Chris’s Blog

This handy little tool has been around for some time now but I’ve found that it does not seem to be very well known so I thought I would write up a quick post.

This performance tool tests your Internet connection to a Microsoft Online Services data center and measures the response times, bandwidth, and overall connection quality. The results can help you evaluate your network configuration for potential use with Microsoft Online Services.

For America use http://speedtest.microsoftonline.com

For Asia Pacific use http://speedtest.apac.microsoftonline.com

For Europe, Middle East and Africa use http://speedtest.emea.microsoftonline.com

Toby and I talking about our “Microsoft Office 365: From Simple Migration to a Hybrid Environment” session at At Tech-Ed Australia 2011.

If you missed it, the recorded session and slides are available for download here: http://cgoo.se/ndiUkE

I recently saw this at Tech-Ed Australia and finally managed to track it down so I could share it. I think it’s such a great video and just excites me about the "future of productivity".

After an interesting and somewhat different keynote, Tech-Ed 2011 has officially kicked off. While everyone is enjoying a few cold ones, I thought I would take the time to tell you about some of the sessions I am excited about attending this year.

There are many great speakers at Tech-Ed this year, these are just some of the sessions I plan to attend.

• EXL310: "Upgrading to Exchange 2010: Notes from Field" with Colin Lee and Sofiane Behraoui
• EXL309: "Microsoft Lync 2010: How to go big with voice" with Brendan Carius and Selvan Loganathan
• OFS-OFC309: "From Zero to Productivity with Office 365" with Ben Walters, Chris Oconnor and Lee Hickin
• EXL303: "Exchange Server 2010: High Availability Concepts" with Scott Schnoll
• EXL304: "Load Balancing with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010" with Andrew Ehrensing

Then of course there is my session with Toby Knight, EXL-OFC311: “Microsoft Office 365: From Simple Migration to a Hybrid Environment” we will be in Arena 1B at 5 PM tomorrow… we’ve got some great schwag so make sure you stop by!

I’ve been having a problem with remote mailbox moves to Office 365. The move completes successfully and everything works ok, but it always generates the following error:

“Could not load type ‘Microsoft.Exchange.MailboxReplicationService.RequestPriority’…”

I’ve seen this mentioned a few times on the Office 365 community forums and some of my colleagues are also seeing this. The good news is that after installing Update Rollup 5 for Exchange 2010 SP1 this error no longer appears.

It’s almost time to head to the Gold Coast for Tech-Ed 2011. I will be tweeting and blogging from the conference as usual. I will also be speaking this year so if you are attending, be sure to come over and say hi.

Microsoft’s Toby Knight and I will be presenting session EXL311 entitled “Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office 365: From Simple Migration to a Hybrid Environment”. Whether you’re looking to migrate all of your mailboxes to the cloud or planning to run a hybrid environment, this is the session for you. We will cover how and when to take advantage of the Simple Exchange Migration which supports migrating existing Exchange on-premise customers who want to move all of their mailboxes to the cloud with full data fidelity. You will also learn how rolling out an Exchange 2010 server in your current Exchange environment prepares you for seamless integration with Exchange Online. Whether you are piloting a few users or moving a large part of your workforce to the cloud, we give you the technical details on Exchange-to-cloud integration that you need to be successful.

The session is currently scheduled for Wed, 31 Aug at 5 PM. See you there!

With the recent launch of Office365 I was very excited at the thought of moving my existing BPOS account to a new Office365 tenant. I signed up, removed my “cgoosen.com” domain from my BPOS account and went through the process of adding it to Office365. I thought the whole process was going really well until I tested it by sending myself an email from another external account. I immediately received a “550 5.4.1 Relay Access Denied” error which seemed a little strange. After some research on the Office365 Community forums I realised that this seems to be a common issue with people moving a domain from BPOS to Office365.

I ended up calling Microsoft Customer Support and after some trial and error here is how I fixed it.

The first thing you need to do is use PowerShell to connect to your Office365 tenant, make sure you have the correct versions of Windows PowerShell and Windows Remote Management (WinRM) installed and configured on your computer. If you are running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, you don’t have to install anything. If you are running anything else, see the link at the bottom of the post. By default, PowerShell’s execution policy is set to “Restricted” that means that scripts won’t run so before we try to connect, we need to change that. Open PowerShell and execute the following cmdlets:

Get-ExecutionPolicy – verify that it is set to “Restricted”

Lets change it to “RemoteSigned”. PowerShell will now run any scripts that you write yourself and scripts downloaded from the Internet only if those scripts have been signed by a trusted publisher:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

Now we are ready to connect to our Office365 tenant. Execute the following cmdlets:

$LiveCred = Get-Credential

Enter your Office365 admin credentials in the dialog

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

Import-PSSession $Session

Once connected you, execute the following cmdlets:

Set-AcceptedDomain -Identity "yourdomain.com" -OutboundOnly $True

Set-AcceptedDomain -Identity "yourdomain.com" -OutboundOnly $False

You may need to allow around 40mins for replication, after that you should be able to receive mail again without the “550 5.4.1 Relay Access Denied” error.

If you are using running anything other than Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, see this link for information on Install and Configure Windows PowerShell.

For more information about connecting to Office365 via PowerShell, click here.

One of my favourite tools is the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant. The Deployment Assistant asks you some questions about your particular Exchange environment and, based on your answers, it provides a checklist with instructions that are designed to help you deploy Exchange 2010 quickly and easily. Each step has a huge amount of valuable information to guide you through your deployment.

The Exchange Team recently announced that they have updated the Deployment Assistant to include a rich coexistence scenario for organizations interested in maintaining some users on-premises with Exchange 2010 and some users hosted in the cloud by Microsoft Office 365 for enterprises. This information is only available in English at this time and requires Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1).

The Exchange Server Deployment Assistant can be found here.

Microsoft recently announced that they are in the process of updating pricing for the Hosted BlackBerry Service for Exchange Online to make it available free of charge. From the 16th of March 2011, BlackBerry mobile e-mail for new Exchange Online customers is now free through the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).  For existing customers, a further announcement is expected later this month on how to take advantage of this change.

In addition, Hosted BlackBerry service will be available for free with Office 365 after it launches later this year.

On the strength of its market position, Microsoft has recently been placed in the Leaders Quadrant in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Secure E-mail Gateway.

The Secure Messaging solution offers customers a hybrid model of in-the-cloud services – Forefront Online Protection for Exchange – and on-premises software – Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server – to provide defence-in-depth protection.

For the complete report, click here