Real World Computing

Depending upon your settings and circumstances, there's a chance that groups created in Microsoft Teams might play so well together.  Specifically, your team might not be available for email.  As it turns out, the teams ARE available... they're just hidden.   and a little PowerShell is enough to coax them out.  Our Example In our example, the site is called Application Redevelopment and you can see from the screenshot that it appears in teams but not in outlook. The PowerShell Commands Session Setup The setup is as per usual; Start PowerShell in Administrator Mode. Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned Press Y and Enter. $UserCredential = Get-Credential Enter your user name and password. Create the session. $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection and activate it. Import-PSSessio...

If you have a few big groups, you'll probably be asked to provide a list of their members on occasion. Like Notes, if you don't have a CRM on the front of your system, it's hard to get a list of group members that includes anything apart from their name... unless of course, you use PowerShell. Note: If you're copying and pasting from this blog entry, it's worth pasting into notepad so that you can rejoin any lines before pasting into PowerShell. I only give you one command at a time, so it should all be on one line. The Procedure Start PowerShell (in Administrator Mode) and connect to Office 365 Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned (and press Y ) $UserCredential = Get-Credential Enter your email address and password. If you're using 2 Factor Authentication... You'll need to open the Microsoft Exchange Online Powershell Module which should be on your desktop if you've followed the instructions ( see this post ). Enter the following command (c...

Last week, following best practice guidelines, we switched to Multi-Factor Authentication. While it was a little painful at first, it's working well now for our admin team. I'm not sure if or when we'll push this out to our users. It might be too difficult for them. (in fact, personally, I think that Google's token system might be far easier) In any case, as it turns out, we can't login to PowerShell now that MFA is running. A little searching provided the answer. We had to install an extension for PowerShell.  The process is already very well documented , so I won't go over here except to add one observation; You must install it via Edge (or possibly IE) -- it won't install via Chrome. 

Some time ago, we did an export of our Domino contacts into the Office 365 address book. It was mostly successful and we got the users and their email addresses but missed a lot of detail on the phone numbers, company names and fax numbers.  At the time it didn't matter but recently we reached a point where we needed this information to be present.  The process was much fiddlier than it should have been, so here's how we did it. Exporting out of Domino This was easy, literally a five minute job for about 5000+ contacts. Domino has menu options to export as CSV, so I won't go into detail here. The end result is that you should have a CSV file that looks something like this; ExternalEmailAddress,FirstName,LastName,Name,Title,Company,Phone,MobilePhone,Fax,StreetAddress,City,StateorProvince,PostalCode,CountryOrRegion atano@clonewars.com,Ashoka,Tano,Ashoka Tano,,Cartoon Network,08 8988 9889,,,,,,, ynotfar@dagpbah.com,Yoda,Not Far,Yoda Not Far,Jedi Master,Food of th...

It's not an unfamiliar scenario with all of the rebranding that's happening these days. Your Office365 group has the wrong mail domain and now you want to change it. It's the kind of thing that you'd expect to be able to change via the admin portal. After all, there's a neat little domain selector box on the page. Alas, that's not how Office 365 groups work. You need PowerShell for that one. PowerShell to the Rescue PowerShell, the interface you have when you don't have an interface...  Here's how to change the domain on your group. Run PowerShell as an Administrator and type the following commands; Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned $UserCredential = Get-Credential $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity " Group English Name " -PrimarySmtpAddre...

One of the odd things about Office 365 is how much you have to resort to PowerShell to get things done. That's currently the case with the Office365 Groups, a recently introduced type of group that works particularly well across all of the Office365 applications.  I've been setting a few things up with Office365 groups lately and I've had two instances where I needed to do some renames. Once was when the people who asked for the group changed their mind about the name and the other was when I wanted to rebuild an existing sharepoint site (and reuse the name). In both cases, I was able to change the name but the email address itself was greyed out.  The Solution is to use PowerShell Start Powershell by clicking Start and typing PowerShell, then Right-click on the icon and run as Administrator. In the console that appears, type; Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned This elevates some privileges. You'll need to choose Y and press enter.  Next, you...

You'd think that setting rooms up in Office 365 would be a simple matter of going to the Office 365 Admin console, expanding Resources, clicking on Rooms and Equipment and then using the Add Button This works but it doesn't do everything. If you want your rooms to appear in the Room List (and to show available times), you'll have to use PowerShell to put them there. Finding Answers So... I spent a while trying to find the answers without a whole lot of luck. I think that coming from the Notes/Domino world and not being familiar with the outlook terminology hindered me a bit in this regard.  In any case, big thanks to IT for Dummies btw whose page called " Create Room List Office 365 " made very little sense to me but helped me to explain to Microsoft Support what it was that I was looking for.  BTW: Microsoft support can be reached via the Support and then Service Requests options in the Admin Center. I've found their support to be excel...

We started moving over to Office 365 quite a while before we decided to ditch Notes mail and move to Outlook. It was also my plan to get rid of our internal active directory server and rely solely on the cloud for authentication.  As it turned out, management wanted to keep the AD server a little longer, so we've had to synchronise our onsite accounts with the Office 365 ones. The synchronisation processes immediately created duplicates (and sometimes triplicates) of users.  The journey to resolve this issue was time consuming and data destructive, so I thought I'd let everyone know how to fast-track it. What Causes the Problems Microsoft's Office 365 users have unique ID's much like the objects in the Active Directory. When you create a user from scratch on Office 365, you create them with a unique ID. While there are tools that will let you change these unique IDs, we've found that they generally do more damage than good. Deleted people are another pa...