Depending on your situation, you may want to take control of how Exchange’s Autodiscover lookup process works. Specifically, there are a lot of scenarios where Autodiscover will break because the lookup process isn’t properly controlled. In this article, I’ll go over registry settings that will let you control which steps are used and which ones are skipped.…
This post will go over some of the many errors that occur when attempting to move a mailbox to Office 365. The error messages you see are discovered when showing the details of a failed migration and then clicking on a failed user in that migration.
Issues
1. “You can’t use the domain because it’s not an accepted domain for your organization”
Office 365 will not accept migration of a mailbox if that mailbox has an email alias that includes a domain that doesn’t exist in Office 365.…
The Problem
A very common issue when moving an organization from an on-premises Exchange environment to Office 365 is non-usable domain names. The issue happens because a domain name of the Active Directory Domain has one of these issues:
- The Domain used by AD is not “owned” by the organization. This issue happens when a company decides to use a specific domain name on their Internal network when they have either lost control of that domain name or never had control of it.
For those of you who are still working with a significant on-prem Exchange environment, you are probably in need of a good script to go through the admin logs (IIS Logs, Exchange Functional Logs) to clear things up on occasion. Those logs can take up a lot of space very quickly, so a regular process that does it for you is a big time-saver, and will keep you from running into those horrible midnight inadequate space notices.…
No, I’m not talking about sunscreen. The SPF I’ll be discussing here is Sender Policy Framework. It’s an email security measure that can prevent unauthorized use of your email domain name. I’ll be going over a few things in this post, but if you just want to know how to craft an SPF record, you can scroll to the “The SPF Puzzle” section below.…
One of the most historically difficult problems to address in IT is usernames and passwords for multiple applications. We all have a multitude of accounts we have to manage. Bank accounts, social media, email, work accounts, cloud storage, and every other system we use relies on usernames and passwords to “authenticate” who we are. There are a number of different solutions for this problem, but the most user friendly method is a technique called “Identity Federation.”…
Microsoft has significantly changed the way admins export email in Office 365 are done by eliminating export tools in each application (Exchange, SharePoint, etc). There is now a single solution for exports, including Exchange PSTs, OneDrive, and SharePoint files. This central solution is the Security and Compliance center. Unfortunately, there isn’t much information on how to properly export data from Exchange Online now that the Compliance center in Exchange Admin is deprecated.…
If you have set up a new Hybrid configuration with Office 365 lately, you will notice a new option in the Hybrid Config Wizard, the Hybrid Agent. Before I go into my personal views on this new option and whether you should use it, let me first explain what this agent does. Note: Before I start, I should state that I have not had an opportunity to test the Hybrid agent’s features yet, so there are still a few questions I have about it.…
Shared Mailboxes make it possible to centralize email for a specific group of employees. If you don’t know what a shared mailbox is, think about the “Contact Us” address most web pages have. Or your company’s “Support” mailbox. Exchange implements these very easily through mailbox delegation. Grant users full access to the mailbox in the Admin Portal and the mailbox will appear in Outlook.…
Exchange server maintenance requires some specific steps in 2013+. There is no specific maintenance mode, as in previous versions, but you can complete a few actions to take a server out of production. You will need to drain the SMTP queues on the server, tag the services as unavailable, then disable transport entirely. Each step needs to have some rest time, so that is built into the script.…