The school year is rapidly approaching and for many of our new and existing customers, seizing the window to prepare for the return of students is critical to success.  Tapping into incoming student orientations and welcome communications is one of the very best times to reach an engaged and captive audience of users.

To this end, our new Live@edu Marketing Bill of Materials is ready and waiting.  The BOM includes more than 50 useful downloadable items like mail templates, banners and copy blocks; all with clear calls to action directing students to log-in and start using their Live@edu accounts.  It also contains a playbook designed to show accounts how to drive usage.  If you haven’t already, please visit www.microsoft.com/liveatedu/marketingkit today and start building it into your awareness plans.  It is localized in the following 17 languages:

Chinese (simplified & traditional) > Danish > Dutch > English-US > English-UK > French >French-Canadian > German > Italian > Japanese > Korean > Norwegian > Portuguese >Russian > Spanish > Swedish

These materials are designed to be customizable & easy to implement, but just let us know if you have any questions about how to integrate them into your plans.

Enjoy!

One of my international colleagues, Ben Nunney, who is a Live@edu deployment specialist, has been working recently with the University of Chichester, and has just got one of them to reflect on how everything went.  The post is an excellent read.

To me, a number of things jump out:

• Live@edu works when integrated into a mixed environment.  Novell, SunONE, Linux, Windows… there is a who’s who of tech vendors and technologies in there… typical for a lot of universities that have evolved their IT infrastructure over time.  It is a common misconception that a Microsoft solution has a high number of on-premises dependencies… we don’t.
• As with any project, a good plan is important – simply sticking some commodity services into the cloud, like email, does not auto-magically mean that users will simply latch on day one… I like the University’s approach here around training and solution due diligence.
• Vendor roadmap and quality of support is important in making a decision to move to the cloud.  These were the primary reasons that Live@edu was selected, but it is a factor that often gives pause for a number of customers… in moving to the cloud, you can’t simply lay your hands on the servers any more if something happens… you need to rely on the vendor providing support.

Ben says he is planning some more of these… maybe I will get one of my customers to do one… I think feedback like this is highly valuable.

Enjoy!

Jonny

Exciting times for Moodle users that also are considering Live@edu!

Today, the Education Products Group (EdPG) announced the availability of the Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle at the Open Source Conference 2009 (OSCON). The Plug-in is a free downloadable solution that provides integrated access to Live@edu services such as email, calendar, instant messaging and search directly within the Moodle user experience for the classroom, and allows easy access to such services with one simple sign-on. This means students, teachers and faculty can quickly communicate, collaborate and conduct research from directly inside the Moodle learning management system. 

To help Live@EDU customers gain access to and understand this functionality, Microsoft is releasing the full source and accompanying documentation to the plug-in. The team believes this will be useful to Live@EDU customers who use or are considering using Moodle; they are also hoping schools using Moodle will consider signing up for Live@EDU services now that the Plug-in integrates some of them (e.g. Outlook Live and Windows Live Messenger) directly into the Moodle environment. 

The Microsoft Live Services Plug-In for Moodle is available at the Education Labs website (www.educationlabs.com) which also launched today. This is a new site where the Education Products Group will post some of their latest projects and ideas to get early community involvement and feedback, and where early adopters can go to learn about our latest research in the education vertical segment  The Live Services Plug in for Moodle is the first code released on Education Labs site.

Download, FAQ and Developer Guide: http://www.educationlabs.com/projects/moodleproduct/Pages/default.aspx

Michael Golden blog post announcement here.

Port 25 Microsoft Open Source Community blog post here.

Channel 9 demo video here.

Channel 9 video on the Education Labs group here.

Jonnu

This question came up today with a customer I was talking to that wanted to create MailUser objects in Outlook Live along with associated LiveIDs.  The customer wanted to create the MailUsers in an Accepted Domain they had set up on Outlook Live so that they could give their Faculty and Staff an ads-free experience on things like SkyDrive/Office Live Workspaces.

The customer ran into an issue when they tried to create some MailUsers with LiveIDs that existed before they had enrolled in the Live@edu program with Outlook Live.  They got the following error message:

Member name is used by an unmanaged member. UnmanagedMemberExists: The specified member name is in use.

We document how to deal with this when this happens while trying to create mailboxes, but I wanted to let you know that the same switches work with the New-MailUser cmdlet.

so for example:

New-MailUser -Name "Tamara Johnston" -WindowsLiveID tjohnston@contoso.com –ImportLiveID

Hope that helps!

Jonny

So I have been blogging here for 12 months now, and the journey has been exciting and rewarding for me.  According to the little ClustrMaps widget I have on my home page, I have received hits totaling many thousands from all over the world.  I also get to see search referrals, and I see that many of these hits are from education customers as opposed to folks simply wanting to know how things like PowerShell works in general… so that is also good.

You may have noticed that I am posting a lot now over on the latest service from our Exchange Team, http://outlookliveanswers.com/, but I will continue to post here as new topics and questions come up.  I am currently fiddling around with ILM and GalSync 2010 on a Virtual PC that I am setting up… I hope to be able to demo some ideas and concepts on that soon… I used to do MMS/MIIS in the past… so I am on the ramp up again on that technology.

Anyway… keep the comments and questions coming in.

Jonny

One 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…

• The dog ate my USB stick.
• I left it stuck in to a library PC
• Someone stole it
• Someone stood on it at a party
• …

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

Something 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

Many, 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

As 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

That’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

We 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.

I 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:

add-MailboxPermission -Identity JennyA -User admin -AccessRights fullaccess

… 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.

remove-MailboxPermission -Identity jennya -User admin -AccessRights fullaccess

Jonny

I 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:

add-MailboxPermission -Identity jennya -User admin -AccessRights fullaccess

Then add the new inbox rule to

new-inboxrule -name "Redirect to personal hotmail" -mailbox jennya -redirectto jennya@hotmail.com

You will see something like this:

Finally, remove the admin’s access rights

remove-MailboxPermission -Identity jennya -User admin -AccessRights fullaccess

So that is it…enjoy!

Jonny

A 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:

add-MailboxPermission -Identity jennya -User admin -AccessRights fullaccess

Then, you can check to see what the TimeZone is currently set to:

get-MailboxRegionalConfiguration -identity jennya

You will see a result like the following:

Then, you can change the TimeZone to something else…let’s say Pacific Standard Time

set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration -identity jennya -TimeZone "Pacific Standard Time"

Finally, remove the full access privileges from the admin account:

Remove-MailboxPermission -Identity jennya -User admin -AccessRights fullaccess

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

With 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]:

# to modify Default Mailbox Plan
set-owamailboxpolicy -identity OwaMailboxPolicy-DefaultMailboxPlan -instantmessagingenabled:$false

#to modify Gal Disabled Mailbox Plan
set-owamailboxpolicy -identity OwaMailboxPolicy-GalDisabledMailboxPlan -instantmessagingenabled:$false

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:

# to see Default Mailbox Plan IM settings
get-owamailboxpolicy -organization:"contososchool.info" -identity:"OwaMailboxPolicy-DefaultMailboxPlan" |  fl *instant*

or

# to see Gal Disabled Mailbox Plan IM settings

get-owamailboxpolicy -organization:"contososchool.info" -identity:"OwaMailboxPolicy-GalDisabledMailboxPlan" |  fl *instant*

Enjoy!

Jonny

A new group (http://k12live.groups.live.com/) has been set up recently, and in it, you can find the genesis of some conversations dealing with the particular concerns of that segment.

Check it out!

Jonny

We have just launched our new Live@edu program site: http://www.microsoft.com/liveatedu/free-hosted-student-email.aspx. 

Some key new features (from my point of view):

• Better layout – the key components of the offering are now more apparent I think.
• A load of mini-demos and overviews – if you are like me, and like to watch demos rather than read about them, you will like what we have done I hope (expand the sections to see them).
• A revised FAQ - more clearly differentiates between Outlook Live and Hotmail, and is more extensive than before.
• A completely revised enrollment process and management portal… read more below:

New Enrollment Forms – The enrollment process is greatly simplified to streamline on-boarding.  The number of fields we ask for at this important point has been reduced from 46 to just 16, and some previously manual aspects of on-boarding are now automated.  The end result is that customer wait times for receipt of their Live@edu admin ID has been slashed from 48 hours to just 5 minutes!

Services Management Portal – The SMP is our new one-stop admin portal for the IT Pro that makes it even easier for them to administer their account and access critical tasks and information on the services.  This is currently only available to new customers, but existing customers will get this in a matter of weeks.

We would appreciate your feedback… so send on any thoughts.

Jonny

Following on from a previous post on restricting users from modifying their Outlook Live properties, another one of our escalation engineers, Kevyn Pietsch, has weighed in with more great content!  Over to Kevyn!

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Please note: The following information is specific to R3, and may change during future updates of the product.

In Outlook Live, one of the features that helps promote collaboration between students is the capability users have been given to create and manage their own Distribution Groups(DGs; aka Public Groups), as well as manage their membership in other DGs, via the Exchange Control Panel(ECP). Tenant administrators(TAs) have asked for guidance on how to control what users can do in this area. One example we've heard TAs ask about is how to prevent students from creating their own DGs. This blog discusses how to use Role Based Access Control(RBAC) to prevent users from being able to create DGs, as well as how to completely remove their abilility to access the Groups page, in the ECP.

By default, users are given access to manage DGs they belong to, and DGs they own, via two default RBAC roles/role assignments. The roles define what a student can view/modify for their own account. In order to determine the names of the two default DG roles/role assignments, you can run the following RPS command:

Get-ManagementRoleAssignment -User DefaultMailboxPlan | where {$_.name -like "MyDistributionGroup*"} | fl Name,Role

In a default RBAC setup, the output will be as follows:

Name : MyDistributionGroups-MailboxPlan-DefaultMailboxPlan<tenant specific alphanumeric sequence>

Role : <domain name>\MyDistributionGroups_DefaultMailboxPlan

Name : MyDistributionGroupMembership-MailboxPlan-DefaultMailboxPlan<tenant specific numeric sequence>

Role : <domain name>\MyDistributionGroupMembership_DefaultMailboxPlan

The roles listed above are comprised of the cmdlets(aka tasks) listed in the following tables. The parameters of each of the cmdlets is not listed in the tables, but can be determined, per cmdlet, by running the following command:

$(Get-ManagementRoleEntry <role name>\<cmdlet name>).parameters

Role: <domain name>\MyDistributionGroups_DefaultMailboxPlan

Role: <domain name>\MyDistributionGroupMembership_DefaultMailboxPlan

Removing users' ability to create DGs

Please note that the following information assumes a default RBAC setup for the DG roles/role assignments.

In order to prevent users from being able to create DGs, the New-DistributionGroup cmdlet must be removed from the list of cmdlets they have access to. Since default roles(aka parent roles), such as the DG roles listed earlier, cannot be modified, a customized copy of the <domain name>\MyDistributionGroups_DefaultMailboxPlan parent role must be modified and assigned to the users via a new role assignment. Also, the role assignment that assigns the <domain name>\MyDistributionGroups_DefaultMailboxPlan parent role to users, via the DefaultMailboxPlan security context, must be removed. This is because the cmdlets/parameters in the roles that are assigned to users are cumulative. The steps to do this are as follows:

1. Make a customized copy of the <domain name>\MyDistributionGroups_DefaultMailboxPlan parent role by running the following RPS command:

New-ManagementRole -Name Limited_MyDGs_DefaultMailboxPlan -Parent MyDistributionGroups_DefaultMailboxPlan

Note: When using a parent role name in an RPS command, including the <domain name> part of the role name is optional. For this example, when specifying the parent role name in the -Parent paramter, I have left out the <domain name> part of the parent role name. Also, for this example, I used the customized role name of Limited_MyDGs_DefaultMailboxPlan. It is recommended that a memorable naming convention be used for the new role/role assignment names.

2. Remove the New-DistributionGroup cmdlet from the Limited_MyDGs_DefaultMailboxPlan role by running the following RPS command:

Remove-ManagementRoleEntry -Identity Limited_MyDGs_DefaultMailboxPlan\New-DistributionGroup

3. Create the new role assignment to assign the Limited_MyDGs_DefaultMailboxPlan role to users, via the DefaultMailboxPlan security context, via the following RPS command:

New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Name Limited_MyDGs_DefaultMailboxPlan_RoleAssignment -Role Limited_MyDGs_DefaultMailboxPlan -User DefaultMailboxPlan

Note: For this example, I used Limited_MyDGs_DefaultMailboxPlan_RoleAssignment as the name of the new role assignment that assigns the Limited_MyDGs_DefaultMailboxPlan customized role to the users, via the DefaultMailboxPlan security context.

4. Determine the name of the default role assignment that assigns the <domain name>\MyDistributionGroups_DefaultMailboxPlan parent role to the users via the following RPS command:

Get-ManagementRoleAssignment -User DefaultMailboxPlan | where {$_.name -like "MyDistributionGroups*"} | fl Name,Role

5. Remove the default role assignment from the users by running the following RPS command:

Remove-ManagementRoleAssignment -Name <default role assignment name from step 4>

Removing access to the Groups page

In order to remove access to the Groups page, you simply remove both of the default DG role assignments by going through the following steps:

1. Determine the names of the DG role assignments that assigned the roles to the users(via the DefaultMailboxPlan), via the following RPS command:

Get-ManagementRoleAssignment -User DefaultMailboxPlan | where {$_.name -like "MyDistributionGroup*"} | fl Name

2. Remove the two default DG role assignments by running the following command against both of the role assignment names from step 1, via the following RPS command:

Remove-ManagementRoleAssignment -Identity <role assignment name>

In the last few days we released the Release Candidate build of Windows 7… great to see, and I am looking forward to seeing our education customers adopt this new OS.

Some customers might be aware that Windows 7 ships with the very latest PowerShell CTP (Community Technology Preview) preinstalled.  Conveniently on the Windows 7 beta build (Build 7000) that we shipped a few months ago, the version of PowerShell was the correct version that worked with Outlook Live.  On the RC Build of Windows 7 there is a different version of the CTP, and right now this does NOT work with Outlook Live.

So the upshot is that you should either continue to use Vista SP1 or Windows Server 2008 with PowerShell for best results.  Follow the instructions here: http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/cc546278.aspx

Jonny