A lot of customers want to mail-enable resources such as conference rooms so that when users want to send meeting requests, they can also ‘invite’ a conference room to secure it for the meeting.

This can be a achieved quite easily now…in Outlook Live R3…these commands were not available in Exchange Labs R2.

First of all, create your mailbox for your conference room (confroom in my example), then:

set-mailbox confroom -Type Room

Set-CalendarProcessing confroom -AutomateProcessing autoaccept

The ultimate effect of this is that if a user attempts to book confroom, the mailbox will respond accordingly; Accept if it is free and Decline if it is not.

Thanks

Jonny

A customer asked me the other day if it is possible in Outlook Live to create a Distribution Group that is only able to receive emails from their students that are on Outlook Live, and Staff members that are on a separate email solution.

This is entirely possible using just the basic settings that are available in the Exchange Control Panel User Interface.  See the demo:

Download

In the demo, I configured the permissions in the GUI, but you could also achieve the same end result using PowerShell.

set-DistributionGroup "AllContoso" -AcceptMessagesOnlyFromDLMembers "Permitted"
Set-DynamicDistributionGroup "AllContoso"-RequireSenderAuthenticationEnabled $false

Enjoy!

Jonny

Quite often, a mailbox may have multiple aliases associated with it.  A student on Outlook Live, for example, will have their regular email address, but they might also be the president of the Chess Club and so want an email alias for use with that also.

Further than that, I have spoken to some customers that would like to provide their students with the ability to specify their own email alias through a simple web application that they might have developed…and…make that new address their primary email address.

I have prepared a short demo where I show how proxy addresses can be created, and the Primary SMTP address manipulated in PowerShell… below that, I have outlined at a high level the type of application that could be built to give students some choice over their email address.

Double click for full screen

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If you are thinking about developing a web application that allows a user to select their own email address, you may want to develop something like this:

Essentially:

• User authenticates onto an institution-controlled web-page – this could be AD integrated.  Page is ‘aware’ of who is logged in.
• Various email options are presented based on information on the user that is pulled from a Student Information System (or it could be AD as well if this info is in there).
• User chooses their desired email address.
• Option is presented to the user to make the new address the Primary SMTP address.  User makes their choice.
• Form is submitted to a secure service that pushes parameters into a PowerShell process.
• PowerShell Process pushes the new Email Address information into Outlook Live
• User can now send email 'from' the new address.
• LiveID stays the same.

In this example, I have reflected the conversations I have had with IT Administrators.  It would of course be completely possible to allow students to specify whatever they want… but with that comes some risk of ‘unusual’ names :)

Jonny

Just a quick shout out to one of my customers in Oregon… Coos Bay Public Schools.  They have just released a case study with us on their Live@edu deployment!

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000003627

Go Coos Bay!

Jonny

I do a load of workshops with customers, and in support of this, I had created what can loosely be described as a Workshop Manual.  Anyway, I have just updated it for use with R3/Outlook Live and the latest and greatest versions of the PowerShell/WinRM CTP releases.

Here it is:

  It has even now got a Table of Contents, and everything!

Happy to make adjustments to this, if any wants me to.

Jonny

A question that came up LOTS in the past on Exchange Labs had to do with disabling user access to mailboxes… the typical scenario was that an institution wanted to carry our an investigation about a student, and pending the outcome, no access to email should be permitted.

This scenario has now been addressed for Outlook Live…and in quite a novel way.  Instead of turning off the mailbox completely which does have its downsides as the mailbox can then no longer be accessed by anyone really, an administrator can instead disable the client access methods to that mailbox for the associated LiveID.

Double click to view full screen

Download

The demo just covers turning off OWA access… to turn off all of the protocols we enable, use the following cmdlet:

set-casmailbox <mailbox alias>-OWAEnabled:$false -PopEnabled:$false -ImapEnabled:$false -MapiEnabled:$false -ActiveSyncEnabled:$false

Happy ‘disabling’!

Jonny

The first thing many new Outlook Live customers want to do is create a bunch of accounts. I recommend you use dummy account names for this until you are ready to use your real data. I even go as far as to recommend running one of more parallel Outlook Live tenants purely for testing purposes.

Microsoft has provided a script for administrators to use to create and manage many Mailboxes/MailUsers/MailContacts. You can download this script (called CSV_Parser_RS.ps1) from http://connect.microsoft.com/ site and by registering for the Outlook Live ‘Connection’. You can use your admin account for your Outlook Live tenant to do this. The script changes every so often so keep checking back for the latest updates.

This CSV_Parser_R3.ps1 script works with a Comma Separate Values file (CSV) which is basically a text file with a .csv filename extension. You can work with csv files in Notepad if you like… others prefer to use a spreadsheet for the sake of their sanity.

Download

Rather than go through all of the variations of what you can create in your CSV file, I would recommend consulting http://help.outlook.com on the topic; only the basics will be covered here, but I will revisit this topic from time to time. What you see used above is a typical selection of fields to use to start some account creation testing.

Using the CSV Parser Script in PowerShell

The syntax for using this script looks a lot like you are creating a PowerShell Session. This is because the script needs to know about many of the same parameters as it executes. The script does all of the session creation and removal for you, so you do not have to worry about that. Session removal is the last thing that happens… if however for any reason you terminate the script before it completes, please ensure to remove the runspace the script created. Remember, you can remove all sessions by typing:

Get-PSSession | Remove-PSSession

Steps are as follows… I will assume that you place this script and your csv file into “C:\Parser”. You can obviously put the files somewhere else if you like…just remember to change the paths and filenames.

# capture the admin LiveID username in a variable
$Cred = get-credential

# run the script
C:\Parser\CSV_Parser_R3.PS1 -UsersFile C:\Parser\test.csv -LiveCredential $Cred -LogDirectory C:\Parser\ -ValidateAction $true

Some notes to consider on managing your mailboxes with CSV files…

As time goes on, you will likely find that you will need a number of csv files to maintain your accounts. Different administrators do this in different ways with csv files, but the following is fairly typical:

• A Master CSV file is maintained that contains up to date information from whatever your ‘fountain of truth’ is for your student data. This could be a SIS like Banner. This file should reflect precisely what is on Outlook Live.
• When new mailboxes are added, the record entries are added first to the master CSV file, and then created again in a separate ‘new mailboxes’ CSV file which contains all of the details for required new mailboxes in a set time period – e.g. 24 hours. This ‘new mailboxes’ CSV file is then processed with CSV Parser and then discarded or stored somewhere as a perpetual record of what happened on the date it was used.
• When mailboxes are updated, the records are first updated in the master file and then the records are created again in a separate ‘mailbox updates’ CSV file which contains all of the details for required updates to mailboxes in a set time period – e.g. 24 hours. This ‘updates’ csv file is then processed with CSV Parser and then discarded or stored somewhere as a perpetual record of what happened on the date it was used.
• When mailboxes are deleted, the records are first deleted from the master file and then the records are created again in a separate ‘mailbox deletes’ csv file which contains all of the details for required mailbox deletes in a set time period – e.g. 24 hours. This ‘mailbox deletes’ CSV file is then processed with CSV Parser and then discarded or stored somewhere as a perpetual record of what happened on the date it was used.
• It is obviously a good idea to have some process around this… start creating mailboxes manually, and very quickly you will have a confusing mismatch between what you believe is in Outlook Live according to your Master CSV file, and what is actually in Outlook Live.

Enjoy!

Jonny

Customers that used R2/Exchange Labs in the past and that also used the get-mailbox cmdlet will know that when they entered that, PowerShell presented a very comprehensive list of information about the various mailbox attributes.  In R3/Outlook Live, the results from this cmdlet have been tidied up a lot, and now it only pulls back a high-level summary of information.

…but what if you want all of the information?  What do you enter?

get-mailbox <mailbox alias> | format-list

Hope that is useful!

You should also know that the help that comes with the various cmdlets is now MUCH improved also.  To get help on any given cmdlet, just enter get-help followed by the cmdlet… example:

get-help get-mailbox

There are also some great PowerShell resources on the web on the likes of Technet.

Jonny

So, my first podcast on R3… and I thought I would start at the beginning… where else?

Double-click to view in full screen

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To interact with Outlook Live through PowerShell, you will need to authenticate using your administrator LiveID and create a remote PowerShell session (in R2, these were called RunSpaces). The first account that you created on your Outlook Live tenant is an admin account. This account has the ability to do everything on your tenant, including using PowerShell. If you want to create additional admin accounts, please see http://help.outlook.com/.

You can authenticate in a number of ways… 1 simple example follows… but if you are a developer, you may have some other ideas.

Open Powershell, and enter:

$Cred = Get-Credential

This will present a dialog box into which you will store your LiveID admin username (e.g. admin@contoso.edu) and your password. $Cred is the name of the variable that will contain your credentials for use in other commands. If you don’t like $cred, feel free to call the variable something else.

You will then need to create a PowerShell Session (from here on in, I will just refer to this as a session). Enter:

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

$Session is the session object… again you can call this variable whatever you like… $Jeremy, for example :) . Note that in creating this session you are loading up the Exchange Shell (cmdlets that you will be using), connecting to our service securely over SSL, and pumping in your credentials from the first step.

Finally, you need to import this session into your local client so that you can start using it. Enter:

Import-PSSession $Session

All being well, you will now be able to run basic commands. I usually run:

get-mailbox admin

Don’t forget to remove your session once complete:

remove-PSSession $session

Enjoy!

Jonny

We have just completed a video with a University of Washington student on how she is using Office Live Workspaces to manage groups projects.  Thanks to Liz Moffat, a Junior in their Informatics Program, for recording this with us!

Download

Liz picks up on a number of benefits:

• Collaborative working – especially with distance students
• Reduction of work redundancy in a group
• Work from anywhere
• It’s free!

Enjoy!

Jonny

Well… “Jonny 5 is Alive!”  What movie is that line from?

I just got my Outlook Live tenant off the ground (contososchool.info), and I am running the PowerShell that is built into the Windows 7 beta right now to create 1000 accounts.  Of course you don’t need Windows 7 to get things moving… Vista SP1 or Windows Server 2008 will also work with the latest versions of the WinRM v2 and PowerShell v2 CTPs.  Instructions here.

First random impressions:

• Activation was a cinch – the same as for Exchange Labs, so no learning curve there.
• Basic Powershell remoting – the implicit remoting rocks – no more of the ‘push-runspace’/’pop-runspace’ stuff… you just create your session and import it to your local machine… and off you go!
• New CSV_Parser script – works same as the last one.
• Hiding users from the GAL… works instantly… much in demand, and this is one of the first things I tried out.

…anyway, much more to come.  Much of what you need you will find in help.outlook.com, but given that I know many of you like to actually see how all of this stuff works, I will be podcasting a lot over the coming weeks… any special requests, please drop me a note/comment or head over to http://liveatedu.groups.live.com/ to discuss.

Very excited!

Jonny

Exchange Labs is undergoing an exciting transformation as we upgrade to the latest service release of the offering; R3.  As part of this upgrade, we are also be taking the opportunity to announce our final release branding of the service; it will now be known as Microsoft Outlook Live®.  The URL that end users will use to access the service will also change to http://outlook.com/, however http://exchangelabs.com will continue to work until further notice to assist with transitions.

I wanted to take this opportunity to bring readers up to speed on some of the things you should be aware of to assist your planning and support.  If you have any queries, don’t forget that you have some great resources available to you: your Microsoft account team, our recently refreshed Live@edu support services and our new wealth of online help.   I of course have been awaiting this moment, as I will have a load of podcasts to do now :).

The Exchange team have even released a bit of a Bob Dylan inspired video on this… worth a watch.

For your convenience, I thought it would be a good idea to lay out some of the more significant changes you will see here.  The upgrade of the service to what we are calling Release 3 (R3) will commence on Feb 13^th 2009, and will continue until the end of May 2009 at the latest.  During this time period, a rising number of your existing end users will see the Exchange UI and some features change to reflect our new branding, new users will go straight onto the new release. As an IT Admin, you will also witness the introduction of some new tools and deployment options.

This is not an exhaustive list, please refer to our new online help website for full details.

New End-User features and functionality:

1. Support for Safari and Firefox browsers - Users enjoy the great functionality they get in Outlook Live with Internet Explorer but sometimes want the flexibility to use other web browsers.  Outlook Live Premium support will be available for IE 7+ as well as Firefox 3+ and Safari 3+ (MAC only).

2. Instant Messaging and Presence - Outlook Live now contains instant messaging integrated into the client, connected to the Live Messenger Service (hosted).  Using the colorful status indicator of another person, users can quickly decide if they should send an e-mail or just fire off a quick IM to get a fast response.

3. Conversation View - Allows users to group conversation so that they can view messages in context and narrow the number of messages in their inbox that they must pay attention to.

4. Live Header - Addition of the Microsoft Live header bar across the top of the Outlook Live web experience.

5. New online help – A wealth of information related to the end user features and functionality

New Administrator features and functionality:

1. New Exchange Control Panel functionality – Administrators will get extended management capabilities and be able to manage contacts, and eventually a lot more.

2. New Identity Lifecycle Manager Management Agent - Provides identity synchronization, certificate and password management, and user provisioning in a single solution that works across Microsoft Windows and other organization systems.  The new ELMA will be available in pilot to customers soon.

3. Hide users from the Global Address List - Service plans that provide a level of privacy for end-users who wish to remain hidden, see http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd229067.aspx

4. PowerShell v2.0 CTP3 is required - In the current beta release of Outlook Live R2, administrators can use Windows PowerShell v2 and connect to an Exchange server remotely to perform some management tasks in their organization.  This requires downloading and installing Windows PowerShell v2 CTP2 and the WinRM 2.0 CTP2, from the connect site.  Instructions here.  With the release of Outlook Live R3, administrators will need to download and install the updated Windows PowerShell v2 CTP3 and WinRM 2.0 CTP3, by March 16.  Instructions here.  This new version has some changes to the syntax used, so review the technical documentation for instructions.  The new version can only be used after the domain has started to be upgraded.  Administrators can see if they are on R3 by logging into Outlook Live with the first/primary admin account and seeing the Outlook Live branding, instead of Exchange Labs

5. New Branding – After the upgrade, the way that branding in R3 is implemented will change.  Customers that have implemented R2 branding can leave their look and feel intact if they like.  From Feb 26^th, R3 branding options will become available. 

Enjoy!

Jonny