Office365 Archives - Squidworks

Try Office365 For ConnectWise Automate For 1 Month Free

The team over at Plugins4Automate is offering a great value to try out their new Office365 for ConnectWise Automate plugin. Get the first month free and have a go at this great plugin. Here is just a few of the neat things you can mange.

Azure Active Directory

Need to add a new user, re-enable a user after lockout or just manage a password change, you can perform quick tasks in Office365 directly from your Labtech consoles.

MSOL Exchange

Need to add a forwarding address or maybe convert a users mailbox to shared, set a users Out Of Office replies or view their current mailbox stats, with our Exchange integration you have access to Exchange online with just a few clicks inside of LabTech

Sharepoint Cloud

Create new sites or manage users and groups for existing sites quickly and easily inside of LabTech.

For more information about this plugin and how to get started visit:

Get Office 365 For Free

Office365 for Labtech Plugin special offer for MSPs

Access Office 365 for all your clients in a single pane of glass from inside LabTech in just a click with the all new Office 365 For LabTech plugin from the guys over at Plugins4Labtech (P4L). We here at P4L want to give all MSPs a chance to experience how having Office 365 at the techs’ fingertips can save time and money so we are offering 50% the life of the subscription if purchased in February. Just use the PROMO code TRYOFFICE365 at the checkout at plugins4labtech.com. You will receive 50% off your monthly subscription. The catch? We want your feedback. What do you like and what do you not like? After you take it for a spin, send your feedback to support@plugins4labtech.com.

What an incentive to come try a tool that puts control into the hands of the helpdesk!

Take me to the plugin

New premium Office 365 for LabTech plugin

Plugins4Labtech (P4L) has reached a milestone with our Office 365 for LabTech plugin. After years of development, accolades from LabTech and managed service providers (MSPs) across the globe, we are finally ready to promote our Office 365 for LabTech plugin on www.plugins4labtech.com.

P4L is moving the Office 365 for LabTech plugin out of the development/beta phase (free) and into main production (premium plugins). This comes after several new improvements to the plugin and the successful trials of the plugin over the last six months. P4L would like to thank all the people involved with the testing and trials of this very inventive plugin. P4L also wants to thank everyone who helped with the strenuous testing allowing us to put together a very powerful tool. Trial (free) versions of the product’s license will expire on January 31.

We recommend users download the latest version of Office 365 for LabTech now.

Office 365 for LabTech is now a premium plugin that allows the collection of data and maintenance of Office 365, Azure and SharePoint services. From simple password unlocks for end users to setting ”out of office” messages for users’ email boxes, the Office 365 for LabTech plugin has what the help desk at your MSP needs—quick and easy access to common tools to manage Office 365.

P4L hopes you will come and join in the revolution of technology. Use P4L as your partner to automate.

How-to keep a user synced with DirSync, to be excluded from DirSync while retaining the AD user

Converting DirSync User to a Cloud user in 365

I’m not sure if anyone has run into this problem before, so I figured I would share a quick fix that I found to take care of this problem. The easiest process that I have found to accomplish this without having the user be deleted each time dirsync runs is the following:

On a domain controller in the environment, move the user out of the DirSync scope. The Domain has a Synced and UnSynced OU, moving the user to the UnSynced OU accomplishes this.
Force replication on the DC a few times (unless there is only one DC in the environment)
Login to Office 365 and delete the user from Office 365- this will put them in a soft-deleted state.
From a DC in the users environment, run all of the DirSync/Azure AD Sync profiles to allow the changes to sync with 365
From Office 365 web portal, find the users mailbox in the Deleted Users section, select the appropriate user and re-attach the mailbox. You will need to specify a new password for the user to use when accessing Office 365 since they are no longer synced with AD.
Open up a PS-session to Office 365, Import the appropriate modules including MSOL modules
Run the following command substituting the appropriate value. The ImmutableID is what will prevent DirSync from deleting the user’s mailbox each time it is run. ImmutableID links the 365 account to the AD account and is what DirSync looks at to bind the two accounts (generally speaking).

Set-MSOLUser -UserPrincipalName %user@domain.com% -ImmutableID $null
From a DC in the user’s environment, run all of the DirSync/Azure AD Sync profiles to allow the changes to sync with 365
Validate that you can login via Office 365 with new password and that the account shows being in the cloud.

Good Luck!

Office365 for LabTech Pre-Release Feature Overview

Plugins4LabTech is about to release to the community it’s next generation of Office365 Management for LabTech

Plugins4LabTech has completely rewritten this plugin from the ground up. No longer are your required to go through a set of manual installs and system prep to use the plugin. No longer is your workstation tied to processing Office365 commands. No longer do you have to deploy MSOL scanners at every location that uses Office365. No longer do you have to have a client systems collecting Office365 data. So say goodbye to all that luggage and say hello to the new and improved Office365 for Labtech.

Let’s go over some of the new innovations we have coming with this new plugin. Our biggest change comes in the form of a single pane of glass. We have moved all views into one master manager so you can flip from client to client without ever leaving the windows console you are in. This centralization does not stop at the user’s view but continues to the data collection and control systems. You now assign a single system anywhere across your MSP to manage Office365 for all your techs and clients. You can control what is collected and at anytime you can start a manual collection of data through the plugins control center.

The Control Center

The Control Center allows you to deploy all the MSOL modules you need to manage Office365 to your master scanner. If you find that you would like to use the Console Shell feature on your local workstation as well then you can select from the list of systems, your workstation PC and “Deploy MSOL Modules” to your workstation quickly. You can execute manual scans of all clients MSOL data, MSOL Statuses and more from this convenient window. Verify when the last scans took place to know if your data is up to date and how many clients were scanned. We also monitor and display if your scanner is online and available and if we see it up to date with it’s MSOL modules. All this is done automatically when you install and add your clients. LabTech will execute scanner twice every 24 hours to keep all data up to date with the clients real world data so as to capture changes made from AAD Connect if active for clients.

Your Single Pane Of Glass

The Office365 for LabTech console is pretty strait forward, At the top you have your active Office365 client list to select any client configured for Office365. From this view you get to manage the clients Azure, Exchange, Groups, Sharepoint sites and licensing usage along with the most recent MSOL hosting statuses for each client. Once a client is selected then their list of users becomes available for selection. By selecting a user from the list each tab will reflect that users information where relevant allowing you to manage many aspects of the user’s experience. In Azure you can manage new users, user passwords, unblocking a locked out user, setting strong password requirements and enabling and disabling many other features in Azure.

Azure Groups

Quickly manage new groups and removing old groups and Add and remove users from groups without ever leaving LabTech.

Exchange Management

Easily Convert user mailboxes to shared mailboxes saving your client license usage when archiving expired employees. Setting mailbox permissions quickly like Grant Send on behalf of, read only or full access to mailboxes for any user is a snap with Office365 for LabTech. Set forwarding addresses and manage a users Out Of Office messages and activity all right inside this single pane of glass.

Manage Sharepoint

Add and remove sites from Sharepoint. Manage Sharepoint groups and members site access.

MSOL License Management

Get access to all the license information for your clients, see what service plans exist for each license the client holds and the usage of each license. Add and remove licenses for users quickly without ever leaving your LabTech console.

MSOL Status

MSOL statuses keep you informed as to the state of the hosted services Microsoft is providing to your clients. Each client can have different status messages based on location of hosted services and the systems and services affected. These status messages are extensive and provide detailed information from Microsoft on the issues and resolutions completed.

The All Powerful MSOL Shell

Our Holy Grail, The MSOL Powershell console, Launched from Office365 For Labtech’s single pane of glass, has also been rewritten from the ground up to include module loading management, new commandlets and a clean look. If you are one for shells then this makes it easy to launch a Powershell console for access to any clients data directly from your workstations (no login information required). Run commands and scripts directly from the shell accessing all the MSOL services the client is entitled to as the tenant admin.

Our plugin has a little something for everyone, Stats and metrics for the senior staff, High level control over clients settings and global data for you engineers and access to common tech functions like password updates and removing lockouts making Office365 for LabTech a must have tool in your Labtech Tool Belts. We are not stopping there, Plugins4Labtech development team is continuously adding new features and functions to this plugin allowing the plugin to grow as MSOL services change and develop.

Office365 for Labtech will be released to the general community on Monday, June 20th for the opening of Automation Nation. If you are going to be at Automation Nation come seek me out if you would like more information on this release.

Visit Plugins4LabTech.com for more information and downloads. Would you like to see a Demo of Office365 being used in LabTech?

LabTech Plugin -> Office 365 UM keeps improving with new features.

Squidworks Office365 UM Evolves

“New Flash we are now at version 1.8.6 and have added many great features since the writing of this blog, come check out all the new stuff when your done reading.”

Today Version 0.1.7.0 is launching, the 7th release of the first plugin in Labtech to manage Office 365 in the cloud.

GM-O365UM

In the beginning

If you are in the Labtech community then you should know about Cubert’s Office365 Plugin but did you know that it has been evolving?

Back in the beginning our plugin looked a little like this:

In the first version publicly available V 0.0.11 you could only see your users and change their passwords but this was a big step. We were now using remote Powershell CMDs in Labtech scripting and bringing the collected data back into Labtech’s database. This was the first steps to building a plugin for Labtech and getting the data from the cloud into Labtech. We now had a method and a functional process to import data from the cloud and the possibilities opened up for all sorts of new things to come.

It wasn’t long before we were trying new commands and adding some features to our new plugin. Shortly there after we had release a new version that provided the ability to manage some basic permissions like Send As and Send on Behalf As. We started working on added the ability to setup a forwarding email address and full level permissions to allow access for users to other users mailboxes. Version 0.1.4 was released which added the final pieces to our Office365 UM or so we thought.

Moving Day

The Office365 tab’s face was full, no space left to really do anything new but the requests kept coming in for new features. Cubert can you do this was the common theme in the forums. We asked ourselves where are we to put all this new requested functionality? We were out of space and something was going to have to change if we were going to move this plugin any further.

In version 0.1.5.0 we introduced some tabs of our own:

We redesigned the face of the plugin giving us the ability to spread out our functions across different tabs. This gave us the space we needed to really start making this thing preform.We added some new features like adding new users to Office365 , deleting users and also restoring deleted users, converting user mailboxes to shared mailboxes and improving the data collection and error management on the back end.

Our look was getting notice

Cubert heads to Labtech’s Automation Nation 2014 for the second year to see whats in the pipeline in the skunk works at Labtech. Speaking with several people at AN2014 we discovered that there were people using the plugin and had some insight in to how we could make it better and we were determined to do just that.

Our plugin was starting to take shape and the download counts were starting to roll in but with the users comes the problems. The first real wide spread issues started to arise with how Labtech was executing Powershell scripts. This process did not always produce the same results. We found that across platforms that some users were experiencing execution errors with the Data Miner scripts we had designed. We decided a rewrite of the collector was needed, a design that would use the native Powershell application on the PCs instead of the one provided with the Labtech Agent.

We re-crafted the entire data collection process and called it of course “Collect Data” aka “Office 365 Collect Data” . The new method incorporates all user data mining in a single session and adds our newest feature to the Office 365UM Distribution Group Management.

Come and get it

So today we announce our 7Th release of the Office365UM plugin for Labtech available for download now at Squidworks Office365 Plugin for Labtech . We hope you enjoy our products and post here at Squidworks, your experiences with the plugin. This will help drive the development in the direction that is most useful to you and helps us build a better plugin.

Here is what we can do today:

Add, update and delete user accounts and email addresses
Manage Send As, Send on Behalf As and Full Permissions on Mailboxes for other users
Set and delete Forwarding email addresses for users
Restore soft deleted users (30 day limit on retention)
Convert User Mailbox to Shared Mailbox
Set/reset users password
License/unlicense user
Add and delete distribution groups
Add,delete and view group members
Add/Remove groups from Global Address Lists
View License counts and type

Thanks to everyone involved!

Cubert

LabTech & ConnectWise Office 365 User Manager

LabTech Software User manager for Office365 plugin

Get it here -> Version 0.1.8.6

As of Version 0.1.6 we have added several new features and some bug fixes. These new features include ability to manage Send As, Send on Behalf Of and give full permissions to users of Office365. Set forwarding email addresses and reset user passwords, Add new users, Soft delete users (30 days to recover) and update user s Active Directory information. We have also updated the user views to include mailbox sizes and item counts, provisioning status, Client license type and license counts available and consumed licenses.

New in version 0.1.7.0

Distribution Group Management: Add and delete groups and manage the members in the groups.
We rewritten the way we collect data, we now create and run shell scripts directly on the workstation verses using the powershell script cmd in LT scripting. We have combined several sub scripts in to a single script that opens one connection to O365 and grabs all user data in 1 session. This has improved the speed of data collection by several fold.
We fixed a few issues with the Plugin script and added some more error handling.

We have change the layout in version 0.1.5.0 to a tabular design to allow for more controls to be added in a logical manor, We now can restore user mailboxes and convert users to shared mailboxes.

New in version 0.1.8.0

We resolved some issues with several features, added a new license manager, added the ability to export a list of licenses and the users to a CSV file and we now have a documentation and help center located on each tab to better assist users in managing Office 365.

New in Version 1.8.1

We added several new controls to the main application, you can now set domain password policies, manage calendar access for users and set user passwords to never expire. We also made a few fixes and added some new code to help with troubleshooting data collection issues.

New in Version 1.8.2

Several bug fixes, updated scripts and updated Windows Azure packages with latest versions.

New in Version 1.8.5

Added new feature :Powershell Session, this opens up a powershell session with Office365 and hands you the console to run any cmdlet you want on the clients Online services without the need to lookup the clients account information and building a session your self. One quick click and you accessing Microsoft Online and loading all modules needed to manager your Office 365 in the cloud.

Minor issues fixed.

New in Version 1.8.6

Added new Collector Tab that allows you to set the collector, launch new collections or test the collector for readyness.

Added script to update powershell to version 3 on all collector system with powershell 2 installed.

Here is the list of things to setup:

#1 the Zip comes with scripts, a group and a search along with the plugin DLL. You will need to import these into your system and set them up if they do not setup correctly during import. You should also view the plugin first before setting up the group and scripts to mine the data. This will allow the new database tables to be created to store the data the miners will be collecting. When you import the group and search the group doesn’t schedule the Office 365 Collect Data script correctly so you may need to verify and or replace the schedule group script to run every 2-4 hours.

The scripts are:

“Install AD Module for PowerShell” – Setup Powershell on any remote windows 7 x64 or 2008 R2 or newer system.
“Office 365 Collect data” – Should be scheduled in Group to run every 2-4 hours. Collects the user data and keeps it current in database.
“Office365_Plugin.ps1” – Must be placed in L:\Transfer\Scripts\Office365\ for plugin to function. If you are using Labtech from remote and or do not have the mapping available you can use a USB thumb drive and store the script in the same location on thumb drive and mount it as drive L:\ and you will function correctly from remote or cloud based RMM.

Next after you install the Microsoft powershell script on a system that meets the standards (Win 7 x64 +) at each client (any location and only one location needed) Add a new password to the password Tab at the “Client” Level that’s title is “Office365”, the username be the admin email address for client (Example:admin@clientname.onmicrosoft.com) and the password used. All scripts and Plugin will use this location to get the passwords needed to access each clients Office365 accounts.

To prep systems that will be acting as the data miner for the client you should first find a Windows 7 x64 or Windows 2008 R2 or greater system at one of the clients locations. Then run once on that machine the new Office 365 script “Install AD Modules for Powershell” on that system. Once complete the script should automatically “check” the “Windows Azure Active Directory Modules Installed” box as seen here in picture. You will need to also run this script on all workstations you plan to use to support your helpdesk, remembering to “uncheck” the Windows Azure Active Directory Modules Installed” box for all systems on your helpdesk as you do not want them as part of the search group.

You will want to install the powershell tools on all support center personal workstations that meet the minimum requirements. We use these tools in the plugin as well as scripts so console users will need tools also. Remember to go to each of those systems in Labtech and “uncheck” the box “Windows Azure Active Directory Module Installed” so that helpdesk employees do not get office 365 probe running on their systems every 2-4 hours. Next you should setup search and group, the search looks for a flag to be set in the “default” location on the Info tab of a PC. If found “checked” it will add this system to the four hour scripting of the user data fetcher.

“C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules\MSOnline”
to
“C:\Program Files\Windows Azure Active Directory\Powershell\MSOnline”

There was a security issue with plugin accessing %windir% so we had to move the MSonline module manually to an area we could read from. I will be fixing all this in the upcoming release.

When you execute changes using the new plugin it will launch a Powershell console to execute the connections to MSOnline, pass the information to MSOnline and then close. This can take a little time to complete depending on MSOnlines current load on system. Be patent and allow the Powershell window to close on it’s own.

Import the Group and Custom search:

Whey you import the scripts, custom group and search they may not end up where they were meant to be so you may need to move things around in LT to get it setup correctly.

Once you import the group you should have under the groups drop down a new group called MSOL Office365 Hosts. There should be 1 script scheduled “Office365 MasterMiner”. It should be scheduled to run every 1-2 hours and to skip if offline. This group should be using the custom search you have imported as part of the plugin install. Just verify that this is accurate and if not reset group to use the Office365 search.

If group and search are functioning correctly you should get a list of all systems that have the “Windows Azure Active Directory Module Installed” checkbox checked. This should be only 1 system per client. You do not need to have them installed at every location. It does need to be a Windows 7 x64 or Server 2008 R2 or greater system to operate the powershell functions.

That’s about it…

Enjoy Office365 management via Labtech

Cubert

[How-to] Relay mail from copiers or scanners through Office 365

Sending mail from network devices through Office 365

You just completed a migration to Office 365 for all your users but now you need to relay mail from network devices like copiers and scanners. You will need to setup a relay connector in Office 365 to allow these simple SMTP devices to relay mail to you or other 3rd party email addresses.

Below is the basic instructions on how to allow mail from a known IP address to pass through your Office 365 Exchange service.

Obtain the public IP address you’re using when mail goes out from scanner.
Log on to the Office 365 Portal.
Select Domains. Highlight one of your domains and use the wizard to obtain your MX record. The MX record will look similar to contoso.com.mail.protection.outlook.com. Make a note of the MX record for later.
In the upper right, select Admin and then select Exchange from the drop down.
In the Exchange Admin Center, select Mail Flow > Connectors.
If no inbound connector exists, create one.
1. Give the connector a name.
2. Select On-Premises for the Connector Type.
3. Under Domains, add a single asterisk (*). This will allow sending to any domain. Other values in this field will limit the domains that you can send mail to.
4. In the IP Addresses section, add the IP address from Step 1.
5. Leave all the other fields with their default values and select Save.
In the DNS for your domain, I suggest that you modify your SPF record to include the IP address from Step 1. The finished string should look similar to this: v=spf1 ip4:10.1.2.3 include:spf.protection.outlook.com ~all where 10.1.2.3 is your public IP address. Skipping this step could cause email to be sent to recipients’ junk mail folders.
In the device’s settings, specify a Smart Host value equal to the MX record value you recorded in Step 3.
That’s it!

Enjoy

Cubert 😎

[Solved] Single sign-on users in Office 365 can’t sign in to Lync Online from inside their corporate network

Lync 2013 Fails to connect to service.

You installed Lync 2013 on a domain computer and it fails to connect to the Office365 Lync service. Users who connect from inside their corporate network can’t sign in to Lync Online from Lync 2013, and they receive the following error message: Cannot sign in because the server is temporarily unavailable. This issue only applies to Enterprise SSO users who sign in to Microsoft Lync Online by using Microsoft Lync 2013 from inside their corporate network. If you modify the DNS of the computer to use a public DNS address the lync client connects for 8 hours and then fails if DNS is pushed back to the domain level DNS. All internal computers have this problem with connecting where external systems do not.

AD FS 2.0 utilizes the HOST service type for SPN registration because of default Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) SPN requirements. While HTTP makes sense for web-based applications, it does not satisfy rich clients who use the WS-Trust protocol.

When you deploy an AD FS 2.0 Federation Server farm, you must specify a domain-based service account that needs a registered SPN to enable Kerberos authentication to function correctly.

setspn -s host/{your_Federation_Service_name} {domain_name}\{service_account}

Make sure that the AD FS 2.0 service is running under the domain-based service account that was mentioned in the previous step. Afterwards you will need to set the service account on the ADFS service to use the same domain service account and restart the ADFS2 services.

Configure the AD FS 2.0 server to accept request headers that are larger than 40 kilobytes (KB). Microsoft says -> The HTTP request that the user sends to the Internet Information Services (IIS) server contains the Kerberos token in the WWW-Authenticate header. Therefore, the header size increases as the number of groups increases. If the HTTP header or packet size increases beyond the limits that are configured in IIS, IIS may reject the request and send an error as the response. If the previous solutions didn’t resolve the problem, downgrade to Lync 2010 or try running Lync2013 as a Local administraor.

Sign in to Microsoft Lync failed because the service is not available or you may not be connected to the Internet on a Mac

How to get Lync to connect

Your company has setup an local or Office 365 Microsoft Lync service and you are having a hard time connecting to it using your Mac. When you put in your information you receive the following error back – “”Sign in to Microsoft Lync failed because the service is not available or you may not be connected to the Internet“.

I had a similar problem recently and found through digging around that actually I was having a SSL failure where the Mac was rejecting the unknown CA authority that signed Microsofts “sipdir.online.lync.com” URL used to connect to Office 365’s Lync services. We had to import the SSL into our key ring manually and then assign the always trust to the certificate.

By default the SSL imported into “Microsoft Intermediate Certificates” inside of the Key Ring Manager , you need to double click this certificate to pop the information box on the certificate, find the Trust drop down which should expose the selection boxes that will allows you to set the trust level on the certificate. Set it to Always Trust, now 2 finger click on SSL certificate and select copy certificate. Next select the System folder inside of the Key Ring Manager then 2 finger click in the right panel of the System Folder view and select paste “certificate name” so that the certificate is now in both places.

Launch Lync, place Active Directory email address in the email box and in the user ID box and your domain password to log in.

How to import the SSL cert from Microsoft.

You can download here or from a Windows box, Goto https://sipdir.online.lync.com/ in Chrome and the following should appear.

Now click the green pad lock to bring up the Permissions and Connections property box. and select the Connection tab. Then select the Certificate Information link.

This properties box should appear, select the details tab and then the copy to file button to launch the export wizard and export the SSL (using the defaults only) to a file.

Now copy that file over to your Mac or zip it up and email it to an account accessible via the Mac system and follow the import process above on all Mac systems that have issues connecting.