I know that sound like a weird title right? How can you leverage Microsoft Online Subscriptions on-premises? After all Office 365 is in the cloud? What is not obvious is that a number of the subscriptions actually do grant you usage rights that are for on-premises use cases! The key document to refer to is the […]
Free Windows 10 upgrade offer via CSP
Most of us know that there was an offer from Microsoft to upgrade from Windows 7 and 8.1 back in 2016, however most of us don’t know that you can still get a ‘free’ upgrade today! Microsoft announced a new offer in January 2017 for any customers who have a Windows 10 Enterprise subscription via […]
Exchange Resource Mailboxes – Part 1
Since Microsoft Exchange 2007 Resource Mailboxes have been a feature of Microsoft Exchange. Overall it appears that Room and Resource mailboxes are a feature that has matured over the previous versions of Microsoft Exchange Server and now receive just a few minor improvements to make them simpler to manage. IBM’s Domino platform has always had […]
Exchange Federation to Office 365 without Hybrid
Exchange Federation has been around a long time, but of course more recently any time you talk about integrating with Office 365 people start going down the hybrid route. What if you don’t want hybrid though, what if all you want is to be able to share free/busy information? Let’s set the scene. We have […]
Exchange Server 2016 – Unable to determine file version PowerShellEngine
After installing Exchange Server 2016 CU4 on Windows Server 2016, the Exchange Management Shell would fail to connect with the error: New-PSSession : [xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Processing data from remote server xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx failed with the following error message: [ClientAccessServer=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,BackEndServer=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,RequestId=bc9549f6-b772-4933-8132-84dfcd57372d,TimeStamp=07/03/2017 12:25:32] [AuthZRequestId=7f855afa-31f2-4e46-bd1b-c1bf1ebc95f1][FailureCategory=AuthZ-SetupVersionInformationCorruptException] Unable to determine the installed file version from the registry key ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\PowerShellEngine’. For more information, see […]
The Microsoft Account Dilemma
For about 18 months now I have been in a world of pain. Up front I want to say that Microsoft do an incredible job at this really. This is complicated stuff I am sure, connecting all these disparate systems, migrating and consolidating. I think where they have gone wrong is that by trying to […]
Microsoft Changes MCSE/MCSD… again…
As you will probably know, a few years ago Microsoft changed MCSE so that the qualifications would no longer have a version number in the name but instead they required a recertification every three years. This was good on one hand since it avoided you needing to change your CV, however it did mean enforced […]
Office 365 Tenant to Tenant Migration
Last weekend I undertook a Migration from one Office 365 tenant to another – manually. Whilst we normally work in the enterprise space migrating thousands of users, this was a special case project undertaken deliberately as a manual process end to end. It wasn’t without issue and hiccups, made more worrying because it was for […]
Autodiscover exposed
for Exchange & O365 Autodiscover is a fundamental technology in Exchange and Office 365. When Outlook first starts the ‘out of the box experience’ is that it will first of all figure out if it can find an email address for you on the account you’re logged in with and then takes you through a […]
O365 Groups, Teams, Distribution Lists or Yammer
In Office 365 there are now many similar options available for collaboration. You now have the traditional Distribution Lists (aka Distribution Groups), Office 365 Groups, Yammer and more recently Teams, and of course there is also SharePoint, OneDrive and Skype for Business. So with all this choice… how do you choose? What is available Microsoft’s […]
Tenant Isolation in Microsoft Office 365
I have often wondered how Microsoft have architected their cloud solutions to ensure that there is no cross-talk between tenants (be that accidental or malicious) and hey presto a document from Microsoft has surfaced which outlines exactly that. In summary it talks about Azure AD being stored in partitions and these partitions being replicated in […]
Office 365 Persistent Chat (Microsoft Teams)
A common complaint from people who are used to using Skype and who are moving to Skype for Business is where is persistent chat? I mean in Skype I can be part of a group conversation and even if I’m not actively logged into Skype the next time I log in I can see the […]