Real World Computing

Over the past few months, I've been looking at a whole range of options to do with file storage on the basis that Microsoft's OneDrive simply doesn't do what we need. The whole time of course, I've been unable to shake the feeling that Microsoft should be offering something that already covers this space. After all, file sharing is one of the major "tentpoles" in most Windows networks.  As it turns out, SharePoint is the answer to this - and it works well if it's playing nicely with OneDrive.  My initial investigation of SharePoint was flawed for a number of reasons. Firstly, it appears that I was looking at an "old version".  The "new" version has really only started to come out over the last few months but it's light years ahead of its predecessor. The second reason that SharePoint was overlooked was because I really didn't have a great understanding of how (or why) it works. I was trying to compare it to IBM Domino a...

Last time on Real World Computing, I talked about migrating mail from IBM Notes and Verse to Microsoft Office 365 . Now it's time for Part 2.  Mail Routing We did routing in two parts. Initially we had MX records for both IBM and Microsoft with Microsoft having the higher number (which means lower priority). After the cutover date we switched the priorities so that Microsoft Office 365 had the higher priority. One of the cool things about Microsoft’s setup is that they give you two domains, one is your own and the other is an @mycompany.onmicrosoft.com one. When we first saw this we thought it was a “bit wanky” but as it turned out, it was very useful indeed.we quickly discovered that we couldn't send mail to our internal colleagues on outlook from notes and that all of the agents in our Domino applications were only delivering internally. Changing these to point to the onmicrosoft addresses fixed that problem. As far internal mail, we just added a mail rule to f...

It was always just a matter of time. Eventually we were going to have to make the jump from IBM to Microsoft. It's not that IBMs software isn't good. It's very good. It's simply that IBM is the Beta to Microsoft's VHS. Technically the IBM product line is far superior but on the surface, IBMs poor UI will never match the incredible pull of Microsoft's polished Office 365 offerings. We're just finishing a mail migration from IBM Notes/Verse to Microsoft Outlook, which we did entirely in-house and I thought it would be worthwhile going over the method we used. The Before Status Prior to the migration, all of our users had the IBM Notes client on their desktops. We had three production servers and two test/dev servers. All of our user mailboxes were on the IBM Cloud and we had a split with some users on Verse and some on Notes. We were also running an extensive extranet with a myriad of centrally controlled expansive security options. Our address books...

Following on from Part 1 where I talked about how to get rooms to show up in the room list, here's the next step where we extend the booking time from the default of 180 days. Why is there a limit? In most circumstances, a limit makes perfect sense. It stops employees from booking meeting rooms for years in advance and then leaving the company. In our case, it's actually fairly common to book the meeting schedule up to about 18 months into the future - so the 180 day (6 month) limit is quite restricting for us. I decided to change the limit to 730 days. Essentially two years.  The Steps I'm going to assume that you're familiar with PowerShell by now... I wasn't when I wrote Part 1 but now PowerShell is my friend. If you're unsure about how to execute the steps, please go back and check Part 1 as there's only a couple of commands at the end that are different. So, without further ado; Start PowerShell as Administrator (Local Admin Rights...

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...