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Starting September 11th 2017 Microsoft Teams supports guest access for external users. 

Guest access for Microsoft Teams uses a separate guest license type that must be activated in the services & add-ons section of the Office 365 Admin portal. 

Office 365 Admin portal notification:

When we make this change, the ‘Pick the license you want to configure’ setting in ‘Settings > Services and Add-ins > Microsoft Teams’, will now have an option for ‘Guest’ with a default value of “off” for the ‘Turn Microsoft Teams on or off for your entire organization’ setting.

When you've not activated guest licenses, external user receive an odd error when trying to access your shared team.

Link

• Expand your collaboration with guest access in Microsoft Teams

Enjoy Office 365!

This is a quick post on how to obtain the license key for your on-premises Exchange Hybrid Server.

Even though that there is no such role like a Hybrid Server, you can get a dedicated license key to license your Exchange server used for Office 365 hybrid connectivity.

While using your Office 365 Global Administrator login, you can access your hybrid product key using the follow link:

• http://aka.ms/hybridkey

The web site will check if your Office 365 tenant is eligible for an hybrid key first. Then you have to select the approriate Exchange Server version.

Links

• Exchange Server Hybrid Deployments, https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj200581(v=exchg.150).aspx
• Exchange Hybrid Key, http://aka.ms/hybridkey

Enjoy your Exchange hybrid setup wth Office 365.

This blog post focusses on an issue where your Exchange Online users are not able to send emails to other Exchange Online recipients outside of your organization when using a 3rd Party Centralized Email Flow Setup. The term 3rd Party Centralized Email Flow Setup describes a solution where you not follow the preferred hybrid architecture proposed by the Exchange product group, but use a 3rd party software as a centralized email gateway.

Problem

You have followed the recommendation to secure the Exchange Online inbound connector for your on-premises email servers by using a certificate name or the remote IP address of your on-premises email gateway.

Assumption

The on-premises email security gateway utilizes a self-signed certificate to secure TLS connections. The gateway is configured to use two different send connector setups:

• Internet Connector
  Use receipients domain MX records
  Use self-signed certificate
  Target address space: *
   
• Office 365 Connector
  Use tenant.mail.protection.outlook.com to route internal email messages
  Use self-signed certificate
  Target address space: tenant.mail.onmicrosoft.com

In this case Exchange Online Protection (EOP) will not be able to differentiate between tenant internal inbound mail flow and mail flow targeted to other tenants. Therefore, email messages sent from your Exchange Online users to recipients located in other Exchange Online tenants will be discarded.

Interestingly enough, this will happen silently. Your gateway solution will log a successful delivery to Exchange Online Protection. The tenant administrator of the recipient domain will not find an any information in the Exchange Online message tracking logs.

The following diagram illustrates the setup.

Solution

The solution for this problem is pretty simple. Just use dedicated certificates for each connector targetting Exchange Online.

Change the Internet Connector to fully trusted 3rd party certificate. In this case you are not required to modify the existing Exchange Online inbound connector setup.

The new connector configurations are:

• Internet Connector
  Use receipients domain MX records
  Use 3rd party certificate
  Target address space: *
   
• Office 365 Connector
  Use tenant.mail.protection.outlook.com to route internal email messages
  Use self-signed certificate
  Target address space: tenant.mail.onmicrosoft.com

The following diagram illustrates the new setup:

Links

• Important notice for Office 365 email customers who have configured connectors, https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2016/03/29/important-notice-for-office-365-email-customers-who-have-configured-connectors/
• Mail flow best practices for Exchange Online and Office 365 (overview), https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj937232(v=exchg.150).aspx

Enjoy!

Troubleshooting Active Directory Federation Services is a tedious tasks for any administrator. Therefore, I've started this blog post to have a comprehensive overview of information sources.

The following list provides links for Active Directory Federation Services troubleshooting:

• ADFS – How to enable Trace Debugging and advanced access logging, https://migration-blog.com/2015/11/26/adfs-how-to-enable-trace-debugging-and-advanced-access-logging/
• Troubleshooting ADFS: Enabling additional logging, http://www.jaapbrasser.com/troubleshooting-adfs-enabling-additional-logging/
• AD FS Diagnostics Module, https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/AD-FS-Diagnostics-Module-8269de31
• Under the hood tour of Azure AD Connect Health: AD FS Diagnostics Module, https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/aadceeteam/2015/02/13/under-the-hood-tour-of-azure-ad-connect-health-ad-fs-diagnostics-module/
• AD FS for Windows Server 2016 Best Practices, https://flamingkeys.com/ad-fs-windows-server-2016-best-practices/
• Backup and Recovery with the AD FS Rapid Restore Tool, https://blog.auth360.net/2016/10/02/backup-and-recovery-with-the-ad-fs-rapid-restore-tool/

Additonal information about AD FS can be found here: 

If you know of other AD FS troubleshooting information, please use the comments section below to share.

Description

This script fetches emails from a given monitoring mailbox by searching email messages for a given subject string. In this case email messages sent by the ENow Management Suite (http://enowsoftware.com/). Status messages are parsed to extract Disk Performance alert data for further processing in Power BI.

The mailbox is queried using Exchange Web Services (EWS). The EWS endpoint is identified by AutoDiscover.

The script exports the following columns for further processing:

• SERVER = Name of Exchange server reporting issue
• DATE = Date of issue occurance (Short Date)
• TIME = Time of issue occurance (Long Time)
• IO = READ or WRITE
• THRESHOLD = WARNING or CRITICAL
• VALUE = reported value

You can easily adjust the script to fit your requirements. Search for other message subjects and parse for other content in the message body.

Requirements

• Windows Server 2012 R2+ 
• Exchange Server 2013+
• Exchange Web Services Library

Examples

Code Samples

# Run script using default parameters
.\Get-EmailContent.ps1

Example output

"COMPUTER";"DATE";"TIME";"IO";"THRESHOLD";"VALUE"
"EXLABP08";"19.05.2017";"11:15:38";"READ";"Critical";"109,90"
"EXLABP08";"19.05.2017";"11:15:38";"WRITE";"Warning";"23,61"
"EXLABP08";"19.05.2017";"11:15:38";"READ";"Critical";"80,13"
"EXLABP08";"19.05.2017";"11:15:38";"WRITE";"Warning";"21,58"
"EXLABP08";"19.05.2017";"11:15:38";"READ";"Warning";"33,01"
"EXLABP08";"19.05.2017";"11:15:38";"READ";"Critical";"53,04"
"EXLABP08";"19.05.2017";"11:15:38";"READ";"Warning";"24,24"
"EXLABP08";"19.05.2017";"11:15:38";"READ";"Warning";"40,01"

Power BI report examples

This example shows that P04 and P08 have exceeded the critical and warning state disk performance thresholds more often than the other servers.

The next example shows the same date in a different report.

Version History

• 1.0, Initial community release

Links

• Download and follow at Github: https://github.com/Apoc70/Parse-MailContent
• Download and like at TechNet Gallery: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Parse-email-message-bfdef982
• Download EWS Managed API 2.2, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42951
• Download Power BI Desktop, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=45331

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