the Microsoft Technet I found this very interesting Post about Microsoft Teams. I reposted this Article here by me in the Blog. It was written by Cian Allner. If you would like to see the original Article, just follow this Link: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/37465.microsoft-teams-survival-guide.aspx     This “Survival Guide” aims to gather useful materials related to […]

In August 2017 Microsoft released a new Product in their Portfolio. They call it ‘Microsoft 365’. But what is ‘Microsoft 365’? Microsoft 365 is a complete, intelligent solution, including Office 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise Mobility + Security, that empowers everyone to be creative and work together, securely.   By discovering the Portfolio I found […]

PowerShell on Samsung Galaxy and iPhone? PowerShell Web Access is a new Windows Server Feature. It provides a web-based PowerShell Console. After installing, you can access PowerShell from any device, even from your Samsung Galaxy or iPhone. The setup is a three step process: Installing PowerShell Web Access (and its sub-features) Installing the certificate Configuring […]

As Web Application Proxy is a standard Windows Server role service, you can use many Windows Server PowerShell tools to control Web Application Proxy: Shows Web Application Proxy Windows services status Get-Service’appproxysvc’,’appproxyctrl’,’adfssrv’|fl-property* Shows the configuration of Web Application Proxy Windows service Get-WmiObject-ClassWin32_Service-PropertyStartMode-Filter”Name=’appproxysvc’” Get Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) results for the Remote Access role Invoke-BpaModel Microsoft/Windows/RemoteAccessServer […]

You can check in a very easy Way all of your Exchange Virtual Directories by using my Script I share with you in this Post. It shows you in a simple way all current Vdir’s on your local Server or all Servers of your Exchange Organisation. During the Script you will be asked if you […]

To create Mail Address Policies on Exchange I prefer to use PowerShell. If you go this Way, there are some small Showstopper you have to know about it. For example how to Manage Resources and the internal Domain? Then also witch Format to use for the Mail Policies? I made a short Script to create […]

How to create fast and clean a new Exchange DAG? – Use PowerShell! Since the last Versions of Exchange we don’t need to configure a dedicated Network Adapter. More about that you can find here. I wrote a small simple Script to create a DAG with two Exchange server. To download the Script just go […]

If FSMO role holder DC goes under upgradation process or down, we think about FSMO roles as its important and we know the traditional NTDSUTIL way of transferring and seizing FSMO roles which takes few minutes. To transfer all 5 of the FSMO roles. Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole -Identity “Target_DC_name” –OperationMasterRole PDCEmulator,RIDMaster,InfrastructureMaster,SchemaMaster,DomainNamingMaster transfer all 5 FSMO roles using […]

About the way how you can deploy an ADFS Infrastructure I have already described here and more about ADFS you can find in the Microsoft Technet Aricles here or in the Technet Blog here . But what about a SAAS for your Customers if you don’t want, that they know each other? Normaly you use a […]

Deploying a new Exchange Server infrastructure is never been so Standarted like today with Exchange 2016. In this Post it is not the question HOW to install Exchange, it is about how to Plan it. Microsoft recommends to use Building Blocks. The Perimeter for one Building block are: Number of Mailboxes 3000 Number of max. […]

You can change the Azure administrator that manages your Azure subscription or manages the Azure services used in your subscription. To view Azure billing information and manage subscriptions, you must sign in to the Account Center as the Account Administrator. + Add an admin for a subscription You can add an Azure administrator in the […]

  Availability The Cloud Solution Provider program is available to companies with offices in the following countries/regions. These are grouped by market. Partners in the CSP program can sell to other countries within the same market even if they don’t have an office in those locations. Availability by market Brazil Canada India Japan Korea New […]

Finding out who owns a Domain is easy, there are a lot of Web Tools to find out, all informations… But what about the Shell? You can use my Script to get all informations with one simple command.   You can download it on GitHub:   https://github.com/MSB365/GetWebWhoIs.ps1       Photo by Ricardo Cruz on Unsplash

I had to install on several servers the OMS Agent to manage the Systems in our Workspace. To go forward with this request I wrote this Script witch is doing the main work for me. After I wrote this PowerShell Lines, I was able to give it to our Operations Department for deployment on all […]

For creating a Remote Desktop Gateway infrastructure we need different configuration steps. For the Deployment I prefer to use PowerShell. With this Script you will be able to Deploy all needed Roles and Services for an RDG. Note: After you run this Script, you sill will have to make some configurations for your environment. E.g. […]

Creating SSL Certificate Requests needs a lot of Time, how to create a Request without IIS I wrote here in my Blog already with this Entry (Create Certificate Request without IIS (ADFS3.0)) But even here you need a lot of time, so the Solution is – PowerShell! Reinout Segers wrote a fantastic Script how to […]

I was asked to create an informal export from Mailboxes with the Total Mailbox Size. Till now nothing special, I know. But the requester asked also for the Total Size of the Archive Mailbox from each User. So I had to find a Way, to merge all outputs for each user. But here is the […]

I was asked from a small Business Company to create an easy way for the Administration, to create default Email for new Employees. Admin Team had no expirience with PowerShell but the Text was random only Usernames and Phonenumbers Were Variable. For that I wrote a small Powershell Script which opens a Windows where you […]