Christos Polydorou

In the era of the cloud, service releases and changes are nearly constant. Microsoft Office 365 could not be an exception, especially with the large and increasing number of services and millions of users. But some of those changes and releases sometimes cause issues with on-premises infrastructure that is not property configured. Today I am going to focus on the networking side of things and talk about allowing access to Office 365 services from firewall and proxy servers. The first thing you'll need to permit access to Office 365 services from your on-premises machines is to know the service endpoints and by endpoints I mean IP addresses and URLs. Fortunatelly, this information is available from Microsoft in this   article so the only thing you'll have to do is read through it, get the information for the services you're using and configure your proxy server and firewall. That's easy, what happens though when that information is updated? This is where the problems sta...

After using dirsync for a few months now in order to sync the on premises Active Directory with the Windows Azure Active Directory for our company's Office 365 subscription, I got a very strange error today. A user reported that she could not log in to her mailbox via Micosoft Outlook so the first thing I did was to check the ForeFront Synchronization Service Manager logs to see if there is something wrong with the password sync process. On the Windows Azure Active Directory Connector there was the message "stopped-extension-dll-exception". The first thing that came to my mind was, OK some update broke the whole thing. I decided to take a look at the Application log in case there's something there that could help, and it was. There were several events stating that there is a error connecting to the authentication service. I searched the web for a bit and there were some people that suggested to check the Azure account used for the process for expired password. I...

After setting up the office365 domain and configured almost everything I tried to setup dirsync in order to synchronize my local Active Directory with the one on Windows Azure. Microsoft stated that I did not have to install it on a Windows 2008 R2 SP1 computer as the article with the minimum system requirements says so I fired up a brand new Windows 2008 Standard server for which I have the necessary license. After installing the updates to the .NET 3.5 and .NET 4 I installed dirsync and set it up. Everything seemed to be working fine, all the users could login to office365 portal with their credentials and they could  set up outlook without a problem. When the users started changing their passwords the changes were not reflected back to Windows Azure! I changed some attributes for a test user account (Name, Department) and the changes were reflacted to Windows Azure. After many full sync and imports and pulling my hair out for a bit, I enabled logging using the Enabl...

I had a couple of users yesterday that have Office 2007 Standard SP3 on their computers and they couldn't setup their office365 account. I checked the software requierements for office365 where Microsoft Office 2007 SP3 is listed. I had automatic updates enabled and there were no pending updates. When the user tried to setup their account the credentials used were not accepted. The user was able to login to office365 portal though. As is turns out there is a necessary update, kb2687404 , that has to be installed if not installed automatically. The updated states to fix a problem with expired passwords but fixed the issue for me. I also checked on other two machines with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows and  Microsoft Office with Service Pack 3.

We've been using Microsoft Exchange 2007 and 2010 for many years now and I've always used the add-receipientpermission command to give the users the SendAs permission. Today I had to do it for a company that is using Office 365. After a google search I found out that I could load a session and connect to the server that's hosting the mailboxes: First of all you have to create a variable for the credentials that you're going to use with the following command:     $cred = get-credential Then you have to create a session object for Microsoft Exchange using the following command:     $session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection And import it using:     Import-PSSession $Session After that you're ready to configure the appropriate permissions:     Add-RecipientPermission -Identity target@exa...