Office 365 – How to connect with Powershell

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

In Office 365 you can do and automate a lot with Windows Powershell. Now this small post shows you how you can connect to Office 365 with Powershell.

Install the Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant
32-bit
64-bit
Install the Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell
32-bit
64-bit
Open Powershell and import the MsOnline Module or use the desktop shortcut which was created by the installer.
```
Import-Module MsOnline
```
Connect to your Microsoft Office 365 account
```
Connect-MsolService
```
Use your Office 365 LiveID to login (for example bob@bobscompany.onmicrosoft.com)
Now you can start working with Windows Powershell in your Office 365 account, if you need some more help about the available Powershell cmdlets you can list them with
```
Get-Command -Module MsOnline
```

Office 365 – Verify domain hosted at Genotec

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

office365

You can add your own Domain to your Office 365 account. If your domain is hosted at Genotec, you can simply create the DNS records for your domain with the DNS editor Genotec provides in the Hosting Control Center.

Under Domainnames, yourdomainname.com you can create a new TXT entry to verify your domain. For example:

After you have verifyed your Domain you have to add some other DNS Records for Exchange and Lync Online to work.

Here the DNS records for Exchange Online:

And here the DNS Records for Lync Online:

Remember to add the dot at the end of hostnames.

Office 365 important DNS knowledge

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

office365

Last week Microsoft launched Office 365. Office365 is clearly a great product. Microsoft offers three different “plans”. One is for small businesses, Plan P, maybe stands for Professional or Personal. Plan P is a offer for small businesses with less than 26 users. For bigger companies or Enterprises Microsoft offers Plan E (Enterprise) which also includes Plan K (kiosk workers).

Now there are a lot of differences between this plans which are described on the Office365 website. But there is something I just realized after I used Office 365 the first time. If you want to use Office 365 with your own domain, Microsoft has two ways to do this.

With Plan P you have to delegate all the DNS configuration to Microsofts DNS servers, which means your DNS servers for your domain, will be somednsserver.microsoft.com. Microsoft offers you a simple UI to create additional CNAME and A records. And all your MX records and A records which are used by Office 365 will be created automatically. This makes it very easy, but even for some small businesses this does not work, because they may need more than just some simple additional A records or CNAMEs.

If you wanna use your own DNS servers or the DNS servers of your provider, you have to use one of the Enterprise plans (there are more than one plan). With a Plan E1 for example, you can choose to delegate all the DNS administration to the Microsoft DNS servers or you can choose your own, maybe already existing public DNS servers. In this case Microsoft tells you which DNS records you need to create (MX, TXT and A records).

Microsoft WebMatrix and Microsoft WebPlatform Installer

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

For a project at KTSI we needed a platform to quick deploy PHP and MySQL applications. There are a lot of solutions out there in the web, for example XAMPP. After testing some options I had a closer look at the Microsoft WebPlatform Installer and Microsoft WebMatrix. Those two tools do exactly what I need. With the WebPlatform Installer you can easily install a local instance of IIS Express with ASP.NET, PHP, MSSQL and MySQL support with in 5-10 minutes.

But the coolest tool in my opinion is WebMatrix. Webmatrix lets developers create, manage and deploy Web Applications very very easy. And if you need to to more Webmatrix lets you also work with Visual Studio on the same project.