While adding features to my latest update of the Create-LabUsers tool, I wanted to provide a way to generate and send test email data to randomized recipients. While generating a random list of recipients wasn’t terribly hard, what did take a bit more work is generating random text. Most of us are familiar with the…
Update: I’ve added a shortlink for this tool: http://aka.ms/createlabusers. Because you didn’t ask for it, I went ahead and added to it. Well, that’s a lie. I actually had some really great ideas and feedback, so I’ve added a few new features that I wanted to draw attention to: Detect existing Exchange session – If…
Today’s post is less about anything in particular than it is about jotting a few things down for personal reference. I learned a couple of things over the last week while developing a tool. I’m sure I learned them once before, but as a person with finite storage and recall capacity, this tidbits were replaced…
Today, while I was testing out some transport rules, I wanted to send a bunch of test messages to make sure they were firing correctly. I wanted to create some custom messages and be able to automate them, and I wanted to use an outside relay service that requires SMTP authentication. It took a good…
As I help organizations transition to think cloud-first, one of my goals is to help them get the most out of their Office 365 investment. In this post, we’ll talk about tackling a corporate blog. SharePoint Online comes with a number of out-of-the-box templates, and the one that most closely maps to the blog requirement…
While working with a customer last week, it came to my attention that the Get-UserHoldPolicies script I had put together to enumerate retention policies and eDiscovery cases that put a hold on content wasn’t displaying policies that were global. The types of policies I checked for were enumerated in a user’s InPlaceHolds mailbox property, but…
With the advent of scammers, spammers, phishers, and other types of baddies, and the complementary rise in anti-malware, anti-spam, domain and sender verification techniques, we’re in a perpetual cat-and-mouse game. I’ve had several customers over the past few weeks ask me about best practices for configuring some of the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) features. I’ve…
In Part 1 of this blog series, I went through the setup of the Splunk Add-On for Microsoft Cloud Services, which you can use to extract, query, and analyze data provided by the Office 365 Management Activity API. In this particular post, we’re going to explore the Microsoft Office 365 Reporting Add-On for Splunk, which…
I’ve had a number of customers ask me about configuring their monitoring systems to Office 365. So, rather than repeating the same information and re-issuing the same links (most of which contain outdated information), I’m going to put together a series on how to connect a few systems to Office 365. Since Splunk is “free”…
