Controlling Autodiscover with the Registry or GPO

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.…

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O365 Hybrid Migration Errors & Fixes

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.…

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PowerShell Script: Delete System Logs

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.…

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AC Brown’s Cloud Guide – Part 4 – Cloud Service Providers

What are Cloud Service Providers

Moving from a traditional IT infrastructure to a cloud-based or hybrid infrastructure is a complicated undertaking. Cloud systems will reduce the level of control an organization has over their application, and getting the right setup is sometimes difficult. This is where Cloud Service Providers (CSP) come in. I should first point out that CSP is a Microsoft term for organizations that partner with them to provide migration, administration, architectural, security, and development services to their customers.…

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How Does SPF Work?

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.…

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Step by Step: Export Office 365 OneDrive Data

Office 365’s OneDrive is a wonderful tool for storing, sharing, and securing access to files of all types, but running an export of Office 365 data can be confusing. One of the rules for OneDrive is that, unless shared, data is normally only accessible by the user who owns the OneDrive folder. But when employees leave the company, accessing that data and exporting it to a more accessible location requires a bit of work.…

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Save Sent Items in a Shared Mailbox

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.…

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Exchange Server Maintenance Functions

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.…

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Fixing Outlook Certificate Errors

How to solve problems with Exchange Autodiscover. Certificate Error issues in particular.

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Office 365 Migration – When Do I Need to Use Third Party Tools?

This post may be late in coming, given that most smaller companies have already moved away from on-prem solutions to cloud based services for things like email and file sharing, but I feel like it’s important to stress some of the realities involved in migrating from on-prem to cloud systems. Particularly when migrating to Office 365.…

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