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June 22 The Center For Forgotten Sticks – avoid with Office Live WorkspaceOne of my colleagues in Microsoft UK just sent me a rather humorous video that suggests what happens to all of those USB sticks that students lose around the world every day. Pretty funny… I talk about this kind of thing to customers all of the time as well…
One key benefit of using our Live Services is the amount of storage we provide… it adds up to a LOT. In the video we talk about Office Live Workspace… but there are others as well:
That’s One Hundred and Fifty Five GIGABYTES… and I am sure that there are more to be had if you look at PhotoSynth and more… Jonny June 18 GalSync 2010 releases for Outlook LiveSomething my colleague described at the “most anticipated 267KB [he] has seen in quite a while'”… ILM support for Outlook Live is now with us. Webcasts by the Exchange team are planned, and I will do my best to blog on a few choice hints and tips here as well as these come up. GalSync 2010 can be obtained from the Outlook Live connection on http://connect.microsoft.com.
Enjoy! Jonny June 16 GALSync 2010 documentation now availableMany, many customers that I have been dealing with over the last year have been awaiting the launch of ILM support for Outlook Live. Well the wait is now almost over… more on this soon. In the meantime, feel free to immerse yourself in the extensive documentation we have just released to the web: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd575560.aspx. I get a feeling that this will generate a lot of chatter… Enjoy! Jonny Import Users feature added to the Outlook Live Exchange Control PanelAs I have noted before, the great thing about hosted cloud services is that users and admins do not have to wait for major version upgrades to obtain new features. A new feature that has just landed in the Exchange Control Panel is an Import Users feature that allows an admin to stage a CSV file of new user mailboxes on our servers for processing instead of tying up a local desktop or server. Below is a nice pic of this in all of its shiny new glory :)
Currently this feature is for new imports only… but I am told that functionality will be expanded to include other operations soon. In the meantime, please read all about this here: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/ms.exch.ecp.csvimportlearnmore.aspx?v=14.0.482.25&r=ia&l=1, and if you are an admin, please try it out and let us know what you think over on http://outlookliveanswers.com. One point to note, is that for updates/deletes, and to work with MailContacts and MailUsers, you will still need to use CSV_Parser.ps1. You should also note that the CSV file format with the new Import Users feature is slightly different to the one that CSV_Parser requires… so don’t make the same mistake I did and try using one of your existing CSV files with it. Enjoy! Jonny June 04 Upgrading to WS2008 SP2 and Vista SP2 with PowerShellv2/WinRMv2 CTP3That’s a lot of letters and numbers up there in the title… isn’t it great that you can write stuff like that and folks still know what you mean? Anyway, what are we talking about here? Some of the early users of WinRMv2 and PowerShellv2 on Windows Server and Vista machines may now be upgrading their OS’s to Service Pack 2. In doing so, Powershell connectivity to Outlook Live may stop working, depending on what iteration of the bits you originally used. If you do upgrade to SP2 and PowerShell stops working, you will need to reinstall WinRM/PowerShell. Simply follow the links here to get the latest builds: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/cc952756.aspx Hope that helps. Jonny June 01 Introducing Outlook Live AnswersWe are pleased to announce the release of Outlook Live Answers. This forum and blog site provides Live@edu Outlook Live administrators and end-users with a friendly “Q&A” forum to quickly find answers to their questions and for administrators to get dynamic information about their Outlook Live service. The site complements our help.outlook.com product documentation and will extend and replace our chalktalk DL. Instead of dispersing information in DLs, use of the forum by you and your student, faculty, and alumni end users will enable us to build a knowledge base that is available 24 hours a day. There is also an administrator section, so you can continue to connect with your peers on administrative issues just as you do today on chalktalk. One particular exciting feature is a new Status and Alert system used to notify Outlook Live customers of service issues. This update, located at http://outlookliveanswers.com/servicestatus.aspx, replaces the manual external blog approach we have previously used and allows us deliver targeted service information about your specific account How does it work? The Outlook live answers site provides end-users with a “Q&A” interface into the forums:
As you start typing, we look for answers in the forums. If you want to ask a question, just click the “Ask” link. Users can share solutions by clicking on “Share” to find unanswered forum threads where they can share their knowledge with the community! The Status and Alert System provides you with information on your account. To use it, simply sign in to Outlook Live Answers with your Live@edu LiveID and if there is an issue, you will see an alert notification at the top of the home page as well as more detailed information on the dedicated Service Status page. By signing in with your Live@edu Admin LiveID, you will see additional details that aren’t relevant to your end users. .
How to participate Visit our site at www.outlookliveanswers.com sign in with your LiveID, create a site account name (this will be used as your display name) and explore! If you are your school’s Live@edu administrator, then please sign in using your Live@edu Admin LiveID to take full advantage of the Status and Alerts system. Also, don’t forget to visit the specific forums section for Outlook Live administrators where you can post questions exactly as you ask them today using the chalktalk DL. We’ll keep the chalktalk DL alive for a short period of time to enable the transition, and send reminders regarding the new site regularly. May 21 Open another user’s mailbox in Outlook LiveI seem to be on a roll today with the whole mailbox permission setting thing in PowerShell… anyway this is my last post on this for the time being… I would be interested in hearing some thoughts from others here on the potential applications. A lot of IT Managers in the schools and institutions I talk to want to know how they can see the contents of a user’s mailbox. The reasons for this vary, but mainly it boils down to doing investigations and protecting kids from cyber-bullying or harmful content in email. By default, a user mailbox is private and no one else can open it to view the contents unless the individual user grants these permissions. An administrator however is all-powerful, and can grant themselves the necessary permissions, and then simply use OWA or Outlook 2007 to look at whatever they like in someone else’s account. To grant permissions, first of all, connect to the Outlook Live service using PowerShell, then run the following command:
… in this case, JennyA is the mailbox that the permissions are being modified on, and Admin is the account that is getting the permissions. An admin can then look at this mail box using OWA for example. To open another mailbox in OWA, click the drop-down arrow to the right of the Logged On user at the top right of the screen, and enter the alias of the mailbox you want to look at:
Once you are done with the investigation, you can remove the permissions again.
Jonny Setting an inbox rule for a mailbox using PowerShellI was talking to a US East Coast Higher Education institution yesterday that is currently in the process of rolling out Outlook Live. They intend doing a hard switch over of the service behind the existing student email addresses, and one thing they also wanted to retain were redirection rules that the students had set up… they have all of the details for this on a per-address level. This objective can be achieved through PowerShell scripting… what follows are the component commands to use. In Outlook Live, inbox rules are set on a per-mailbox basis… and this is something that users would normally configure manually through Outlook 2007 or OWA. An administrator can however grant themselves with access to a mailbox, and then proceed to set up rules on the end-user’s behalf. In this example, I am using JennyA as the mailbox to configure, and Admin as the mailbox admin. JennyA is redirecting her mail to her personal Hotmail account. First of all, as an admin, you need to grant yourself full access rights to the mailbox:
Then add the new inbox rule to
You will see something like this:
Finally, remove the admin’s access rights
So that is it…enjoy! Jonny Using PowerShell to set a Mailbox TimezoneA question I get asked quite often by Outlook Live administrators is if it is possible to programmatically set the timezone on a mailbox. The scenario is that a student has not set it right when they first logged in, and they may lack the knowledge to set it to what it should be. This can lead to help desk calls if students get confused when their calendar (for example) does not align with what they expect the time to be. A timezone for a mailbox can be viewed and set through PowerShell. In the example below, JennyA is the user, and Admin is the Exchange Organization Administrator. First of all, as an admin, you need to grant yourself full access rights to the mailbox:
Then, you can check to see what the TimeZone is currently set to:
You will see a result like the following:
Then, you can change the TimeZone to something else…let’s say Pacific Standard Time
Finally, remove the full access privileges from the admin account:
If you need to do this en masse, you could of course write a PowerShell script to do this that works in conjunction with a CSV file containing the mailboxes you want to adjust. The timezones are all referenced with their full name. If you don’t know what to use, manually set a time zone in OWA, and then use PowerShell to see what it is called. That’s it! Jonny Disable the Instant Messaging Widget in Outlook LiveWith the release of Outlook Live back in Feb this year, we added in a little Live Messenger widget that allowed users to manage connections with their Messenger contacts, and to kick off basic chat sessions… this is a service that has proven popular in some quarters with students.
Some schools however dislike the use of messenger, and would prefer to have this widget removed… this can be achieved in the all powerful PowerShell (thanks to Kumarswamy Valegerepura from the Exchange front end team for providing some assistance here!) This is a setting that is part of the OWA Mailbox Policy. There are potentially 2 policies to modify here, the DefaultMailboxPlan and the GalDisabledMailboxPlan, if you are making use of both, if you are only making use of one of these plans, please be sure to modify the correct one. Anyway, after connecting to Outlook Live with Powershell, run the following command[s]:
You should then log into http://outlook.com to see the outcome… the widget should be gone. You can also confirm the setting in PowerShell by entering:
or # to see Gal Disabled Mailbox Plan IM settings Enjoy! Jonny |
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