The GuruXP Blog

One of the new features that Office365 new platform (Wave 15) brings us by the hand of Exchange 2013 is to be able to work in Offline mode and that´s what i´ll be explaning in today.

Just to be clearer, this is not meant to be a Microsoft Outlook substitute, this new feature has been created to avoid networking cuts during a travel and avoid networking issues, so if what you want is to be able to work in complete offline mode, then you should use Microsoft Outlook for it as it offers a lot more advantages tan just OWA.

Also when we work with these feature we´ll wet some limitations like:

• Only the content of the inbox, drafts and the last viewed folders in the past 7 days.
• It´ll only show the first 100 ítems of each folder.
• The attachments are not stored so we will be able to see the message but not the attachment when we don´t have an internet connection active.
• We will be able to reply and forward mails as compose new ones, but they wont be sent until we get internet and they´ll be stored on the the lower side of the screen as a notification but not on the Out Box.

Once all this is said, here´s how to enable this functionality:

• Access your inbox through Office365 portal.
• Click on the Little gear icon (settings) and select the «Offline Settings» option:

• Select the «Turn on Offline Access» option and click on «Next«:

• Select «YES» and click on «Next«:

• Click on «Next«:

• Click on «Next» again:

• And lastly click on «Ok«:

Hope you find this article useful.

In order to Add or Remove Office365 users using PowerShell, we must hace our environment ready to use with PowerShell and connect with Office365.

Once this is done, we can proceed…

Add Users:

We must have available licenses on our subscription if we want to assign one, if this is not the case, then we must Access to our Office365 Administration portal and buy some.

• Log in to our office365 using powershell.
• Run the following command to create the user:

New-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName a.lopez@contoso.com -DisplayName “Antonio Lopez – Contoso Ltd.” -FirstName “Antonio” -LastName “Lopez“

• Specify the location of the user (in this case, Spain)

Set-MSOLUser –UserPrincipalName a.lopez@contoso.com –UsageLocation ES

• Assign a license to the recently created user with the following Cmdlet

Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName a.lopez@contoso.com -AddLicenses “tenantname:AccountSKUId”

Where “tenantname” will be in our case “contoso” and “AccountSKUId” will be the plan we wish to assign. The available AccountSKUId are:

K1: SHAREPOINTDESKLESS EXCHANGE_S_DESKLESS

K2: SHAREPOINTWAC SHAREPOINTDESKLESS EXCHANGE_S_DESKLESS

P1: MCOLITE SHAREPOINTLITE EXCHANGE_L_STANDARD

E1: MCOSTANDARD SHAREPOINTSTANDARD EXCHANGE_S_STANDARD

E3: OFFICESUBSCRIPTION MCOSTANDARD SHAREPOINTWAC SHAREPOINTENTERPRISE EXCHANGE_S_ENTERPRISE

E4: OFFICESUBSCRIPTION MCOSTANDARD SHAREPOINTWAC SHAREPOINTENTERPRISE EXCHANGE_S_ENTERPRISE

A2: SHAREPOINTWAC_EDU MCOSTANDARD SHAREPOINTSTANDARD_EDU EXCHANGE_S_STANDARD

Besides, we can run the following cmdlet to determine the AccountSKUId used on our Office365

Get-MsolAccountSku | Format-Table AccountSkuId, SkuPartNumber

Note: if we want to do a license upgrade to a selected user, we must first remove the assigned license and then assign the new one.

To remove a license to a user, run the following:

Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName a.lopez@contoso.com -RemoveLicenses “tenantname:AccountSKUId“

Remove a User:

Simply run the following Cmdlet:

Remove-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName a.lopez@contoso.com

This will move the user to the «Deleted Mailboxes» área because it´s not a HardDelete…

Until next post….