The GuruXP Blog

Hi, it’s well known that Yammer as well is great for team collaboration in a social level, but is also known that one of the weaker points of Microsoft social platform either if it’s part of the Office365 suite or as a standalone plan, is their notification APPS.

Well, some days ago I received a mail from the Yammer product team on which they announce the end of the actual Windows APP based on  Adobe Air to give pass to the new Windows Notifier APP.

From my point of view, the only problem that had the Windows APP was that when you read a message or a thread on the APP, these weren’t synced with the web, I mean, if we read a message on the APP, and then, we enter some days later to the web, the messages were still on an unread status.

According to the mentioned E-Mail, this is being done because they don’t want the APP to be a replacement of the web, but a companion APP to notify about changes on conversations in real time so we can read on the web directly by clicking on the alert.

I decided to test it out and these were the results:

• The installation was fast and easy.
• The configuration represented no complication for basic users.

• Once the APP was running, I observed that it limits Only to alert over the home network, what it means that if we have more than one network inside our Yammer (which is more common every day) we wont have any type of alert like we had on the old APP where we could select the network to work with.
• Once read all the alerts and inbox messages on the web, passed a few seconds, the APP will update and remove the notifications.

• It will show us alerts not only of the inbox messages, but also the all company messages and all group messages,  and not only as a visual notidication but also with a sound notification (something we didn’t had before).

In conclusion, we hope some features like alerts for multiple networks be part of the APP on a close future if what they pretend is to be a companion APP and not a replace of the web, so it will make sense for the many profiles that make use of multiple yammer networks with one account.

If you want to try it out you can download it from here:

https://about.yammer.com/product/desktop-application/

Many of you already know what Rights Management Services (RMS) can do for us on an AD environment under the ADRMS role, and also are up to date that Office365 integrates this as a feature on enterprise plans.

Well, there are some situations which you want to enable RMS on a tenant via GUI and just after clicking the activate now button, the process gets stuck with the following screen no matter how much time you leave it (normally it takes no much more than 2 minutes):

For all of those that are suffering the situation, you have an inmediate solution via PowerShell following these steps:

• Download and install the RMS Module for PowerShell
• Run PowerShell as an Administrator
• Import the module with the following CmdLet:

Import-Module AADRM

• Connect to the service with Global Administrator credentials:

Connect-AadrmService -Verbose

• Finally enable RMS:

Enable-Aadrm

This process shouldn’t last longer than 2 minutes, after then we can disconnect off the service with the following CmdLet:

Disconnect-AadrmService

Hi, today I’ll be bringing you a short but useful article for large orgs. Often we encounter with read receipts confirmations when we receive e-mails and many of the users reject them, what are the meaning of those then?, well if we can’t control external users from doing that, we can for our org users.

Of course we can do it via GUI either by OWA or by Outlook, but we have two inconvenients, one is that those settings will be applied only with client depending, and the other one is that is not operative to do it one by one on large orgs. So what happens when we have 300+ users? POWERSHELL!

To do so, we need to get our environment configured and once this is done, run the following CMDLET:

Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration -Identity user@yourdomain.com -ReadReceiptResponse NeverSend

In this case we will be configuring the user user@yourdomain.com to never send read receipt confirmations, but we can customize it replacing the «NeverSend» with the following options:

• «DoNotAutomaticallySend»  To always ask for confirmations
• «AlwaysSend» To always send confirmations
• «NeverSend» To never send confirmations

But how do we apply this to all users? very simple, making use of the «|» to the command we want to preceed, i.e:

Get-User | Set-MailboxMessageConfiguration -ReadReceiptResponse AlwaysSend

To confirm that the value has been correctly applied, we can run the following:

Get-MailboxMessageConfiguration -Identity user@yourdomain.com | fl ReadReceiptResponse

Greetings.

Until now, we had to be really careful when choosing the right Office365 plan for our Org, because if we chose a P1 plan and later on we wanted to change to an E1 plan because of the need to, we would have to pass thru a hell setting up a new E1 subscription, create users, configure the environment again, add the domain, export one by one the users data to later on import them to the new subscription, etc…

Well, after so many time, Microsoft made possible the path to migrate different family plans (SKU) through the portal to another one greater than the one we have, without the need of any of the previous steps.

Of course there are some limitations when doing it and in resume, you cannot downgrade, only upgrade to a different plan.

If you want to learn some more about it, here’s a link from Microsoft on how to do it and the limitations that may exist:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-suite-help/switch-to-a-different-office-365-plan-or-subscription-HA104031833.aspx#_To_switch_plans

On this month of 2013, i´ve writen the following posts:

• Purge deleted users in Office365
• Print and save invoices inside Office365 enterprise plans
• APP: Service health dashboard for Office365

I Wish you find them useful, let me know if they are

Two days ago (12/3/2013), Microsoft published a new APP called Microsoft Tech Companion with the objective of helping the IT Professional to be up to date with the latest news, articles, blogs posts, tweets and wikis of the technology we want. How? This APP brings us the possibility to customize a feed for the product AND VERSION we want, where we can indicate the sources of the info to be reached including tweets, blog posts, articles and/or news regarding the chosen product.

Of course we can have several feeds configured and pin them to our home screen (in the case of Windows Phone and Windows 8) to get the most of the Live Tile feature.

By the way, in order to do so, you must use a Microsoft Account to log in (Live, Outlook, etc…) and remember your preferences.

You don’t want to setup a feed? The APP will show us all the latest news of any Microsoft Products.

If what we need is to search something in particular …

We have a search screen with an included history button if we search something recurrent and avoid us of typing it again, but for recovering or getting back to an interesting article we can always bookmark it ;).

This utility is very simple as it only manages to notify and show the Office365 Administrator the Service Health of the service, if there´s an issue or if it´s been one, know the status, details and also acces the Post Incident Report (PIR).

Actually this APP is in B1 phase and only suuports the viewing of one tenant at a time, but in the future is expected to support «multi-tenancy» and integrate the support tickets for those Admins that manage more than one subscription ;). By the moment is only available for Windows Phone 8, but the plans are to be released for IOS and Android very soon. As a requisite, the account that needs to be used on the APP has to be at least a Service Admin or Global Admin.

Here are some screenshots of the APP for you to take a look:

As a final comment, this demonstrates that there´s an API to play with in Office365, but it´s inside Microsoft walls by the moment. ;).

One of the things that most persons ask at the Office365 forums is how to print and/or save invoices.

Well to do so, we must access our Office365 portal (http://portal.microsoftonline.com) with our Global Admin or Billing Administrator credentials, click on «licensing» on the left side panel and then on «Billing»:

Select a date and click on «View».

We will then get a list of the subscriptions we have, click on «view details» of the desired subscription:

Finally click on «view invoice (.pdf) to open it on PDF format and be able to save it or print it.

Hope it helps…

When we delete a user in Office365 this isn´t deleted as well because it gets sent to a recycle binfor 30 days (Soft-Delete). This can be good when we want to restore it with all the permissions, content and details, but what happens when the user John Smith leaves the company and some days further another user named Judy Smith gets incorporated to the company as well? If we would like to assign the new username following the org policy Initial.LastName (J.Smith) for example, we will encounter that Office365 will Return an error saying it cannot create the user because the username already exists.

To force the deletion of the user from the recycle bin, we must do it with the use of PowerShell.

To do so, we must get our environment prepared for PowerShell and Office365.

First we must signin to our Office365 subscription with the use of the following CmdLets:

$LiveCred = Get-Credential 

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

Import-PSSession $Session

Import the Online Services module:

Import-Module MSOnline

Run the following CmdLet to get the ObjectId of the user to be deleted:

Get-MsolUser -All -ReturnDeletedUsers|select userprincipalname,objectid

Finally execute the purge of the desired user with the ObjectId obtained before:

Remove-MsolUser -ObjectId «objectid» -RemoveFromRecycleBin -Force

Hope it helps someone.

On this month of 2013, i´ve writen the following posts:

• Search and delete messages between dates in Exchange Online with PowerShell
• Force Outlook to connect to Office365 instead of Exchange On-Premise

I Wish you find them useful, let me know if they are