Christos Polydorou

Today's topic: Active Directory and Password Expiration! Not being able to login due to an expired password is a very common scenario for Active Directory user administration. If the password for a user is not set to never expire, then a group policy will most definitely make it expire after a period of time since the last change. Our goal for today? We are going to create a report that will contain the setting for the expiration of the password, the time it was last set and the time since the change. To get that information we are going to use Powershell and the ActiveDirectory module. All it takes is a singe Get-ADUser command to get the information from Active Directory piped to a Select-Object command in order to form the output: Get-ADUser -Filter * -Properties passwordlastset, ` passwordneverexpires | Select-Object Name, ` SamAccountName, ` PasswordNeverExpires, ` PasswordL...

I have my second Office365 setup finished for a month or so and today my goal was to set the "password never expires" attribute on two of the cloud administrator accounts. I use dirsync to synchronize the local AD with the Windows Azure AD so I've set up an administrator account for that perpose. Since I do not want to run the dirsync setup every three months I decided to set the password never to expire. I also have a second global administrator cloud account in case there's something wrong with the sync. In order to set the attributes on the cloud users you have to connect to the Online Directory Service. Before you start you need to check the system requirements and install and import the necessary powershell module from  http://technet.microsoft.com/library/jj151815.aspx Then you just have to open powershell and run the following commands: Connect-MSOLService -Credential $cred  to connecto to the service  and Get-MSOLUser -UserPrincipal...