When setting up your account in Office 365, it’s important to consider what you want to name your tenant before you make your account live. “Tenant,” you ask? If you’re not familiar with this term, think of it this way: Office 365 is a multi-tenant cloud, which basically means that the one huge cloud domain (onmicrosoft.com) has many tenants, or clients – kind of like a big apartment building with multiple apartments.

When you create your Office 365 account, you set up your domain, such as contoso.onmicrosoft.com. And here’s the important bit – once you’ve chosen a name, you can’t change it!

According to Technet:

“The name of the tenant appears in Lync invites and SharePoint Online, but Microsoft does not currently have tools to rename a tenant or migrate data from one tenant to another. If you change your mind later, you have to create a new tenant and manually move your data and settings.”

Even though you will add your own domain and use it for Exchange and Lync, whenever you send out a Lync invite it’s going to be coming from thisisjustatrial.onmicrosoft.com (for example). And while you can name your Public SharePoint site to whatever you’d like, your internal SharePoint site is going to be thisisjustatrial.sharepoint.com. Not very pretty, and bound to cause some trouble when users have to try and remember that URL.

So take some time when setting up your tenancy and make sure that your domain name makes sense and isn’t too long or confusing to your users – you’ll be glad you did!

The Lync 2013 client has introduced a number of changes from the 2010 client, and one of the biggest (and hardest to get used to) is the number of menus and options that are accessed by hovering, instead of having a button to click on.

One feature that we’ve really missed is the ability to switch between your phone handset and your headset mid-call. There used to be a button that you could click on in your chat window that would allow you to switch between devices on the fly – this was incredibly useful, especially if you’ve just come flying over to your desk and picked up the phone because your workstation was locked and you can’t get it through the soft client. That button has disappeared in Lync 2013, and we’ve been sorely missing it!

Well, fear not… that option is still there, it’s just hidden in a hover menu now – here’s how you access it:

Hover over this button:

This opens the menu that allows you to hold or transfer your call, as well as the dial pad and devices.

Click on Devices:

And now you can transfer between your handset and your headset on the fly!

You can also adjust your volume here, which is awesome, because this is separate from your headset’s volume, so you can get your volume louder, even if your headset is turned all the way up.

Recently while performing a migration from Exchange 2003 to Office 365 (wave 15), I ran into a few mailboxes that were failing the migration with the following error:

The error sounds pretty straightforward, and the general recommendation on the community forums is to delete these accounts and start over. Makes sense… these are user accounts that were created before I started the migration, so maybe they were corrupted? …except for the fact that there were some other users that had previously been created whose mailboxes were migrating just fine. So I checked the accounts in Office 365 and sure enough, their user accounts did not have Exchange Online enabled!

I enabled their Exchange Online licenses, and they were caught in the second round of the migration… might not be the solution for everyone, but definitely a sweet little fix!

This is not meant to be an exhaustive, how-to post… just more of a run through of the different strategies available for migrating to Office 365 from various email platforms, and my experiences with them.

1. Exchange to Office 365

This is the smoothest method available – if you have Exchange 2007 or later,* Office 365 will auto-detect your settings and migrate your mailboxes to the cloud with minimal fuss. And (even better), this also grabs your distribution groups and email aliases on your mailboxes! Definitely my favourite way to go if I have access to an on-premise Exchange server to migrate from.

* Exchange 2003 requires manual setup, and is a little tricker to set up – but once you have your connection, works just as well as the newer versions.

2. IMAP Migration

IMAP Migration is what you’d use if you were going from another hosted provider – whether they be Google Mail, or even another hosted Exchange. This method of migration has several drawbacks, and is my second least favourite method of migrating mailboxes into Office 365.

• These drawbacks include:
  • IMAP migration will only grab the inbox and Mail enabled folders – it will not pick up your calendars or contacts, so you’ll need to manually export those to a CSV or ICAL file.
  • Requires setting up a CSV file with email addresses and credentials for all the mailboxes to be imported – there is no intelligence to find your mailboxes and distribution groups.
  • Migration control is funky – once you’ve started a migration, it needs to run a full pass at all the mailboxes before it will start over and rescan the mailboxes. This means that if you’ve found errors (of which there will be plenty), fixed them and then re-ran your migration, it simply picks up where it left off – it doesn’t go back over and rescan your mailboxes for changes.
  • It takes a long time – a small migration of around 35 users ran for almost two weeks on its initial scan without ever completing its initial pass. By the time we were ready to cut over MX records and go live, we still needed to manually export and import mailboxes.
  • As I’ve mentioned before, there is no graceful way to stop the migration – deleting the migration batch will not run a final sync… very frustrating!

  And a couple of gotchas:

  • Won’t copy any folders with a forward slash (/) in its name.
  • Won’t copy any items larger than 35MB, and it won’t tell you what it’s skipped… it’s just a fun mystery for you to explore!

3. PST Capture

Microsoft provides a free PST import utility called PST Capture – and while it sounds like a great idea, especially in an environment where you have a lot of PSTs to upload, it is not without its own batch of headaches.

First, you need to install the PST Capture Console on a host computer – then, you install a PST Capture Agent on all the computers that you want to be able to scan for PSTs. Once you have these two components in place, the agents will report back to the console with all the PSTs that they’ve found that need to be imported. Oh, and did I mention that you need to have a copy of 64-bit Outlook installed? 32 bits need not apply!

In my experience with this tool, I found it very unreliable – even after jumping through all the required hoops to have it working on your network, it would fail on every attempt to upload a PST into Office 365. Overall, a lot more frustration then there needs to be… which brings me to my tried and true, “if all else fails do this” option.

4. PST Export /Import

If you do not have the ability to migrate from an on-premise, Exchange 2007 or greater server, this is THE ONLY OPTION I would consider. Mind you, it’s not completely automated, and it requires you to set up users, aliases and distribution groups beforehand. However, it just works! All you need to do with this procedure is walk up to each desk, export their Outlook profile to PST (which catches mail, calendar, tasks, and contacts). Once you have a PST sitting on their PC, create a new profile that connects to Office 365 and import that PST. Once you’ve started importing the PST, you can move on to the next computer and repeat the process.

The beauty of this procedure is that you don’t need to worry about when it gets up into the cloud – it might take a while to get all the information uploaded, but your user is working in the meantime, and all their data is at their fingertips. You even have the ability then to import their autocomplete data, earning their undying affection and names like “Superhero” and “Rock star”

TL;DR? My final suggestions are simple – if you have the option to do a clean migration from Exchange 2007 or newer… do it. It works well, and is (mostly) stress free. If you have any other scenario, export mailboxes manually to PST and import them into clean Office 365 profiles. You’ll be glad you did.

One of the biggest issues we’ve had in our new Lync 2013 installation is that calls will not route to a user when their presence shows them as in a meeting – this was an obvious frustration, because it means that the more often than not, the person whom you are in a meeting with can’t get through to you at all!

As a workaround, you had to set your presence to “Available” if you were expecting a phone call for a meeting – by no means a true, or long term solution.

It turns out that this is not a bug, but a configuration issue – According to this TechNet article the Parallel call routing method adheres to a user’s status, and will not send calls to them if they are in a meeting. Switching the call routing method to Attendant changes that behavior and allows calls to route through regardless of their presence. In fact, the only status that Attendant will not route calls through on is “Do Not Disturb”.

Here’s how you change this in the Lync Control Panel:

Click on Response Groups, then Group:

Select the Group that you want to modify and change the routing method to Attendant:

Click Commit to save your changes.

Just to make sure your changes take effect immediately, restart your Response Group Service on your Front End server.

Problem Solved!

XCloner has quickly become my backup plugin of choice for Joomla websites, and it works very well for WordPress as well – It’s saved my but more than once, and it’s great for doing site migrations (hence the word “Cloner”). Here’s the procedure for installing and configuring it, with an added dose of Cron loving at the end:

Download and Install:

• Click on the logo to go to their downloads page:

• Download the latest version for either WordPress or Joomla:

• Log into your Joomla or WordPress control panel and install the plugin:

• Once you have it installed, head over to Components to configure it:

• Your first task is to change the password from the default:

• Click Settings:

• Click on Authentication, then change the password to something else (make sure you document what the password is)

• Click Save:

• Now, if you go back to the main screen, all the settings are green (Authentication stays red until you change the default password):

Go ahead and click on Generate Backup: I normally just leave the default options in place (backup databases, backup files, automatically generate a name)

• Click Continue to start your backup running:

• It takes a few minutes to run the magic:

• Once the backup completes it’ll give you the details of what it’s done, and the backup file name: Click Close

• If you go back to the main screen, and click on View Backups you can download the backup from there, or restore from it, or check when your last backup was done. You can also use the backup file to migrate a site from one host to the other – it’s a complete clone.

Automate your backups with Cron

• You can also set this up as a Cron job for automated backup magic – go to Configuration – Cron

• The only setting I found I needed to change was to have it Delete Old Backups:

For everything else, just leave all the defaults and click Save.

• Go back to the Cron Command Setup and grab this script:

Copy the script, and add on an email command at the end so you get notified when the job is complete: | mail -s “Website Backup Task” myemail@mydomain.com

And add it to the Cron jobs in your CPanel – If you have MySQL maintenance tasks set up, then you might want to consider setting it to run on a different day or time, so that your webhost doesn’t get too hammered for the entire 2.5 minutes that it takes to run these tasks. It’s probably not an issue, but if you have multiple websites hosted on your account, the host can sometimes get a bit twitchy if there’s too much happening at once, and shut you down.

Sit back and enjoy the magic!

We’ve been having an issue with LogMeIn crashing when we connect to a remote computer – LogMeIn gave me an option to try, and then showed me a neat trick to apply it to all our servers at once. Rather than going to the preferences for each server individually, you can create a Host Preference Package and apply it globally, or to individual groups or computers.

Here’s how you create or edit the preference packages

Open LogMeIn Central, and click on Host Preferences:

Click on Add Package, or select one of the existing packages to edit it.

If you’re creating a new preference package, give it a name here:

From here on, the options will be the same if you are creating a new profile, or editing an existing one.

Click on the Category drop-down box:

There are three general settings I apply, and they’re under Network, Log Settings and Remote Control.

Under Network, I set the auto-update option so that the client stays up-to-date automatically:

Under Log Settings, I turn on debug-level logging: (This helps LogMeIn support immensely when it comes to troubleshooting)

Under Remote Control, I’m unchecking the option to disable wallpaper (this was the fix for BG Info crashing that I blogged about earlier):

Make sure you click Save at the bottom of each screen, and then when you’re done editing everything, click Finish and Save All.

The final step is to Assign it the computers you want it on – note that with this system, you can create different preference packages, and assign it to whichever computers you want. You can only apply these packages to computers that are on a Pro account – Free users need not apply:

Select all the computers you want to add from the list, and then hit the arrow to assign them to the group. Click Save when you’re done – your settings have now been applied to all the selected computers at once. This was a huge time saver, and a great way to make sure you have the same settings on all your remote computers.

We ran into an issue with Excel files taking a long time to open from a network location after Trend 8 was installed – the issue has something to do with the way Trend scans files before it allows them to open. One of the indicators of this problem was that when you open a spreadsheet off the server, we’d see three dialogue steps in the progress bar:

Contacting filename.xls…
Downloading filename.xls…
Opening filename.xls…

With a progress indicator beside each step, almost as if there’s a delay forcing a download of the file. When Trend is disabled, the file opens immediately – at least, the steps happen so fast that we don’t see them at all.

The fix that was recommended by Trend support worked for this situation:

• Open the ofscan.ini share on the server where Trend is installed.

• Find AvoidExcelSaveIssue in ofcscan.ini, and change it to 0.

• Logon the web console, and go to Global settings. Click on “Save” without doing any change. This will push the AvoidExcelSaveIssue setting to client.

• Wait for 5 minutes for the setting to deploy.

• To verify if the setting was applied:

Open the registry and go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\TmFilter\Parameters\

Verify that the REG_DWORD —> AvoidExcelSaveIssue = 0 is in place
Reboot machine to apply the settings – you should be good to go after the reboot. Of course, your mileage may vary

On a recent migration from hosted Exchange to Office 365 using an IMAP Email Migration, we ran into a bit of an issue when trying to complete the migration:

There’s no way to stop it gracefully!

It turns out that Microsoft has removed the Stop button, and have deprecated the PowerShell cmdlet Complete-Migration (see below).

Why is this a problem?

Well, the Stop command (or the Complete-Migration command in PowerShell) is supposed to contact the server and run one last sweep through the mailboxes for any changes that have happened since the migration started. Once it runs that final sweep and syncs any changes, it stops the migration and sends a report to whomever you have specified at the beginning of the migration. Since this is no longer an option, Microsoft suggests letting the migration run completely through and then waiting 24 hours after cutting over your MX records to allow it run another sweep.

However, an IMAP migration can take a very long time to complete, and it won’t run a second pass at your migration until it has completed at least once. So, if you’re under the gun and trying to complete your migration before the end of the month in order to avoid another billing cycle for your client on their old Exchange provider, you’re going to have to come up with a Plan B.

Now what? What’s my Plan B?

The answer is simple – backups! Make a backup of your OST files (Export to PST from Outlook). Once you’ve set up the Office 365 Outlook profile, you can import from the PST and it will sync up into Office 365 at its own comfortable pace, getting you out from under the gun and enjoying your weekend.

Once you’re happy that you have all your mailboxes backed up, you can pause the migration and click the delete button in the Exchange Control Panel. The does the equivalent of the Remove-MigrationBatch PowerShell command, but it does not sync any changes in your mailboxes on the server.

My final opinion:

The IMAP migration process has more glitches and gotchas than it’s worth – and here’s why:

1. It won’t copy over calendars and contacts, so you’re forced to migrate those manually
2. It won’t copy any folders with a forward slash in its name (/)
3. It won’t copy any items larger than 35MB (this is the official MS word, but rumors on the community forums are that it can skip file sizes as small as 30MB – Your mileage may vary)
4. Unlike a migration from On-Premise Exchange, it won’t tell you what has been skipped, or why
5. It can take forever! A simple migration of 35 users ran for over a full week (168 hours) without completing a full sweep

From now on, any migrations out of a Hosted Exchange provider that I need to do, I’m going to be exporting Outlook profiles and importing them for each user. This plan of attack might take a while to get up into the cloud, but for the most part your users are not going to mind – they have everything on their computers in their Outlook profiles, and it will sync up to the cloud with no further interaction on your part. Just make sure that you have cut the MX records over first and waited a while to catch any email stragglers.

Good Luck, Have Fun!

In Windows 8, when Internet Explorer is set as your default browser, its default option is to open as a full screen App. There are several ways you can get around this:

1. Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer and open iexplore.exe, and pin it to your task bar. Internet Explorer will open as normal in desktop mode.
2. Under Internet Options – Programs you can specify how IE handles links; either it will open them in App mode, or on the desktop. If you set that to Always open on the desktop it will open links on desktop mode, provided you’re not in the App version.

But what if you want to tuck App mode away entirely? Here’s one way that I’ve discovered:

3. In order to set IE to not open in App mode, you need to specify another browser as your default browser – here’s how you do that.

First, when you hit start, you’ll notice that the icon for IE is the new Fluid style, and not a standard IE icon.

Alongside that we have Chrome, which still looks like a normal icon:

From your start page, start typing in default to search for the option to set Default Programs:

When you select Chrome (or whatever other browser you want to use), you’ll see it only has 1 default (if any):

Click the option to Set this program as default, and that will change to looking like this:

And now, the icons have switched around:

Chrome now has a full size somewhat fluid looking icon, and IE looks like a normal icon again. Also, when you search for Internet, you’ll see that the App version of IE has been turned off:

Enjoy!